We’re known for doing beautiful real-time visualizations (that’s a live link to 1% of everything happening on twitter. But for most companies, if we monitor your mentions real-time, you’ll be waiting a long time between tweets.

We’re also known for complex affinity analysis– to say people who like A also like B.  Then we split this out by 92 different countries to see how your brand performs by language and geography.  But if you have customers mainly in one city, only one Facebook page, and only one product– the fancy analytics here don’t mean a thing.

There just isn’t enough data there to do social affinity–  it’s just not physically possible.

The same thing is true for small websites using Google Analytics. If there are only a few pageviews a day, there’s just not much analysis possible, unfortunately.

Some clients ask us to fudge the metrics to make them look good.  We’d rather focus on taking rapid, intelligent action than to sweep things under the rug.

So if you’re a start-up or small business, focus not on big data, but on big action.

Then people will buy from you regardless of your name or what the pretty charts say!