Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

Until I was approximately 25, basketball was my top priority. Since the 6^th grade I played the game nearly year-round, my teenage years a blur of traveling summer teams, after-school practices and early morning workouts culminating with a college scholarship and a brief stint on a Bay Area semi-pro team.

As a digital marketing consultant, I work with marketing teams at a variety of different software companies across industries. Today I was pondering some of the common qualities behind what makes the best teams successful, and jotted down the following list. If you’re at a software company of any variety, stop and ask yourself – which of the following does my marketing team embrace, and which am I lacking?

Donna Farrugia, Executive Director at The Creative Group (a staffing agency) wrote a post over at iMedia Connection this week on finding social media talent. Some of what she wrote makes sense, however there are a few items that as a practitioner, I disagree with.

I’m currently reading a fascinating book: The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. You’re already familiar with the invisible gorilla experiment if you’ve watched the popular “awareness test”
video that got passed around in 2008 (and has been viewed nearly 10 million times). That test was essentially a clone of the original experiment.

First impressions count. Malcolm Gladwell popularized this familiar notion recently in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking: we make snap, lasting judgments and decisions that in many cases may be permanent. Your website is offering that all too important first impression to prospective customers daily.

Businesses and marketers continue to misunderstand how to effectively leverage the web for increasing returns on traffic and leads month over month. They place too much emphasis on a limited amount of static web pages and mentally put each one on a pedestal. Change a product page!? What? We can’t do that. Okay, we can make a tweak – but hold on while that goes through our 5 layer approval process designed during a pre-internet world.