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Playing it Safe is a Trap: Five Syndromes in Online Marketing
By Michael C. Gilbert, May 8, 2008
I'll soon be teaching a two-part seminar entitled Online Marketing Reinvention and Improvement, so the topic of online marketing in civil society is very much on my mind. Specifically, I've been focusing my thinking these last few days on the common mistakes that organizations make. I was fascinated to discover that a great many of these mistakes can be seen as aspects of a single problem.
No, the problem isn't the usual techno-anxiety anthem of nonprofits just not being up to speed. Nor is the problem inadequate spending on hardware, software, and technology staff, as much as the latter would like to think so. (I would like to say that it's inadequate spending on Gilbert Center seminars, but no, it's not that either.) So, if it's not any of our usual regurgitations, what is the problem?
The problem is playing it safe.
When it comes to communicating with their current and prospective stakeholders online, nonprofits will often choose the path that feels the safest to them. They do this in regard to their methods, their metrics, their language, their content, and their management practices. I argue that such a choice is anything but safe and indeed is responsible for some of the most serious and common mistakes that a nonprofit can make.
From the very beginning of my own nonprofit technology career, I have railed against the use of fear to motivate nonprofit organizations into adopting new tools and strategies. It was one of the main themes of my keynote address at the first Silicon Valley Conference on Nonprofits and Technology, during the time in which the Web 1.0 hype was out of control. Vendors and consultants had one theme: Nonprofits that didn't get with the web were going to fall behind, losing out to those that did. It may even have been true, but I think it missed more important points and was both shallow and destructive. Climates of fear produce bad decisions.
We're going through a smaller version of the same thing now, under the banner of Web 2.0. Although I think the label is misleading and at least a little silly, it's getting people to focus on the read-write, peer-to-peer nature of the Internet that's been there all along. But the anxiety based pitches are very much alive and they continue to play off of the predispositions that many nonprofits have, as a result of both broader cultural issues and the dynamics of scarcity in civil society, to be anxious and fearful in their decision making.
There are five major online marketing mistakes that reflect such anxious thinking.
1. Seeking safety in "best practices"
Genuine best practices could be a great way to nurture continual improvement in a community of organizations if we could count on their being a robust and critical dialogue about what constitutes the "best". But we can count on no such thing. Very few things called "best" practices are anything of the kind. In fact, the vast majority of lists of "best practices" are simply compilations of what the list maker has come to understand as being what people who recommend are recommending and what people who do are doing.
Such lists would be more responsibly named "prevailing practices", and not "best practices" at all. Indeed, the fact that such practices are what everyone else is doing is precisely what makes them feel so safe. The phrase "best practices" is respectable, but its function is to allow organizations to hide amidst the herd. It's a fancy way of seeking safety in numbers.
One of the corollaries of this herd behavior is that it makes us vulnerable to hype. Is everyone else building applications in walled gardens like Facebook? That must be an emerging best practice!
2. Seeking safety in the wrong metrics
There is a famous quotation attributed to Albert Einstein: "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." Now, nonprofits have a well-deserved reputation for not being committed to good metrics and evaluation, but when they do start counting things, it's often the wrong things. This is especially true in online communication.
This problem comes in two flavors. The first is just measuring the easy stuff and then attributing inappropriate conclusions to it. This is exemplified by the habit of using web site hits as some sort of measurement of the effectiveness of the site. The second flavor is more subtle, but also harder to avoid. Although we may use the word "strategy" liberally when we talk about online communication, we tend to focus on metrics that are tactical in nature. Click-through rates, open rates, and similar measurements are certainly valuable when it comes to improving our tools, but we are drawn in by them because they allow us to compare ourselves to others. We obsess about tactical benchmarks, hoping that we're doing as well as our peers. But in the end, it means we focus on doing things right, rather than doing the right thing.
3. Seeking safety in self-promotion
Take ten nonprofit organizations with email newsletters. Collect 100 links to web pages from them. You would be lucky to find more than one or two that point to sites other than those of the organizations sending the newsletter. What's going on here? Let's say we're an organization that works on homelessness in Baltimore. (I'm not picking on any particular organization here.) Our stakeholders probably share our passion for this issue: the conviction that nobody in this great city should be without a roof over their head. But do we ever link to what some other organization may be doing about this issue? No! We act as though our stakeholders have some sort of focused passion for us as an organization. We are organizational narcissists.
Why is this? Why do we stand in front of our partners in our cause and point, not at the cause, but directly and indirectly, always at ourselves? It feels safer somehow. Our stakeholders have limited attention and we want every single bit of it directed at our news, our stories, our calls to action. We fear that if we open the door to anything else, any other organization, that we'll lose them.
4. Seeking safety in cautious language
Irony, humor, drama, passion, specificity, intimacy, idiosyncrasy - these are some of the characteristics of the kinds of content that holds people's attention these days. And yet, to a frightening degree, these are also the characteristics of which we seem to be most afraid. This becomes especially true when we strive to make our online communication more "professional". For example, in the nonprofit newsletters currently in my own inbox, I can't find a single joke.
We seem so afraid of offending a few people that we're willing to let everyone else be mildly bored. We may constantly try to inject urgency into our communication, but the sheer frequency with which we do that just adds to the impersonal and formulaic experience. We're also afraid of what people (even our staff) might say, were were to give them the freedom to speak to stakeholders. Even though we know that people want to hear the genuine voices of other people, we are too afraid of disagreements and "mistakes" to let that happen.
5. Seeking safety in control
Ultimately, we seek to control things that needn't be controlled, in our desire to avoid the uncertainties that come with the kind of communication practices that truly light a fire in people. Indeed, we are simply afraid to light that fire because at some point it will no longer be in our control. We set up time consuming approval processes, elaborate branding requirements, and many other mechanisms to ensure that the communication of our staff and our stakeholders all remains firmly managed. Even our notion of "viral marketing" tends to involve setting things up to encourage our stakeholders to do exactly what we tell them to do.
This is not the place to describe the alternatives to these fear avoidance tactics. (Indeed, I sometimes feel like all our other work is about such alternatives.) But it's important to note that the alternative isn't just random risk taking. That's a straw man that we set up to justify our actions. The overarching alternative is simply to practice letting go, a bit at a time. The more we allow anxiety and fear to guide our decisions, the more power we give them and the harder it is to break free. Breaking these five patterns is a good place to start.
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