It’s been a while since I blogged the last few years have been ups and down. I am going to start back blogging and podcasting. Its always finding the time to do it. The last month I have been pondering my career and looking back at the last few years. It has taught me one thing, I have learned way more from my failures then successes.

In marketing we are all about success and results. Its rare to hear about the failures. Most presentations you hear at conferences and events always focus on how great the strategy/tactic worked. Always with amazing results. I however find more value in looking at what didn’t work and why.

This past month, I went to an AMA Atlanta Digital Marketing event and Micah Hart, Director of Internet Marketing for the Atlanta Hawks, did something i haven’t seen very often. He told about a social tactic that didn’t work. This really caught my attention, his point was that you need to experiment and try new things. This is something I firmly believe we should do.

Why should you experiment? The first thing is you never know whats going to take off. Going viral is not easy and its not because its a good idea/concept its just something that strikes a chord in the public. If it fails in social media, no one is really going to notice. The general public doesn’t look at how many likes a post on a page received, the number of comments or shares. It would be a safe bet to say that most Facebookers rarely venture to a brand page, if it doesn’t show up in their news feed then they won’t see it. Which is a totally different problem.

I think we need to embrace our failures and learn from them and make better content going forward. We don’t need to dwell on them but learn what made them not work and improve the strategy going forward.