For a long time, I wrote about marketing.
I loved it, actually, because I think it’s a topic that really has endless possibilities. So many things in business either drive TO marketing or FROM marketing, and the ties to sales and branding and customer satisfaction and internal morale and culture and how communication as a practice evolves are really vast.
But somewhere along the way, I stopped.
Because I believed that everyone else was saying the same stuff, and my voice wasn’t needed. That maybe I just didn’t have anything unique to say among all the other voices out there. That maybe everyone had everything they needed to know.
This year, something interesting happened.
I took a marketing job again. Not a social media job, not a community management job, a marketing job, at a senior level, for a company that really needed marketing leadership. (I think most people forget that good ol’ core marketing was what I did for over 15 years before I hit on this internet thing in any significant way).
And a year later, guess what our top performing piece of content is?
An ebook that’s chock full of 101 level tips and strategies around social media listening.
Yep. Nearly seven years after I got involved in the social analytics space, we still need the fundamentals.
It’s really easy to forget, actually, when you get into the thick of it.
We think it’s saturated because we seek it out, immerse ourselves in it, read and absorb and are constantly using content and information to improve our own point of view and how we practice our discipline.
The interesting thing is that marketers, in large part, are my customers. They’re who I work with every day at Sysomos.
But they don’t have hundreds of hours to spend just on social media listening or social media strategy like I did for so many years. It’s one piece of their jobs, still, and one that they’re hoping they can do really well mostly quickly so that it can inform everything else they’re doing effectively and with a positive return.
We still need the basics for that.
Every time I think I’ve outgrown something or it’s outgrown me, I seem to find that what I need is a shift in perspective. There’s a lot of material out there, but there still isn’t a lot of great information, and there are even fewer big ideas.
Maybe, just maybe, I’ve still got something to offer in this little marketing corner of the world after all.
Stay tuned.
Creative and innovative ideas… Yes!
Watched a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson last weekend. He made the point that life is about uncovering your talents, as they sometimes lie deep within you. Life needs to throw stuff at you for these talents to be uncovered. I think we all have something to offer marketing. It’s a part of life, as it’s fundamentally about relationships and sharing, even when driven toward branding, or sales, or customer validation etc. I’d love to see corporations take this point of view, and really harness employee advocacy, or co-branding, as a means of employee engagement. Great article!