Wide Angle

Remember the old vinegar and baking soda volcano experiment of elementary school days?   The one where you begged your mother to use her kitchen as your laboratory, constructing that pasty mess of flour and red food coloring to see what would happen if you poured in more soda?  Yeah, we know how that turned out; bet you were mopping the floor for hours.

That “what would happen if…” approach to experimentation hasn’t completely faded from memory.  In fact, it’s how most companies are thinking about social media.  “What would happen if I post my TV commercials to YouTube?”  “What would happen if I create a Facebook app?”

But while the “what would happen if…” method works well for kitchen counter experimentation, it falls decidedly short when it comes to social media.  If we take that approach, we risk significantly stunting our learning:  We won’t be able to pinpoint why something worked (or failed) or how it impacted our business (if at all).

Social media leaders take a different approach.  To learn as much as they can as fast as they can, leaders apply the test-and-learn method to add some rigor to their social media experimentation.

Click Image to Enlarge

The graphic on the left illustrates a process map outlining the four steps of a strong test-and-learn social media plan.

Let’s take each in turn:

Step 1:  Brainstorm Hypotheses: Here, you’ll want to articulate how you think social media will advance your business objectives.  Put that belief in “if, then” language to make it easy to scale the learning across the organization.

Step 2:  Map Hypotheses to Growth Goals: Next, pullout some Post-It Notes.  Write your hypotheses down and populate that Growth Priorities matrix shown above.  You’ll want to focus your attention on those hypotheses that align squarely with your business’s top growth goals.

Step 3:  Prioritize Hypotheses Based on Biggest Barrier to Growth: Now that you’ve culled down your list of contenders, rearrange the Post It notes you’ve got left to sort your hypotheses based on their potential purchase funnel impact.  Pick experiments that will help you overcome your biggest funnel barriers to growth.

Step 4:  Pre-Commit to Next Steps: This last step is critical.  Before you run to setup your Twitter account, think about the five most likely outcomes of your experiment, and get key stakeholders to pre-commit to next steps for each of those scenarios.

So if you hit your target of a 20% lift in clickthrus, what happens next?  If you miss and only get a 10% bump, what then?  Making that call in advance will shorten your speed-to-action curve, so you make the most of your learning.

Could your organization benefit from the test-and-learn approach?

MLC Members: Learn how the Computer Sciences Corporation used test-and-learn to reduce time spent planning digital media experiments by 33%.