The first and hardest act is always convincing business owners that people are more than the numbers in their Google Analytics. This is true whether they are a non-profit looking to cure Cancer, or a E-commerce brand trying to push some new sunglasses.

The Internet has given us access to more information than we’ll ever know what to do with. While this is great news for anyone who has ever stayed up late wondering how many seconds have really passed since the beginning of the Universe. Unfortunately despite all the gifts the web has doled out, and the high-minded talk about Social Media Revolution, we have a greater and greater tendency to see each other as statistics rather than people.

Trust me, it’s really easy to do, especially when the only access you have to the people visiting whatever slapdash piece of content you’ve put together is from the comments, which are often poorly concealed spam and from analytics packages which can barely differentiate between people and bots let along tell you anything useful about them.

Despite the ease of viewing the Internet as a nameless, faceless playground, this is dangerous. Not because abstracting things doesn’t have a practical benefit, but because it makes it far to easy to think you can succeed by following trends lines rather than thinking about what actually makes sense to do.

Reducing people to data points makes us far too comfortable ignoring common sense, which is a bad thing – always.