“Can’t see the forest for the trees” –> An expression used of someone who is too involved in the details of a problem to look at the situation as a whole.
Remember this scene in Major League (great movie, BTW) when Willie Mays Hays keeps trying to hit the ball out of the park even though he’s the fastest guy on the team? His manager comes over and tells him to hit the ball on the ground and leg out his hits because that’s the role he plays on the team.
Or this scene in Miracle when Herb Brooks says he’s “not looking for the best players, I’m looking for the right ones”?
Makes sense, right? Anyone who’s ever assembled a team – sports, work or otherwise – knows it’s about the sum of the parts, not the individuals. A team of superstars is great for fantasy football, not so much in real life.
Maybe you’re not as big a fan of sports movies as I am. In that case, think about your group of friends. You likely have a friend you go to when you have something serious to talk about. That same friend may not be the person you’d choose to plan your bachelor party. You, like both of the movie coaches above, realized that each player or friend played a different role when viewed in the larger context of your life.
I share these analogies because I’ve had quite a few recent conversations with clients, colleagues, and friends who were obsessing over the performance of an individual blog post, Tweet, or Facebook status. What was the reach? What was the clickthrough rate? How many times was it shared? It made me want to ask about the performance of that lunch meeting with a mentor or that single in the softball game last night. Did you compare that lunch to other lunches you’ve had and kick yourself for not fully optimizing it? Did you swing for the fences your next time up because why accept a lousy single when you can crush the ball over the fence?
Very little in life can be measured in a vacuum. A home run is better than a single right? Then why not fill your team up with huge guys who crush the ball every time up? A crazy weekend in Vegas is better than a night at home playing trivial pursuit, right? Then why not head out to Vegas every weekend? Well, for starters, you’d end up with a team of players who do this and a life that resembles this. But it’s also because the success or failure of anything has to always be considered within the larger context. A crazy weekend in Vegas is great, but sometimes you just want to chill out at home. A home run hitter is great except when you need someone to run down that fly ball in the outfield.
The same thinking applies to brands and their use of social media. Just because that cat GIF you posted reached more people and had more likes than the post where you talked about your organization’s community service efforts doesn’t mean it was any more or any less “successful.” Just because that Tweet of your staff party wasn’t retweeted 100 times doesn’t mean you should stop sharing that sort of content. Just like the home run hitter and the base stealer, each piece of content plays a different role in your overall strategy and needs to be measured as such. Your goals for that content should be driven by you, not by the social platform. In some cases, you may be trying to drive traffic to a website, or to drive shares of a piece of a content, or sometimes, it’s just to show a different side to your organization. Your social media content and conversations are not banner ads so stop evaluating them that way.
Continue to be a slave to the metrics these social platforms use and you will soon become part of their business strategy, rather than the other way around.
*Image Credit: Matt Becker
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