Social Media: Adopt a trial and error approachEarlier

National B2B Centre’s Group on LinkedIn. The  Children’s Clothing National B2B Centre has helped me a lot this year with regard to e-marketing, – they have provided input and ideas when I needed it most.

In their newsletter they mention that Seth Godin (master marketer and thinker in the online world) has just writtent a blog in which he defines “The hierarchy of success”:

1.Attitude
2.Approach
3.Goals
4.Strategy
5.Tactics
6.Execution
The gist of the post is that most of us focus on points 3 – 6 but that success has more to do with number 1 and number 2, attitude and approach.

In their newsletter the National B2B Centre goes on to saying: “Our experience is that the most successful companies are definitely strong on those two characteristics.  Those of you who attended our eBusiness Conference 2009 may have heard Malene Stanley from KSBKids and Nick Blenkarn from Severn Partnership relating how they have used a variety of tools and technologies to achieve success. What have set them apart from other people that we have worked with is their willingness to try things out, to explore, to recognise when something needs to change, to be ahead of the game”.

Personally, I often feel I know very little about the whole e-commerce, social media business, but I have come to accept that the feeling of always being a little behind is part of the game. As much as I think it is crucial to have a strategy when venturing into social media, I also think one has to adopt a trial and error approach.   Most of what I do is work in progress, – learning as I go. At times even my mistakes can be rewarding. One thing is for sure avoiding experimenting with the social web is a greater risk than experimenting with it and failing!