The importance of strategy is woven into the fabric of every consultation and class I teach.  I shout it from the mountaintops.  And yet, sometimes I break my own rules … and with good reason.  In a fast-changing competitive marketplace, sometimes not locking into a strategy is the best strategy.

I have an entrepreneur friend who said that his start-up company has a different direction every three months. On the surface, that may seem extreme, but when you are a small company, even something like gaining a new customer, hiring a new employee with special skills, or a sudden move by a competitor can dramatically create a course correction.

One of the most costly mistakes you can make in business is brilliantly executing an obsolete strategy.

In my particular field, the dynamics are changing tumultously. Right now, building a competency in social media marketing is barely-controlled chaos.

2011 was really a year of “wait and see” for me.  And I’m glad I took this approach.  It was uncomfortable in some ways but I needed to just let things unfold to see what monetization opportunities would emerge. Here’s what happened:

Although I have been teaching at the college level for several years, the demand for my services shot through the roof in 2011.  I was flexible enough to embrace opportunities that didn’t exist at the beginning of the year.

My consulting business shifted dramatically from multi-million dollar companies to multi-billion dollar companies.  I think this is where I am more comfortable, but it means I would have to risk more by taking on fewer, larger clients.  And can I find the right resources to help me scale in this way? Some big strategic decisions will have to made for 2012.

The speaking schedule also shifted quite a bit in 2011.  I evolved and matured as a public speaker and learned that I am very good at this.  Do I want to grow the speaking side of the business?  The trade-off with travel — is it what I want? I’ll have to bring focus to this area in the next year.

The Tao of Twitter, was released in February 2011 and was a surprise hit (at least to me!).  My second book will be released by McGraw-Hill in March and the publisher is expecting big things. This is going to throw me into a new public spotlight and undoubtedly open up more writing opportunities.  Should writing books be an emphasis going forward?

And then there is {grow}.  Blogging is the favorite part of my job but I have done a poor job monetizing the property, at least directly.  I have a new video series coming out in January and a few other ideas but I have definitely sub-optimized these opportunities.

This is a round-about way of saying that it was a very good strategy to NOT have a strategy in 2011.  None of these opportunities would have been fully available if I had decided early in the year to wed myself to one defined path.

Now, I need to be clear that although my strategy was in flux, being fully aware of my core competencies and points of differentiation were not. That’s an important distinction. In a dynamic marketplace, remaining open to strategic shifts is OK but it only works if you are clear about how you uniquely create value.

So I’m going to spend a little quiet time over the next few weeks assessing my opportunities, combining them with my passions, and defining the best monetization path and focus for the next six months. Even now, I don’t think I want to lock in completely. Is there even such a thing as a long-term strategy any more?

That’s the way things are playing out for me.  What is the role of strategy in your company? How has that changed with the increasing speed of business? How do balance the need to stay numble with the benefit of a strategic plan?

I’ve had a variety of sales jobs in my career and have dealt with some great people … and some world-class jerks. Not just difficult and demanding people, but unethical, bullying, liars at Fortune 100 companies.

One time, a powerful VP demanded that my company buy-back $1.2 million of our material due to a cosmetic issue that did not affect the performance of their end product. In fact, the defect would not even be visible to their consumer. It was a dicey situation. Yes, we were “out of specification,” but this was also going to be a painful financial hit for my company.  It was like being ticketed for going 56 miles per hour in a 55 mph zone.

In the end, we paid an $850,000 claim for the products that were made from the defective material.

I later found out this VP secretly sold the defective products to his customer any way, simply adding our claim payment to his bottom line (and annual bonus payment) through some accounting jujitsu.  My customer loved bragging about his cleverness to demonstrate the power he could wield over my company.

The dude was eventually fired for this type of behavior, but that did little to comfort me when I still had to work with him every day. And yet, I really had no choice but to take it or quit.  This guy was personally responsible for the acquisition of $1.5 billion of my company’s products — at that time, 10 percent of my employer’s total revenue!  I had a one-line job description: Don’t lose the account.

I knew that I would only be in the sales position for a few years at the most, so I decided to weather the storm and approach the challenge patiently and calmly, as long as my own ethics or any laws were not compromised.

I realized that the customer is NOT always right. But the customer is always the customer.  I was the one who had to adapt to survive and compete.

Fortunately, this is an extreme example but the point is, we can’t always demand that a customer — even a really bad one – change to conform to our needs and processes. Only we can change to adopt to the customer’s needs … or, if it gets too bad, quit.

Understanding this wisdom is difficult but a key to success in a fiercely competitive world.

This story came to mind because last week we had a debate on {grow} about the customer demands for rapid online service, even from hotels, restaurants, and other providers who are on the “value” end of the product line. This is an unfortunate development but they really only have one choice: Figure out how to adapt to the customer service needs AND maintain a low cost structure. They’re not going to be able to dictate customer expectations and still compete in the long term.

I’m currently working with a supplier that is imposing new processes that will take up more of my time and dramatically hurt my cash flow.  As a business partner, I want to cooperate and make the whole “system” better, but when I point out that their service levels are declining and the value of these new processes seems to be flowing in only in their direction, their response is defensive instead of responsive.  And you know … they might be right and I might be wrong.  I’m not perfect.  But I’m still the customer.

They may get away with it for awhile if the switching costs are high, but in general the information flow of the web has dis-intermediated many traditional competitive hurdles. It’s easier than ever to find new suppliers for most goods.

In the end, all of us who have to compete for a living know we have just one true source of competitive advantage –

LISTEN to our customers more intently than our competitors,

DISCOVER un-met and under-served needs, and

RESPOND more rapidly and effectively.

That’s it.  The customer is the customer. Adapt or die. Right?

I had my eyes opened to the massive growth of the crowdsourcing industry at a SXSW panel earlier this year.  Ever since then, I have been looking for an opportunity to bring more information on this trend to {grow}. I’m fortunate today to have an expert on the subject, David Bratvold, provide a guest post:

If you’re not yet familiar with crowdsourcing, it’s a new work process that involves getting a crowd of people to help with a task typically performed by one employee or contractor.  Imagine needing a new logo for your business.  Rather than hire a freelancer, agency, or in-house designer, with crowdsourcing you can post your need and several designers will compete and create a custom logo just for you.

While this is a common example, today crowdsourcing extends far beyond simple graphic design and can be broken down into four main subcategories:

• Microtasks -
  Taking a project and breaking it into tiny bits as seen on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (“the online marketplace for work.”).  Each crowd worker can only see his little bit of the project. You could hire one person to label 1,000 photos or hire 1,000 people to each label 1 photo.
• Macrotasks -
  Similar to microtasks, however, workers can see more, if not all, of the project and can get involved with any portions they are knowledgeable in.  This form is most common with solving complex problems such as the X-Prize or seeking out a better recommendation algorithm for Netflix.
• Crowdfunding -
  Getting a crowd to help fund your cause or project.  It’s unique because you set a monetary goal and deadline and you must get fully funded by your deadline or you’ll get nothing. Here is a list of 13 crowdfunding sites.
• Crowd Contests -
  Asking a crowd for work and only providing compensation to the chosen entries. Commonly seen in design sites like 99designs, and the graphic design example in the opening paragraph.

(For a more thorough explanation, read “What is Crowdsourcing.”)

As the early stages of crowdsourcing continue to gain momentum, there are a few megatrends worth keeping your eye on.

1) Curated Crowds

The bigger your crowd doesn’t necessarily mean better output when it comes to crowdsourcing.  This has been made apparent with the early days of crowdsourcing design sites.  A design contest yielding 1,000 designs can become simply unmanageable.  If you offer a prize large enough, any monkey with a crayon could contribute.  I’m not saying a large crowd produces bad results, I’m simply stating there will be bad among the good.  Luckily, there are almost always a lot of great designs, but it takes extra time to sift out the bad.

Sites like Genius Rocket have begun shifting to a curated crowd model.  Anyone can request to join their crowd, however, they must prove they’re talented before being able to participate in some projects, or even at all.   LogoTournament has been silently curating their crowd since the early days.

2) Quality Improvements

As microtasking gains in adoption, more crowdsourcing platforms are seeing success with adding an extra level of quality control on top of the basic input – output model made popular by MTurk.  If you’ve used MTurk, you’re fully aware the results you get may be less than correct.  Sites like Serv.io & Microtask have added extra redundancy and QA checks to ensure high levels of accuracy.  If a client requests it, Serv.io can maintain perfect accuracy when needed.  As this option becomes more available, people will be demanding 99.9%-100% accuracy, considering it doesn’t incur a lot of extra expense.

3) The Standardization of Crowdsourcing

As it’s been pointed out, crowdsourcing is not an industry, it’s currently an undefined space.  The current leaders in crowdsourcing are working to define this space and standardize as much as we can.  Groups like the Crowdsortium are for players within crowdsourcing to discuss what’s going on.  Daily Crowdsource, along with David Alan Grier, are leading the pack towards standardization.  Grier has been pushing for a trade association for quite some time, and recently has begun publicly discussing it.  Daily Crowdsource, Grier, and other leaders are working to define the official taxonomy of crowdsourcing.  All these recent motions are to help standardize crowdsourcing in order to ensure a healthy future.

4) Corporate Acceptance

Crowdsourcing isn’t just a fad for early adopters.  In fact, several Fortune 100 corporations have taken a big step into crowdsourcing.  General Electric is leading the charge with multiple million dollar open innovation projects. Others like General Motors, Procter & Gamble, and PepsiCo continue to execute crowdsourcing projects (not just one-off publicity stunts).  Amazon even built one of the largest
crowdsourcing platforms.  It’s not often a new process is adopted so quickly by large corporations, but this will make it easier for other Fortune 100 corporations to begin crowdsourcing, which will trickle down to smaller corporations.

5) Early Adoption

Although you may be familiar with the term, crowdsourcing is still in the early adoption phase.  A very small percentage of people are familiar with everything  crowdsourcing can do.  Sure, any tech geek can name 99designs, but can you list 10 other uses of crowdsourcing?  Were you aware you could build a car, stress test your website, or volunteer your “waiting in line” minutes to a charity all with the help of crowdsourcing?

Have you tried crowd-sourcing yet?  What are your favorite applications and success stories?

David Bratvold is the founder of Daily Crowdsource, the #1 site for crowdsourcing news. His goal is to educate business professionals on the benefits of crowdsourcing.

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One of my strategic partners bought me one of these Cisco umi devices. It’s kind of like high-definition Skype for a big screen TV.  He thought it would be useful for our long distance collaboration.

We ran into technical and service problems and it took us four months before the damn thing was operational. It was also priced too high, and then you had to subscribe to a pricey monthly service plan.  I honestly didn’t know how Cisco was selling these things into a home market which is what they were obviously trying to do through their Ellen Page TV ads.

I have a friend who works for Cisco and I suggested that any Marketing 101 student could have seen the obvious technical, competitive, and pricing issues with this product. All they needed to do was a little analysis and research. “That’s the problem,” he said. “They never did that. They are not even applying any type of basic marketing plans to their new product development and sales efforts.”

Is it posible that a blue chip company like Cisco is ignoring marketing fundamentals?

I have long wondered … when will it get to the point where the product development cycle becomes so short in the tech business that marketing became obsolete?   Here are further indications that we may have reached that point:

• Last week Hewlett-Packard killed its entry into the tablet computer market (TouchPad), just 48 days after it was first put on sale.
• A few months ago, Microsoft pulled the plug on its Kin mobile phones after less than two months of sales.
• Remember how the A-List bloggers gushed about Google Wave? It was buried 77 days after it was launched.
• Pure Digital, maker of the popular Flip camcorder, had planned to release the Flip-Live on April 13, but Cisco, which had just acquired Pure Digital, shut the entire division on April 12.

What the heck is going on here?  How could these big, smart companies make these seemingly big, dumb moves?  Don’t they have any business school grads who know how to do customer, product, and competitive research? Market testing and planning?  A SWOT analysis for Pete’s sake?

I’d like your views on this but it seems that there are a few factors at play here:

• The short product development cycle and rapid rate of product obsolescence forces companies to take shortcuts on research and market planning expenditures. The product launch is now the same as the market test.
• Frequent executive changes and consolidation in the tech industry forces a tendency to “clean house.”
• When Apple is the dominant competitor, it is an expensive proposition to try to compete against them.
• If a product is not immediately perfect, it is crushed by tech bloggers and negative social media buzz.

If I am correct and this does represent a point where the speed of business has outpaced marketing’s ability to research and plan, there are some serious implications for all of us.

Significant brand damage.  H-P didn’t just have a misstep, it breached consumer trust.  How can you put your faith in a company and its products if it is short-sighted enough to dump a major market entry in a couple of weeks? Your most loyal early-adopters just shelled out $500 to buy your tablet and you pull the rug out from under them?

The end of brand-building?   Take a look at this picture of the first iPod.  When it was introduced in 2001, it wasn’t the first MP3 player or the prettiest one, or the one with the most memory, but it was the product willing to stick with a plan and innovate at a breath-taking pace.  Apple didn’t build that brand over night. They did it right and gave the product a chance to grow. What is the world coming to when a company dumps a product before it ever has a chance to catch on?

What about competition?  Did you see that Facebook apparently abandoned its “places” feature after just a few months? This was supposed to compete with Foursquare. Are you telling me Facebook can’t knock Foursquare around? We need competition in the tech industry.  In fact these companies need competition.  The main advantage of Google Plus is that it has slapped Facebook in the face and said “Compete!” We’re sure to get better products out of it.  Apple seems committed to innovation but lets face it, without competition, their pace of change will slow too. Why spend heavily on R&D when nobody is even trying to unseat you?

Is this a weird and unprecedented moment in marketing history — the end of marketing as we know it — or is it simply an extended run of stupid?

I’ve figured out Google’s grand plan for world domination. More or less.

See if this makes sense to you.  It sure did last night when I was sipping whiskey on my back porch.

Google’s business is built on collecting data about people and then selling those people highly targeted ads.  The more data they collect, the more ads they can sell.

That’s why they introduced Google +.  Facebook was getting too doggone much of the information collection market.  Even Twitter was honing in.  Every tweet was one little snippet that was out of reach of Google. So Plus was a bold grab at world info marketshare.

if you don’t think this is the name of the game, look at what happened this week with pharmaceutical companies.  Facebook reversed their decision that had allowed pharma companies to not have comments on their pages.  This provides potential costs, complications and legal ramifications for these folks that I won’t get into here, but you can read about it more thoroughly in this scintillating coverage from the Pharma Times.

Nobody seems to know why Facebook did this.  Except me of course.  It’s all clear.  Or a wild guess. You decide.  The way I see it, if Facebook pages don’t have comments, Facebook can’t collect information. If they can’t collect information, they can’t sell targeted ads. And they HATE that.

But I digress. In the whole big global pie of digital information, there is one gold mine that has yet to be tapped. In fact, it might be the motherlode of personal information and it lies tantalizingly out of reach of Google, of Facebook, of everyone.

Text messages.

The world sends billions of text messages every year. Or is it every day?  I can never be sure of these numbers. I usually make my facts up anyway. 57.8 percent of all statistics are made up. You can take that to the bank.

But I digress again.  Now, how in the world would Google ever get access to text messages? Hmmm … perhaps they should buy a mobile phone company like Motorola! Well, butter my buns and call me a biscuit. They just did that.

Android Shmandroid.  Google wants the text messages!

Now there is this sticky little issue of privacy to overcome.  To really get access to text messages, you would have to obtain people’s permission to actually give up their most intimate thoughts and dreams to the Internet.

Who would be stupid enough to do that?  Wait, wait … I know this one!  TEENAGERS.  Hell, they already spill their lives all over Facebook every day anyway.

What would it take for a high schooler to give up the nano-particle of privacy they have left and let Google listen to their text stream? How about a free smartphone, complete with all the latest Google Goodies?  How many teenagers would give up their text privacy for a new smartphone every year?  All of them. That is a scientific fact. I saw it on The View.

Let’s look at how the economics would play out. Let’s say the manufacturing cost of a smartphone is $25.  Do you think Google could sell the equivalent of $25 worth of new ads over the course of a year to reach a break-even?  You betcha. I’d buy stock in that.

So that is the plan.  While Mark Zuckerberg’s personal fortune is climbing by a billion dollars a year (or is it a day?) Google is going to data-mine text messages all day long and kick his Silicon Valley ass to the curb. That really is the plan. I read it on Twitter.  Or maybe it was Harvard Business Review. Oh well, same thing.

Does any of this make sense or do I have to cut out caffeine?

By Robert Dempsey, Contributing {grow} Columnist

The information density of our world is creating a challenge for every indvidiual and business.  We have not yet reached the Age of Filtering!  And while you may be thinking “more is better,” maybe we can take a sales lesson from an unlikely source – a Thai Food Cart.

The Paradox

Many companies offer a long list of services, which makes their website nearly impossible to navigate and confuses a would-be buyer. While it may seem like a paradox, offering fewer options increases the likelihood of getting more business. To see why, I’m going to use an example of something seen quite frequently here in Thailand – the open-air restaurants composed of between 10 and 100 food carts.

Specialization: The Lesson of a Thai Food Cart

In every Thai town there is one common sight – open-air “restaurants” composed of food carts. Each evening food vendors drive or wheel in their food carts (some are the entire back of a pickup truck), set up tables and chairs, and start cooking. You want to talk about competition? These restaurants can have 10, 50 … even 100 of these carts!  In this environment you have to be very good at what you do. And that means specializing.

These carts run the gamut of tasty offerings:

• Noodle soup
• Roasted pork leg with rice
• Sweet desserts
• Fried chicken
• Sausages

… and many other dishes.  Heck, even the soups are broken into different styles – one cart may be selling pork soups and another chicken.

The point is that each of these vendors specializes in one type of dish. But it’s not limited to food carts.

Many of the restaurants here have a limited menu, offering only curries or 6 different chicken dishes. The restaurants that have a signature menu item are the ones that have the longest line of people waiting to get in.

What is YOUR signature item?

Well I’m assuming you aren’t actually running a food cart as your business but don’t let the example hold you back from seeing the lesson, which is offering too many options to customers may not be a good thing for your business.

When a potential customer visits your website, they don’t know what the right answer is for them. If they did, they wouldn’t be searching for it. But they do know, more or less, what their problem is. That’s where content – be it on your blog or on your sales pages – comes in.

Don’t confuse them with a large list of services, products or solutions.  Show them you understand their problem and can help them solve it.

And Don’t Worry – This Is Very Common

If this is how your website is set up today, don’t feel bad – it’s how the majority of websites are built. Take a look at the site of any large company, hit their home page, and take note of how many actually address a problem within the first 5 seconds of you reading it. It’s going to be very few.

So now the question is, if we know that specialization can increase demand for what we do and probably allow us to charge premium prices to do it, why aren’t more companies doing it? In a word: fear.

Don’t Let Fear Run Your Business

Are you afraid of losing business if you don’t have that long list of services available? I know I used to be. I thought that by not offering a service I was losing out. But what I was really losing was my most valuable asset – time. It was only when I honed in on where my business can provide the most value – direct response social media – and specializing in that, that demand increased and so did my prices.

How can you apply the specialization lesson from the Thai food cart in your business?

Robert Dempsey specializes in direct response social media and blogs at http://DempseyMarketing.com/journal/.

Image courtesy of Heinrich Damm

“No.”

That’s the short answer to a question that was posed to me in Focus (which seems quieter and more manageable than Quora).  It got my attention because it is a question I often hear in my classes too.  Instead of preaching fear and pontificating about social media as the Second Coming of B2B Marketing, let’s look at this another way.

Social media is growing fast, but it’s no longer new. If social media were such a dominating competitive force that non-users would be threatened with extinction, wouldn’t we be seeing some signs of that by now?

In fact, I am struggling to recall one case study where a B2B company used social media to dominate a market and extinguish a competitor … and I watch for these things.

I really like Eric Qualman’s inventive Social Media Revolution videos — I even show them in my classes some times. But there is one phrase in there that makes me cringe: “The ROI of social media is that you will be in business five years from now.”

Oh puhleeeze.  Let’s see.  Eric’s first edition of this video came out in 2009 which means we are less than two years aways from the Social Media Armageddon.  I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to change my vacation plans just yet.

Social media marketing can undoubtedly be used in very meaningful and powerful ways but I don’t think it is necessarily a “let’s bet the ranch” investment that is going to transform very many B2B marketplaces.  And let’s not forget the powerful applications for HR, PR, and many other parts of the company. I’m an advocate and think every company should make an informed decision about how these tools integrate with current efforts and can create some new ones.

Yes, it’s big, it’s bad, it ain’t going away.  And I’m all over the value selling perspective. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that a ton of business in this world is still won and lost at the end of a negotiation by the company who is prepared to knock off another penny per unit, especially in these economic times. That can kill a business faster than an inactive Twitter account.

I also think it’s difficult to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage based on a social media strategy. The entry barriers are low and it would be pretty easy for competitors to mimic efforts.

If you’re selling ball bearings to Ford you’re probably not going to tweet your way to long-term success, right?

What do you think?  Are you seeing any non-tech B2B businesses storming the fort with social media marketing successes?

Failure is a stigma in our culture, so we tend to put it out of our minds, and avoid it at all costs.  Yet, failure is unavoidable … and according to Seth Godin and many other entrepreneurial gurus, quite desirable.

I have been in business more than 20 years and consider a successful FAILURE as a pivot point, not necessarily a stopping point. Here is the story of my most recent “FAIL” credential!

In May 2010, I founded emidaASIA with Alex Conrad, a seasoned entrepreneur with vast experience in Asia. We had the idea of introducing ‘mobile money’ to the “un-banked” population in Asia.  Those without bank accounts could engage in commerce via their mobile phones, thus taking a giant step into the 21st century.

We licensed technology from Emida, a leader in prepaid global solutions, with operations in 40 countries outside Asia and $1+ billion annual payments. They are a smart, profitable, established company, and I had personally known the CEO for over 10 years. In fact I had brought some of the first angel investors to the company!

We did all the right things: we set goals, and had measurable milestones to success, with realistic time frames.  We separated strategy from tactics and knew the signs to look for in a strategic FAIL (failure to execute the overall plan in the defined timeframe) versus a tactical FAIL (failure to execute the individual steps which result in accomplishments along the way).

Our first goal was to test the viability of this exciting new business model in Asia.

Our mobile products were developed to target opportunities for mobile customers to connect through our product — driving more traffic on the network, more transactions and more revenue and profits. Good for everyone’s bottom line!

Fast forward — a year later — we were just not getting traction and the team was faced with the fact that we were failing.

But a bigger decision was HOW to fail? We had to review assumptions, and analyze missed goals, (and there were many), including our conviction that we would be able to spread the Emida ”rest-of-world” scenario straight across Asia.

Some of the tactical goals we missed were related to the time & cost to bring a partner to contract; technical back-up for multi-language implementation; and finding key personnel to run local operations.

We also found that our market assessment and business model assumptions were incorrect:

• Market saturation was rapidly increasing with seemingly competitive products often with no transactional history…..
• Local operators were reluctant to get too far ahead of the market, they were unwilling to select our product over competitor’s mobile wallets……
• Government and bank approvals can be excruciatingly slow. We should have given more consideration to the ‘gray’ and ‘black’ aspects of soliciting approvals……
• Our licensing model was too thin to support a viable business to pay us, and multiple 3rd parties who expected a piece of the transactional pie…. As a self-funding company, staying power to wait a couple of years for critical mass was not there.

We were facing rapidly saturating markets, impossibly slow and murky approval processes, and seriously diminished margin expectations.

So now what? We recognized that we had a “strategic FAIL”, and came to a quick decision.  While it no longer made sense to move forward as planned, it also did not make sense just to simply walk away … there was a lot of brand equity established.

We quickly established a new partnering agreement with Emida, which transitioned the emidaASIA brand equity and market intelligence over to them. Combined with their resources and experience in other parts of the world, our equity enabled Emida to build on our gains with a fresh look.

Although we failed, we did salvage the project and gained a wealth of knowledge through our demise:

• Build in flexibility to account for changing market conditions — even when we thought our assessment was solid.
• Licensed technology is a great way to get a quick start in a marketplace, but you have to be able to accurately communicate to the marketplace what they are investing in? (IP and/or mega traction)
• Scaling rapidly across a continent benefited from a key partner.
• Although our major thrust was a failure, in the process, we identified MANY exciting business opportunities in related niches, including predictive analytics for the mobile money transactions.

So stay tuned, we’re not done yet! New ideas and businesses will emerge from the ashes!

Don’t you agree that this was a successful failure?

Caroline Di Diego (CASUDI) is a multi-faceted entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience with early-stage companies, building effective start-up teams, creating workable business models, and bringing new technologies successfully to market (well usually!). You can find her blog at www.esse-group.com and follow her on Twitter @CASUDI

A {grow} Community Week Contribution by Steven H. Parker

Fail fast.  Fail often.  Fail spectacularly.  Fail worse than everyone else.  Fail like there’s no tomorrow.  If you fail enough, success is guaranteed.  What a crock!

I don’t disagree with the premise behind failure worship.  I’m a huge fan of dogged persistence, tireless pursuit and continuous improvement.  I practice all three in my work every day because frankly, I don’t know how to do it any other way.  Nothing about what I do is fast, easy, cheap, simple or obvious.  But it drives me bonkers the way we worship, promote and advocate the embrace of failure in such stupid ways.

The emphasis is all wrong.  It’s like assuming all you’ve got to do to win the marathon is get the lead for the first 100 yards.  More failure is seen as better than less, under the misleading assumption that it will lead inexorably to success.

This view ignores the fundamental reality that you have to learn from failure, and apply what you learn to the next attempt.  If you don’t, then there’s no path leading from repeated failures to success.  A single broken link breaks the whole chain.  And what is missing from the cult of failure is that it often is to learn the right lesson from a failure.  Worse, there’s no practical advice on how to suss the lesson out.  The implicit assumption is that all lessons will be obvious, but it isn’t necessarily so.  In fact, it can be difficult.  Often the data is contradictory.  How do you draw valid conclusions from conflicted results?

Ask anyone who’s been through a major, life-altering failure.  Take it from me, nothing is automatic.  It may take years to recover and there’s no little red reset button.  I was one of the many agency owners whose businesses were vaporized by the dot com bust 10 years ago.  We threw every innovation we knew at the problem of winning new business.  We failed and failed and failed again.  Because we were working in the mindset of a market that no longer existed.  Our market had suddenly imploded by about two-thirds.  Nothing we tried was effective, because for a while, no one was buying anything.  Our real failure was not recognizing how quickly and completely the steep downturn in the tech sector had broken our business model.  But that was a doozy.  We had to retrench and retool.

Too many people seem to be seeking “permission to fail.”  It does relieve a lot of the pressure to perform.  In our instant gratification-oriented society, this is welcome news.  Hey, relax!  Don’t kill yourself.  Just keep failing until you get it right.  Things will work out. Is this ambition or slacking?  Is this just another example of wishful thinking?  Are we deluding ourselves?  Or are we just too lazy?

In so many fields today our culture has no middle, no gray areas.  Only extremes.  But the middle and the gray areas are where real life happens.  What a shame when we don’t recognize it.

Actually a few people do.  Like Seth Godin.  In Poke the Box, he does a masterful job arguing for taking the initiative, being accountable, making stuff happen, owning your failures and learning from them.  But he puts failure worship in the right context.  True, it’s not to be feared, it’s a (hopefully) temporary impediment to be overcome.  But it’s not a “goal,” heaven forbid, nor an acceptable outcome to be glorified.  Godin astutely nails the Nike psyche by admonishing us that no, it’s not “Just Do It.”  It should be only, “Do It.”  There is no “just” because it’s damned hard work.

There’s real work in converting your failures to success.  The only way to convert them is by learning.  If you put in the effort to learn, eventually you may succeed.  But there are no guarantees.  Not even if you’re 100% buzzword-compliant with “lean, agile, game-changing, innovative, disruptive, blah, blah, blah.”

The next time you’re tempted to jump on the failure-lovin’ bandwagon, stop and think.  It shouldn’t be “fail fast” – it should be “learn fast.”  Forget about failure.  It comes naturally, with hardly any effort.  Instead resolve to decide what proactive steps YOU will take to ensure that you learn whatever lessons you can from each failure and apply them the next time.  That valuable lesson or insight will not walk up to you and introduce itself.  You might have to go grab it and wrestle it to the ground.  Don’t waste a failure!

Focus on pursuing your lifelong learner merit badge.  It has a better future.  And a longer tail.

Are you with me on this or are you a fail fan?

Steven H. Parker has helped Internet and technology startups to tell their stories for more than 25 years.  He is founder and CEO of Parker Communications.  He’s @sparker9 on Twitter and blogs at Marketing Dissector

Illustration: Toothpaste for Dinner

It’s time to step up and address one of the great myths pervading the social web — that an essential best practice is decentralizing social media marketing and pushing it down to employees at every level of the company.  This is a philosophy that sounds good, but is often detached from practical reality.

I have been immersed in the social web for more than three years. It’s a big part of my job.  I teach about it. I consult about it, and of course I write about it. And here is a conclusion that I can confidently make: Social media marketing can be very, very difficult to do successfully.

Why force social engagement?

So why do so many people insist that we should be shoving social media down the throats of employees at every level of the company?  This is like forcing me to do accounting.  It would not be a good fit … I just don’t have that mindset.  Not every person has the right mindset, ability, or openness to succeed with social media but that doesn’t mean they can’t still fit in your company.

Of all the people I interact with on the social web, I would say I am most in-tune with Jay Baer. He is a true intellect and I highly recommend a regular dose of his blog Convince and Convert. But we disagree somewhat on this point.

I’m not picking on Jay … his viewpoint is widespread.  But his recent post Speak No Evil – Why Trust Isn’t a 4 Letter Word in Social Media, is a good focal point for the issue.

A hiring problem?

Jay concludes that “it’s everyone’s job to represent the company on the social Web” and that if you don’t have employees who can represent you, ”you don’t have a social media problem, you having a hiring problem.”

The underpinning of this hypothesis is that every employee should be both skilled and trustworthy on social media or you are not running your company well. This logic gets further twisted for me with claims that people are communicating stupid things to the outside world in emails any way … so why not trust them to put it out into public on the social web?  Seems like apples and oranges. Emails don’t go viral.  Just ask NFL player Rashard Mendenhall.

Should everybody tweet?

Jay uses the example of Mendenhall and his recent litany of tweets that were outside mainstream American thinking.

Let’s look at the Mendenhall example. Yes, he was out of step with mainstream thought.  But who isn’t to some degree? The man was hired to carry a football toward a goal line, not necessarily to “stay on message” during a news event.  So did the Steelers make a ”hiring mistake” because he sends out stupid tweets?  No.  The guy is one of the best football players on earth.

Part of the ”social media is for everybody” myth is that we should humanize our companies — trust people to be themselves and everything will be OK. Again, this is just too simplistic and disconnected from reality. You just might get what you ask for, as the Steeler ownership discovered.

I work with an extraordinarily gifted man who is one of the best sales people I have ever met. He is kind of “folksy,” maybe even leaning toward redneck.  But he is a perfect fit for his marketplace and there is nothing he would not do to serve his customers. The man is a star and he has single-handedly built up his business — he’s probably the most valuable employee in the whole company.

Putting this fella into the public social media spotlight 140 characters at a time would be a disaster.  I imagine his tweets would come across as incredibly embarrassing — taken out of the context of the individual and his environment. Does this company have a “hiring issue?” Of course not!  His customers understand and love his quirky humor but that doesn’t mean the whole world would.  Here is what I would say to him — “You just keep selling your heart out buddy. Don’t worry about Twitter.”

Uniform political correctness is impossible

When consultants pontificate that every employee should have enough common sense to be on the social web, what they are really saying is we need to hire people who are always politically correct. Which of course will create the most boring, ineffective companies — and who would even want to work there?  Not every employee has good judgment about everything — especially when we are turning them into public spokespersons.

Before you drink the Kool Aid on this perspective of “cover the world with social media,” ask yourself one question. Think about some of the best bosses and employees you have ever had. Would they take naturally to the social web? And if not, does that make them a bad hiring decision?

Let’s put this into a practical context

Theoretically I agree with Jay. But I think applying social media effectively requires business sense and balance. We wouldn’t force everybody into a sales role. We wouldn’t put everybody into the glare of the six o’clock news in a PR role. Why would we set an expectation that everybody should be able to have a role in social media or that is a sign that we have a “hiring problem” if we don’t?  Being adept at social media is NOT EASY for everybody. And we should be able to live with that human diversity.

Instead I think it makes sense to encourage social media participation in the context of the goals of the company, the available resources, the competitive environment, and the talents of the employees:

1. I agree with Jay that the PR or marketing department hasn’t cornered the market on social media greatness. Certainly employees can become online ”beacons” for your brand, but don’t force them to do it or dismiss it as a “hiring problem” if they don’t want to blog or participate in Twitter.
2. Acknowledge that social media participation is going to occur, sanctioned or not.  An explicit social media policy is a must.
3. If employees do want to be formally active on the part of a company, give them the training and guidelines they need to do it well. Explain how it connects to strategy and the implications of representing the voice of the company.
4. With the increasing importance of social participation, start adding this to the job requirements of new employees, if that is key to their role in the company.  For example, I certainly would not care if a star engineer doesn’t want to blog. You know, some people have to be about the business of actually making stuff.  Again — “context.”

What do you think?

So I absolutely recognize and appreciate the opportunity that Jay and others put forth, but I think this nuance is important –  It’s not that everybody SHOULD be a marketing voice for you company. It’s that everybody COULD be a marketing voice for your company depending on context.  This approach simply recognizes human diversity and that an employee can be extremely valuable … even if they don’t participate in the social web. What do you think?