Do We Need an App For Everything?
Welcome to The Social Lab! This blog will not only help you navigate your social media but also investigate marketing trends and examples of great social media work. Do you have something we should talk about? Make sure to send us an email.
Regarding social media and digital marketing today, everyone is trying to make work and processes as easy as possible. This is okay, but many things go wrong when the sole goal is to streamline a process without making sure quality control is in place.
We recently came across a situation that will be the perfect example of why we don't need an app or program for everything we do as marketers. A client was in need of creating a Facebook catalog and shop. They asked us to make the catalog for them but wanted us to use Flexify (an app within Shopify) to automate adding products to the website and then have them populate the Facebook shop.
Typically, having an app like this with a URL feed is a great idea, but we immediately noticed issues. Flexify wasn't populating all the information necessary, so the client was stuck with a catalog that needed to be optimized. After troubleshooting and realizing it was a glitch on Flexify's end, we immediately suggested an alternative: a manually created catalog. This particular client only has six products, so they are the perfect candidate for an old-fashioned catalog that is manually controlled. What are the perks of manually creating your catalog?
For one, quality control is a lot easier when you are on the system. You will immediately notice when a product says "out of stock" when it isn't. You will also immediately see if an image is off-centered or fuzzy. Could you notice all of this if adding or updating products was automated? Of course! The issue is that people become complacent when there is AI involved, and they believe that they are free to do other things rather than check to make sure the AI is doing the right thing.
This isn't an official stat, but from our experience, 8 out of 10 individuals need to remember quality control once AI is involved. Humans constantly look for ways to make their lives easier, but better ideas exist than skimping on quality control.
So, what happened to the client's catalog and shop? While they battled for a couple of weeks on using an automated system, they eventually realized that manually creating and editing the shop was the best idea for everyone. This case study applies to so many situations in the digital marketing world. Email marketing comes to mind, where instead of crafting unique messages, companies simply spam and drag their email addresses through the dirt. Posting even has this issue. Companies and individuals direct post from Instagram to Facebook without editing the copy and making it specific to the platform it is going on.
Ultimately, you have to decide whether taking extra time and ensuring a task is done perfectly is essential to you, but remember that while the rest of the world is using an app for everything, you don't have to.
Have you had any exciting situations with apps and AI? What do you think about the trend of using bots for everything? Let us know with an email.
