Archive for the ‘Eric Ries’ tag
Truthful Information
I was reading a prominent blog by Eric Ries who is a startup expert. He discusses the issue of truthfulness at talks given by successful entrepreneurs (http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2010/10/stop-lying-on-stage.html). He is arguing that when these people give talks they gloss over the issues that they had and celebrate their successes to a greater degree then might be warranted. This is of course because they want to make themselves look more in control then they might have been during the process. Eric was saying that when you actually sit down with these entrepreneurs after their talks in a dinner setting you get a more true picture. He thinks that this is ultimately hurting the startup community because it gives an unrealistic view of how good you have to be to start a company and challenge an incumbent. I tend to agree, but aside from that, this brings up a few points that I want to discuss.
Truthfulness:
When I worked as a project manager in the Hedge Fund industry, I was constantly battling with this issue. I had to really dig at what people were telling me to make sure that they were giving me a clear picture. There were many reasons why someone would not be perfectly clear and they are not all self-serving. My job was to get through all of this haze and try to get as clear a picture as I could so that I could develop a good plan of action. One of the techniques for doing this were to get the opinions of several individuals that were looking at the problem from different angles. I was sometimes able to piece together a sufficient picture from many smaller and often overlapping versions of the true story. I was able to reciprocate when I was given true information and call people out on misinformation. Because we were in a work/community setting this process tended to work quite well.
Social Media Relevancy:
The many versions of the truth example that I just gave seems to be a recurring theme in my life no matter what I do and that got me thinking about the value of social media. The goal of marketing communications for a business, in my opinion, is to create a truthful dialogue with the customers so that each party can find out what the other is really all about. The customer wants to know the company in terms of values and qualities and the company should be seeking out the opinions of the customers to understand their wants and needs. The goal is to get this information in its truest sense. Everyone knows that people are going to bend or cloud the truth for one reason or another and the goal of the marketing communications is to cut through that to get answers.
Cutting Through the Fog:
The question is, is social media a good way to cut through this fog? There are a few attributes of social media that lean in that direction. There is a certain level of anonymity so people are more likely to tell the truth. Although these days people are trying to build their online brand, so it is less anonymous. The lines between the online and offline worlds are blurring and people are less likely to say something that will get them into trouble. They are less likely to have their drunken picture on Facebook where their employer might see it. Social media does present a great opportunity to have a greater dialogue though, where people now have access to others that they would not normally had.
Conclusion
People are always going to obfuscate the truth when they communicate, it is as old as language itself and even though there were opportunities for a more truthful dialogue online at one time, I think that has largely evaporated. The big key is the access and increased communication overall. If we get back to my project management experience, there are ways to get at the truth that are not always easy but we as marketers and entrepreneurs needs to take the increased communication as a positive and employ the same filters and techniques for sorting through the information that we always have.