Today’s guest post is by Tac Anderson. Tac is the VP of Digital Strategies for Waggener Edstrom EMEA and blogs regularly about communication, technology, social media and developing trends at NewCommBiz. Tac just recently moved from Seattle to London. And his post today is about a concept near and dear to my heart.

I have always been fascinated by some people’s need to make rules. I’ve recently moved my family me to London, England for the next two years and I’ve learned that the Brits are famous for this. The British take credit for “inventing” many of our modern sports, but really they just formalized the rules around a lot of existing popular sports.

If you look at the English language, it’s mostly a mashup of German and French. I’m no historian, nor a linguist, but from what I understand the German tribes invaded after the Romans left forming many small kingdoms across Britannia. The French from Normandy eventually came over taming the wild Germanic tribes and became the primary ruling class. The Upper class spoke French and the commoners spoke German. But over the years (centuries) of upheaval and churn, an early type of English was formed. Even if you look at Shakespeare’s time, most of the grammar was there but spelling wasn’t that big a deal yet.

But eventually rules were set and taught and we now have hundreds of people who live to correct other people’s grammar and spelling on blogs. What these rules allowed for is for broader teaching of the English language both in reading and writing. Before this point, reading and writing were luxuries of the upper class.

Rules allow for scale.

While the English language has continued to change, with new words being added, like that after many hundreds of years you have British English and American English but if you know one you can read the other one (mostly) just fine.

But if it wasn’t for well-established rules the two languages would be so far apart as to be as unrecognizable as listening to BT (British Telecom) support from someone with a heavy cockney accent (I know this from firsthand experience).

For an example a little closer to home let’s pick on Marketing.

The Marketing world likes to fancy themselves as a bunch of rule breakers, and while that may be true compared to accountants, we’re actually a profession made up mostly of rule makers and rule followers.

As an example: Marketers many decades ago created the Cost Per Thousand (CPM) metric as a way to buy and sell advertising and even though the metric is practically useless as a way of measuring the value or ROI of advertising we still cling to this metric. In fact some poor PR practitioners even try to use an ad equivalency model to measure the value of their PR coverage.

Marketers love informal rules almost as much as formal rules. Marketing managers the World over live and die by Marketing best practices (just another form of rules) and over the last several years have been desperate to find and create best practices around social media.

Before that, the lack of social media adoption was largely due to the lack of best practices aka – rules. In recent years we’ve created countless social media best practices which have enabled enterprise adoption and subsequently, scale.

But when everyone plays by the same rules, rule breakers find a way to get ahead.

Let’s go back the British and the Americans. Looking at the American revolutionary war one can easily ask, how did a bunch of farmers beat the great British army? It defies logic. But if you know anything about warfare back then, the “proper” way to fight a battle was to march your army, in their nice uniforms, in neat orderly lines onto the open battlefield and shoot at each other like civilized people.

The tax dodging Americans knew there was no way they’d win that way so they hid behind trees and deployed guerrilla warfare.

Going back to language, if you look at the Jamaican language, it is a form of English (although you’d never know this from listening to it. In fact while English is the official language in Jamaica, “Jamaican” is considered by linguists, its own language. It developed when slave owners taught their slaves to speak English but the slaves devised their own way of speaking English, which was heavily accented in a way that still kept their communications private. They broke the rules.

A few years ago social media was instantly adopted by social media rule breakers (many of whom didn’t come from Marketing backgrounds BTW). While most companies focused on getting their messages out through heavily rule bound processes between the company and the media, companies who deployed social media could communicate directly with their customers, bypassing all of the rules and most of the
costs.

But social media is quickly becoming rule bound as a byproduct for the need to scale.

While I may make fun of my rule bound friends the truth is that I need them. We need rules. Rules are a good thing. But so is rule breaking.

We’ve spent the last several years creating a lot of rules, and that’s good, but I want to encourage the rule breakers out there to keep breaking rules. And to the rule makers (who are usually the ones in management and in charge of budgets) don’t dismiss the rule breakers. Keep encouraging them and be prepared to take some risks.

If you quit breaking rules you’ll lose out in the end.

There is always a strong need by those that follow the rules to resist those that want to break the rules. For a recent, relevant example look at the kick up around TechCrunch and Mike Arrington’s recent CrunchFund.

MG wrote about why TechCrunch was beating the traditional press and making them nervous:

Traditional journalists may be appalled to learn this. But this is a big key of why TechCrunch kicks their ass in tech coverage. We’re fast and furious in ways they can’t be, because they’re adhering to the old rules. Are there benefits to those old rules? Sure. But in my opinion, the benefits of the way we work far outweighs the benefits of the way they work.

Literally hours later, MG wrote a post on TechCrunch announcing that these broken rules could lead to AOL ousting Mike (even though AOL is also an investor in the fund).

Rules are there for a reason. But rules are also meant to be broken. The trick is knowing when to break them and when to adhere to them. (Please note again I’m not talking about basic rules around human rights.)

My general rule is that if breaking a rule cause people to freak out or even gets a highly emotional response, it’s probably a good one to take a closer look at.