I give lots of speeches and talks each year and end each one with the quip, “Beware the artisan who claims 20 years of experience when, in fact, they have one year of experience 20 times.”

Now I’m adding a new line — “Beware the person who starts a sentence with “I’ve seen…” unless their next sentence begins with “I’ve done….”

There is an overwhelming difference between seeing something done, and actually doing it.

Seen It, Versus Done It
I know my clients expect me to know most, if not all, of the answers when it come to things Internet. Make no mistake — they already know a bunch and they learn frightenly fast. They’re
very smart people. But the world has become a very, very complex and fast place, even for me, and the questions I’m being asked can rarely be answered with black and white responses.

Here’s what’s happening — someone asks a question and I give a sound business answer based on 34+ years in marketing communications and 15 years developing on the Internet and all the latest information I can gather. Then some “interactive genius” 20-something says — “but I’ve seen an email with 30 links” or “but I’ve seen interactive flash work on old PCs,” or “I’ve seen two meg web pages work just fine because everybody has broadband,” or ” I don’t see why a corporate email server wouldn’t deliver this email the way I designed it” even though it’s 200K, includes rich media and insecure form posts.”

Get the picture? You may not like the answer based in experience and business trial because it’s not clear-cut, black and white. But you really won’t lke the outcome if you follow the advice of an inexperienced person simply because “they’ve seen” a lot of things on the Internet. The chairman’s teenage son has “seen” the same things, why don’t we ask him too?

So what happened that decades of experience, including both great successes and miserable failures, counts for little in the face of someone with little or no actual business experience or understanding but lots things they’ve “seen.”

Experience Counts
The Internet is an unbelievable morass of options, variables and possibilities. And it’s full of land mines and inevitable train wrecks and growing legal issues. For every situation there are a variety of plausable and possible answers. I don’t know it all, but because of building hundreds and hundreds of sites, designing and sending literally millions of emails and creating and managing systems that account for hundreds of millions of revenue each year for our clients, we do know just a little. And we know what we’ve “done,” not just what we’ve “seen.” There is a big, big difference.

If it was my money, I’d depend on the one who’s “done it” instead of the one who’s “seen it” done.

steve