Your RICE Is Undercooked: Why Data Beats Vibes Every Time

RICE is only as good as the numbers you feed it.

And if those numbers are based on hunches, gut feelings, or a slightly delusional belief in your own brilliance… congratulations, you’ve built a very elegant guessing machine.

As writers and creators, we are notorious for this. We fall in love with ideas. We project enthusiasm as demand. We mistake “this feels clever” for “people will care”.

They won’t.
Not unless reality agrees.

So if you want RICE to work properly, you have to drag it out of the abstract and anchor it in the messy, unfiltered truth of what your audience is actually talking about, struggling with, and paying to fix.

That’s where social listening and internal transcripts come in. Not as buzzwords… but as reality checks.

Here’s how to use them to turn Reach, Impact, and Confidence from optimistic fiction into something approaching certainty

1. Social Listening: Finding the Digital Water Cooler

Social listening isn’t about tracking brand mentions or counting hashtags like a bored intern.

It’s about eavesdropping.
Quietly. Intentionally.
On the conversations your audience is already having when they think no one’s selling to them.

This is where you discover what actually deserves your time.

Reach (R): Where Is Everyone Actually Hanging Out?

Publishing great content in the wrong place is like giving a TED Talk in an empty pub. Technically impressive… spiritually pointless.

Instead of asking “How many people are on this platform?”, ask:

Where are people engaging when this problem comes up?

Look at:

Engagement velocity, not raw volume
Comments, not impressions
Arguments, not applause

If a topic gets 100 mentions on LinkedIn but sparks 50 long, emotionally invested comments… and the same topic gets 1,000 mentions on X with five lazy replies… You already know where the real audience lives.

Also, follow the subject matter experts. Not the loud ones… the trusted ones. Where they post, link, and linger tells you exactly where attention concentrates.

And pay attention to format bias.
Some ideas thrive as long-form breakdowns. Others die unless they’re short, sharp, and borderline frantic. This affects both Reach and Effort, whether you like it or not.

What this fixes:
Your Reach score stops being “I hope this does numbers” and becomes “this channel reliably delivers 4,000 relevant eyeballs on this exact topic”.

Hope is not a metric.

Impact (I): The Complaint Department

Impact doesn’t come from being clever.
It comes from being useful when it hurts.

Social platforms are essentially public complaint desks. People vent there because the problem is big enough, expensive enough, or annoying enough to escape their internal monologue.

Look for the language of despair:

“I hate when…”
“Why is it so hard to…”
“Can someone PLEASE explain how to fix this…”

Recurring frustration equals demand.

Then go one level deeper.

Watch how people talk about competitors. Disappointment, bugs, half-delivered promises… those aren’t just reviews. They’re content gaps waving frantically at you.

And if you notice people sharing absurd DIY workarounds… spreadsheets for things that shouldn’t need spreadsheets… ten-step hacks to solve a one-step problem… that’s a market crying out for clarity.

What this fixes:
Your Impact score stops being subjective. If people are publicly losing patience over a problem, you can confidently call that a high-impact topic. No hand-wringing required.

2. Sales and Support Transcripts: Where Politeness Goes to Die

If social listening shows you what people complain about, transcripts show you what actually costs them time, money, or momentum.

This is the good stuff.

When someone is on a sales call or filing a support ticket, curiosity is over. They’re already invested. Something is in the way.

Impact (I): What Kills the Sale

Sales objections aren’t friction… they’re unfinished content.

Every hesitation, every “we just need to think about it”, every comparison question is an informational gap you haven’t filled yet.

Ask your sales team one simple question:

“What stops deals from closing?”

Those answers are your highest-impact content topics, full stop.

If prospects constantly ask how you compare to a competitor… write the comparison before the call happens.
If pricing causes confusion… explain it clearly, publicly, and without a defensive tone.

And listen carefully to the words prospects use when they describe what they want. Efficiency. Control. Stability. Relief. Those aren’t features… they’re emotional outcomes. Use them.

Confidence (C): Guaranteed Wins

Support transcripts are proof of demand, you don’t have to guess at.

If the same issue appears again and again, month after month, that’s not a nuisance… that’s a content mandate.

Fifty tickets about “How do I set up Feature X?” means one thing:
a guide on Feature X is not optional.

Use the exact language customers use in those tickets. Not your polished internal terminology. Their words are how future customers will search… and trust.

What this fixes:
Your Confidence score stops being a shrug. If internal data proves the problem exists, you can assign near-certainty without flinching.