Stop Flapping Your Arms
There’s a method to the madness of an orchestra conductor, and it doesn’t always look obvious to the untrained eye. To the audience, it can look like the crazy person on the podium is just waggling a stick at the musicians and music comes out.
To the musician, however, the way that stick waggles means a world of difference in how they play their instrument. Because of that, the conductor and the orchestra will spend months practicing together and years practicing by themselves in order to come up with everything needed to work together to produce beautiful music
If someone just walked on-stage without this prior planning and practice and started flapping their arms like a conductor trying to make music, what would happen? Chaos.
“When the orchestra look at me, I want them to see a completely involved person who reflects what we rehearsed, and whose function is to make it possible for them to do it.” - James Levine, conductor, Metropolitan Opera
Tune up the Band #
The analogy holds true for how a business conducts itself online.
The best businesses don’t just walk onto the digital stage and flap their arms hoping that music comes out. They take time to study, and they apply their culture and unique personality to best practices to come up with a strategy, and then walk confidently on stage with a plan.
If they fail, then they failed with a plan, and they can go back and reevaluate to make it better the next time. That’s called practicing, and anyone who has ever been good at anything ever has done it. Everyone has failed, learned from it, and gotten better.
With no firm strategy, however, failure is more confusing and deflating because you can’t assign specific reasons for why things happened they way they did. People can and have thrown the entire idea of marketing their business digitally away because they tried and failed, even through they didn’t understand what they tried or why they failed.
Know the Score Before You Play #
If you are going to commit to communicating as a business through digital media, then you need to stop and ask why.
Why are we doing this? What do we hope will happen? If this is our goal, how are we going to accomplish it? Answering those questions will dictate strategy. Having a strategy will help you make better, more tactical decisions. Better decisions = better results.
With a plan in mind and practice under your fingers, you’ll be able to walk onto the digital stage and give the audience exactly what they want. Otherwise, they may just start throwing tomatoes at you.
Oh, hi, by the way. I’m a digital marketing specialist at Lieberman Technologies in Evansville, IN. I help businesses compose social media, SEO, and digital advertising strategies and also have kind of an obsession with music. You can hire me to help your business by clicking here.