If your living depends on the economy of ideas, chances are you’ve had a meeting like this. You know the one. Your client reviews your plans for the year. They like your ideas. They agree success will be achieved. Then, invariably, you get the question. “Can you come back with some really out of the box thinking? You know, something totally new. The next big thing.”

Normally, I love when clients do this. It means they are ready to move outside the comfort zone of stable but predictable results and really go for it. My team is usually chomping at the bit with a whole slew of innovative ideas that simply require a client with some cojones to pull them off. The table is set.

And so it begins. You conduct brainstorms. You pull the research and write the deck. The pitch is awesome. The concepts are killer and will launch a tidal wave of internet memes. That’s when this happens…

“I love it. Can you bring me some case studies that show how others do this?”

Oh noes.

For better or worse, the availability bias is stifling your innovations. At the risk of oversimplifying, the availability bias is how the prefrontal cortex evaluates risk based on the availability of similar situations it can readily recall when making decisions.

Case in point. You’re far more likely to die driving in a car within 25 miles of your home than in a fiery terrorist induced airline crash. But on a daily basis the media bombards us with images of crashed planes and terror scares while auto accidents, even fatal ones, barely make it out of the local papers. Thus, your prefrontal cortex will most likely associate flying with danger.

If someone you know is more afraid of flying than driving to Target, that’s the availability bias in action.

So what does this have to do with pharma? Well, everything. As most of you know pharma is, at its core, a risk averse culture. Everything is based on minimizing liability. The marketing and communications practice groups are oriented completely around legal and regulatory reviews, with every aspect of a program analyzed and inspected to insure nothing could be misconstrued or misrepresented.

When creating innovative programs, this can be a challenge. As the prefrontal cortex finds it harder and harder to associate innovation with success, new ideas become more difficult to sell in. As communicators see risk takers get punished and homogenous ideas get approved, a sort of mediocre groupthink sets in. At that point the lawyers don’t become the roadblock, the culture does, since things that are new begin to feel risky, regardless of whether they are or not.

This concept came to life for me recently as I was meeting with a client reviewing online media plans. 99% of the plan was a mix of sites that you’d normally expect to see, but we found an online gaming property that would perform far better than the rest. The site was respectable, had no sleazy ads, and over indexed in their target audience. We designated 2% of the budget for a 1-month test.

Client: “We can’t do this.”

Me: “Why? “

Client: “Because we’ve never bought media there before. No one will go for it“

As simple as it sounds, recognizing this little Jedi mind trick is the first step to making it work in your favor. The brain wants to draw on experience to feel more comfortable. As such, the more you can provide, the better off you will be, but how can you do this when an idea is totally new? Try these 3 things and you should have a better success rate getting to yes:

• Facilitate a culture of learning. The more new concepts and programs you can feed your clients, the less risky new ideas feel. You want to train them to look at new things and teach them that new, well, happens. Lunch and learns are great for this.
• Get the regulators to participate. By including legal in these sessions, they too begin to think in new ways. This will also provide you with invaluable insight as to how they think, what they look for, and what they need to feel comfortable saying yes.
• Show what got you there. It’s rare that an idea isn’t in some way built upon a previous one. Even Einstein admitted to standing on the shoulders of giants. Whenever possible, show the things that sparked the idea. It will help the clients get there too.

This question has come up quite a bit with our clients. Not to get too academic, but we’ve had to address some conceptual ideas to get them better prepared to make more informed decisions.

The good news is that we have been refining a point of view on this  that has been received very well by our clients and opened new opportunities for the team. The bad news is that it’s probably not the answer you are  looking for, but might help anyway. I’ll explain.

The question seems simple enough. Who should own social media? Organizations have oriented themselves to think about new tools and trends like any other mechanism within the organization. They think of them as channels. That social media is Facebook, or Twitter or whatever the next hot thing is. Channels became rigidly defined and pervasive because they required very specialized skills to cultivate and manage.

But social media isn’t a channel, it is a set of behaviors, behaviors that are made visible and viable by the technologies that enable them. It’s easy to understand this thinking, after all, it’s got the word media right in the name. But thinking of social as merely a channel limits the power of the behaviors at hand. They are not something you own, they are something to cooperate with. In essence, the specialized skill required for social media is people skills, which should be channel agnostic.

Ask any socially tuned person who owns social media and the majority of the time, you get the (correct) answer, which is “everyone does.” Yet organizations try to apply the channel mindset and force it into a specific function, when really there is no “right” answer.

To get clients out of this mindset we have started referring to social media as social business. After all, every aspect of the organization will need to begin to adopt socially enabled tools and policies to stay relevant with an ever increasingly savvy work force and customer base. HR will need to use these tools to recruit better talent, communications to drive reputation, marketing to drive behavioral shifts, etc.

By showing clients what the end point could look like, framing the starting point becomes easier. The question isn’t who owns social, but what parts of the organization are best suited to begin to drive the adoption of it. This may seem like an exercise in hair splitting, but the nuance is critically important, because it makes taking that first step appear less intimidating.

It’s understandable for a client to look for data or research that explains how other companies are handling this shift. It can be useful to analyze, but I find too often clients are unsure of how to move forward and are terrified to make the wrong decisions. In those cases, the data becomes a crutch and presents a false choice in and of itself. Clients in essence say “I can not choose, so I will choose what others have chosen.” Most of the research on the topic is anecdotal or biased in one way or another, and if the previous choices are incorrect, theirs will be as well. So how can we help clients more forward?

The answer, in most cases, is to ask a simpler question: What will best serve your customers in a way that will effectively move the bottom line? That answer will drive clients towards more effective adoption that demonstrates tangible results, making further adoption easier.

For some it may be that social should be adapted to provide tech support, for others as a sales channel or others recruiting tool., etc. The answer is going to be different for each because how you influence a decision or perception is as unique as the individuals you communicate with. The holy grail of marketing used to be 1 to 1 targeting. Somehow we forgot that social can do that.

This brings us back to the issue of adoption verses ownership. Drawing this distinction eases the process of moving forward, since the tasks look smaller and more manageable. Consensus is easier to build because you begin drawing a roadmap for everyone, rather than threatening existing ideologies. Clients leave the conversation feeling they may not need to rethink the org chart (yet), but rather need to modulate the tactics employed by each. Should they restructure? Maybe, maybe not, but the answer can only be effectively decided upon by looking at the whole business, not just the marketing or PR channels.