Pascal’s Wager of Social Media
When in doubt, do
All companies, media and otherwise, are often faced with the question — in this new media landscape, what is worthwhile? There’s Twitter and Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat. There’s podcasting and video and blogs. What should we do? What is important?
The short answer is, we don’t know. It’s a gamble. You have a plan, you have a strategy, but then you roll the dice and play the odds.
And the best way to answer this question is to look at Pascal’s Wager. I learned about Pascal’s Wager in Philosophy 101, which related to the believe in God, and the reasoning why its the smarter side of the bet to believe in God.
If you believe in God, and you’re right, well great, you win and you win big. God exists, you go to heaven and enjoy the afterlife forever. It’s a major victory. The value of believing in God, if you’re right, is enormous. If you believe in God and you’re wrong, and God does not exist, you lose. You’ve spent your life wasting time believing something that wasn’t true. But in the end, it wasn’t all that much of a loss. Maybe you feel stupid. You could have spent your time doing something else.
If you don’t believe in God and you’re right, that there isn’t a God, you win. You get a nice feeling of confirmation after you die that you knew it all along. A victory, yes, but a small, fairly inconsequential one. But if you don’t believe in God, and you’re wrong, you lose — and lose big. Eternal damnation big. It’s the ultimate loss.
Pascal argued, among other things, that the believe in God is a smart wager to make. Here’s a helpful decision matrix:
This same concept can be applied to a lot, and I’d argue it can certainly be applied to digital media, and this new media landscape of social media. There are all sorts of new avenues to try, new platforms, new opportunities to throw against the wall and see what sticks. And the Pascal’s Wager of Social Media is as follows:
Let’s say there’s some crazy new social platform — we’ll call it MeNow, the best new app that everyone must try and be given it’s 15 seconds of fame.
Let’s say you decide to spend some time and resources adapting your content and brand to MeNow. Not a lot — we’re not talking about devoting dozens of millennial interns or hiring a team of content producers. Experimenting, something for a couple hours a day or a couple hours a week. If you’re right, you win — you’re now blessed with having a major presence and becoming an early adapter force on this platform. You develop a huge following, the platform brings in tons of visitors or customers or clicks or clients, and you’re leaps and bounds ahead of your competition — a success by all measures.
If you spend time and resources on it and you’re wrong — that it really wasn’t necessary or valuable for you to do it — then you lose. But what do you really lose? You’ve wasted some time. You’ll never get that time back. Perhaps you could have spent your time better on other platforms.
On the other hand let’s say you decided to avoid MeNow altogether. If you’re right, that it wasn’t important, that it’s not necessary for your business or company — congrats, you won. You successfully allocated your resources in the most efficient way, and you can laugh about about it on other social media platforms, bragging about how you were ahead of the curve when your competition was wasting their time on a flash in the pan social platform. It’s a legitimate victory —I felt that way about Meerkat, for example, and I think I got that right. But a not-doing-something victory is far less of a win then a successfully-doing-something victory.
But if you ignore it, and you’re wrong — that if you had devoted even a small amount of time to the new platform, you would have seen tremendous benefit to you and your company, and you could lose your standing in your industry, falling behind the competition — you’re wrong big. You might lose a potentially valuable traffic stream, a new audience acquisition tool, and see your competitors advance beyond you. You might be doing irreparable damage to your brand and organization. A huge loss.
Just like the original Pascal’s Wager, the smarter bet to make is to just do it. Do it, even if it was the wrong decision. The ramifications of not doing it is so much worse.
There are of course caveats. You can’t devote massive resources to this. You shouldn’t be hardheaded after you make your bet. This should be a nimble experiment. It should be about learning, looking at metrics and analytics, assessing quickly and adjusting and pivoting.
If something’s not working, don’t be overly attached to it. Don’t stick the square peg into a round hole.
And perhaps the most important thing is you’ve got to be empowered — through your bosses, or any who hold you accountable to feel comfortable saying (and to mean) “This didn’t work.” Not in the small sense either. But to realize and verbalize, “This entire idea didn’t work, and we tried and we failed, and let’s move on.”
If you have the leeway to try, then it is important to follow the Pascal’s Wager of Social Media model, and when in doubt, do.
That’s one of our philosophies at Krakauer Media. Trying, at a small scale. Experimenting and tinkering and, possibly, moving on. Or, finding a big victory.
Don’t be afraid. It’s always better to try.
Steve Krakauer is the founder of Krakauer Media, a digital media consulting company based in Dallas, TX. For more information: http://Krakauer.Media. Read more about the future of media here.
