We ask for them. Nay, we *demand* them, especially when we’re trying to understand something that’s new to us. Through observing what others do, we hope that we can somehow find some clarity for ourselves and the challenges we’re about to undertake.

But when we’re looking for best practices, we’re not really just trying to observe what others are doing or learn from other examples. We’re seeking out something, maybe a couple of things, to ease our path and help remove some of the obstacles ahead.

Reassurance: “It’s possible.”

Seeking out proof that someone else has accomplished something similar to what you’re aiming for means that your perceived risk is diminished. It helps allay our fears that our assumptions or ideas don’t have a foundation, and gives us the courage to attempt something because someone else has helped ease the path before us.

By observing that someone else has done it, we want to tell ourselves that we can do it too,. And somehow, even though the details and context of their work might be completely different, and even though *we* have no guarantee of experiencing the same success, we find reassurance in the fact that the idea has been tried before and that someone lived to tell the tale.

Instruction: “Here’s how we did it.”

Things that intimidate us are far less daunting if we have steps to follow.

By seeking out best practices, we’re looking for a framework that we can adapt, or at least pieces of one that can help clarify for us where we should start, or where we should go next. The challenge, of course, is that most “best practice” examples leave out many of the gory details, either for marketing purposes or because there’s confidential or proprietary stuff in there that businesses don’t want to give away. But quest for them we do, in the hopes that we can read between the lines enough to get the play-by-play that someone else followed and draw a roadmap of our own.

CYA: “I didnt pull this out of thin air.”

Many times, we’re seeking out best practice examples not for ourselves, but for the people we’re trying to convince.

A case study or example says to our boss or the board “See, I didn’t make this up.”, and helps us establish some kind of precedent for the business case we’re trying to advocate. If someone else took the risk, surely we can too, and we’re not crazy for thinking so. It’s a tool to help us gain buy-in, and reassure the natives that our thinking is rooted in sound reasoning, rather than something from completely off in left field.

Expectations: “If we do this, what might we expect.”

We often want the case studies to be our own trial run on paper.

Without investing our own time, money, or resources or shouldering the risk, we can watch on paper what someone else did and how, and try to suss out an accurate picture of the results and outcomes so we can get an idea of what we might expect should we take on something similar. Perhaps we’re hoping to sniff out the level of risk, the types of obstacles or challenges we’ll encounter, or the length of time and amount of resources something will actually take to do on our own. We’d also like to get an idea of the results we can expect so perhaps we can set our own goals accordingly.

The Challenges

First off, all of these reasons for seeking out best practices are perfectly reasonable and legitimate. People and companies will always do so, and hopefully people and companies will continue to share what they do and learn so that others can gain the benefit of their experiences.

But it’s really important to recognize the limitations of what “best practices” and “case studies” can actually provide to you as a business, or as someone responsible for making decisions for yourself or your company.

1. No company is your company. No matter how similar the program or initiative, the inner workings of someone else’s business – from culture to organizational design to finances and objectives – are going to be completely different than yours. And all of those things affect every bit of a project, from initial risk tolerance to how they determine success or failure and everything they invest along the way. You can glean some top-line similarities, but the details of how they got from point A to point B are always going to be different than yours, which can have a significant impact on outcomes.

2. No one shares every detail. Especially when it comes to the illustrious Case Study, companies love to share their success stories, or the key details of what made something work. It’s as much a sales and marketing tool as it is a teaching tool, however. You’ll likely not get in there a lot of the ugly bits: the false starts, the budget arguments, the internal culture and political snags, much less how those were resolved. Nor will you get every single data point. It’s very important to realize that you’re looking at an edited view of both process and results.

3. Innovation isn’t achieved by mirroring patterns. If having a standout success is important to you, if leading your sector or industry into a new era is something you value, then you aren’t going to get there by following in someone else’s footsteps. There’s a difference between improvement and innovation, and we need both. So while case studies can be a great gut check or even a bit of reassurance, to *really* get out there and change the game, you’re going to have to create your own way of doing things and be your own case study.

4. We can limit our perspective too early. This is actually pretty basic psychology, and can be hard to overcome unless you’re paying really close attention. Surrounding ourselves with pictures of what other people have done colors our perception about where the boundaries and possibilities are, and what the solutions might be to our challenge. If we’re looking to case studies to set the bar for us rather than help validate a bar we’ve set for ourselves, we might just sell ourselves short.

Business is a set of probabilities, not guarantees. A case study or a set of “best practices” is not insurance. It’s merely one point of view.

Social media especially is something that’s being touched at a surface level today, but there is so much more, little of which is being documented and shared as how-tos and methodologies. If what you want is a comfortable path to walk, you’ll find yourself only able to find examples of some of the most basic – and somewhat superficial – practices that you can adopt and follow.

The true integration of social into business, however, is at the first stages of taking shape. And if that’s the direction you hope to head – before the masses catch up to you – you’re going to have to draw your own map. Surely some learnings will emerge, some consistent patterns and successes will take hold, and those can be incredibly valuable. But documenting them, sharing them, analyzing them and understanding the drivers? That is a trailing practice, and can only be done after, which means the “case studies” will necessarily always lag behind the breakthrough progress itself.

No stance is “right” or “wrong”. Therein lies part of the challenge of embracing and being part of a fundamental shift. At what point to linger and wait in hopes of being the adopter with more information and less perceived risk? When to use your own power of insight and analysis, make a hypothesis, and lead the charge instead?

Where do you stand?

image credit: Vectorportal

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Are Case Studies Helping or Hindering You?

I see so many case studies for social media being presented – in their entirety – as:

• social discounts and coupons
• a video campaign
• a clever Facebook contest

But this drives me crazy insane. Here’s why.

Social media is not just direct marketing parked online.

Ultimate social media success by my definition is far more that whether you took advantage of the latest application craze to market the same stuff you always have.

Part of the trouble is that we rarely distinguish between Social Media, The Tools and Tubes and Social Media, The Business Philosophy. And they’re different.

Social Media as a Tool Set

Twitter. Facebook. YouTube. They’re all technologies and tools. The means, if you will.

Adding a social sharing component to your campaigns and content is a good thing. In technical terms, it means you’re “adding something social” to your communications to give them longer legs, more interactivity even. Adapting some of your existing brand focused efforts for increased social media awareness, sales, or customer loyalty is fine. It’s part of the deal, and it’s certainly something into which you need to evolve.

But it’s only part of it.

Social Media as a Business Philosophy

This where it gets sticky, and where the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when we applaud a company for being awesome at social media when they pull off something cool, innovative, or a contest specific to a social network.

If the proper intent doesn’t live behind the campaign effort and there aren’t more pieces being put in place to make the entire approach to business more socially-minded, it’s just a clever campaign.

Businesses that are supporting their outward facing social media efforts with a true underlying philosophy are the ones that will win in the long run. That means your campaigns need to be representative of broader goals to:

• Listen to the newly amplified and disseminated voices of your customers online, and the feedback they’re sharing
• Respond to that feedback, and take it into consideration when you make decisions related to how you operate
• Provide helpful, useful information to your customers that supports their entire relationship with you, not just their moment of purchase
• Empower every person in your business to be and do all of those things themselves, within agreed upon guidelines, but with the freedom to respond with speed and personality
• Adapt your people and processes to provide more open, fluid networks of communication. That means inside your business, between your business and community (past, present, and future customers), and among and within the community itself.

Campaigns can be fun. Entertainment is a viable goal in itself. So might a click through be to a discount coupon to drive more foot traffic to your store. But these are merely single parts of this revolution, and superficial ones at that. We’ve got to buttress the surface work with deeper re-engineering of how and why we do what we do.

Otherwise, It’s All Window Dressing.

If we continue to celebrate video campaigns alone as the pinnacle of social media success, we’re missing our own boat.

Yes, it’s something to get noticed and talked about. Yes, it’s important to earn more and broader footprints for your brand online. But it can’t stop there, or you’ve negated the rest of the cycle and the subtleties that are what make social media so powerful in the first place. The video campaign ought to be an indicator of a broader system of listening, response, participation, improvement, and back again.

You can be the listener. The observer. The helper, the educator, the business that’s invested and responsive. You can be more than a turbo-charged marketing vehicle, and you should be. Social media marketing is only part of the equation. As Jay Baer would say, it’s not enough just to do social, you have to learn how to be social.

The companies that will stand out as examples worth emulating will show evidence – or at least discussions of their exploration – of weaving all of those pieces together to form a more evolved, more symbiotic whole.

It may be new and we may just be getting our sea legs, but let’s not settle. There’s more to all of this than just a campaign. And if there isn’t, I’m in the wrong business and have made a grave, grave error of judgment because I’ve been believing in – and seeking to create – something much more evolutionary all along.

What say you?

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Successful Social Media is More Than A Campaign

Those of us that work directly with businesses and clients around social media aren’t always at liberty to discuss openly what they’re up to.

We can anonymize the information to a certain degree, but if the campaigns or information about their efforts aren’t already public knowledge, we can’t always spill the beans.

I know you’d like to hear dozens of examples of how some companies are setting up their listening strategies, with specifics. Or how they’re organizing their resources and teams. Or how they’re building engagement guidelines. What they’re putting into their goals, strategies, and how they’re measuring. You want tangible examples with numbers, definitive data points, and identifying information enough that you can draw parallels to your own business somehow.

But businesses don’t always to put it all out there, especially when they’re in tinkering and exploration mode, and the competition is thick and fierce. In part, they hire providers and advisers that they can trust to keep that information confidential. In fact, many of us have to sign NDAs to do our work, which means that without explicit permission and specific parameters, we can’t disclose a thing.

It’s one thing to evaluate and analyze public campaigns and try and interpret intentions, strategies, tactics, and what they all mean based on information that’s available. It’s entirely another to have the privilege of a peek behind the scenes, and talk with a company about the true ins and outs of their thought process, decisions, strategies, and approach. Put frankly, some companies just aren’t at the point in their social media exploration where they’re comfortable letting people poke around in their sandbox.

And I think that’s perfectly okay, and their absolute prerogative. Every business has to decide what’s best for them, and when and what they’re comfortable sharing. Remember, case studies are meant to illustrate a goal, a process and a result. Many of us are still somewhere in the middle of the process part.

There are those that are willing are telling their stories, at least in part, and they’re not hard to find. Here’s a collection of some of the social media case studies I’ve gathered from across the web.

But keep in mind that the openness of the social media world is wonderful in theory, not always easy in practice, and it’s not an absolute. When you’re asking some of us to share our experiences with companies from the inside to inform your own efforts, it’s sometimes not our decision to make. And when you’re asking companies to share what they’ve done, remember that many of them are still working it out themselves.

Where does that leave us? We are going to have to forage, form a hypothesis, start somewhere, and hammer it out for ourselves, based on the best information we have. Either that, or wait until the roads have been paved for us.

The more we tinker, the more we share, the more examples and touchstones we’ll all have. And as we go, it’s up to us to take what we know, continue to innovate, and create the rest.

Onward…

image credit: casey.marshall

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Social Media Case Studies and Confidentiality