Imagine an aircraft flying confidently across the sky. The cabin lights are on. Passengers are comfortable. Coffee is being served. From the outside, everything looks exactly as it should.
Except the aircraft is several hundred kilometres off course.
An organisation can have an impressive dashboard and still be moving in the wrong direction. A campaign receives one million impressions. The CEO's LinkedIn post goes viral. Followers increase by twenty thousand. Engagement is up. Video views are up.
The report looks excellent.
Then the board asks a simple question: "So what changed?"
Visibility is not the same as influence. Activity is not the same as impact, and applause has never been a business strategy.
This is where organisations can get themselves into trouble. The numbers that are easiest to see often become the numbers that are easiest to celebrate. But a large audience does not automatically mean greater trust. A viral post does not necessarily change perception. High engagement does not necessarily influence a decision. And a growing follower count does not tell us whether the organisation is becoming more valuable, more trusted or more resilient.
Netflix offers a useful example of why this distinction matters.
When Netflix began restricting password sharing, the response online was loud. Customers complained, commentators questioned the decision and social media criticism created the impression that the company had miscalculated.
But Netflix was not trying to win an internet popularity contest. Its stated rationale was fundamentally commercial: more than 100 million households were sharing accounts outside the intended household structure, affecting the company's ability to invest in its service.
The company proceeded with the change.
By the fourth quarter of 2023, Netflix reported 13.1 million paid net additions, its largest fourth-quarter addition on record at the time, while revenue grew 12% year over year. Netflix itself attributed part of that performance to the benefits of paid sharing, alongside pricing changes and underlying business strength.
The point is not that every unpopular decision will produce a successful business outcome.
The point is that public reaction and strategic impact are not the same measurement.
An organisation can be unpopular online and still be making a strategically sound decision. It can also be universally praised online and still be solving the wrong problem.
That is why the more important question is not simply whether communication attracts attention.
It is whether it creates movement.
At Consult24, we define influence as the ability to create movement in perception, trust, behaviour, decision-making or commercial outcomes.
That movement does not always happen publicly.
A stakeholder conversation that restores confidence may generate no likes at all. An executive intervention that changes a critical decision may never appear on a social media dashboard. A shift in how investors, employees, regulators or customers understand an organisation may be almost invisible online while creating significant value for the business.
Some of the most consequential communications work may never go viral.
This is why the obsession with visibility can become dangerous. It encourages organisations to optimise for what can be counted immediately rather than what may matter over time.
The answer is not to stop measuring.
It is to measure what matters.
At Consult24, this is increasingly the standard we apply to our own work. The question is not simply whether communication performed well, but whether it changed something that mattered.
Did it change perception?
Did it strengthen trust?
Did it influence a decision?
Did it create commercial opportunity?
Will people remember it six months from now?
These questions force a different kind of accountability.
They move the conversation from content performance to organisational impact.
Because communication can be busy without being strategic.
There is always another post to publish. Another trend to join. Another campaign to launch. Another report to present.
And somewhere, right now, someone is probably preparing a quarterly communications report with a very impressive collection of upward arrows.
Engagement is up.
Reach is up.
Followers are up.
Video views are up.
Congratulations.
Now for the uncomfortable question:
Would the organisation be any worse off if none of those numbers had changed?
If the answer is "probably not", then perhaps the dashboard has been measuring attention while the business needed influence.
Those are two very different things.
This is not an argument against reach, engagement or audience growth. Those metrics have their place. They can tell us whether people are paying attention and whether a message is travelling.
But they should be treated as signals, not as the destination.
The deeper question is what happens after attention.
Does someone think differently?
Does a stakeholder trust the organisation more?
Does a customer make a different choice?
Does an executive make a better decision?
Does an organisation become better prepared for a crisis?
Does communication create a commercial opportunity that would not otherwise have existed?
That is where influence begins to separate itself from visibility.
The communications industry has spent years teaching organisations how to be seen.
The next challenge is helping organisations understand what being seen is supposed to achieve.
Visibility can be purchased.
Influence must be earned.
And earning it requires more than frequency. It requires insight, relevance, credibility and a clear understanding of what the organisation is trying to change.
At Consult24, this thinking sits behind our shift towards research-led strategic communications. We are increasingly interested in what communication changes, not simply what it produces.
Because if communication is going to matter to the business, it cannot exist merely to create noise, fill a content calendar or produce an impressive monthly report.
It has to create movement.
Perhaps that is the metric worth chasing.