This question is in large part supported by the hundreds of start ups, which all measured social media and tried to convince their potential buyers with even flashier Dashboards. Those looked good and got many PR and Marketing executives excited; however, the basic question still remained: “What does this mean for me?”

The basic underlying issue is a misconception between correlation and causation. The first one is a pure mathematical concept, the latter needs some form of scientific reasoning. For example, even if there is a correlation between the number of storks in a given year and the numbers of newborns, it does not mean that babies are brought by storks. A great info-graphic by SEOmoz explains this visually here.

In the early days of Social Media Analytics companies, the world was full of nice graphs, which were not insightful. Each start up created a new metric and each time the question was: “So what?”

Thus guys… Get focused. Otherwise, what happened to the poor Bot in this movie will happen to you!