You can read below, or watch this short video.
The quote in the headline is an overly harsh standard I read in an online forum one day. It goes too far because there are some kinds of science that can never become engineering. Like social science. I mean … God forbid that social science becomes engineering. That sounds horrifying.
But the phrase illustrates a point, which is that the genuine test of an idea is whether it works in the real world.
We should apply a similar skepticism to marketing ideas. Or … how about search engine optimization?
When you say that something works in the real world, that seems to imply a few steps.
- It’s comprehensible.
- It’s actionable.
- It has an effect.
- That effect is measurable.
I want to focus on the actionable part.
Great ideas aren’t all that useful until they’ve become operational.
For example, “early to bed, early to rise” may be a great idea, but until you make it a habit of setting an alarm and actually getting out of bed, it doesn’t do you much good.
I’ve been listening recently to some great advice on how to structure content for SEO purposes. It’s top-notch stuff, but to my way of thinking, it’s not all that valuable until it becomes actionable, and that means it’s been reduced to a checklist, to a form, a procedure, or to some kind of practical tool.
A personal anecdote illustrates this.
When I was starting off as an editor, I had final sign-off on the replacement pages we sent to subscribers to update their looseleaf services. When the first monthly update came out, I was horrified to see all the mistakes. Page numbers, dates, section headings. There were even times when I confused right and left pages.
To make sure I never did that again, I made a checklist, which I reviewed diligently for every page in every update until all those checks became second nature.
That’s when good ideas and good intentions meet reality. In short, we need …
- Tools — how to do it.
- Checklists — what do review.
- Sign-off — don’t trust your own eyes.
- Metrics — how to measure that you did it.
This kind of an operational focus is the difference between an intellectually stimulating idea, and something that gets things done.
If you need help converting your good ideas into operational realities, give me a call.
