Business Voyeurism

The Internet is great; it’s a valuable resource, as long as you watch out for all the people walking down busy streets with their faces buried in their phones. It’s also a fantastic place for dreamers. Five or six years ago I wasted a few thousand dollars on Google Adwords and similar from Yahoo and Bing. What I got was one short game of phone tag. I never talked to a live person or exchanged emails with anybody. Business voyeurs.

It’s so easy to click and look without serious intent. It’s super easy to inadvertently click on something (that will require a payment to the host website). In the old days (waaaay back in the 1990’s) people still looked at newspapers and magazines for a lot of their information. We never knew how many people read our ad, our story or had a modicum of interest in what we had.

Now people are fascinated by page views, clicks, newsletters opened, etc. Yet the result is the same – the serious will pick up the phone or write an email. The rest are just part of big data that gets some people excited over nothing. It’s almost as ridiculous as getting excited when a certain number of people, most whom you don’t know, like a picture you posted on Facebook.

I realize it does take people looking at websites, blogs, newsletters, etc. to capture interest. My point is that we shouldn’t get excited over the numbers, just because we now have access to those numbers. We need to get excited over real live people who show an interest in what we have.