A blog about all things wonderful and sometimes useful.

15 January, 2013

The Taboo of the Test!

What are you afraid of?

Happy Tuesday!

After a month off in December traveling the world with my husband it is time to get back at it.

I attended the Colorado AMA happy hour Last Wednesday night at Shannahan’s. For those of you who don’t know me, I have been actively involved in the COAMA for several years and am constantly amazed how this organization has changed and grown over the years. More on that Later.

I was fortunate on Wednesday to have a wonderful conversation with a developer on how we as marketers and technology geeks stay current on the ever changing online landscape.  How to we get out of the rut of only knowing what we know. How do we stop taking what we know as the only way to do something.

Being a small business I take it upon myself to read, read read and test.  As an SEO my job is centered around testing.  As we were discussing the idea of testing it was like speaking to a kindred spirit, who understood that we are only as good as the data we have and can always improve.   Try it and if it doesn’t work we can change it, use the information we learned and apply it moving forward.  Every website, social media initiative and marketing plan should be malleable and ever changing…..growing as your business grows and changes.  We don’t set it and forget it. So why is there this push back against testing?

Maybe it isn’t so much the testing but the fear of failure?

We spent much of our conversation discussing graphic designers and how the new school of designing is based off data married with aesthetic. Brilliant! But what happens to the conversation when the design isn’t based on data but emotion? the love of a color?  trying to be too creative? Honestly, websites get produced that fail.  So how do we change the conversation and the way we work together to utilize more data and less emotion? Is this the right approach is there still something data can’t convey that the human can.  Yes, data doesn’t’ have intuition, but it does provide insight in numbers.

We don’t know everything there is to know. As marketers, creatives,  SEO’s whatever title we put on on ourselves we have to fail. We have to test, test some more and test some more. It is a never ending cycle to constantly improve and stay relevant.

So, it really does boil down to one thing.  What are we so afraid of?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2013 at 8:21 pm and is filed under Thoughts and Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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