In recent post Sam Lawrence, CMO of Jive Software, raised the question “Will insightful and credible people from (the) Blogosphere make analysts irrelevant?” Good question, Sam. As my father used to say, let’s take some think time on this one.
Sam was referring specifically to social media analysts who evaluate different social media technologies and their effects on the strategic outcome of the companies which employ those technologies. To do such requires much time and attention. Analysts, in any industry, must go deep, really deep, and be very involved with their subject matter. It’s not just a matter of knowledge; it’s a matter of insight. To be successful at this requires time, beaucoup time.
I’m an analyst at Kahuna Content, a busy one spending gobs of time getting deep into my subject matter, and then I always wish I had more time. I just can’t manufacture any more time. But clients can.
They can hire analysts. That’s part of an analysts job. Doing what my father used to talk about; providing think time capacity. Like everybody else, clients have limited amounts of time. They can’t be experts in everything. They have businesses to run. To consider that the Blogosphere, even with all its collective knowledge, can replace the expertise of a human brain steeped in a specific subject is, sorry Sam, just unrealistic. Making sense of any one subject in the Blogosphere, takes time, beaucoup time. And even then, you can’t really be sure if you have the correct information. If such a possibility was realistic, well then we could just stop sending our kids to college and just steer them to the nearest PC with an Internet connection.
Nope. Sorry. The Blogosphere just won’t replace the human brain.
