You failed ! Congratulations
07/01/10 05:57 AM Filed in: Business of
marketing
According to Seth Godin's book Linchpin, successful people and companies are different for one reason: they think about failure differently. Successful people learn from failure but the lessons they learn are often different ones. They learn that the tactics they use may not have worked and the lessons from their mistakes can only serve to strengthen their future efforts in the area of social media. Failure counts as done.
In marketers quest for job safety, they are laying the groundwork for their own demise and for the demise of their marketing. There are too many people within marketing who want to play it safe while others wait in the wings to say "see, I told you it would never work". These are the people who are more concerned about their status within the organization as opposed to people who are willing to climb out on a branch to take risks. Linchpins are optimists, change agents and winners. Those who wine and spread fear are largely self-fulfilling prophecies within the company.
The digitization of work makes MBA's marketers very happy. It's the sort of thing you can put on checklist or spreadsheet. However all your competitors are probably doing the same thing so your opportunities are limited. As a rule of thumb the easier it is to quantify, the less it's worth. This is especially true in today's new media. Quantification is the reason that there is so much bad marketing. It's because people want to check off a box on a spreadsheet and say look what I did. It's because the people in finance don't understand marketing and question the cost of everything without knowing the value of anything.
If your company or organization does not recognize failure as learning than you will never have the freedom to try new things and think within the seams of the box. You will be afraid to do what is right or speak up because the resistance has won and when that happens you start your decent into a job and lose your career. See the presentation on Linchpins here
