Social Media Marketing: think agile software

The credit for this article goes to "The electric Sheep Company"
Author name : Giff Constable
http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.com/giff/?p=600


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During my lunch blog-browse, I ran across two posts that hit on different sides of the same issue: are social media marketing projects falling short because they take a build-and-ship approach? Today projects need to focus on near-term ROI, which ostensibly is a good thing, but this is leading to risk averse behavior from CMOs. One point of consensus at the Advertising 2.0 conference was that the short average tenure for CMO’s is leading to short term thinking, not unlike public companies hamstrung by the pressures of quarterly numbers.

Over at Hyperempowered, Marc Schiller asks whether brand “build and ship it” thinking can ever compete with startup “alway in beta” thinking, where services and experiences are constantly updated and improved in an iterative fashion.

At Experience Matters, David Armano writes, “one of the biggest challenges agencies face is that marketing initiatives are often focused on short term gain vs. fostering long term relationships. This results in a churn and burn which can become difficult for us to sustain.” This points to the reality that a relationship and “conversation” is not built overnight, but also highlights the need for longer-term, iterative thinking.

The software industry learned the hard way that “build it, ship it” was a pretty awful approach, and thus agile development was born. A key step was the ability to move away from shipping physical media. The Web makes it easy to update software whether desktop apps or, even easier, purely online applications.

When one is creating a TV spot or a radio ad, one faces the same issue: one must create and ship because once it is out there, it is out there and cannot be changed — you have to start again with a new campaign piece. Now that agencies and their clients are moving online, they need to learn the same lesson that the software industry learned: iterative is the way to be.

Don’t spend all your budget guessing user behavior, but rather put your best foot forward with a first release, monitor closely, and save some budget for constant improvement.
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