The real real data

I came across a very interesting post on Facebook from the team that is handling Social Media for Expo 2015 in Milan. How is the event going? We don’t know. The organisers and/or City Hall and/or the national government, it’s not clear, decided not to give us, you know, the stupid citizens who actually paid for this event with our taxpayer money, any numbers. Total number of tickets sold? We don’t know. Average attendance at the event compared to the 100,000 people per day they were expecting? Same as above.

What we do know, on the other hand, is how many fans and followers Expo has; how many posts and likes and comments; tweets, and retweets, and live tweets etc. You name it, we have the data. Does all this activity lead to ticket sales? No, we don’t know that, either.