Global warming be darned, it snowed in Dallas last week and temperatures never reached 50 degrees. While I had the ‘pleasure’ of braving the elements for the week, I had the sincere pleasure of visiting with members as diverse as airlines and beauty products to discuss the impact of social media on their respective competitive landscapes. It occurred to me that the current state of social media for most organizations is the Heisenberg principle in action: marketers can’t determine both their competitive position and relative velocity (social media adoption) with the same degree of certitude. And right now, the equation is weighted toward velocity – everyone knows the speed (forward and fast) but very few have stopped to find their current position.
Allow me to belabor the physics a little further and propose two reasons for this tendency to adopt first, position later, based on comments from our social media networking breakfast facilitated in partnership with our sister Communications Executive Council:
- Anybody remember entropy? It’s essentially a highfalutin term for disorder, and the universe always tends toward more of it. The same goes for managing social media. Adoption first, position later occurs because there is little management of early efforts and savvy marketers pave their own paths (as do savvy communicators, and savvy market researchers. . .). Making a concerted effort to develop social media experiments requires active reduction in the number of players making decisions. The universe doesn’t like that.
- Back to Heisenberg. Even if we wanted to measure both velocity and position, the average marketer doesn’t necessarily have the right tools to find both at once. Plus, with such strong pressure to make social media work and make it work now, striving to find the right position almost feels like a sacrifice of terminal velocity.
The biggest member takeaway from our networking breakfast was to break this false tradeoff through the use of test-and-learn experiments – a science class for social media. Finding the right position and speed for our social media efforts first requires the brainstorming of hypotheses; it’s OK not to know upfront. By mapping those hypotheses to growth priorities and selecting those experiments that can help overcome the largest barriers, marketers can fast-cycle learning to develop the proper competitive position. By pre-committing to next steps prior to the tactical execution of the social media endeavor, we don’t need to sacrifice speed. And that way, marketers can tell Heisenberg to take a hike.
MLC Members, learn more about executing a social media test-and-learn strategy at our upcoming teleconference on December 16th. Click here to register!
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