Guest commentary by Jason Amunwa

Towards the end of August, Wired magazine published an article called “The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine”. This article, as many from Wired do, flipped my lid, because it put a name to something that I’ve encountered numerous times while working in social media – that is, the decreasing need for perfection in marketing messaging, and the increasing importance of timeliness and relevance.

Obvious example: YouTube. Who’d have thought that clips and short videos with near-zero production values could command a viewership that dwarfs that of even network television? By spending less time putting a perfect sheen on their material, content producers have been able to capture consumers that value more frequent updates and timeliness, over waiting a whole week for a new episode to be shot, edited, focus-tested and marketed prior to release.

Eric Cartman, South Park's biggest antagonist

Another great example: South Park. Love it, or hate it, South Park is consistently the topic of many a water-cooler conversation usually within a week of major news stories breaking. This is not only because of their outrageous stories, but I believe a direct result of their low-budget, paper-craft visual style. It takes South Park 7 days to create a 20-minute episode from start to finish, which means when Kanye West gets up to his usual tricks on Saturday, South Park is there with an entire parody episode ready to go the following Friday, before anyone else has a chance to react. They understand that being first carries more weight with today’s tolerant, and time-strapped consumer, than being perfect.

These examples of cheap and simple trumping the perfected and honed are all around us, and are especially applicable when it comes to marketing in social media. I’ve had clients worry about their ability to manage a crew to create videos for their corporate YouTube channel. My response? You and your iPhone 3GS are all you need to create engaging, honest, human content that has a much higher chance of resonating with your customers than the slickest of perfectly-lit and staged infomercials.

So relax! It turns out that getting it done on time is becoming more advantageous these days, than getting it done perfectly.