Avoid risk - sprint towards the online people monster

The most frequently cited reason for not starting to learn, experiment and invest in social media initiatives is ‘risk’, I am told. 

‘Risk’. Oooh, the thrill of the danger, those hushed tones. ‘We’re safe, we avoid these risks’. What misplaced cowardly fearful reactionary bollocks. Medieval logic applied to contemporary culture – ‘stay away, pestilent creature, nay! Nay! Get back foul beastie from whence thee came!’ Crapola.

This is not second hand knowledge: I’m told this by senior business, marketing and PR people at conferences, at executive briefings and in training rooms, at client meetings, and this is backed up through anecdotes from my peers scattered through the industry. This risk is often most pressingly felt and feared one step removed, by the marketer’s boss, by the CEO, the FD, the invisible other person.

This is fear of risk by doing something is deeply, deeply perverse and flawed.

As a marketing community we need to reconsider and then communicate and persuade the business world of the real risks that come with experimenting in social media, and quickly.

In the stable times of yesterday, ah…those halcyon days the rules were known and appreciated, when business was fair, we could re-employ and re-use a known marketing formulae, working with a proven and stable business value chain, it was textbook stuff.

But safe marketing isn’t like safe home security measures – you can’t lock up the doors and windows and be safe by staying in and blanketing yourself to the wilds of the night outside. Do that, and you’re fucked.

Safe marketing is the same as it ever was: it is actually about embracing and managing risk. Risk is what fuels great marketing.

It isn’t about staying indoors – it’s about deciding when to venture out and how, it’s about taking risks, being bold and judging and evaluating and learning and evolving and LEARNING (again!), learning faster than competitors.

Many people believe that the marketing landscape, the fundamental rules of the jungle, are entirely different to how they once were during those halcyon days. I agree in the most part. In fact, sharing that belief has been my job and my mission for the last few years. Yes we do have a new book of philosophies, a new humility and authenticity to find and unlock in our communications, a new value chain, new business models and marketing techniques in the networked world.

But I fundamentally believe that marketing is an evolutionary activity, one that builds on great ideas, and that the core risks we face today in digital social media are exactly the same as they ever were with every other form of change in media creation, communication and consumption.

So what were the risks then, in the good ol’ days?

1.    Failing to meet our consumers needs
2.    Failing to communicate to consumers how their needs will be met by our offer
3.    Not doing either of these well enough to stand out and be chosen over our competitors

And in detailed, straightforward terms, how did these risks manifest themselves?

1.    By being slow to innovate
2.    By being crap at identifying and then meeting needs
3.    By having awful, ineffective communications
4.    By being forgettable, uninspiring, useless, unremarkable

The risks [cue arm-waving and air-punching big shouty body language] are the same today as they ever have been.

And the perversity is quite simply that by avoiding the 'risks' of social media by waiting, by ignoring or denying, is to actually inflame and exaggerate these risks.

To ask ‘can you provide a case study of someone else in our industry sector who has done this exact same proposed activity’ is an analogue for ‘I don’t want to lead, I want to wait ‘til the opportunity has mostly passed and by the way I have no marketing balls, no guts and am actually a lily-livered goat herd better suited to managing a crazy golf course on Bournemouth seafront than a multi-squillion pound marketing P&L’.

You cannot hide from social media – that increases risk, this thing that scares you so. To truly manage risk you can only embrace the new and learn-by-doing.

As with every other disruptive innovation in communications, the best way to avoid risk in this new changed jungle is to run towards the disruption, to sprint right at the monster disrupting our old media channels, and to throw our marketing-selves headlong into the gaping toothy maw of the online people monster.

Stop hiding, start learning, evolve, win. Don't you think?

Comments

[David Stone]

"Stop hiding, start learning, evolve, win. Don't you think?"

Spot on. I like the Calacanis quote "As Internet people we shoudn't bother with people who don't understand the Internet because they'll be dead soon"

http://twitter.com/loiclemeur/statuses/494641312

[Will McInnes]

Dave - thanks for pointing out the Calacanis quote, it's excellent and I plan to start using it at every talk and meeting :) Enjoyably breathtakingly arrogant, but actually true.

[Rob]

I'm not sure how much of it is being scared of risk, it's more just lack of understanding - the fact that whatever proposition you give they don't know if it'll 'work' or not, because they've no experience in that field. So if we do something that someone else has done, it's 'proven' as a 'real workable thing' (too many quotation marks, sorry).

For example, there's no real way of saying which of our ads currently running is doing anything for us, or indeed if any of them are, which in theory could be scary as we're paying so much money for them. But it's easier for someone in Marketing to 'get' an ad, for them to understand how it works, regardless of whether it actually works in the real world or not. We think we understand ads, and understand the process, so we'll do it. It's much harder for someone who doesn't use social media to 'get' a proposal along those lines. So I'm not sure it's fear of risk per se, more a case of not understanding, so being afraid whether what we're doing is 'right' or not. The fear of being wrong as an individual (hence the worry of the 'invisible person' you mention above) in some people in some organisations is greater than the fear of something that everyone agreed should be done not working.

[Rob]

I've just read that back and I'm not sure I've been clear. Hmm.

[roger warner]

ha - well put will. (damn well wish we'd written this one up!).

go bash heads.

marketing is by definition a risky business. our job is to flirt. to ask 10 gals and only get the one. by whatever means - social media (nerdy flirting), trade shows (possibly infectious disease flirting), PR (shy but smart, have your friends do it on your behalf flirting)

thats all there is to it. not a job for civil servants!

[Tim Aldiss]

Doesn't this run deeper through society Will? I mean doesn't the fear of being pownced about by a pack of yobs who are drinking beer while leaning on your car make the average Joe think twice before syaing anything these days?

I think the revolution should continue... we need to be heard!

Each of us have a responsibility to speak up, and if there is a commercial risk then a basic framework of understaning and a bit of knowledge sharing is needed.

[Will McInnes]

Tim - I think you're right, but that's scary. It's easy for me to encourage marketers to take more risks, but when you put it in the context of us 'running towards' the risks of a pack o' yobs that strikes fear into my lavender-fragranced heart!

Maybe we are constantly in fear of everything all the time. Hmmmm!

[pkontopoulos]

It's so strange that I got into your post about social media risks and the million questions on how to avoid them. It's so common in my everyday business talks these days, that I have stopped pitching about the hows and what you can benefit, focusing on how risky is what i am suggesting.

On the other side we can see it positively, business people got into phase #2 in their social media excursion, they now know what social media is, they understand that there is value but they need to quantify it and are afraid to test.
It's a progress after all!

Great post. I should translate it in Greek.