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As organizations progress through their social business journey, for every believer who had drunk the Kool-Aid and thinks social is the solution for everything, you’ll find a skeptic, who is typically less eloquent, but is probably asking things along the lines of:

Why do I need to learn this “social business” platform? I can’t see the business motivation behind it, it’s all hype and no meat. Our current toolset – email, phone, meetings, SharePoint and intranet – is more than enough for our needs. We don’t need yet another tool to make our work life even more complex.

I confess that, between the two groups, I like the skeptics better, as their questions – when vocalized – keep us all honest and make us think about the actual value of introducing “social” to the workplace. It’s easy to understand why a significant number of people don’t see anything wrong with the conventional ways of handling information and knowledge at the workplace. Ultimately, because information is not visible or tangible, it makes it much more challenging to notice the inefficiencies in processing it.

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I teach a lot of online classes at various universities, constantly explaining the Do It Wrong Quickly (now being called agile marketing) approach to the digital marketing world. In one of my classes, on search marketing, a student lamented that my coaching to experiment, to try things, to take a guess and then see what happens before doing something else wouldn’t work at all in her organization. In fact, she told me point blank, “Taking a guess can get me fired!” First off, if guessing at Internet marketing can get you fired, you might be working for the wrong person. But assuming that you can actually reason with your boss, or that you can quit before he says “You’re Fired!” and go someplace else, here are the things you need to keep in mind as to why agile marketing is so important, especially for search marketing.

It is absolutely critical that you guess at search marketing because not doing so allows you to do some very bad things:

  • Choose keywords that make no sense. Being forced to look at the right landing pages, rankings, and guessing at improvements caused you to realize that you have big problems to address, starting with the right keywords. The worst thing you can do in search marketing is to target the wrong keywords. If you are forced to tell people that you know what you are doing, then you are likely to stick with the wrong plan just to show that you weren’t an idiot without ever trying what is right.
  • Stick with dumb paid search ads. Similar to keywords, if you decide to plan out what you are going to do and stick with it, you’ll never discover the best ad, because it is never the one that you try first. Only by experimenting can you figure out what to do.
  • Assume things are OK when they are not. This is actually the worst of all of the problems, and it can happen in any kind of digital marketing, not just search. If you don’t take a guess at what improvement you will make, you have nothing to compare your actual results to, which prevents you from realizing that your improvements efforts might not be working.

The direct marketing principles underlying digital marketing are based on the idea that you project what you expect your results to be before doing anything, and then check to see whether it happened before deciding what to do next. Taking an educated guess is crucial to making the whole process work.

I know that it might feel that taking a guess is bad because you want to do something more accurate than taking a guess. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything more accurate. So, the real alternative to taking a guess is not to have any goal at all, which leads to the bad outcomes I outlined above.

I appreciate that guessing is uncomfortable, but it more comfortable than failing–really failing in your search marketing program. None of us wants to be wrong, but accepting that we mostly get things wrong will help us to eventually get them right. The right answer will only be found by actually doing the guessing for your sites, making changes, guessing again, and seeing how you do.

Think about it this way. When you first stepped up to a bowling alley, you had no idea how to hurl the bowling ball or where to aim it. You took a guess, probably a really bad one the first time. After a while, if you kept at it, you got better at it, until you felt as though you were doing more than just taking a guess–you had an idea of where to aim and where the ball was going. You could have taken all the online courses and read all the books in the world on bowling, but you were never going to succeed by just studying–you had to do it. And it probably wasn’t very comfortable to throw the first ball–you probably felt a bit embarrassed at how badly you did it–but it was the only way to really learn to bowl.

I am making you throw the ball in search marketing. And search marketing is even harder than bowling because the ball changes shape, you can’t see the pins, and they move. And you don’t know what a strike or a spare is, so you need to predict what you expect to happen ahead of time to see whether you are doing a good job or not.

It’s very uncomfortable and very difficult. But not doing it means you are guaranteed not to win and not to improve.

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If you call yourself a social media marketer and you’re not completely promiscuous about it, you’re not serving yourself, your boss, or your clients. If you’re not constantly downloading new apps or registering for every single new social network, you’re slacking; if you don’t endlessly click YES when it asks you if you want to search for or invite your friends, you’re derelict in your duties; and if you aren’t hooked in to share everywhere whenever possible, you’re not going to understand how all of these connectors, sharing strategies, cross-posting techniques, check-in features, and general spaminess and shamelessness quotients work first hand, then how would you be able to honestly either know about or be recommend any of them. And unless you want to be a professional tweeter and Facebooker all your life, you had better know both what’s out there now as well as what’s coming down the pike. Read the remainder of this entry »

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The Wall Street Journal, in a recent article, Avon Is Late to Social Media’s Party, says sales for cosmetic products have steadily moved online to sites like Sephora.com, Beauty.com and Drugstore.com. This has contributed to a -75% decline in operating profit for Avon and their 5.8 million sales representatives that sell door-to-door over the last decade.  Now, Warren Buffet and Coty are making a move to take over a company in crisis. I feel bad whenever 1-to-1 relationships are replaced by computers. Even though WSJ says Avon is late to “Social Media’s Party,” I don’t believe Avon is. Social media is not about being early or late; it’s there for any brand ready and willing to join. Read the remainder of this entry »

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If you try to keep up with the Internet and social media marketing industry throughout the week, you already know that there is too much information for people to ingest let alone digest (that is unless you don’t have a job or a family or hobbies or a life in general). People like to talk about signal to noise ratios which sounds really cool but if you would like to hear it in layman’s terms I’ll spell it out for you. Most of what passes as news these days is C-R-A-P. I should know, I add to it as the managing editor of Marketing Pilgrim. I try not to, but every day I get caught up in passing things along to my readers that are really a distraction and don’t do anything to help them understand Internet and social media marketing better or, even more importantly, apply it to their business. Guilty as charged but I am trying to make it better. Read the remainder of this entry »

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