Digital Marketing | Social Media | Online PR – The Future Buzz

Guest Post By Dayne Shuda of Hunting Business Marketing (follow him on Twitter)

“Innovation without imitation is a complete waste of time.” Mike Rowe – Dirty Jobs

In December 2008, Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs took the stage at TED to talk about his outlook on the state of work in the United States. He discussed his experiences working in over 200 jobs that most people find gross, despicable and downright inhumane. It’s an entertaining and enlightening lecture, but the point I want to focus on is where Mike states that “Innovation without imitation is a complete waste of time.”

I’m a fan of Rebecca Thorman, career/lifestyle blogger and PR pro for start-up Alice.com. Her thoughts are usually spot on. However her post last week: bloggers are not writers, gets enough wrong it’s worth dissecting.

Social media is not new. At this point, you don’t need a social media expert, you just need a good marketer (all marketers should understand social media by now). The term – once meaningful – has been overused to the point it has become nothing more than a buzzword in the hands of most. Social is simply what the web does, and as a net native who has watched the abuse of the term social media over the years, I’ve slowly become adverse to its use at all.

But unfortunately we have to use it. Too many businesses and clients are enamored with it, or perhaps feel if they don’t start throwing it around they will be viewed as passé.

(Note from Adam: this is a guest post from my blog designer – Michael Martin at Pro Blog Design. If you’re reading through email or RSS, you’ll walk to click through to the site to read today’s post and check out the new look.)

You’ve hopefully already noticed that The Future Buzz is looking a little bit different these days (And even more hopefully, you might even think it looks a little better these days!).

We’ve been exploring digital marketing strategy over the past few weeks and fleshing out potential answers to common problems digital marketers, PR professionals, bloggers and SEOs experience. Let’s continue this series with an element which is deceptively simple, yet in reality difficult to execute: cohesion of content. The problem I stated originally:

Today’s post is a bit personal. If you’re only interested in reading my marketing content, feel free to skip this one. I want to try and answer a question I’m asked repeatedly: many people I talk with wonder how I am able to do so much. The answer is simple: I’ve learned to balance multiple interests. It’s not really that difficult and there is nothing stopping you from doing the same.

Continuing my series on conquering common digital marketing strategy development problems, today we tackle problem number two:

Things like print newspapers and compact discs were made obsolete years ago. They are living artifacts. Digital is the master copy – we’re only waiting for the divide to bridge. It isn’t really an argument, you either can foresee the future where all information, content and forms of media are semantic, social, malleable, searchable entities or you can’t. It may take time but there is no stopping this path, it’s one of the clearer long-term trends.

Last Monday I shared 12 common problems associated with digital marketing strategy development. Since I’m not one to talk problems and not offer solutions, over the next few weeks I will address these problems one by one.

Yesterday I embraced my own philosophy of never being afraid to have opinions or taking sides. I stated my opinion about the popular blog, Mashable.

And Pete Cashmore, Mashable’s CEO is smart – he actually took the time to leave a comment and continue the discussion. For that, he’s earning another post about his brand (think what you will about the first one, it’s still positive to gain more awareness). Before I get into his comment – which was a great response – I want to run through something else.