Give Me One Of Those….
You know:
Make me a viral…
We need a Facebook…
Get us on YouTube…
Do something social…
Give Me One Of Those!!!
Box ticking, check listing – making sure you have covered all of the bases in the digital revolution has become a knee-jerk exercise in executional banality…in fact, so much so that the default reporting and analysis of all the powerful channels and methods available to us as marketers has become reduced to what I wrote about last week – assumptions and pronouncements based on nothing more than GMOOT thinking – and as unfounded in the end as that famous Bill Gates quote, “640k ought to be enough for anybody.”
So yes, I “can make you a viral” (a new Harry Potter spell?) and convince you that the numbers of views are amazing – and that this is the new marketing and really all that you need – until you start to look at your sales figures and wonder where the people went. I can create a Facebook presence for you – drive some fans – more or less, depending on your “real world” off-line status – but if you haven’t thought out the value exchange between them and you – and understood the link between those folks and action, then you have created nothing more than just another siloed digital destination.
Getting you on YouTube is easy – no real criteria – amazing that many people still think that somehow you get chosen to that first post – to be fair some do, but that’s another story. Again, the real question is so what? Am I just sharing? Do I want someone to do something? Am I happy that they like my video…even if they don’t really link it back to me with some outcome?
And finally, we are social animals – Norman Rockwell got this right in his famous painting The Gossip in 1948 – way before we made sharing and connecting easier and more fun, and potentially more powerful, and truthfully more boring (our parents dreaded seeing their friends’ travel slides…). Word of mouth and personal recommendations were pervasive if not well-understood (by all) channels for marketing.
So where does that leave us?
As I see it – unless you are Harry Potter and have the right charm – you can’t just conjure up success in the digital world – although so much of it still looks like magic – and when you get down to really understanding it all – the forces at play here are wonderfully and amazingly complex in ways that are tailor made for extraordinary thinking and creativity.
As for GMOOT thinking – the assumption that all it takes is a checklist is a surefire way to fail.
At the end of the day we are in an ever-changing landscape of possibilities – in fact, I’d argue that the revolution has hardly begun – and even though it has, it will change and morph and evolve as all revolutions do….
Listen:
“Revolution is not a onetime event.” Audre Lorde
And there you have it.
GMOOT? One time box ticking?
Or more…?
Norman Rockwell understood it some 60 years ago…do we?
Great stuff David. And thanks for including the great relevant links throughout the article. Very helpful. Love that Rockwell reference!
David, it really is amazing what gets sold these days. Remember when having a web site was concidered cutting edge? Boxes got checked and bonuses paid to marketing heads. Few stopped to ask what the conversion to the bottom line was, or how it actually supported R&D or CRM. I fear the social movement as u point out is really poorly understood in it’s application to business today. We sit out here in Africa (specifically Botswana) and I fear we have other basic challenges to the realization of what social networks can do, such as basic access to the Internet.
Love your rambles David! Keep em coming! – KB
With all the hysteria around getting into digital, must be there, what have you done, some very sound words of reason. Terrific, thanks David.
Thanks David!
…”ever-changing landscape of possibilities” indeed, with ever-changing consumers who have ever-changing needs and who seek ever-changing challenges…
Even though Mauritius is still a long way away from all the digital craze happening in other parts of the world, it is slowly creeping into everyone’s life, certainly the youth live by it.
Keeps us on our toes and I personally feel that everyday is a learning curve, that digital is a wild animal we can’t pretend to be taming and that we must morph as well to ride the revolution.
As Kabelo pointed out, it was once considered cutting edge to have a website. No matter how little it focused on conversion rates. I believe the business-card-like websites of the past was considered cutting edge simply because the notion of having a website was novel.
Most of the social marketing initiatives we see today suffer from that same hype. Companies will want a Facebook page, a viral ad on YouTube or any other social media GMOOT simply because everyone else is doing it. Because it’s (at least for some) new, unknown territory and because we all want to jump the bandwagon to feel like first movers.
In itself, it is not a bad thing to jump the bandwagon and to test the new social media possibilities; even without having a clear-cut strategy of how to convert the likes and hits and friends to dollars, customers and long-term relations. Sometimes you will strike lucky. Sometimes you will fail miserably.
However, without the failures of the past and the constant consideration of how do things differently and better, would Lester Wunderman have invented the direct mail? Probably not. But someone else sure would at a later. And that is, as I see it, the real lesson here.
With the pace at which social media opportunities are evolving, we can’t afford to sit back and wait for a sure-fire way of doing things. We need to encourage ourselves and our clients to simply just do it. To try out new possibilities and to push the boundaries of how social media can help us make money.
What’s really important here is to have a good framework for gathering intel and a strategy to help us and our clients learn from those failures in an ongoing effort to boost conversion rates and ROIs.
So I absolutely agree with Nadine’s parallel to evolution. Trying things out and learning from our mistakes is how this organization has evolved. And it’s how we will continue to be one of the very best in the market.
Thanks for a great and though-provoking Ramble.