Don't worry if you've never studied chaos theory. This is not intended to be a crash course, but rather the sharing of some important insights from a digital marketer who has studied the art and science of chaos and has applied what he knows to social media marketing.
While most traditional science describes predictable phenomena like gravity, electricity, or chemical reactions, Chaos Theory deals with nonlinear systems that are effectively impossible to predict or control, like weather, traffic, the stock market, or our brain states. These six simple ways to understanding dealing with chaos can help you effectively "manage" your social media campaigns.
  1. Chaotic Systems Cannot Be Controlled. If you think about social media," says Meinhardt, "it's dynamic and will yield widely diverging outcomes based on the "initial conditions" you bring to the social conversation." The implication being that any attempt to "control" social media will not succeed. This is an important base understanding as it fundamentally changes what you can and should focus on (which we'll dive into via the next 5 points).
  2. Determine Your Initial Conditions. "As marketers, we can only determine our initial conditions into the social chaos," says Meinhardt. "This includes your brand image, personality, story, attitude and ad unit type." These are the elements you can inject into social media platforms and various environments. What you can't do, however, is control what happens to these elements once you release them into the social stratosphere. In other words, you no longer own your brand. You are the steward of your brand, but it is your customers who control your brand, and what they have to say about your brand matters to their peer more than what you have to say.
  3. Be Outcome Ready. "Marketers need to be outcome ready," Meinhardt explains. "You need to be open to continually learn and respond quickly to customer reactions." This point ties in nicely to a related article from my interview with former Navy Seal and best-selling author, Leif Babkin. Despite how well you plan, the market is dynamic and will never play out exactly as you intended. You need to be decisive amid uncertainty. Know your mission and respond to the demands of the environment just as long as it's moving you toward your ultimate outcome. At times this may mean not responding to the ensuing conversation at all, but rather observing the community's conversation to an outcome.
  4. Let Go of Preconceptions of Your Campaign. This is a difficult one for most marketers. We are trained as professional marketers to deliver the desired results. And usually we will do just that. The road to get there, however, is rarely as clear and straightforward as we'd like. "As marketers, we need to align our initial conditions to our campaign goals, but we need to let go of any preconceptions of the outcome of any campaign," says Meinhardt. Your preconceptions are what will cause you heartache. Instead, focus on your desired outcome and be willing to be flexible within the social media campaign structure in order to get to your ultimate outcome. Even if you're doing exactly what you did last time, the social media context and overall environment is constantly moving, so your results will not be identical.
  5. Optimize Your Spend to the Most Effective Variation. Variety is the spice of life. You need options in order to optimize and manage your social media campaigns. Meinhardt recommends that you, "insert variations of initial conditions into the social system and optimize your spend to the most effective variations." He also recommends that you train yourself to let go of underperforming messages. This sounds obvious, but if someone in your organization loves a particular set of messages, they may resist your recommendation to let go of them when they don't perform. Remember, what resists, persists. And that persistence will cost you.
  6. Test, Learn, Apply & Stay Open. You should see all of your social media campaigns as one continuous test. The minute you think you've got it, that's when you're about to be surprised. Social media by its nature is a chaotic system. As such, you need to keep an open mind so that you're constantly in a state of learning while you apply what you learn so that you can continually improve upon your campaigns. "Always be open to new reactions and outcomes," Meinhardt recommends. "You need to test, learn and then execute from those learnings."
So there you have it. Social media aligns nicely with good old-fashioned chaos theory. Thankfully, Karl Meinhardt took the time to explain how to leverage the 6 best ways to manage your social media marketing campaigns via chaos theory.