Do We Need an App For Everything?

Welcome to The Social Lab! This blog will not only help you navigate your personal 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 or contact us on social media.

When it comes to social media and digital marketing today, it feels like everyone is trying to make work and processes as easy as possible. This isn't inherently wrong, but there are many things that 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 act as the perfect example for 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 create the catalog for them, but wanted us to use Flexify (an app within Shopify) in order to automate the process of adding products to the website and then having 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 wasn't optimized. After doing some 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 6 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 a lot. You will immediately notice when a product is saying "out of stock", when it clearly isn't. You will also immediately notice if an image is off-centered or is fuzzy. Could you notice all of this if the process of adding or updating products was automated? Of course! The issue is 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 forget about quality control once AI is involved. Humans are constantly looking for ways to make their lives easier, but skimping on quality control is never a good idea.

So what happened to the client's catalog and shop? While they battled for a couple 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.

In the end, you have to decide whether taking extra time and making sure a task is done perfectly is important to you, but try to remember that while the rest of the world is using an app for everything, you don't have to.

Have you had any interesting situations with apps and AI? What do you think about the trend of using bots for everything? Let us know with an email or contact us on social media.