Examples. What Was Your Biggest Social Media Mistake? What Did Your Learn? Flickr Photo by elycelfeliz “I made a mistake.” Those are hard words for some people to utter when there has been a screw up and they’re responsible for it. It is especially hard given the blame game culture that exists in most workplaces and work relationships. That’s where people are quick to point a finger at you and make you feel shame. After all, nothing focuses the mind as like a hanging as Samuel Johnson once said. I feel very differently. Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Standford, has spent decades demonstrating that one of the crucial ingredients of successful education is the ability to learn from mistakes. The ingredients of successful social media strategy are to learn from mistakes and Networked Nonprofits have cultures that allow this happen.
I had the pleasure of doing a mini-workshop on the “10 Habits of Highly Successful Tweeple” for a small group of people from nonprofits who work in the sexual and reproductive health movement. Clearly, this was a slip of the fingers. Granting Permission to Innovate - HBR Agenda 2011. I’m thinking about the notion of strategic resilience. In the face of growing unpredictability, how do we provide ourselves with appropriate options for the future?
How do we leverage the increasing interconnectedness of our markets without becoming victims of those connections? Singular, one-dimensional strategy is now outdated and risky. From a biological perspective, resilience means having multiple options for survival. Species that can emerge to address a need, for example, make ecosystems resilient. Certain companies—the big examples are Amazon, Apple, and Google—have avoided the one-strategy trap by relying on what I think of as “permission to innovate.” They’ve magnified anticipation of and tolerance for innovation among their customers, partners, employees, and stockholders and managed to sustain it over time. When people talk about building a culture of innovation, they tend to focus on what’s happening inside a company—and that’s clearly part of it. Joe Gerstandt | Keynote Speaker & Workshop Facilitator | Illuminating the value of difference.
There is a great deal of evidence showing diversity (especially cognitive diversity) to be a powerful factor toward innovation, increased problem solving ability and better decision making for groups. Put another way, it is going to be more and more difficult with each passing day for teams and organizations to compete if they are not able to capitalize on cognitive diversity, or diversity of thought. We can and should integrate this into our efforts to recruit talent and build teams and maybe even start thinking about actually redefining what “talent” actually means; but we should probably start by focusing on the cognitive diversity that we already have on board. Truth of the matter is that if we have a group of people together and we are discussing anything of any significance, there are going to be different perspectives. But often those different perspectives are not being shared. And this is where human nature and some of the basic dynamics of difference show up.
Failures Are Really Mini Successes. I tend to talk about failure a bit on this blog. Failure is a good topic for discussion, whether it is project failure or failures by people. Why is it such a good topic to talk about? Because people fail every day and so do companies. However, in our world, people like to talk about success, especially monstrous success even though a very small fraction of people will ever achieve it. I like to talk about failure because everyone knows what it feels like in some way, and there are not a lot of people talking about it. Recently, there was an excellent thread about failure on a mailing list that was start by Wil Reynolds and his post about applauding failure. The other thing I notice is that most entrepreneurs are the best exaggerators and liars out there. I highly recommend you read the rest of his post as well. In most places, any sort of failure is seen as a very bad thing, almost like a disease that is contagious.
Projects and companies fail all of the time. How we do it: Strategic tests from four senior executives - McKinsey Quarterly - Strategy - Strategic Thinking. All strategists grapple with the question of how to create and preserve competitive advantage. But individual perspectives are likely to differ, depending on a company’s strategic journey, the industry it’s in, and the idiosyncrasies of the organization. We talked with four current or former senior strategists from diverse corporate environments and markets about their strategic challenges—and came away with four distinct, thought-provoking lists of strategic tests. Does it violate any strategic laws of gravity? I have been interested in strategy, both at a conceptual level and as a practitioner, since the late 1960s, when I was studying at the Harvard Business School and the transition was under way from talking about long-range planning to thinking about strategy.
At that time, many core conceptual frameworks of strategy were emerging. I’m using very simpleminded examples, but people do make these kinds of errors. Do my numbers match my strategy? Will it create value? Is it material? How centered leaders achieve extraordinary results - McKinsey Quarterly - Organization - Talent. For the past six years, we have been on a journey to learn from leaders who are able to find the best in themselves and in turn inspire, engage, and mobilize others, even in the most demanding circumstances.
And the business environment has become more demanding: the global financial crisis and subsequent economic downturn have ratcheted up the pressure on leaders already grappling with a world in transformation. More than half of the CEOs we and our colleagues have spoken with in the past year have said that their organization must fundamentally rethink its business model. Our work can help. We have conducted interviews with more than 140 leaders; analysis of a wide range of academic research in fields as diverse as organizational development, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, positive psychology, and leadership; workshops with hundreds of clients to test our ideas; and global surveys.
Podcast How centered leaders achieve extraordinary results Exhibit Enlarge Meaning Positive framing. Champions of agile marketing. If I could pick one word to define the future of marketing, it would be agility. All the shifts in technology, media, channels, connections, and culture we’re experiencing have combined to accelerate the clockspeed of marketing. How rapidly can new ideas be tested? How quickly can successes be scaled? How swiftly can failures be caught and re-imagined? How close to instantaneous can reaction time be when opportunities or threats arise in the viral, global fabric of social media? How deftly can a campaign, a program, a product, or an entire company pivot?
These are the questions that every marketer must ask. While technology can help, achieving agility ultimately requires adjustments in the “operating system” of marketing management to better encourage, enable, and harness networked speed. To make this transition, marketers should look beyond lowercase-a agile — an admirable adjective — to uppercase-a Agile, a noun that defines a management methodology. Xmarks: Not So Dead Anymore - WebNewser. News of Xmark’s death has been greatly exaggerated. The bookmark syncing startup that had been announced as dead just a week ago has gotten a new lease on life, thanks to 30,375 loyal users. Last week, the freely available cross-browser bookmark syncing startup Xmarks announced that it had failed to find a sustainable business model.
It was collecting tons of data about how popular sites were, and what its 2 million users were interested in, but it just couldn’t make that info work as a search tool, or as a tool for advertisers. With capital running low, and no buyers in site, co-founder and CTO Todd Agulnick decided to close up shop. But he left the light on just in case there was enough interest to turn Xmarks into a paid service. The company set up a page on PledgeBank, a UK non-profit startup that lets people post petition-based pledges. So far 30,375 people have signed the pledge. “This is not a signed, sealed done deal yet.
Are You Organized For Failure? Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody – The Power Of Organizing Without Organizations is essential reading for everyone seeking to understand how our world has been redefined by the web. I threw sticky notes in a few pages and wanted to highlight a quote that warrants more discussion. This is from page 246, where the open source movement is being discussed: In traditional organizations, trying anything is expensive, even if just in staff time to discuss the idea, so someone must make some attempt to filter the successes from the failures in advance. In open systems, the cost of trying something is so low that handicapping the likelihood of success is often an unnecessary distraction.
Even in a firm committed to experimentation, considerable work goes into reducing the likelihood of failure. This is a game-changer for your business. Using digital communications tools allows you to try everything out and see what sticks. “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. Failure Is Always An Option. Why You Should Experiment. I experiment with many different ideas to create interesting content, drive traffic, earn links, rally communities and inspire people to action. It’s a lot of fun, and at the same time a fantastic way to learn. There is no limit to using open networks other than your creativity. And, quite possibly the best way to learn and find what works for you personally is by experimenting. The top companies and professionals in all fields are constantly experimenting, motivated by an unstoppable passion for what they do. There are so many great reasons you should be experimenting daily with your blog, your marketing and your business.
Experiments attract attention Human beings are infinitely inquisitive. Experiments fail And this is a beautiful thing. Experiments on the web are cheap I touched on cost under the last point, but I want to highlight this further. Experiments often work I’m always pleasantly surprised by how often my experiments succeed. Experiments are fun Max Kalehoff brilliant states: How To Fail Your Way To Social Media Success. Guest post by Beth Kanter Over two years ago, I made a screencast about Web Analytics for Nonprofits that covered the basics of using google analytics, web metrics, and some nonprofit case studies featuring Laura White and the Idealist. That's just about when I discovered Avinash Kaushik's blog, Occam's Razor and his first book on Web analytics. I reached out to Avinash and he was very generous with his time, helping us understand traditional web metrics as well as Google Analytics.
Through our conversation, we also touched on the metrics for blogs. I've learned a lot about metrics from Avinash. Avinash has just published his second book, Web Analytics 2.0. I had the pleasure having lunch with Avinash over at the Googleplex last week. Avinash feels that in a world of finite resources, it is very important to experiment and fail fast. The F-word chapter (Failure) offers some really useful tips about creating and nurturing a "experiment culture.
" Social Marketing Gone Awry: Pepsi Refresh Needs To Refresh Its Security Settings. This year, instead of spending $20 million on SuperBowl ads, Pepsi decided to put the money into Pepsi Refresh, a social marketing campaign which solicits the best ideas from consumers and plans to dole out $20 million in grants to good causes and “great ideas” throughout the year.
The site opened up about 10 hours ago to take ideas from people applying for grants. On February 1, voting will begin to determine the best ideas, which will receive grants ranging from $5,000 to $250,000 each. It’s a bold experiment in social marketing, but it is also risky. Not helping matters is the fact that the Pepsi Refresh site isn’t working properly. There were also HUGE privacy problems last night as each time you tried to submit your plan, it would be linked to some other applicants personal information. Regardless, this is not a good way to launch a massive social marketing campaign aimed at fostering warm-and-fuzzy feelings towards Pepsi. Dell's Social Media Experiment Aims to Capture the Digital Nomad. While the actual term "digital nomad" has been around for a little while, it usually seems to fall under the shadow of the more expansive term of telecommuting.
The fact is that really they are two different ideas altogether. The idea of telecommuting has been around for almost as long as computers have been able to talk to each over a copper wire. I remember back in the days of bulletin board services (BBS) the idea of people being able to work from home was beginning to take shape. At the time, the big drawback was that the technology hadn’t advanced to the point where it was really feasible, not to mention the fact that employers were almost wholly unified against the idea. Then along came the internet and with it increasing access speeds and more powerful machines that could handle what was needed for telecommuting to work. No more were you tied down to a single location if you didn’t want to be, no more did your development or business team all have to be in the same place. Pepsi Refresh: Success Or Failure? — Soap Box Included. Pepsi Charity Contest: Learning From Mistakes and Level Playing Fields - Beth's Blog: How Nonprofit Organizations Can Use Social Media to Power Social Networks for Change.
From my son's kindergarten class The Pepsi Refresh Contest is the boldest experiment so far of the number of social good contests over the past three years that have used crowdsourcing and social media to encourage innovative social change ideas or to raise money for nonprofits or shine attention on their do good work. For context, please see this guest post by Bonin Bough, The Global Director of Social Media for Pepsi, published earlier this month on my blog. The New York Times published an article called "Pepsi Trips Over Its Own Submission Rules" which describes what happened: The tiny charity currently atop the rankings in one category of the contest accidentally got a little help from Pepsi itself. Materials submitted by the Joyful Heart Foundation, a charity started by Mariska Hargitay, one of the stars of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” to help victims of sexual assault, were updated by the staff at Pepsi after the submission deadline, which is against the contest rules.
No. A short history of Social Media screw-ups. Blog Archive Introducing LinkedIn Labs « Every month, our company celebrates “InDay”, a day when LinkedIn employees from around the world are encouraged to spend their time focused on research, learning and developing concepts outside of their normal routine. For employees who like to learn through execution, we throw a Hackday contest on every InDay. This concept began with an impromptu hackday held over the 2007 holiday break and has now grown to a company-wide event (including an American Idol style panel of judges). Teams are given just five minutes to demo their hack in front of the entire company, and judges get just two minutes to ask questions. I’m pleased to announce that, as of today, we’ll be making some of these internal projects publicly available on a new site, LinkedIn Labs. Whether they are hackday winners, or just compelling technology demonstrations, we plan on adding to LinkedIn Labs regularly, as new innovations that are capable of supporting outside users are developed.
2 Social Media Marketing Failures. Bryce Maddock: Socially Awkward: A History of Google's Social Media Failures. 2 Social Media Marketing Failures. About:blank. 5 Social Media Disasters.