Have you ever heard of a concept called The God Complex? Basically, at it's core it's a way of thinking that allows for blanket methodologies to be applied to whole fields and concepts. Tim Harford sums it up really well in a TED Talk that he gave on the subject - the story being how one man, Archie Cochrane, managed to convince the prison guards at a Nazi PoW camp that by by changing the medication, he could cure and prevent a horrible disease afflicting prisoners on the camp.
How did he do this? By trial and error - something many people in social media are scared of admitting pays dividends on new networks.
Take this infographic for instance, released by Umph last week, which suggests that Google+ is a ghost town compared to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn:
This is, in my opinion, not just a tremendously unfair comparison, but also a flawed one. By using universally-recognised standards of engagement and blanket methodology across the four separate sites, the author has presented a deeply-flawed data set is so heavily skewed towards Facebook and Twitter it's unreal. And they seem to miss the fact that a great deal of the sharing takes place in private 'circles' rather than public networks, it's essentially like comparing a private birthday in a restaurant to the Olympic opening ceremony
Every social media platform is different, and should be treated as such. Benchmarking a relatively new network against a relatively old platform with more traction is a prime example of The God Complex - a complete unwillingness to experiment, to use trial and error, to be willing to take a chance. The complete opposite of the mentality Archie Cochrane set out to challenge.
I would wager that the team behind this infographic have set out to achieve what they wanted from it - namely to generate some controversy, and some business by appearing to be straight-talking social media pragmatists. But the data behind this infographic is skewed, deeply flawed, and seems to be motivated by a personal distaste the network, and little else. Oh, and the fact they lost their password when they set their account up.
I feel it's important to highlight this. Presenting data in an attractive way is a terrific tool for the promotion of ideas, but I feel that some infographics apply a blanket 'A vs B' approach to analysing different networks, and deliberately overlook the nuances of a network to try and appear as if they have a universal metric for all networks of this kind - which is like prescribing paracetamol for every ailment and injury under the sun.
What do you think?