When You Only Have a Hammer

You know how the saying goes... everything you see looks like a nail. Well, better than getting into a conversation about holes, right? Yesterday's hammers where more around outbound marketing. Today, because of the Web, we say it's about inbound marketing. LinkedIn, blogs, Twitter, now Facebook -- technology hammers.

When you're extremely passionate about one or two hammers hammers, because you spent time using them and figuring out what works for you, you spend the rest of your time pushing them on others.

You're a Facebook person, so every answer to how we should engage in social media is, of course, friending everyone on Facebook -- and potentially spamming the living daylights out of them for good measure. Or focusing on a fan page without consideration to where customers are really doing business. Same with Twitter. Why not vomit press releases and links all day long on a Twitter stream? Please RT.

Now transfer that to groups of people and culture. Have you noticed how people who work in a company together and spend a lot of time with each other tend to all conform to a certain look and persona? They're hired that way, or they get that way -- sink or swim, or play the whack-a-mole.

When you love a car, a laptop, a smart phone -- you start noticing that make and brand everywhere. You see what you're attuned to. And you stop seeing what could expand your market opportunities or how those tools all need to work as a system.

Holes are different

We don't like holes. Rabbit holes, holes in need of repair, black holes, prison holes, and so on. Holes are metaphorically empty spaces of various depths where either nothing happens, or we have no idea what will happen. So we don't pursue them. Pity, that's where innovation is.

Holes are interesting. They're the place where reality is not predictable. If it were that easy, innovation wouldn't be new.

What do you do with all this? A few ideas for exploration:

• look where no one else is. This is where best practices come in handy, so you can see what everyone else is doing, and do it differently, or do something else
• connect the dots better than anyone else. This is easier to do with technology (scale), check out the service and product continuum: what is the missing link?
• check out the gap in front of you and bridge it. Sometimes the disconnect is a communication issue. Do you need to simplify, amplify, reword, restate, resolve?
• do one big thing and skip all the little ones. Sometimes it's best to invest in one thing, than diluting your efforts and energies over too many, spreading yourself too thin
• figure out which ones of your choices matter. Or as Seth Godin would say, if you need to quit or push through the dip

None of this is going to happen because you have hammers. It's a hole or opportunity conversation. In the last couple of years, many holes appeared where there seemed to be none. Don't let the competition take you by surprise, start innovating today.

What opportunities are you overlooking for your business? Think about enrolling fans, working with brand advocates, loving your customers, supporting your partners, building alliances, forming tribes.

How can you apply this to yourself? Can you be more real? How can you build velocity and momentum? What do you need to be patient about?

[image http://www.flickr.com/photos/whisperwolf/ / CC BY-NC 2.0]

© 2010 Valeria Maltoni. All rights reserved.

Comments

[Jeff Esposito]

Valeria, this is a great concept that I think is often overlooked in the land-grab that is social media. Many companies think in the hammer mindset of keep hitting them on the head and they will bend.

Dell's success has kind of put the green blinders on many company who don't want to take the time to building the communities and creating large holes and disconnects with the customer base.

I'd say that one way I can look to get better is to continue to cultivate the conversation and increase transparency and empathy.

[John McTigue]

There are some hole-fixers that have become hammers, like Tweetdeck for example. Twitter left some huge holes because its whole philosophy was so simple. Tweetdeck and others grabbed the reins and created something even better. Now Tweetdeck is a monster in itself. Not so much with Facebook so far, but we'll see. I like the idea of finding new niches and new ways to connect the dots. You have to take the 10,000 foot view to see them, and most people spend their time mucking around on the ground.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Jeff - it's getting awfully noisy out there. I pay attention to 1/3 of the things I used to pick up on. Too much of it is recycling other people's content and push these days. It's not just companies, people don't want to do the work... even engaging in conversation is a chore. It' easier to just retweet or push content around :) Glad you found a viable way -- the high road and long run always pays off, sometimes later, yet it compounds.

@John - good thread here about Tweetdeck! Some days, no make that most days, I think it's by design. Push people around to waddle in the nitty gritty so we can control them. Please everyone is so busy benchmarking that in the end they all look and sound the same.

[Peter]

Hi Valeria,

I love holes too. To the naked eye the sky is full of them ( unless of course, you have a telescope in which case the hole becomes a galaxy).

So too with business. The naked mind needs conceptual instruments to see what is in plain view. Theories, taxonomies, frameworks and models are vital to not only innovation but all the constellations that surround a business.

Strange though that in science we invest time energy and billions into the development of instruments to see what can't be seen with the naked eye but find the same notion largely dismissed in business circles as esoteric -( unless of course it can be grasped in a minute and understood in an hour ).

Always a pleasure.

Peter

Bu the way, you ( or someone else) will need to explain the concept of more real at some point.

Oh, and don't forget to take the cap off. I've seen more than a few business people use there conceptual telescopes only to see what they intended and mistakes. I'm convinced that much of what we do that is valuable is unintended but because we never look we never know.

[Kate]

I tweeted my admiration of this post (which I don't do that often because I do tire of heavy RT'ers and Twitterfeed'ers) but now am feeling guilty for not leaving my two cents here as well.

I am certainly not a social media thought leader, just a practitioner. But I do tire of other social media types I know locally who recommend the same tools (or "hammers") to businesses, then regurgitate someone's lecture about authenticity and "being real" and then implement or allow the client to implement the tools without any thought as to an actual strategy.

Because they never looked for the needs or the holes. No innovation. No creativity. Just "you need a Facebook page" or "I think every business should be on Twitter."

Do I recommend Facebook for the majority of my clients? Sure. But none of them should use it in the same way because none of them have the same needs and, therefore, the same strategy. It's the tool, not the plan.

All of that said, it's easy to not look beyond the standard hammers. Thanks for reminding us to serve our clients' needs, to think and to innovate instead of constantly falling back into the use of well-worn and familiar tools.

[Tim Holmes]

this is a sensible and nice post! Also liked reading.