The Agile Manifesto is an amazing document to consider if you're looking for a way to build a social marketing effort.
Agile is the software development philosophy and practice developed over the last 10 years that is now being adapted by marketing and business strategists. It favors fast, functional releases of smaller deliverables and then evolving those deliverables towards a larger goal.
Agile lives in stark contrast to traditional marketing campaigns which look more like what software developers would call "waterfalls." Waterfalls start with goals, briefs and strategy, move into creative and design, then production, then release. Waterfalls are all about executing well against the brief.
What makes Agile brilliant for software development also can make it brilliant for marketing--especially social marketing. Agile recognizes that we don't know everything we need to know at the beginning of creating something. In fact sometimes we are fooling ourselves---and our bosses and clients--into thinking we do know everything. After all, "we know our customer," and we usually have market research to prove it.
But then we begin designing and producing the campaign and changes come up. We find out certain media channels aren't available or won't work. Assumptions we've made about budget get blown up. The boss's boss doesn't like the creative, or the business changes the goals based on new customer feedback.
Traditional marketing campaigns--like waterfall software development--hate change. Change is bad. Perfect execution is good. Sometimes we have to present an entire detailed plan in order to get the budget approved in the beginning.
Agile development expects and welcomes change. Fundamentally the best change happens because we understand better and learn more the farther we get into a project. At the end of almost every campaign or launch we say "if only we knew at the beginning what we know now!"
Agile begins with a long range vision of where we want to go. Let's say we're General Mills and we want to engage more moms and dads in our Boxtops For Education program, that raises money for a school by collecting General Mills boxtops (a real program, as you may know.) We could build a big marketing campaign for 2011-2012 and get $10 million committed to its execution. But the problem is that right now we would be guessing what would work.
Agile would begin with two people negotiating. One would represent the business (let's call them the "business owner," and the other would represent the marketing team assigned to the project, (let's call this person the "team leader.")
The business owner and team leader would review what is known about the long range vision about engaging parents---what market research was known, plus some focused customer interviews. From this foundation the team leader and the team and the business owner would develop some ideas of how to begin working towards the long range vision--how do we get more parents of K-12 kids engaged, understanding the value of the program, and building Boxtops For Education programs in their schools?
These ideas might be tactics, product prototypes, test market ideas, conquest ideas, marketing messaging and media. The business owner and team leader negotiate about what will get built for initial launch--a launch that will come in a short period of time--say two weeks.
Two weeks! Who can launch a marketing campaign in four weeks? The answer is that we're not launching a campaign, we're building a marketing platform, starting with a modest, focused first version. If we're smart the first version will engage real customers and get us real results--sales, feedback and metrics.
The business owner and the team leader meet after 1.0 launch and begin building 2.0. As results come in ideas begin flying around. We can get great ideas based on primitive ideas in 1.0.
The point is that instead of talking about what we're going to build, we're building it.
The Agile Manifesto, written 10 years ago by the original software engineers who developed the practice, has four main points. One of them says:
"We value...Working software over comprehensive documentation."
How many companies have "our way of doing marketing campaigns." Our way inevitably includes a strategic brief and/or a creative brief, a media plan, marketing goals, tactics, budget, on and on.
What if there was no brief? What if you got smart people into a room, brainstormed your best thinking and then built something? What you found out would tell you more than all the brand books, quant research and focus groups could combined.
This process is lean, in that it uses a minimum of planning and research to get the initial working release into the marketplace. If we only focus on three markets in order to meet our deadline, that's fine. The point is we learn more and do much better when we get engagement with real customers like the parents participating in Boxtops For Education.
As it is, General Mills happens to be one of the smartest companies in the world when it comes to social media, so I would expect those people would have a lot of good insights about how to begin this campaign.
But even if you're not General Mills you can begin successfully by focusing on a quick, simple release that moves you towards your long-term goal.
Each cycle of building can add more insight and can be more effective. And if management understands the value of this kind of Agile campaign, they should love the idea of putting out more budget based on real results rather than signing up for a massive "moon launch" budget based on focus groups.
Agile is not for the faint of heart. It requires clear understands between management, the business owner, the team leader and the team. Despite what some have said, "failure" is not something we design into the process. We don't set out to fail, we set ut to get a directly to the long term goal as we can. If we do fail--or rather, if we find some ideas work better than others, then let's build on success.
Agile works best on smaller projects and ones that can be built in increments. In software there are now ideas like Features-based development that try to combine lean, agile development of smaller pieces with an uber-management that judges success by how well smaller pieces work with each other towards the long term goal.
But it seems to me that social marketing, if we can use that term, is all about engaging with and learning from the customer. Agile social marketing creates a framework of long term goals and then gets a clear, simple and sustainable engagement effort into the marketplace. As this Agile effort goes on, it will respond to what customers are doing, saying and buying.
This could create a social marketing platform, rather than campaign. A platform serves long-term engagement with customers who are essential to the success of the product or company. The platform is based on values that define the brand or product and it delivers value to customers and prospects through focused incremental improvement.
There are a lot of jokes now about people on LinkedIn calling themselves "Agile Software Ninjas," and so on. Certainly having people experienced with Agile thinking would help a team succeed.
But as experience designer Dakota Reese said to me in a tweet last week: "The best way to learn Agile is to just jump in and do it."
How would this work in your practice or company?
Here are some resources that might help you think more about Agile as a marketing strategy, beginning with the original four-point Agile Manifesto:
Neil Perkin's essay "Agile Marketing," on his blog Only Dead Fish first got me thinking about this
Dmitri Maex essay "Agile Markerting Part II: Learnings from Product Development"
from the brilliant UK firm MadeByMany:
