Marketing: Of Qualifications & Experience
Posted on 25. Oct, 2009 by Franz in Cultures, Web Marketing
It takes 10 years of ignorance and 1 year of brilliance to learn the same thing.
I must say I really enjoyed Rachel Foong’s (@redsheep) blog post on Facebook, where she vented her frustration on certain matters pertaining its usability. Interestingly, she pointed out a lot of good points to where amateur marketers should learn and professional marketers refresh. The thing that caught me reading more were sentences like “Our kids treat Facebook like email” and “Can we pay to help keep these advertisers away from our pages (Facebook)?”
As much as I respect many out there who work so hard to achieve marketing nirvana, many of them don’t show tell-tale signs that they’re really ‘cut out’ for the job – It’s as if they tried to be there, got there, but something’s missing amidst. It’s as if you’re planning a short term marketing campaign without thinking of investment sustainability AFTER the campaign.
The other day when I asked Chris (@spinzer) if “Bloggers are overrated?”, he threw me interesting insights and answers to what’s going on around his realm of blogospheres. Bottom line is – “There is communication, but sure as hell no content to certain groups, and vice versa.”
Then I was back to reading SMCKL’s post by David (@blogjunkie). Azizi’s incline on ’striking balance’ in structure, focus and implementation is true to life – In any possible action we’re taking, we have to strike affecting and factoring balances so that we don’t get disoriented, uncoordinated and jaggy all at the same time. In other words, “Running like a headless chicken.”
That was the key-word to this post. Balance.
In Marketing: Qualifications vs. Experience
On and on when you visit corporate profiles, blogger profiles, company brochures, etc., you get the same thing -
- “10 years into the industry, with high profile clientele and excellent minds behind a successful corporation.”
- “A corporation that has rocked the automotive industry for 20 years.”
- “Best marketing company in Malaysia with decades of industrial experience.”
- “Antonio Lee is a BSc. holder in Marketing & Communications, Head of Marketing in Vodafon Networks, etc.”
- “Juan Thomas has 15 years of online marketing experience with proven track record of RM1,000,000 increase in annual revenue when he introduced….”
In my point of view, that’s copywriting. In a marketer’s point of view, that’s another bullshit we write. In potential clients’ point of view (total idiot to this subject), it’s good profiling. That’s why you still see stuff like that.
Marketing your qualifications
There’s no point arguing about who’s better than who – It’s about who’s faster and more brilliant that counts, nowadays. You bring certain book-knowledge to industrial audiences (in this case, let’s take the online marketing industry for example) and you may just find out that you’re far behind what books have taught you.
You reevaluate your training, check your guns and bullets but you find no advantage when you face industrial professionals – Reason being: “You’re outdated.”
But that’s not a bad thing. When you know you’re outdated and far behind your competitors, you let your guard down and absorb more information quicker. Your learning curve increases dramatically and it channels your inner being to the Marketing subject at hand. You almost sold your sold to the professionals.
From this point onward, you grow much faster than ever. And with proper guidance (and loads of experimentation failures), you’ll emerge as a better contributor to the society than the ‘heavily connected’ community with no content.
Marketing your experiences
There are two types of outcome from people who learn from experience:
- They take 10 years to learn one thing, or;
- They take 1 year to learn the same one thing.
If you find yourself being years into the industry and is thoroughly confident of yourself (including an honest feeling of you’re above the world), then you’re probably more #1 than #2. This reality check applies to everything we do in life – Including being in relationships and so forth.
Even a friend of mine who is one of the industrial leaders in SEO (no, seriously, he’s one of the top guns and also my sub-mentor) has doubts about his programs, ideas and suggestions when it comes to his work on hand. His level of failure is so high during experiments that you wouldn’t believe he is what he is. But how did he grow into it? Because he’s #2.
Diagnosis on the other hand is another thing that you learn through experience. Technically speaking, you can identify a problem through books, but books alone cannot govern all factors surrounding a problem. Simply because books aren’t updated and written by thousands and millions of industrial professionals, their percentage of inaccuracy is higher than normal. That’s why I don’t like reading eBooks on SEO. =)
Marketing 101: Social Diversion
A good example of a diagnosis would be the online greeting card maker “Chak” (info from SMCKL blogpost). He says that “marketers need to make their messages relevant and in the tone of the audience” and “achieves this by going slightly off topic (with movie reviews, interesting links, etc) and using a very casual tone in their communications”.
Unfortunately, Chak didn’t think about what crowd he was speaking to – He was speaking to an audience who’d probably start off with very small budgets, weak financing power or people who can’t afford to throw more than RM50,000/month in marketing communications. Also, he was deeply hypocritical about “making messages relevant” when he “achieves this by going slightly off-topic”.
Like what Azizi said, time cost is expensive. Small time marketers or businesses cannot afford to go ’slightly off-topic’ because of time cost. That’s the #1 reason to a lot of failures. When we’re not focused in our causes and business goals, and put our bait into too many ponds, we’ll end up not catching any good quality fish.
Chak obviously need to rethink his marketing strategy – Going off topic in social media diverts a lot of attention (especially when providing links). Although this can be a good avenue for trust, people tend to forget quickly what they’re really looking for. And the best part is, they tend to forget quicker who you really are.
Creating deep relationships with your community is great – But Chak needs to do it with targeted values, which mean targeted topics in a subject. Talking about movie reviews in a greeting card business isn’t going to cut it – Unless Chak integrates them into his business. For example:
- Famous New & Upcoming Movies – Greeting cards of Batman Returns! Send a batman card to your friend now and win movie passes to the premiere.
- Send free donald duck and mickey mouse greeting cards here, in line with Disney’s new “Princess Minnie” coming out December 31st, 2009. Go duckie them now! (With cute mickey mouse chips and donald duck quacks.)
- Insert your friend’s face into Pixar’s new movie characters, “Zimba (cute/angry cow)”. Make them a moo like a cow now! Send 5 free cards now and get an additional free gift shipped to them.
But if Chak were to run into literally doing movie reviews and then advertising his greeting cards there, he’ll learn that instead of creating a ‘wave of trend’ that will lead to increment of sales, it’ll just ‘divert the attention’ and hope people will click on his advertisements and close a sale. In marketing, that’s considered a weak strategy.
Our community still has a long way to go in really using and understanding social media – Even for businesses alike. And during this learning period, we have to not just think so much about expanding our horizons, but also expanding others’ horizons. That’s what social media is all about.
That’s what 2.0 is all about.
