A Common Flaw: Too Many Features

When I ran social media for a massive Fortune 500 company I had to use “listening tools.” This type of software scrapes the web and social feeds for all chatter about the company. The contracts are typically hundreds of thousands of dollars and complex to use. I had to evaluate serval listening tools and found a common issue.

They offered too many features.

Day-to-day corporate life can best be described as stressful-boredom. When a manager asks to see the results of the October marketing campaign, that needs to be delivered by end of day, you need software to do the heavy-lifting. These listening tools did the opposite. Most of the time I had to reach out to our rep for help, despite paying $80k in training fees.

Just because you can provide all the data, doesn’t mean you should. That’s bad design. It would be wonderful to see professionals from @apple, IDEO, or Porsche design a remarkable listening software tool. They’d save the corporate world a ton of headaches.

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