Alexander Fleming returned to his laboratory from vacation in September, 1928. He noticed a fungus had grown on one of his lab experiments. The fungus had killed disease causing bacteria in one of the petri dishes. He famously remarked “that’s funny”.
Fleming had discovered the world’s first antibiotic – penicillin, by simply being observant.
While most of the learning we do in our social media marketing campaigns results from A/B testing and careful analysis of metrics, we learn a surprising amount from our mistakes.
Social Media Marketing has many moving parts. It’s very process focused.
For example, a Twitter campaign is made up of processes, such as:
- Following prospective clients,
- Responding to DM’s,
- Favoriting relevant Tweets from prospective clients,
- Sending DM’s to initiate dialog,
- Building Twitter lists, and
- Sending well crafted Tweets.
Some of these tasks can be delegated, as long as they are carefully supervised. But all are vital to the success of the whole social media marketing campaign.
Recently, a member of our Twitter Marketing team went on vacation for two weeks. As a result, we didn’t follow many people for those two weeks – we dropped the ball.
As a result of our missing team member, we saw a marked drop in traffic to our blog and our engagement on Twitter. We also saw our Klout score go down and installs of our MondoPlayer App dropped.
Newly followed potential clients proved to be an important segment of our overall Twitter campaign. We would not have learned the importance and scope of this part of our campaign had we not made the mistake of letting the job go undone.
The subtraction of one element in an otherwise fully functioning social media campaign caused the whole campaign to suffer far more than we expected. But it could have gone the other way. We may have learned that we were wasting effort on this task.
It’s inconvenient and sometimes annoying when part of your marketing campaign hits a bump in the road, but it’s always important to be on the lookout for gems of information that would not be observed under ordinary circumstances.
Who knows what you’ll discover the next time things go wrong.