Broaden Your Digital Skills, Leave Specialization To Insects
January 25, 2012 
Author 
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Avinash Kaushik, one of my favorite bloggers, recently published an unmissable post titled: The 2015 Digital Marketing Rule Book. Change or Perish.
If you’re an Avinash fan you’ve likely already read it, but if not it’s worth a read (and a bookmark). I wanted to higlight one point he made that should resonate with Future Buzz readers:
Multiplicity: Competencies, Campaigns, Systems, Everything.
This is something we are most unprepared for.
You can no longer be good at just one thing, or two. It is a 10-thing world now (and maybe a 20-thing world soon).
If you are a catalog company you have to be good at catalog marketing (as long as it continues to provide incremental revenue ), and you have to be good at NASCAR (as long as it provides incremental revenue), and you have to be good at Facebook, and you have to be good at email, and search, and YouTube and… a hundred other things. All while constantly optimizing your portfolio via controlled experiments .
You have to be good at sourcing your products and you have to be good at delivering them.
You have to be good at using clickstream and surveys and competitive intelligence and heuristic evaluations.
You have to be good on every device of every screen size in every country with a monetizable audience.
You have to be good at… many things all at the same time. For far too long we’ve been able to be successful by relying on our sheer strength on one thing. Catalog. Paid search. YouTube. Billboards. TV. With every passing day that strategy now ensures we are rejecting tons of revenue and tons of prospective customers.
Avinash’s thinking reinforces the breadth of skills we outlined in the modern marketing and PR pro fluency matrix. But beyond this, it reminds me of a quote from Robert A. Heinlein which we’ve referenced before:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
This quote provides a great analogy for how the modern communications professional should view the specific areas of focus within marketing.
Digital marketing is not new, and in fact is reaching a maturity point for many. It is not too much to ask of your team and partners to have a wide breadth of skills and able to think across platform / tactics to see the bigger picture of a client or brand on the web.
Certainly, you’ll be better at some things than others. The point is to try all of them so at the very least you’re able to effectively make strategic decisions and manage others for execution. Create a sandbox project if you’re limited to what you can do with your company – there really aren’t any excuses.
But if you wait for 2015, you’ll be far too late. In fact, if you’ve waited this long you’re already behind. Make 2012 the year you become more holistic in both your thinking and execution.
image credit: Shutterstock
andrew replied | Jan 25, 2012 (42 comments)
Love this, Adam. But I’m not sure if I’m following you 100% on the idea of not specializing in anything. Shouldn’t we have a base set of skills to branch out from? Should we all be generalists? That’s useful, but to take a stand in any industry, you need to have a base of specializing to build from.
An intelligent being once explained it to me like this:
Think of yourself as a T of knowledge: Very deep in an area you’re passionate about (the bottom part of the T) and very wide in all things (the top part of the T). This way you can take a stand and hang your hat on a specialty while having the knowledge, understanding, and conceptual framework of other areas of expertise enough to form a point of view and be conversant.
Adam Singer replied | Jan 25, 2012 (597 comments)
Hey Andrew – as noted in the post, certainly you can be extremely talented in one area. I’m not arguing against being able to do that one thing well.
But pure specialists who have no context outside of their area are never going to be as effective as those who broadly understand digital. For example, people on my team who are the most effective bloggers aren’t just great writers: they excel at analytics, SEO, social and conversion optimization. If they were just a writer they would fall short of what they could accomplish.
Look at people like Rand Fishkin — extremely talented at search, social, PPC, linkbait, analytics — the breadth of online marketing (plus entrepreneurship, leadership, etc.). This is the type of talent you want on your team: to get there, nurture a diverse array of skills.
andrew replied | Jan 25, 2012 (42 comments)
Got it. The people who will be left behind are the ones who hide behind their one interest and don’t develop complementary skills. No more “Oh no, I don’t do that … I specialize in _____ and that’s clearly the domain of a _____”
Fully on board, sir.
Brad Smith replied | Jan 25, 2012 (5 comments)
Couldn’t agree more!
It may fly in the face of “common career advice”, but it’s absolutely correct.
Look at a single discipline like SEO. It’s so much more nuanced today, and takes a ton of different skill sets to excel.
The various aspects of online marketing are becoming so integrated that you WON’T be able to proceed, lead or manage anything substantial until you understand the connections and relationships between the disciplines.
Samantha replied | Jan 26, 2012 (15 comments)
To extend it even further, the best marketers are also knowledgeable about sales, the development of their product, the editing required to make a video. Not experts in these things mind you, but the more you know about a variety of topics the stronger you will be in your own career.
Trischane replied | Feb 8, 2012 (1 comment)
I’m excited about the information inthis article, it is very true. We are in a generation of rapid change with convenient expectations. We have to be knowledgeable enough in many areas and learn them quickly which leaves little room for specialties.