I will be the first to admit I HATE failure. It makes me sick. I fight hard to be successful, yet this time I failed and it’s been a hard, huge pill to swallow. Let me explain…
I have a client who I really enjoy working with. They know what Twitter is and they are not too demanding. I’ll call this client Pacific. Pacific owns a business that has at least 5 competitors in their metro area. It’s a discount-deal type of business. One you would THINK would be wildly successful on social media. One of the owners was convinced before they ever hired me that this wouldn’t work for their business but knew they needed to try. Knowing that going into this, I made it my mission to prove him wrong. I don’t fail. I was going to get this to work.
Boy was I wrong.
We were successful in growing the number of people in their Facebook and Twitter communities and getting people to click on the links – they just didn’t purchase once we got them there. We tried everything we’ve ever had success with for other clients – contests, advertising campaigns, targeted posts, targeted tweets, private messages, emails. You name it, we tried it. Nothing stuck. The contests were amazing – a $100 restaurant gift certificate? Sweet! A week at a beach house? Even sweeter! Hardly anyone entered either contest. Talk about being frustrated.
As a result, I’ve come to the following conclusions…
1. As much as social media marketers try convince everyone, social media is not for every business. Some businesses truly do better with just email marketing… or just blogging… or even traditional marketing.
2. You will never be 100% successful in business. I knew this from the get-go but when you have your first let-down or failure, it sucks. Run from anyone who tells you otherwise. Everyone has failed at some point. Everyone.
3. You got to learn from failure and move on. There’s no sense doing the whole woulda-coulda-shoulda dance. Look at the situation and learn from it. Try to find the things that did work and focus on that. Then move on.
Yes, this is a very candid post, but I want you to learn from my failure. Not everything is going to work for every client. Some will be harder than others. Some will fail.
Share with me, have you ever failed? What did you learn from it?
Never let success get to your head. Never let failure get to your heart. – Anonymous
This is such a GREAT post, Mandy. Kudos to you for being humble, honest and transparent. I know those things really resonate with me – and we’ve all been in similar situations. Sometimes things don’t work out!
Thanks Brooke! When this happened, it was hard. I know others who have had that happen and I didn’t want them to feel like a failure. We won’t all be 100% successful.
Thanks Brooke! When this happened, it was hard. I know others who have had that happen and I didn’t want them to feel like a failure. We won’t all be 100% successful.
This is something I needed. A few hours ago, after not hearing from a client for awhile he finally responded that he was cancelling because he could not see the ROI. I have clients that think everything I do is a great and voluntarily increase the budgets and other clients that are super demanding about the smallest things or don’t see any benefit.
I hear you Bobby! I have clients like that too – some believe it and others still don’t. Thank you for taking the time to read and comment 🙂
Thanks for your honesty and for sharing your experience. You’re right that everyone fails. If they haven’t failed it’s because they haven’t tried anything difficult or taken any risks. And you can only succeed if you take (calculated) risks and keep getting up when you fall down.
Be proud of all the work you did and the lessons you learned. You gave it your all and in the end, I hope the customer appreciated it.
Thanks Jenn!! They did appreciate the work.
How can you be sure that it was a failure? What about the brand awareness? But the real question is, how did they track those users? Do they have a tool that allows them to view the customer journey? Some marketing channels doesn’t generate direct sales in some businesses, but you sometimes can see that they have a great effect on their search campaigns for example. I can’t believe that they had zero benefits with the work you have accomplished.
Actually, I can’t believe such a campaign didn’t affect their brand awareness, the proof is that you said that the facebook guests and twitter followers increased and the clicks on the link increased, however, people didn’t buy, and If you ask me, selling is not your area, awareness and PR is, so if someone failed it’s them, the customer, not you, They have to work on their image, packaging or whatever a brand needs to be attractive. I don’t see you failed, they did.
That is very kind of you to say Mohamad 🙂 I take everything I do for my clients personally so when they don’t succeed in reaching their goal, I take it to heart. I appreciate your words!
This is really good, but sometimes everyone should carry his own weight.
http://ahlein.wordpress.com/2013/01/08/carry-your-own-weight/
Love your posts, Mandy. I too have been humbled by unexpected failures this past year. But I try to remember that mistakes and failures are our best teachers. Would like to share a couple of my favorite quotes on the subject. One is from Thomas Edison, who tried literally 10,000 ways to make a light bulb before figuring out how to do it. He said: “I have not failed. I’ve just discovered 10,000 ways that don’t work.” The other is from a favorite mentor who told me: “If you are not making any mistakes, then you are not taking any chances, and you definitely don’t have enough work to do.” He always emphasized that innovation was about taking calculated risk, and productivity was about “doing” and not forever planning to do with a thousand fail-safe systems (which is prohibitively expensive). Thanks for sharing.
Thanks John! I agree – mistakes and failures teach us more than our successes. I love the Edison quote – it’s one of my favorites.
If you don’t fail at something at least once in your life, it means you haven’t tried hard enough. 😉
I agree Cendrine!