Tag Archives | Status Updates

This week started off with a visit to Ann Arbor and the privilege in sitting in on a meeting between some of the brilliant minds at the University of Michigan who are creating opportunities for the next generation of wolverines (leaders and the best). What really caught my ear, was a brief discussion on the importance of learning to fail and the role research plays in that experience. The idea of studying a problem that might not have an answer as a tool to teach students how to fail is almost mind boggling to me. My limited view of research is based in success. We research problems, suggest solutions and implement the idea that has the correct risk/reward balance for the client (this skill started in the communications department at Michigan and was refined during law school at Cleveland State). In fact, it really never occurred to me that research might result in failure. Why? Because I have spent so much of my life researching with the best access to information (the internet).

The concept of learning to fail, working with diverse groups of people and action based learning skills were presented as a tools necessary for kids coming thru school at U of M today. As I listened in awe, I was reminded of the experimental nature of social media. Yes, failure will happen! However, it is not the failure we must learn from but rather the success (no matter how small it is). When we audit a campaign for social media the failures are obvious (200 people following your account on Twitter, no conversation on Facebook, less than 500 connections on LinkedIn). These aren’t the real failures, these are the signs of not having a strategy. If you want your social media strategy to be really successful, you have to be willing to accept failure.

Failure generally doesn’t include public humiliation, in the world of social media all of your success and failure is completely public. Is it really that dramatic, public humiliation? No, it really isn’t. There is such an excess of information that most of our failures are washed away among a sea of success. As we scale the community we communicate with, it is increasingly apparent that our community is a mix of local and global (all you have to do is look at the insights on your Facebook page and you will see that people like your Page from all over the world). Because our community is global and the means of communication are easy to use, information spreads faster than ever (in the recent Occupy Movement pictures and video of violence against demonstrators was shared within minutes/hours and stories were reported that the traditional news ignored).

At the meeting the idea that “knowledge transfer” is quickly becoming accessible to everyone was presented. If you have ever “Googled” anything or watched a YouTube video explaining how to do something, you are part of the generation that knows how to learn independently. School is not the best place for knowledge transfer, in many ways it is the worst (football games to frat parties and everything in between). Traditionally, I have argued that school is for socialization. What opened up in my mind is the concept of school as leadership development. If we want today’s students to be tomorrow’s leaders, we have to do more than inject them with information. We have to teach them how to research, how to engage in the real world with all of the crazy people in it, how to find common ground and most important of all – how to communicate with each other and the world.

Asocial media strategy must include experimentation. You can’t discover what will inspire conversation with your community by emailing out a survey (that only 10% of the people open and 3% respond to). You have to experiment. You have to evaluate the failures. More importantly, you have to evaluate the success. Managing and participating in a community is not a science, it is an art form. As we embrace the next phase of growth in social media, the leaders are going to be comprised of organizations with members who are willing to learn. Judging but what I experienced in Ann Arbor, expect to see action based learning creating the foundations for development tomorrow.