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Jay Leno is a success. Jay Leno is a failure.
Over the course of his career, Jay Leno has achieved stunning success. He has been the host of the Tonight Show and is still a well-regarded stand-up comic.
Yet Leno’s risky bid to develop and host a nightly variety show has been plagued by problems from the beginning. Currently, it looks like the show’s lackluster ratings and uneven quality have doomed the program to failure. Leno’s unorthodox bid did not succeed.
As people, and marketers, we don’t like to talk about failure. Or, if we do, we tend to focus on how to avoid it – especially in the social media realm. Social technologies are so new and the marketing techniques associated with them are so unproven that failure is often viewed as catastrophic. If we fail, the reasoning goes, we lose the right to experiment – forever.
Yet, like death and taxes, failure is guaranteed – especially in the social media arena. For example, every day marketers are finding that:
- The Twitter account they launched gains few followers or notice – even months after its launch
- The blog they toil on each day is largely ignored by the masses
- Despite their best efforts, the community they built remains a virtual ghost town
- The “viral” video they posted on YouTube is ignored by their target audiences – except other marketers
- Their Facebook fan pages and groups are stillborn
- The mobile campaign they launch fails to take off
- The list of failures goes on and on
So, if failure is unavoidable, what can we learn from it? What is the ROI of failure?
The ROI of Failure: Courage, Perseverance and Experience
I’ve heard it often said that people learn more from their failures than successes. Some of the benefits of failure, include:
- Experience: We begin to learn what works and what doesn’t in certain situations
- Perseverance: We learn that success (if it ever happens) does not come over night and that patience is a virtue
- Courage: We gain the courage to
- Be honest with ourselves (and superiors) about our progress
- Aggressively look for ways to “make lemonade out of lemons
- Know when its time to quit rather than continue to waste resources and time
While we are on the subject of courage, failure can also bring freedom – if we let it. If we expect that most of the things we try will fail, we may become more aggressive about trying new approaches rather than paralyzed by fear – of failure.
What have you learned from your marketing failures? Have they fueled later successes? Have you let fear paralyze you or spur you to new heights? Please, share your thoughts on the ROI of failure below.
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