Here’s the thing about numbers – they suck. They cloud people’s judgment. They associate meaning to things that are meaningless and often take away from what really matters.

Take sports. Let’s compare A-Rod’s statistics to Scott Brosious’s, the man who stood at third base just a few years prior to A-Rod in New York. Scott Brosious, who retired in 2001, is a career .257 hitter with a total of 141 home runs. A-Rod is a career .306 hitter with 553 home runs. Over his entire decade-plus career, Scott Brosious didn’t make nearly the sum of money that A-Rod will this year alone at $28,000,000. Yet if they each strolled down Broadway, New Yorkers would heap praise upon Mr. Brosious in a way A-Rod could only dream.

Why? Because beyond all the numbers that A-Rod’s accumulated he hasn’t provided moments or built relationships the way Scott Brosious has. The clutch hitting and late-inning dramatics that Brosious provided is the equity that has made him a Yankee legend despite his pedestrian numbers. So what does this mean? It means that if you’re spending time worrying about accumulating more Twitter followers and monitoring your blog traffic your missing opportunities to build moments and share experiences that naturally make you more valuable.

I’m done trying to poke holes in social media outlets. They aren’t the problem. Twitter is a perfectly effective and maybe even revolutionary medium. The bigger problem is the people who use social media and their infatuation with building numbers instead of meaningful relationships.

We’re so concerned with numbers and having to measure something that we associate false values so we can rationalize our own existence. Right PR people? Height + Width X ad rate X 3 = PR value? Following that formula in PR makes us devalue the real target audience because we’re always searching for the biggest. It’s the same as building a social media campaign around accumulating followers instead of cultivating relationships. You neglect those that really matter.

“Our goal is to accumulate 10,000 followers by the end of this effort.” What happens if you achieve your goal? Now you’ve got 10,000 people who on the other end are just happy that you increased their numbers for them. How often do you actually go through and read what your followers have to say? Probably not often because you’re just happy to see that number on the right side of the page grow. Here’s a news flash – so is the person on the other end. They don’t really care about you either.

The sad part is we seem to be ok with that. As long as we see numbers grow or have something quantitative to shoot for we feel like we’re striving towards something. And the truth is, we are. It’s just that we’re striving towards something completely meaningless.

In a perfect world we’d say, “Screw numbers, they’ll come if we do our job right.” If we work to provide value to others and establish relationships the numbers will come in greater force than they ever could have otherwise. But it doesn’t work that way because it’s too damn hard. How do we measure if someone feels connected to our brand and how do we know if they feel compelled to share what we have to say with others? I sure don’t have the answer. But I do know that strategies built on numbers mislead and misrepresent. Ask A-Rod. Ask Scott Brosious.

Tags: Park&Co, Ryan La Rosa, social media, word of mouth marketing