Counting the 0's, not just the 1's

👉Does Adam Grant only share motivational bytes or is it that his motivational bytes are the ones most re-shared by his audience, giving the appearance that he’s just sitting there typing out tweets he simply knows will get retweeted and shared thousands of times over?

👉Do NPS scores reflect the true health of a business or product? And if they do, as most believe, shouldn’t the survey response rate be taken into account, assuming that any customer who opts out of the survey is likely to have rated lower than a 9 (a score below 9 means the customer is not a promoter) and hence would only have brought the score down? If you’ve ever given your car for servicing you may have been hounded by the customer service folks to rate them a 9 or 10.

👉Are comments the true indicator of the level of engagement with a piece of content or is there some context missing? A mentor of mine who had won a Substack fellowship shared an insightful nugget the other day. A co-fellow from the program with thousands of subscribers for his animation newsletter consistently received low numbers of comments. He tried optimizing his content until he realized (or found out) that his audience saw him as an expert and read his newsletter as an authoritative guide. Which leads to the theory that Educate Me content gets fewer comments than Entertain Me content, even when both resonate with the audience. So does that mean that the LinkedIn algorithm, for example, over-emphasizes comments as engagement just because it is easily measurable?

We optimize for the data we have and ignore what we don’t. But data cannot capture context. So sometimes we end up missing the big picture with big data. We think we can see the whole thing when all that we see is only that which we can count.