The Sports Industry's Obsession with Meaningless Metrics | Hacker News Reader

The Sports Industry's Obsession with Meaningless Metrics

maxwendkos.com

7 pointsMaxWendkos7 comments

As a sports fan, I wonder what's specific about the sports industry in this analysis? Vanity metrics are an issue for any business with a digital presence.

Maybe left unsaid is the idea that sports organizations are used to relying on numbers to assess on-field ability, and it now permeates their social marketing strategies as well? Still, this is a mistake I've seen many businesses in plenty of far-flung industries make.

You're right - this isn't specific about the sports industry. However, sports properties do tend to be a bit behind the rest of the business world when it comes to understanding and successfully adopting new media. It's a shame, because they're playing on such fertile groups. Few brands are so lucky to have such a captive and engaged audience.

This article was targeted at the sports industry because a) I'm working on a sports startup and b) it was written for SportsNetworker - a sports business blog.

Is there an e-mail address I can reach you at?

I know, I was hoping that this would start a discussion about sabermetrics on HN!

I don't see anything here unique to the sports industry, just an instance of a single sports team having a perspective of social media that I think is common to many entities across a variety of industries.

Also, a minor note: teams can push content to "fans" on Facebook as well. Status updates from things I like do show up on my news feed.

Re: uniqueness, you're right. Take a look at my reponse to dwolfson20's comment.

Re: Facebook page status updates, some do, some don't. Take a look at the pages you "like" and check out how much of the published content has never appeared in your feed.

They're in business, too. I've too often seen where management pursues some meaningless metric with no understanding of how that number is arrived at.

Sometimes, I think that the ability to make fancy yet meaningless spreadsheets is, at least as far as management is concerned, my most valuable technical skill. And that depresses me.

It's understandable that businesses are seeking metrics to measure the effectiveness of their initiatives, but problematic when they give credence to completely useless numbers solely because they haven't yet identified effective metrics.

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