On my way back to New York, high above the Atlantic, I’m thinking back to insights I found in Brighton, Norway and Davos over the last two weeks that I was traveling back and forth across Europe.

I’ll leave details about names and brands out for now, focusing on insights exclusively.

A analyst showed me her social media monitoring deck for a large brand. A typical monthly report, deeply diagnostic in nature, takes her two weeks, as it turns out – which is a bit longer than average – and the information was much more useful and actionable to the report recipients than what i usually see in similar reports back in the states.

A good question to ask is how long any report should take (I deal with this in my book) but another is who the recipient is for (marketing, PR/COMMs or research) as the appearance and length will differ for each.

I asked the analyst what makes reporting take longer and found out it has much to do with a client’s questions. It turned out the more vague a client is on what they are looking for, the longer it will take to generate insights – up to a factor of 3x.

In other words a deliverable that under “ideal circumstances” should take 8 hours to assemble might end up taking 24 hours to execute – based on the vagueness of the Ask. On the other hand, a client’s Ask that is extremely specific and detailed may also multiply the execution time of a report by a factor of 2x or 3x, especially when online social mentions that are being collected and measured contain little of the desired content.

Due to Analyst burn out (for example, pricing models typically are extremely optimistic on execution time in-order to keep costs down – analysts usually end up squeezing overlapping projects to a truncated schedule).

I began thinking if what is needed here is a certain level of information provided by the client and profile governance already in place (more like “in the zone”) in order to execute well.

I also think the closer a clients questions are in alignment to the reporting capabilities of a particular platform, the more likely a report can be done in the expected time frame, and vice versa.

I saw some new features to Brandwatch (tagging) that made reports much easier and more pleasurable to do, and cut the time in half to do – I wonder if our approaches, plus the ask, coupled with the right platform is in sync – often I’m sure …. They’re not in sync and certainly not in “the zone”.

All the more reason to choose wisely when settling on Analytics platforms of any nature as the wrong choices can profoundly lengthen the time it takes to execute insights and the overall profitability of any project.