During a recent emerging media roundtable we held, one of our key clients raised the point that, as marketers generally, but digital marketers specifically, if we simply eliminate the 50-100 stupidest and simplest to resolve mistakes, we would be 1000% times more successful. It’s knowing what those mistakes are that is the rube.
During dinner, we also talked about what conferences are the best and most informative. Two seemingly unrelated topics, right?

I recently read an interesting book called The Black Swan, which may help to explain part of this blindness phenomenon. Basically the title refers to the first time Australians, who had only ever seen white swans, saw their first black one. The author tries to explain why (really how) this discovery was so surprising, and extends his hypothesis to everything from economic models to consumer’s ability to be persuaded by advertising.

Human’s have an innate need to create order from random occurrences, and our ability to build patterns (and the assumption that those patterns will go on, ad infinitum) lets us believe that we can see what’s coming. However, this is a dangerous belief, and one that distracts us from the highly unlikely and causes us to overvalue the impact of the improbable but spend on skills sets that hone the comfortably regular.

When I think about YouTube, I think about a black swan – it’s a swan we’ve certainly seen before (TV, Video, and even user-generated content: America’s Funniest Home Video, anyone) - but I think we are completely over-reaching in what we believe to be its impact on our daily lives, if our daily lives consist of anything more than simply being entertained. It’s a black swan because we assign to it an extraordinary amount of benefit and wonder, now, but we also assume it will eventually impact our lives proportionally to anything else that’s remotely similar. 

Who knows, but it’s this random occurrence, much more luck than skill, that brought us YouTube and MySpace, and trying to guess what the next killer app is going to be - but based on conventions we already know - won’t actually deliver us that thing any time sooner.  And it certainly doesn’t mean the next big thing will impact our lives as much as we will initially assume it will, or that it will live up to the unrealistically strong hold it will have on our imagination. What we do know, is the mathematical notion of ergodicity – that over time, we really can’t predict what something will become at all.

So, getting back to the question at the round table – how do we identify and eliminate the stupidest mistakes we make. Although the author doesn’t explicitly advize this for this reason, I’m reinterpreting:  attend conferences and forums that have NOTHING to do with your field, that no one else is attending.  Visit the Agricultural Equipment Technology Conference. Check out to Robocup 2007. Any one up for North America’s No.1 event for 3PL executives & 3PL users?

I really believe that you will get more from hearing about the logistics world’s latest black swan than you will reading another story about how YouTube will elect the next president, or how mobile marketing is where the action is. You will see patterns that can be applied to your assumptions as a marketer, as well as note the subtle connections improbable events or products have with each other.

We’re sometimes blind (and stupid) because we chalk up every major event to a pattern. Sometimes it’s actually just dumb luck. But either way, you’re more likely to get lucky and find inspiration in an environment you’re unfamiliar with as you are competing with 2,000 other eMarketing wonks at iMedia talking about the same things. Over and over, and over.