Self-Selecting Studies Showcase Stupid Statistics
I’ve written about statistics here several times. Usually, I fall on the side of “statistics lie”, or less controversially, “statistics can be made to say pretty much anything”. But sometimes, the biggest problem with something that’s been represented statistically is nothing more complicated than the source of the data being held up.
I’m talking about using self selecting samples, and today I came across an example that only marketing people are likely to see, but more important needs to be IGNORED by most people.
This story at MarketingLand runs under the headline Google, Moz & Hubspot Are The Most Recognized Marketing Tech Brands. If you’re a marketing person, the information is interesting, if not terribly useful, but outside of that circle, it’s … wrong.
Google, of course, isn’t part of this discussion; you know them, probably better than you’re comfortable about. You may have heard of Hubspot — and if you’re a regular reader here you know where I stand on Hubspot. As for the recently-rebranded Moz (formerly SEOMoz; they agree with our position that SEO is no longer a stand-alone proposition), you probably know nothing about them at all.
The very idea, then, that Google, Moz & Hubspot Are The Most Recognized Marketing Tech Brands is the product of self-selection. Only MarketingLand readers were part of the survey that led to that useless statement, and so as a business person your chance as a non-marketing person to ever hear that ‘Google, Moz & Hubspot Are The Most Recognized Marketing Tech Brands’ is approximately zero.
And yet the idea of marketing is one that you need to be concerned with, unless you Hand Off All Your Marketing to The Answer Guy.
MarketingLand is a great source of information if you’re a marketing person with enough of a dose of cynicism baked into your DNA to know what can be ignored. And the lesson MarketingLand is helping me teach today is that getting people’s attention getting the right people’s attention is something you need to work on every day. Do Naked Women help with Influency? Sure, but the lovely girl you see in the image at the top of this article helps more; she and her headline titillate without chasing very many people away. But no amount of statistical analysis will make Hubspot or Moz worthy of having their name lumped into the same category as Google. MarketingLand’s new “study” essentially says nothing.
I’m not trying to pick on MarketingLand; they’ve provided me fodder from which to work today, but MarketingLand does a great job uncovering stuff that marketing people care about. What I’m pointing out here is for you: achieving Influency is about finding things to say that resonate with the people who pay attention to you.
Or sometimes, by getting their attention with pictures of girls in bikinis.
