Why You Should Be Screwing Up In Social Media

Note from Lance: We had a great week in San Diego here at the ERE Expo and you should check out some of the great speakers we had (and unlike many conferences, ERE livestreams and captures much of the content featured at the show and gives it out free of charge). Here’s my post for this week and we’ll be back on schedule Monday.

We’ve got some great sessions about social media at ERE. I’ve got to be perfectly honest with you, I am tired of the talk of best practices in social media. Or control. Or policies. Or social media ROI. Or…pretty much any conventional conversation about social media.

Here’s what you need to be doing: Trying something. Screwing it up. Measuring. Learning. Improving. Repeating.

You heard me right. I want you to screw it up. Big time. Make tons of mistakes. Kill that risk avoidance mentality.

Highly paid consultants would rather make your money theirs by prescribing boring, run of the mill social media campaigns. Social media savvy self-branded experts will roll their eyes at any Twitter person that doesn’t follow “proper” etiquette or protocol on the platform. If you want to build your business profile, you better be tweeting and blogging about only business stuff. Make sure to cover your ass with a social media policy.  And for Pete’s sake, make sure you get terrified at the thought that someone who works for you might screw up in the social media space.

The game changing business decisions of today are based on big risks and the willingness to screw up. If an entrepreneur consulted a lawyer and asked about a business plan, they’d likely get told that it is a risky endeavor. It could bankrupt you or limp along long enough to never truly get off the ground.

Guess what though? They still do it. Sure, some take some steps to minimize risks but some proportion of risk is inherent in entrepreneurship and can’t be eliminated. And most of the time, a single failure isn’t a killer (it is usually the pattern of failure without measuring, learning and improving).

So here’s the big $65,000 question: Why are we treating social media unlike any other business opportunity and simply handing our strategy and tolerance for risk over to an overeager legal or HR department to kill any innovation or interestingness from it? And don’t diss the stereotype because it is mostly true. Of course your company is different. I am sure they absolutely needed a five page social media policy. For reals.

What’s your take on that big question? Why aren’t we willing to make mistakes like we are with other major initiatives? Why are we taking any possible innovation out of our organizations by choice?