FAIL: I’ve Had My Share
“The first director I had at Second City said, ‘You have to learn to love the bomb,’ and I didn’t know what he meant for a very long time. …But there’s a buzz to failing and not dying.”
- Stephen Colbert
So the wine blogger scholarship contest, the one where if enough people submitted applications you could receive $1000, received fewer than 20 submissions. It was, by any accounting, a failure.
I’ve been unpacking the reasons why I think the scholarship is full of fail, and thought I’d share.
I’m no stranger to failure; many things I’ve attempted while building the Capozzi brand have ended in ways I either didn’t anticipate, or were well short of my expectations.
My ill-fated foray into Second Life springs to mind instantly. We spent 5K or so building an island that ended up being at turns either completely uninhabited, or overrun with dildo-waving furries bent on turning my vineyard island into the digital equivalent of Gomorrah. So, like the smiting smiter that I am, I smote the fetid, gangrenous evil that lurked therein. With a vengeance. FAIL.
Moral: If you’re going to attempt to leverage new media strategies, limit your investment until you have measurable, projectable results.
Then there’s the whole custom crush debacle. Yes, we should have wine on the market right now. In fact we should have had wine on the market for almost a year at this point. But, since the compliance person in charge of the custom crush facilities permitting “lost track” of my permit app, we are still without sale-able wine. My lack of oversight was a huge contributer here. Ass-uming and all that. FAIL.
Moral: Keep your friends close, and your consultants closer.
And because we are without sale-able wine, folks who sent in shirt photos are still waiting for their free samples. The free sample thing I don’t feel so bad about, actually. They were free shirts, after all – and the samples will come. But still: FAIL.
Moral: Free buys you lots of goodwill and patience. But for how long?
Now, this.
To recap: I offered hundreds of dollars for a single blog post, literally about an hour and a half of a blogger’s time. I offered this cash reward during what the media keeps claiming is one of the most severe recessions since the 30′s. I also created a rewards structure that incented people to share and encourage others to submit an entry, so that the cash reward would increase. And I gave folks a month to write their post. Then I extended the deadline an extra 10 days.
The results: More traffic to the blog than ever. Lots of buzz on Twitter. Numerous emails seeking clarification. And, ultimately, less than 10 eligible entries.
(There were more, but shockingly, a couple bloggers for whom I have enormous respect didn’t properly follow directions. Crazy!)
So what went wrong?
A number of things, actually. Among them:
* The most obvious is that I was competing for attention with Murphy Goode. They rolled out their YouTube campaign a couple days before I launched the contest and I’m certain their well-earned buzz drowned out my message somewhat.
* There was yet another worthy scholarship, this one for the Wine Blogger Conference, that launched soon after mine. This surely added some confusion among potential entrants. Even one of my judges contacted me asking if the two were one and the same!
But these are reasons, not excuses. I pride myself (perhaps mistakenly, perhaps not) on being a good marketer. A busy, crowded marketplace is a challenge to be overcome, not an excuse for failure. Which leaves me with this:
* The scholarship was simply not remarkable enough.
It didn’t spread like it should, and even when people knew about it (and plenty did) they didn’t choose to participate. I think I know why.
First, I called it a scholarship. Huge mistake! No one enters scholarships! I’m joking (a little), but millions in scholarships will go unclaimed this year, just like they did every year before it.
Second, it required wine bloggers to write about a subject they didn’t necessarily want to write about. Sure it was about wine, but it was about an aspect of wine that I found interesting, not one that they did. Most bloggers, myself included, have a blog for the very reason that they want to express themselves without constrains, on their own terms. The genius of the Murphy Goode contest is that they asked applicants to talk about themselves, which everyone loves to do!
In the end, limited participation has doomed what I thought would become a yearly event. Something like it may take its place in the future, but it will be in a vastly different form. Happily I had learned from my Second Life experience and limited my exposure in the event of a failure by way of the contest’s structure. Still: FAIL.
Moral: To be remarkable, you must align your marketing with the core desires of your audience. Contrary to popular belief, getting a stack of money is not a core desire.
It’s become a cliche, but people are far too afraid of failure. The trick is to fail quickly, and/or to limit your inevitable future failures to a manageable size. That’s where the learning happens.
To those that did enter: I’ll be sending your submissions to the judges for review later this week and the winner will be announced shortly after. Thanks for entering!
13 Comments → “FAIL: I’ve Had My Share”
Looks like you got something out of it, good insight into what on-line buzz works and what doesn’t. And, it happened at a time in your projects that was not a big negative to the bottom line. If the Goode Job promotion would have only gotten a few entries, it would have been a big loss of time, resources and street cred for them. They took a big risk. Imagine if they would have received only a few, obscure and unqualified entries that they would have to then go and give a job to. Their risk paid off. They have not made the decision, but having met at least one of the candidates, odds are, it will pay off.
I agree with your observation that the more narrowly you define the content of the submission, the less interested people will be in providing it. As you point out, the intended participants do the activity because of the diversity of the topic.
But, I don’t think that that had to make it fail, or that making it a scholarship was ineffective. It was that they target two different groups of people. Like offering a years supply of Tofu to the person that makes the best burger. The scholarship was to learn about making wine (that is how I took it, anyway) and the contest was to write about wine. With notable exceptions, people who what to blog about wine, don’t want to make it and people who what to make wine may not want to blog about it.
Don’t let it discourage you, I look forward to hearing about your future successes, and any future (wine gods forbid) failures that you might have. I hope you have a lot of the former, and very few of latter, but we will all benefit from reading about both of them.
Tim
Tim,
Thanks for the comment!
No way does this get me down. I’m fortunate to say I’ve has more successes than failures, but more than that I don’t think either is the real measure of a person. The real measure is if they can come up with the next idea.
Happily I’m not out of ideas. Not by a long shot.
Thanks again for the comment and the encouragement.
Don’t look at this as a failure- look at it as a win! So, you may not have received as many entries as you had hoped, you still gained exposure from people checking out what you were offering, and hopefully you gained followers.
And, if nothing else, you apparently learned from this experience. As I tell anyone that will listen, I have learned more from experiences which were apparently not successful and more from bad managers than good, and poorly run organizations than high performing organizations, and you should take every experience as a great opportunity to learn from.
I hope that I was not one of the entries that was disappointing, but either way- I want to thank you for the experience. As you realized, the topic was a bit limiting and you know that we all like to write about whatever is our heart’s desire, but it is also good to be stretched a bit and I am glad that I participated!
Hi Joann,
Thanks for the comment!
The submissions were great. No issue there.
And I appreciate the kind words. Still, if you don’t achieve your goals, it is not unhealthy to label what results a failure. The trick is not to get emotionally caught up in it.
In fact, I think it’s more unhealthy not to call a spade a spade. If you don’t recognize where you fell short, you don’t learn. Fragile egos don’t travel well
Thanks for the comments, and good luck with the judges!
If it makes you feel any better, I actually intended to write a post for your contest this week- I failed too because I didn’t pay attention to the deadline. When I realized last night that I wouldn’t make it in time, I decided that is actually better. Now when I do write my post, it will not be for the purpose of potentially winning money-it will be because I WANT to write it- so in that respect maybe you didn’t fail after all. Also this means I won’t actually have to follow the rules if I don’t want to:)
No attempt is a flat fail. Even in the previous programs you mention, I would consider them lessons and not failures.
It was my pleasure to participate.
Josh,
This situation is most definitely not a failure. A set-back, perhaps. But not a failure.
Personally, I was extremely interested in this competition. Before I started writing The Beer Wench blog, I had originally intended on creating a wine blog. I chose not to write about wine because I was intimidated because I perceived the world of wine writers to be very prestigious and arrogant (ie: Robert Parker-esque).
This was before I befriended several wine bloggers all over the country via Twitter. Your competition almost inspired me to start – just so I could legitimately enter the competition! The reason I did not is not a failure of yours, but a result of circumstances in my personal life. (Which I am sure you may be aware of via Twitter).
I think that your project was unique and interesting. And I can’t wait to see what you will come up with next!!!
Ashley
I think the key was:
“Second, it required wine bloggers to write about a subject they didn’t necessarily want to write about”
I know Parker’s credibility got a lot of hooplah recently and I’m Robert Parker’s Bitch was popular, but I think the initial tension surrounding bloggers-as-critics is no longer the major source of tension among wine bloggers.
Themes like managing your digital life, twitter vs. facebook social norms, editing audio/video/images, programming…might be other tensions wine bloggers are experiencing. You’re great at addressing these other tensions in your blog. Keep it up!
This was one of the best and most inspirational blog posts I’ve read this year. Sharing your learnings and introspection after your challenges helps us all do better. Thank you and great job. When I am not on my iPhone and manage to eek out some time Ill try to add a few Mabray fails with my learnings.
Josh great post. What ever happened to “Flavor Country?” I see that the mark is listed as abandoned on the USPTO website.
@Jeremy,
The mark was another casualty of the delay in having salable wine. USPTO only registers marks after use in commerce.
Not too worried however. Didn’t have any plans to ever use it on a label.
Thanks for the comment!
Good post, and what a good opportunity to reflect. I agree with everyone whose said it in some form or another – there aren’t really any true failures, just learning experiences. Being a relatively new blogger I’m finding a lot of these my self – and I’m sure there will always be more.
Your worst mistakes are only what you make of them – if we choose to accept them and learn from them, then they’ve served us well. And perhaps having made them in effect is better than not.
I’ll be an avid follower from here on out – I appreciate the direction you’re headed, and am excited to see your continued success.
Cheers
The earlier comments on why it isn’t a failure and the graciousness with which you share your knowledge are right on….so write on.
I’m curious about what you think of the current Murphy Goode dust-up?