Don’t obey your fanboys

I’m massive on companies working with their customers and communities to co-create things. And I’m pretty big on using social, search and behavioural data in development to make big, exciting, shiny new things too. For example, the new Pinterest trends tool is amazing for finding emerging or historic trends that you may have entirely missed before (north pole Christmas breakfast is my favourite discovery so far).

However, the majority of the above are actual genuine insights, the kind of rare rocks that marketing professionals speak of in hushed tones. On the other end of the scale you have chatter from people who claim to love you, seem to actually kind of resent you, and are certain they know how you should run the business, which is why you’re constantly failing and killing everything they love.

Don’t mine them for insights.

This wisdom was proven recently by Magic The Gathering’s lead designer Mark Rosewater, when asked about how the collectable card game had now released multiple sets of cards this year that were poorly received on social media by die-hard fans.

Rosewater replied that over 75% of the game’s fans are casual gamers who have no idea who he is, don’t frequent Magic content on the internet, only collect and play for fun, and are far less knowledgeable about the game than the fan-boys would think they are.

The result? Fan-boys got upset, demanded clarification about data sources, and continued to dismiss the products they hated, aghast that the lead designer of the very thing they loved didn’t understand its fandom. Zero business impact though, as the >75% who play the game casually were totally unaware any of this happened.

While conversation about your brand, the market, vertical, culture and climate those consumers live in are vital to any brand, you shouldn’t listen intently to the the most vocal of your fans. The chances are on public social media there will be a number who post frequently enough to take up a larger slice of the total mentions and share of voice, which in turn skews the data around topics, sentiment, platform and blah.

You end up trying to develop and sell products and services for millions of potential customers, based on the feedback of who are frequently less than a couple of hundred hyper involved people. Amongst those will be content creators who are aware they get bigger numbers if they’re negative and perpetually shout the sky is falling.

The take away? Knowledge and Wisdom are the first two of the Twelve Jewels of Islam. Knowledge is to know why, wisdom is how you let that knowledge be known. Keep that in mind not only for yourself, but for the consumers you are listening to. Because they may not actually know shit.