{"id":1123,"date":"2009-07-01T04:08:45","date_gmt":"2009-07-01T11:08:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulgillin.com\/?p=1123"},"modified":"2009-07-01T04:08:45","modified_gmt":"2009-07-01T11:08:45","slug":"in-praise-of-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/in-praise-of-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"In Praise of Failure"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was chatting recently with Sam Decker, chief marketing officer at Bazaarvoice, about his company’s somewhat counterintuitive business. Its customers use Bazaarvoice to enable their<\/em> customers to post product reviews and ratings right on their own websites.<\/p>\n

\"\"I asked why would a company invite visitors to publicly criticize its products this way.\u00a0 He told the story of one importer who sells a large and eclectic collection of overseas goods.\u00a0 Customer ratings revealed that about one third of its inventory of more than 600 products would never sell well because of aesthetics, utility or other reasons.\u00a0 The company used this feedback to quickly overhaul its inventory. Had it waited for customer objections to show up in sales figures, the process would have taken months longer.<\/p>\n

Fear of Failure<\/h3>\n

If you have ever worked for a large company, you know that failure isn\u2019t considered a good thing.\u00a0 Losing products or business initiatives are usually killed off only after long and expensive efforts to save them. Powerful people stick with pet projects even in the face of overwhelming customer indifference.\u00a0 People who fail are reprimanded.\u00a0 People who fail repeatedly get fired.<\/p>\n

Social media offers unprecedented ways to avert this syndrome, or at least to cut it short. By listening to customers, we can identify and fix shortcomings much earlier in the product lifecycle. By engaging in continuous dialogue, we are more likely to hit the market head on with new products. If we don’t let failure become some kind of referendum on our self-worth, then we are much freer to experiment.<\/p>\n

I look at Google as being the most visible practitioner of the philosophy.\u00a0 Spend a little time with the company’s line of applications and you’ll soon discover its amusing portfolio of error messages. \u201cWhoa! Google Chrome just crashed!\u201d says one. Another moans “We know this is lame, but consider that Gmail didn’t even have folders in its first version.”\u00a0 Google is a company that doesn’t mind admitting its shortcomings because it knows customers would rather see that it working to get things right than pretending that everything\u2019s okay when it clearly isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\"Google_Lively\"Google also isn\u2019t afraid to cut its losses. The company has shut down more than a half-dozen products and services in the last year, including Lively, it’s virtual world (left). It has also closed a couple of high-profile business ventures. Google makes no attempt to hide these business decisions but rather explains its reasoning on employee blogs. That\u2019s because Google sees itself as an innovator, and innovative companies don’t mind getting things wrong now and then.\u00a0 In fact, a company that doesn\u2019t make mistakes isn’t trying hard enough.<\/p>\n

Shoot the Losers<\/h3>\n

Unfortunately, few corporate cultures are confident enough to work this way. One of the most common questions I am still asked by audiences is how to avoid negativity in social media. My honest answer is why would you want to avoid it?\u00a0 The faster you correct problems, the less damage is done. It might have been possible to ignore mistakes a few years ago, but that’s no longer an option. We can talk with our customers about our shortcomings or they will simply talk amongst themselves.\u00a0 Which would you rather do?<\/p>\n

It’s often been said that the reason Silicon Valley became such a foundry of technology innovation is that the culture accepts and even celebrates failure as a consequence of risk-taking.\u00a0 In today’s media landscape, failure is no longer a private matter. Social media tools enable us to minimize the risks and consequences of our mistakes if we simply own up to them. It turns out that\u2019s not nearly as difficult as we used to think it was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was chatting recently with Sam Decker, chief marketing officer at Bazaarvoice, about his company’s somewhat counterintuitive business. Its customers use Bazaarvoice to enable their customers to post product reviews and ratings right on their own websites. I asked why … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[4,10,15,26],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pTy95-i7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1123"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}