We’re working on another new business concept. This one is an online based information sharing platform that will hopefully help people in a very expensive hobby learn key information that will make the hobby a lot more fun while helping them not waste money. Vague, I know, but I’m not ready to share the idea publicly yet!
Anyway, what the idea is really doesn’t matter.
What is important is that we had a member of our team, an extreme Folder, do some market research. We needed him to review posts from some social media groups to get a sense of what our target market was talking about and where their key interests and concerns lay so that we can make sure we target these issues right out of the gate.
Our researcher did quite a job. In less than 48 hours, he compiled a monster spreadsheet. It contained unique identifiers for each post. The URL to each post. The number of likes per post. The number of responses per post. The initial topic that was introduced. Geographic information of the post generators and responders. A ton of detail and sorted in various ways. You could tell he was really into the research and compiled it in an incredibly logical way – just like a good Folder should!
Where it got really interesting though was that he sent the spreadsheet over to me and my partner with a quick email. In the email he said: – you know me.
I could not just peruse… I scraped posts with ‘at least 25 comments’ and put everything in a spreadsheet for analysis… (I’ve attached the spreadsheet…)
I went thru them over the weekend and couldn’t really pull out any themes that smacked me in the face… if you and Drew would like to take a look, maybe you will see a pattern that I don’t.
I sat down with the spreadsheet for a few minutes. It became immediately obvious that there were actually several common themes across the posts that would give us a focus for our content. I had to chuckle because I was happy to see someone who was more Folder than me and let my Crumpler side come to life a little bit.
See, our researcher just was so focused on each specific post and detail, he couldn’t find a way to step back and see the vision and commonality. He was so absorbed at the microlevel, his vision was actually obscured. His strength as a Folder allowed him to gather exceptional research, but his depth of Folder restricted him from seeing the bigger picture.
He just couldn’t see the forest through the Folder.
