The Web is becoming more and more a perfect environment in which to make management decisions based on solid evidence and results rather than emotions and opinions. It is becoming scarcer, almost daily, to have educated guess or gut instinct when it comes to web-based decision making, the world is moving relentlessly towards cool logic and hard evidence
“Increasingly, doctors seeking to provide their patients with the best possible care are exploring what is known as evidence-based medicine–a hard, cold, empirical look at what works, what doesn’t and how to distinguish between the two,” wrote Christine Gorman in TIME in February 2007.
“Few people deny that the trend in medicine is increasingly to be guided, if not governed, by the data–an idea that is spreading to other fields as well,” Gorman continued. “Evidence-based practice is now being taught in nursing, general education and even philanthropy, thanks to the influence of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a results-based group if ever there was one. You could see even the political fights over global warming as the birth pangs of the new practice of evidence-based policy.”
“If the editors of a magazine-NEWSWEEK, for instance-want to know what interests their readers, their resources are limited,” wrote Jerry Adler in September 2007. “They can count cover sales, but that only tells them about one story a week. They can convene a focus group, but that’s a cumbersome and costly way to assess the tastes of 3 million subscribers.”
“Online, by contrast, that information is available for the asking-not just the numbers of readers, but how long they spent with a given story and what else they read. So as journalism increasingly migrates to the Web, the job of figuring out what readers want becomes almost automatic-thereby raising the question, how much does we really need editors, anyway?”
In our life time, there is a common believe that the Web is the greatest network of content the world has ever known. We can, with increasing precision, know what content gets people to act and what content doesn’t. The lengths of time people spend on the page are just the beginning, but let’s take these other factors in our assessment:
- How many links have there been to the content. This is considered by a lot of web gurus as the ultimate measure as the link is the gold standard of the Web.
- Where did the customer go once they read the content?
- Were their reaction positive or negative reaction?
- How has the content been rated by customers?
- Has the content been blogged about? Did it get a conversation going?
Opinion, emotion and gut instinct are dangerous things when it comes to managing websites. Invariably they lead to creating websites that are organization-centric and full of vanity publishing. These sorts of decisions are compounded further when senior managers get involved, who often have no deep experience of Web, thus making their opinions even more likely to be wrong.
We need to work, and promote, evidence that clearly displays how content helps customers complete their tasks. The new slogan for web management should be “Show me the Data”.