What Deming can teach us about social media

Economist.com has a wonderful article about W. Edwards Deming, “a physicist/statistician with a PhD from Yale who applied the ideas of a little-known American mathematician, Walter Shewhart, to business processes. Deming later said later that Shewhart had an ‘uncanny ability to make things difficult’. There was always a need for an interpreter of his findings.”

It’s time for a Deming equivalent to make social media less difficult to understand and, while he or she is at it, to apply a few of Deming’s quality standards.  If it worked for Toyota, why not social media?  I got the idea when I read results of a Heyman Associates survey, Communicators Split on Digital Implementation, Impact, published in MarketingVOX.  Heyman Associates is an executive search firm based in New York, specializing in corporate communications and public affairs.

The survey results are rather astonishing, considering where we are at the digital media adoption curve. “When respondents were asked about impediments and challenges to the broader adoption of digital initiatives, the survey found that the biggest issue facing communicators is a lack of sufficient talent with strong knowledge of the subject matter. Some 42% of respondents cite this as their number-one concern,” according to MarketingVOX.  As one of my friends in the social media consulting business says, everybody is a social media expert these days and most of them talk language laced with gibberish, making everything difficult.

Mark Evans had a great post on his blog Social media is going to disappear: “By ‘disappear’, I mean that sooner rather than later, social media as a hyperbole-driven, standalone, new-kid-on-the-block entity is going to evolve into a communications, marketing and sales strategy and distribution vehicle that happens to rely on a variety of valuable and useful online services. For now, however, social media is being sold as something revolutionary. And there’s no lack of people positioning themselves as strategists and consultants when, in fact, they’re really “enthusiasts” who love using the tools but have little or no experience actually applying them to achieve business objectives.”

So let’s keep in mind a few rules from Dr. Deming. First, there is no substitute for knowledge.  Second, the most important things cannot be measured. And third (taken from a list of problems to avoid in Deming’s Lesser Category of Obstacles), don’t rely on technology to solve problems.