For those who play chess regularly, you know that if you play the game making moves that are designed to keep you from losing, you never actually end up winning. You can’t win with defense alone. This concept goes well beyond chess and is why we say things like: “The best defense is a good offense.” So, if we can all agree on that, then for what purpose am I writing this? Today I want to show you why you’re actually doing this when it comes to your brand’s marketing and, in particular, when it comes to social media.

The reality is that by playing not to lose, you completely prevent yourself from ever getting ahead, trying new things, and ultimately winning. You can define winning however you want whether it’s abstract like helping make the world a better place or something very concrete like increasing market share by 5 points. It doesn’t matter. The same rules apply. In order to win, you have to play to win. To better understand this, let me show you what happens when you play not to lose when it comes to marketing. Playing this way causes you to make four critical mistakes.

1. Playing only defense. When it comes to social media, I review a lot of plans for a lot of brands both formally and informally. I read a lot of case studies of successes and failures. Most of the social media programs I see (especially from healthcare and pharma companies) are purely defensive. They are programs that are done simply to keep pace with a competitor or exist only to respond to someone if absolutely necessary. They also are generally closed with no interaction allowed between customers and the brand. This is playing not to lose. You will never advance your brand forward (or make any money) doing this. If that’s okay with you, skip to the next paragraph. If you’re still here, consider this: what if all of your marketing plans were defensive in nature? No new ideas, no leading edge thinking, no calculated risks. Where would your brand be? Playing defense isn’t enough in any channel including social media.

2. Narrowing your thinking. “So, how are we going to use YouTube here?” Whenever I hear a question like this I cringe. It’s usually a sign that whatever idea follows is going to lack creativity and innovation. It has to by nature. If you approach either your internal team or your agency partners and ask, “What are we going to do on YouTube [or whatever other platform you want]?”, it signals to them a narrowed focus. It’s the ultimate, constraining box that you can cram someone into. Instead of starting this way, how about asking, “How do we solve this problem we’re having with the brand?” If you open the discussion that way, people are encouraged to apply some innovative thinking and creativity because they aren’t constrained to one platform or tactic. This might mean that YouTube makes sense or it might not. Remember that your goal is to solve your business problems and meet your brand objectives, not to check off as many social media platforms as you can.

3. Selling the wrong thing upstairs. CEOs these days have a tough job. They have a bunch of stakeholders that they must answer to and each of these has a different motivation and priority. For the vast majority of CEOs, their job is to grow the company. Typically, this means growing revenue and profit. Because of this, a CEO cannot afford to play not to lose. Not to lose means breaking even, doing the same as last year (if you’re lucky). That’s a surefire way to find yourself out of a job as CEO. This is one of the big reasons why your CEO isn’t interested in your social media programs. It’s why they don’t have more high-level support.

If you present tactics that are completely defensive, with no clear path to somehow helping the company grow, it’s a tough sell to the CEO. Yet, that’s what we do. We put in front of them social media programs that are defensive in nature and ask them to devote their time and resources to help rally the company behind this channel. Why would a CEO do that? Every minute must be spent on growing the company. It’s very rare to find a defensive tactic that leads to growth. Until you’re ready to bring social media ideas to your CEO that are playing to win, you might as well forget about getting any C-level support.

4. Overestimating risk. We humans are very prone to this. We consistently inaccurately assess risk. “People exaggerate spectacular but rare risks and downplay common risks. They worry more about earthquakes than they do about slipping on the bathroom floor, even though the latter kills far more people than the former. Similarly, terrorism causes far more anxiety than common street crime, even though the latter claims many more lives. Many people believe that their children are at risk of being given poisoned candy by strangers at Halloween, even though there has been no documented case of this ever happening” [source: Bruce Schneier]. Mr. Schneier also points out that people both “underestimate risks they willingly take and overestimate risks in situations they can’t control” and “overestimate risks that are being talked about and remain an object of public scrutiny.” Reread that again just to be sure.

Hmmm…sound like anything you know? Any corollaries come to mind? We “overestimate risks in situations we can’t control”=We can’t control what people say about our brands in social media. We “overestimate risks that are being talked about and are objects of public scrutiny.” Hello. You’re reading this blog aren’t you? How many other articles about social media have you read in the past week?

We worry that people will make negative comments about our brands, even though, in general, they don’t care about our brand and they have much bigger things to worry about. We worry about adverse events being reported in healthcare even though they are very rare. Put the real risk into context by first asking: “what’s the absolute worst that can happen?” Assess how likely this scenario is to happen and then repeat. This time figure out what’s slightly less than the worst thing that can happen. Do this until you figure out something that is both a negative and is more likely than not to happen. It should take you a while to get to this point, but that’s the true risk.

What does offense look like instead of defense? Here’s an example from healthcare. Recently, sanofi-aventis had one of it’s Facebook pages “attacked” by a disgruntled patient of one of their products, Taxotere (a chemotherapy for various cancers). Defense is looks like this: you create your Facebook page complete with a massive algorithm to help moderators know exactly how to handle any possible situation and reaction from a visitor. You know exactly who you need to call if there’s a crisis. You know who has to approve what and how long it takes. You’ve got backups and backups of those backups. That’s defense. Nothing in there is offense. Yes, you might need some of this, but you need some offense too. In the case of sanofi-aventis’ page, offense would have looked like this to me. As one patient complains about the lingering side effects of Taxotere and attempts to hijack the discussion on your site, you activate your advocates.

Since you’ve been playing to win, you identified advocates for your product before any crisis came along. You’ve been talking with them to gather feedback to improve your programs and products, enhance relationships with key patient leaders, and a bunch more. That’s playing to win. Playing to win is critical in our example because it represents a way out of a difficult situation for sanofi-aventis. They could have simply contacted all of their advocates and asked them to weigh in on the discussion about how Taxotere helped save their lives. That’s offense. It’s thinking about how to win that sent you out to build your advocates and now you can use them to play offense when you really need a win.

So, are you playing to win or not to lose when it comes to your marketing? How about your use of social media? If it’s all done not to lose, it’s time to rethink your approach.

PS: Want to learn more about social media in pharma and healthcare? Then join me at E-Patient Connections 2010 conference, September 27-29, 2010 in Philadelphia. I’ll be co-chairing the “Social Pharmer” track and also doing a pre-conference tutorial called “Social Media Accelerator.” You can register for the entire conference (including the tutorial) here. Use code “rx2010″ to get a $300 discount. As a further incentive (as if you need one), everyone who registers gets a free Zeo Personal Sleep Coach system. [Disclosure: I receive a small referral fee for registrations from this blog.]

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