Olsonology

At least 90% of the time someone asks me to figure out why their new wireless mouse isn’t working, or why half their presentation is being cut off by the printer, I’m just winging it. And I make a lot of mistakes.

Talking to people at this morning’s Social Media Breakfast at the Mall of America, I noticed that I wasn’t alone in my failure. A lot of really smart social media folks were failures,too!  Some even admitted to a laundry list of failures and even further, owned them like badges of honor. 

Jennifer Rock, Director of Employee Communications at Best Buy, spoke about the challenges of developing a social space online for employees to congregate. While Best Buy’s intranet message board “The Watercooler” has evolved into a fantastic social space for employees, she fully admits that development was not without issue. Having weathered everything from foul language to armchair mutinies, she's gone on to genuinely foster a community of online voices.

^{Jennifer Rock, director of employee communications at Best Buy, describes some of the internal steps and missteps of using social media to connect with employees. Rock was a speaker at Social Media Breakfast}

As a result? She’s more than savvy – she’s pioneering, because she’s operating from a knowledge base you can’t get from Mashable articles and retweets. This doesn’t mean you should aim to fail, but there's something to be said for embracing the times you do. Because learning through doing, and failing, teaches us the best lessons.

When it comes to social media, it sure can seem like the deep end of the pool. I don’t blame anyone for wanting to test the waters first, but there is something to be said about diving in and learning through doing.  So while you may want to avoid doing it on others' behalf, go out there and just try out every social medium you can.

Don’t worry: Everyone’s first tweet is “@newguy: Still trying to figure this twitter thing out!“

-Ben Pfutzenreuter, PR Intern