Entries from November 2007 ↓

So, you’ve run out of ideas and have no good news to tell, but you want to push out a marketing release (it’s not by mishap I’m being scatological here). Hmm, well we could do a survey…

Oh yes, that’s a good idea. But, what happens when your survey, filled as it must be with leading questions and bound to give you the answers you want, doesn’t return the most flattering of results. Hmm, tricky.

Not, it seems, for Power Reviews.

What happens if only 40% of your survey respondents say that they ‘research products online more than half the time’, whatever that question means?

Well, if you start by saying that 65% of users fall into a ‘Social Researcher’ category then you can say 64% of them ‘research products online more than half the time’. That pesky 40% number is transformed, magically, into a clear majority. Breathe easy PR people, the press release, spun into a more positive light, can be released.

That may not be exactly what they did, but it’s common practice. Take note: if the ’social researcher’ category was defined post hoc, then this is a simple statistical fallacy – akin to the the sharpshooter fallacy.

Statistically, the numbers would be meaningless, but that’s not really the point, is it? And that’s just one example of what I thought to be misleading use of statistics in that press release. Please, Power Reviews, could you publish the complete research so I can reassure myself as to your methods and conclusions?

That aside, I dislike most the banality of this genre of press release. Power Reviews are certainly not alone in releasing this bland flavour of news – pay for a survey, scatter-spam the results, wait for coverage. It’s all a little bit patronising, really.

I’ll no doubt get accused of bias here since my old company, Reevoo, did a similar press release a few weeks ago. I’m not biased.

Guys, come on, since when does doing a simple survey constitute news? We’re all consumers, aren’t we? We all know whether we really use reviews to make purchases or not, don’t we? And so do your customers, yes?

And, for all the evidence that people are disposed to say that they used reviews to make their purchases, we don’t need to pretend that advertising doesn’t work. Do we?

I know you chaps have real data, about people’s real online behaviour, not about their opinion of what they were doing after the fact. How about publishing some of that?

Oh, and Journalists, when these press releases land on your desk, please scribble all over them and send them straight back. Don’t play their game and publish it.

In Prime Minister’s Questions today, Edward Leigh’s question hinted at what may have been the root cause of the security catastrophe facing the government. “Is the prime minister aware”, he asked, “… that when the NAO asked for narrow details—not people’s personal bank accounts—the Revenue said that to disaggregate that information would be too burdensome for the organisation?”

Hmm. It occurs to me that the poor chap who mailed the CDs – he’ll no doubt lose his job – may have been working around an intransigent IT department.

An IT department which you’d hope could muster the meagre talent required to filter a few fields from a text file. Hell, any half-competent programmer I’ve ever worked with could have done this in a few lines of shell script or, if the data were XMhelL with a couple of XSLT matchers.

So, maybe the HMRC doesn’t have IT resource they can deploy on a 10 minute task like that.

Or, maybe they asked one of the cowboy IT consultancies to quote them for the job and received a ‘burdensome’ price – after all, it’s an enterprise-y task that’s much harder to do on a 25 million line file than on a 10 line one. Isn’t it? Umm. Not really.

I can’t help feeling that the real problem may be a lack of agility in their development and IT management. And everyone knows that the harder it is to work with IT departments, the more people learn to work without them. Policies or no policies, skills or no skills, expert or bonehead.

Moreover, I’ll predict that the announced inquiry won’t touch this – instead they’ll suggest management and HR failures and recommend more security training for staff. I hope I’m proved wrong here.

Thankfully, it’s not as if they’ve chosen anyone with links to the IT consultancies I mentioned above to conduct the review – they’ve gone with the chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers…

One last point: I’ve read much suggesting this is a problem specific to the public sector. It definitely isn’t. Most big companies have similar data management issues, IT intransigences and security holes. Most small ones too, I think. More on that anon.