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.
