One of those annoying little points of clarity came screaming out at me today…I was reading Kristaphere and came across this about social networking metrics:

I think the fallacy here is thinking one can accurately discern human behavior and motivation from quantitative measurements. I’m from the old school. If you want to know why customers did something: ask them. Directly. Listen to their answers and act accordingly. No, you can’t point and click to get this information or have a pretty line graph in a nanosecond, but you’ll have the most valuable information available for making decisions. How many times do you shop on-line or in person and say “I wish they’d ask me what I think about…..” but you never share it?

After I wiped the ginger ale off my computer screen, I had to think “these are the truest words I will read all day…”  Remember – metrics are nice, but they don’t take the place of interacting with (and understanding) the customers – at least when you want real results.