by Adam Gray | @AGSocialMedia | LinkedIn
Every time I read these words my heart sinks. A “Harvard study” is seen by so many of the business community to be like “Newtons Second Law”, a fundamental fact of the physical world rather than what it is…someone’s opinion, often based on floored (or at best dubious) techniques and we need to ask ourselves if “a recent Harvard study” in fact gives any insights that we didn’t already know.
Shawn Achor makes a funny, but nonetheless worrying, throwaway comment in his amazing TED talk where he says “there’s a trend in the data and that’s all that matters because it means I can get published” and I can’t help but notice that these studies are often less about insights and moving things forward and more about publishing a paper.
The most recent of these unremarkable studies is – Stop asking people “how are you?” as successful people use other lines such as… “What’s your current state of mind?”, “What are you looking forward to this week?” or…wait for it…”You remind me of a celebrity, but I cant remember who – who’s someone you relate to?” Really?
The professor is suggesting that in a business context a small talk opening line might be “You remind me of a celebrity, but I cant remember who – who’s someone you relate to?” This perfectly illustrates what happens when clever people with no experience of the business world (or the social world it would appear in this instance) start to conduct studies and give advice to people rooted in the real world.
Advice in the business world should be given from people in business in he same way that advice in the medical world should be given from people who are doctors. Now to my point, advice in the world of social media should be given by practitioners…and not by well intentioned amateurs or people who know the theory but not the practice.
These reports (and advice) is/are utter utter garbage because all advice needs to be based on things that work rather than things that should work and and there’s often a huge gulf between these. We make sure that not only have we tested our ideas in a theoretical way but we test them in the real world too before we advise clients to do them. We do this because our clients are not looking to be a test bed for our theories, they are looking for an advantage over their competitors.
However, this “ratified by Harvard” mentality is also symptomatic of another element of the world we live in, where people are terrified of learning by their mistakes and would rather read all about it before they do anything…even if that means they are too late and have given a huge competitive advantage to others.
We believe that being good at social media is also about taking (calculated) risks. To get to be #1 you need to go where no-one has gone before. Being #2 is always second best. “Buy from our investment fund because it’s the second best return” or we have “the second best advice in the marketplace”…isn’t going to cut-it. This begins with doing something because “doing something…anything” is a positive move and it encourages taking ownership of one’s own situation and “working it out for yourself” is great at encouraging people to help find floors in what you’ve done or find a better way of doing it. Case in point, we have recently been joined by a new associates and they said “I want to do this…what do you think?” I said we’ve tried it and we couldn’t get it to work…but nonetheless encouraged the new associate to try it because the fact it hasn’t worked doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. So much of our work at DLA centres around empowering people to take these steps, to publish, to stand-out from the crowd, to be different.
YOU need to take the plunge and trust your instincts because waiting for someone else to give you direction and insights will at the very best put you “in the pack” and more likely behind.
People who read this article also read these:
https://www.social-experts.net/the-three-stages-of-enlightenment-with-social-selling/
https://www.social-experts.net/can-you-tick-the-social-media-box-and-say-thats-done/
https://www.social-experts.net/is-it-time-for-you-to-update-your-operating-system/
