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Comment by archimedespi | Hacker News Reader

It's like corporate timecube :)

But in all seriousness, how do people even get away with shit like this?

This is absolutely a higher level of nonsense, but I've seen quite a lot of bullshit people are getting away with in web / social marketing. Basically, nobody in a "creative" agency has any fucking clue how statistics work, so they fudge some numbers and invent interpretations. Customers don't have a clue either, but they're compelled to believe because they spent money on it, and since actual sales data are hard to correlate with particular actions, the agency can extract money from their client as long as the client isn't doing too badly.

It reminds me of an article posted here a month ago[0]. Some juicy quotes: [1].

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10872359

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10873226

Similarly, I have rarely met an SEO or social media expert who wasn't full of shit, and I have to deal with these people on a regular basis.

I've read reports with analyses that were blatantly wrong from a statistic or technical perspective, I've had discussions about the value of 'meta keywords' and whatnot where google itself refuted their arguments. And the most 'effective' experts I found were only so because they'd do all sorts of shady things like set up blogs for link juice.

On the other hand, I have met plenty of people with deep knowledge of SEO and social media, but very few of them called themselves primarily experts in this area. Usually they'd be web developers/designers, or small creative studios, or just have some unsexy job description working for a big company.

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