There's no amount of marketing budgets or number of social media networks you can throw at a product if what you're doing is executed poorly.
Does the product need to be remarkable or at least needed in the first place? Tom Fishburne nails it in this post about urban spam - the definition of what is remarkable is a moving bar.
What is a surprise and delight today, will be just another campaign tomorrow.
The brain loves novelty, but it gets used to things quickly - and even faster when it is stimulated with increased frequency, intensity, and duration.
Times Square anyone? After a few minutes, it all blends in and, especially if you have something to accomplish, you tune it out. The noisier, actually the easier to tune out.
You need to question whether something is worth doing if you cannot be remarkable at it, as Tom puts it. There's a learning in there - social media must be hands on because what is remarkable changes constantly and you cannot automate understanding the context. I don't care how good you are - things are just moving too fast.
Sure, you can automate the invitation, and to a certain degree some of the service, but you cannot automate the experience. And that without you is a guessing game - are you interrupting? Does anyone care about your carefully planned launch? Is there attention left in this conversation? Who is connecting the dots?
Even when you're a known entity, there are moments when people just aren't ready to welcome you into their lives.
Execution is key to results, and execution is hard for a variety of reasons. Not last among which is that we seek to have something be repeatable to create a process around it so we can deliver. And repeatable, once everyone's experienced it, becomes routine - what you expect - and ceases to be remarkable or memorable.
So what's the solution?
While we think about it, here are some ideas to get you started thinking about execution:
- start loving the moment or part in the process where you go from conceptualizing what to do to actually doing it. That helps in moving from the strategy to the implementation phase more quickly.
- love the work itself or you won't be able to transmit the enthusiasm for it and people will notice it's not there. Joy is important for execution, believe it or not.
- simplify everything you can so that when complications arise, as they often do, you'll be able to deal with them. If you get bogged down in the process, you will have less energy to work on delivering.
- stop trying to go for perfect, having a few wrinkles on the onset will actually give you a faster correction curve. For some items, like this "pure sex" Ferrari P4/5 built by Pininfarina, it may be a good idea to prototype some before you are a Pininfarina yourself.
- ask lots of questions, and be ready to learn about the answers without stopping from being inquisitive (but also without driving anyone crazy with "why" "why" "why"). I call it asking intelligent questions - those that move the conversation forward and are direct.
- change direction early, if you see it's a dead end or not working out, instead of throwing good energy after a bad course. Sometimes the hardest part may be "not doing" or doing something else. Driven people tend to want to push through even when there is evidence they should ease off the gas pedal.
- fail spectacularly, don't almost make it quietly. This reminds me of that guy who takes a tumble and gets up on his feet with a "ta-da!" at the end.
What else? What inspires or prompts you to action? What do you do when you experience a resistance to moving from talking to doing?
Without execution, we would not have the experience of the Ferrari P4/5 built by Pininfarina - and that would be a real shame. "Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow." [T S Eliot]