austraLasia #3486
Are numbers king?
ANYWHERE: August 6, 2014 -- Is it 2 S. 24:1 or 1 Ch 21:1? So, you'll be heading for your Bible at this stage - please do, but I could also save you the trouble: "Go and take a census of Israel and Judah ..." (OK); "Satan rose up and incited David to take a census of Israel ..." (NOT OK). Both are NIV translations, except for the parentheses! It's just that these days we get a lot of numbers thrown at us, be they Saints and Blesseds, or 'Friends', number of tweets per day, FB 'reach' statistics. Endless, really. This writer's feeling is that we often get given numbers but not so often any useful analysis. Of course, there is nothing inherently evil about numbers, just as there wasn't anything inherently evil about census-taking. The problem was the motivation for it ...
Are numbers king? Let's tackle it with ROI (not the French word for king, but the acronym for Return On Investment), and let's be a little brave and use the current Rector Major's Facebook numbers: he indicates that at 11 p.m. on August 5, 2014, at Valdocco (to be precise) his FB 'reach' for that day's message on the 1872 event that saw the Salesian Sisters come into formal being, arrived at 20,324 'unique individuals'. He can also tell us that since he began putting up his messages in English, the English language 'reach' has moved from 1,500 to 4,800, again as of yesterday evening. Question is, do we have a way of measuring the unmeasurables in all of this? Let's try, shall we?
There are hard and soft numbers come into play. The hard numbers are probably the numbers you see above, called 'reach' in FB lingo, though they are at best a crude statistic. Still and all, they do indicate something. question is, what? And then, what would the 'soft' numbers be? It will be to do with the 'awareness' that is being created and I suppose again in FB lingo that might be 'likes', 'shares', 'followers' and especially 'comments'. But there's a largely unmeasurable set of numbers there too which just occasionally we get to hear about. I got to hear about one yesterday. A Salesian in Lesotho, so 'liked' one of the messages on the RM's FB page that he copied it into a youth newsletter in two parishes and had it immediately disseminated. Now that is 'reach', the hard-to-measure ripple effect which certainly won't turn up in FB statistics.
If 'Salesian' is a brand, and I think we would want to accept that it is, then each individual (sdb, fma, fs, 'friend' of don bosco, sympathiser with the cause ...) can be a brand ambassador. What sort of things might be involved in creating such an ambassador? Let's list five of them:
1. Discovery
2. Creating interest
3. The desire to 'purchase'
4. The decision to 'buy'
5. The loyal 'customer'
Yes, business language, let's admit, but the quotation marks already suggest that we might learn something for our 'business' of evangelisation. In the digital world, by the way, the words 'evangelise' and 'evangeliser' are common, especially in the software world, so let's not be squeamish about borrowing back.
Let's take just three of these: discovery, desire and loyalty. Discovery leads to awareness (or it might work the other way too?). Desire means that influence is beginning to exert itself. It could be as simple as the unmeasurable 'word of mouth'. Loyalty translates into engagement, otherwise it's not really clear - and we would accept that in religious terms as well. So, maybe a lot of our numbers are all about Awareness, Influence, Engagement.
Are they measurable? Facebook thinks so, to some degree at least.
Awareness might be about quantity, in which case we could look at the RM's page and judge it on number of visits, amount of content, the 'traffic' it generates, all measurable by FB insights.
Influence, then, is quality. FB has its 'reach' measurement, but these days, people who work a lot with text can also go in for 'sentient analysis'. There are many tools around today for this kind of conceptual analysis, based on theory informed by contemporary lingustic studies. There is Bayesian theory, for example, about probability and inference. In linguistic terms, by way of example, you can identify sentiments, concepts by the way natural language (doesn't have to be English - Spanish will do!!) collocates words.
And then there is Engagement. Let's call this the 'size' and the 'power' of the community, at least at one level. Comments, likes, shares are all measurable indicators. and then there's the ripple effect mentioned earlier.
Could we come out on the side of Samuel, then, rather than Chronicles in this instance (RM and FB)? Certainly, since we accept wholeheartedly that its motivation is a particular ROI: 'the salvation of souls', and so long as we continue to analyse what the numbers really mean, to the best of our ability.
Are numbers king?
Are numbers king? Let's tackle it with ROI (not the French word for king, but the acronym for Return On Investment), and let's be a little brave and use the current Rector Major's Facebook numbers: he indicates that at 11 p.m. on August 5, 2014, at Valdocco (to be precise) his FB 'reach' for that day's message on the 1872 event that saw the Salesian Sisters come into formal being, arrived at 20,324 'unique individuals'. He can also tell us that since he began putting up his messages in English, the English language 'reach' has moved from 1,500 to 4,800, again as of yesterday evening. Question is, do we have a way of measuring the unmeasurables in all of this? Let's try, shall we?
There are hard and soft numbers come into play. The hard numbers are probably the numbers you see above, called 'reach' in FB lingo, though they are at best a crude statistic. Still and all, they do indicate something. question is, what? And then, what would the 'soft' numbers be? It will be to do with the 'awareness' that is being created and I suppose again in FB lingo that might be 'likes', 'shares', 'followers' and especially 'comments'. But there's a largely unmeasurable set of numbers there too which just occasionally we get to hear about. I got to hear about one yesterday. A Salesian in Lesotho, so 'liked' one of the messages on the RM's FB page that he copied it into a youth newsletter in two parishes and had it immediately disseminated. Now that is 'reach', the hard-to-measure ripple effect which certainly won't turn up in FB statistics.
If 'Salesian' is a brand, and I think we would want to accept that it is, then each individual (sdb, fma, fs, 'friend' of don bosco, sympathiser with the cause ...) can be a brand ambassador. What sort of things might be involved in creating such an ambassador? Let's list five of them:
1. Discovery
2. Creating interest
3. The desire to 'purchase'
4. The decision to 'buy'
5. The loyal 'customer'
Yes, business language, let's admit, but the quotation marks already suggest that we might learn something for our 'business' of evangelisation. In the digital world, by the way, the words 'evangelise' and 'evangeliser' are common, especially in the software world, so let's not be squeamish about borrowing back.
Let's take just three of these: discovery, desire and loyalty. Discovery leads to awareness (or it might work the other way too?). Desire means that influence is beginning to exert itself. It could be as simple as the unmeasurable 'word of mouth'. Loyalty translates into engagement, otherwise it's not really clear - and we would accept that in religious terms as well. So, maybe a lot of our numbers are all about Awareness, Influence, Engagement.
Are they measurable? Facebook thinks so, to some degree at least.
Awareness might be about quantity, in which case we could look at the RM's page and judge it on number of visits, amount of content, the 'traffic' it generates, all measurable by FB insights.
Influence, then, is quality. FB has its 'reach' measurement, but these days, people who work a lot with text can also go in for 'sentient analysis'. There are many tools around today for this kind of conceptual analysis, based on theory informed by contemporary lingustic studies. There is Bayesian theory, for example, about probability and inference. In linguistic terms, by way of example, you can identify sentiments, concepts by the way natural language (doesn't have to be English - Spanish will do!!) collocates words.
And then there is Engagement. Let's call this the 'size' and the 'power' of the community, at least at one level. Comments, likes, shares are all measurable indicators. and then there's the ripple effect mentioned earlier.
Could we come out on the side of Samuel, then, rather than Chronicles in this instance (RM and FB)? Certainly, since we accept wholeheartedly that its motivation is a particular ROI: 'the salvation of souls', and so long as we continue to analyse what the numbers really mean, to the best of our ability.
