By Will McInnes

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?

MeasurementCamp: and so the conversations began

In amongst some heavy shit elsewhere in some of the more fundamental aspects of my life, I wanted to find the time to blog about this because I care about it.

So we had the first MeasurementCamp.

Some background for those that haven't heard of this movement:
The smart people at Chinwag (and I don't say smart cos I wanna suck up to them, I say smart because event after event they seem to nail the digital zeitgeist right in the effing jugular and I admire that proximity, insight and timing) put on an event called Measuring Social Media and I was lucky to be invited onto the panel. More background on that event here and elsewhere.

What I tangibly felt in that room that night were those mercurial and compelling twins: need and opportunity. Given that overt calling, and the incredible turnout and breadth of people in the room (in terms of background, role etc) my top-of-head suggestion was collaboration: 'an open-source set of agreed measurements for social media'.

With a bit of help from a wiki, out of that first night some twenty five (?) of us met earlier this week at the first MeasurementCamp.

The purpose of MeasurementCamp is:

...to create a set of open source resources which allow interested parties to measure their social media communications online and offline.

That's shit wording - my wording so far, but it's wikified so let's hope it 'heals' - but I hope you get the idea...

The MeasurementCamp movement is about fundamentally addressing these issues of what do we measure, what do we believe in, what can we learn from measurement, what can we all agree on and work towards as an industry, what do we report back on and share and benchmark against. That kinda shizzle.

Why? Because it matters. Drucker, the guru's guru, said what get measured get's done. Because the SEO industry and Google's billions owe their existence to their ability to prove. Because we all know it's brilliant and fun and profound and the right-thing-to-do, so why can't we prove it? Because.

And the name MeasurementCamp is probably clumsy too.
Geek purists will say that a somethingCamp should run over a weekend and this that and the other. I don't give a flying flea-bitten donkeyfied horseshit. What those geek purists have done for the world is create a format of events that is profound and wonderful that it is bleeding into horrible soulless and broken worlds like that of business conferences incredibly quickly (e.g. 'Marketing Tech: Tailormade' where delegates chose the talks to go to on the fly from 4 concurrently running options, where all speakers were clearly briefed to be very very practical in their content) - so we're gonna take that goodness and apply it here, regardless of what the purists might snark. Because at the very core of the MeasurementCamp movement will be the same essence of BarCamps (and TransitCamps and - perhaps most breathtaking of all - Social Innovation Camps) and apply it: collaboration in its true form; small groups working on practial things; no hierarchy; goodness.

I don't know how many people exactly were there, and I don't know how many of the gang came to the original Chinwag event. That kinda shit *really doesn't matter now*.

What matters is what we started. And the 'we' was a really exciting group of PR folk, digital agency and independent peeps, some of the big players in the buzz monitoring/technology space, a really cool group.

From an initial open discussion we came out with the following things that'd be useful to each of our selfish needs:

• Metrics to measure - what do we measure
• Shared vocabulary - making life easier within the industry
• Benchmarking - how do our results compare with everyone else?
• Standards - ensuring apples-for-apples comparisons across industry
• Proof or evidence (of social media success) - case studies to convince colleagues or clients to participate in what we inherently know to be right
• Tools - to measure stuff with

Social Media Cafe majordomo Lloyd Davis suggested that any who felt strongly about spending the next 1.5 hrs talking about a given subject say it out loud and that people could gravitate towards the topics they felt interested by. That worked well and so the MeasurementCampers split into 3 groups of similar sizes:

• Metrics to measure
• Proxies to measure - at Lloyd's suggestion, so I think this was about finding other things that already exist (e.g. sales data) to measure social media 'marketing' performance
• Proof

Then in true caring-sharing fashion each group reported back before we all departed.
It felt to me that real progress made.
The groups are going to be updating the wiki - it looks like some of that has started already. I'll flag it up here when there's some real progress for the rest of the world to benefit from.

Next steps:

• Sign up on Upcoming for the next installment
• Contribute to the wiki

Whirlwind few weeks

Sorry for the lack of blogging - I doubt it has significantly impacted on your quality of life nor on that bad case of botty nits that your donkey is suffering from, but I can say that normal service will resume soon.

In the meantime, as a team we were at MarketingTech: Tailormade earlier this week with our little stand, our little social media ebooks and a medium-sized talk on Practical Tips for Web 2.0. Nice bunch of peeps, good interactive, practical format is what client-side attendees demand, and some great conversations started...

Tomorrow is Social Media for Business with the good people at NMK - really looking forward to a nice training day sharing the new shizzle goodness with a group of mainly industry peeps.

Thursday is my first international assignment at Search Marketing World in Dublin, where I'll be talking about the future of digital social media for a few minutes and then being part of a panel - I try to give good panel ;) And more importantly looking fwd to a bursty hour or two of touristy nobbiness in Dublin city centre (please add any suggestions or recommendations to the comments!)

And Friday is a private in-house briefing for a very well known food goods company.

Friday afternoon will be a period of intense exhaustion, lifted only by regular doses of office Peroni supplies.

In the real world, we've had a couple of great clients join in the last few weeks so we're not just prancing around talking about high fakery and silly nonny bonkersness, but you can find that kinda news on the team blog as and when we get to it.

Hope you're well, and if you're gonna be at the Dublin thing please drop me an email - be great to hook up.