Digital Marketing, mobility, digital natives

I was recently asked to be a guest speaker to a group of first year digital marketing students at a local University. The topic was to use real world business cases of digital marketing from the perspective of someone in the industry. Easy to argue that I am not a digital marketer with a media agency, however I work for a software company using and selling software for digital marketing.

One of the limitations I discovered was that the text books the students were using were fairly old and really did not cover digital media well. This is a little funny because the students, as a group, are called “digital natives”. My conversation with them was to emphasize the fundamentals and broaden the conversation on how rapidly the space is changing and forcing a sort of nimble adaptability on marketing organizations that has never been seen before. Where marketing organizations had cozy relationships with management and would cautiously act out their strategy, today’s media savvy teams need to be very cozy with technology in a proactive way and be willing to act fast.

Not surprisingly, almost everyone in the room had a Facebook account; was using LinkedIn, and was very comfortable with consuming mobile media. What was a little surprising was the very limited understanding of the strategies used by companies to leverage social media. To highlight the need, we used the Utilities and Telecommunications market as an example from the perspective of a utilities company in a deregulated market place like Europe, a customer as an asset and the cost of net new customers versus keeping existing ones happy. What tools, methods, and approaches are working well? Where are some disasters? What are some fascinating successes?

In planning for the session; chatting with colleagues, going through news events, and following twitter feeds there were meaningful examples of some recent and stunning events. What has became apparent is that the speed of social media is causing some companies to be more exposed to a larger base of their customers with good and bad news faster than ever before. Consequently, today’s marketing departments need to be empowered proactively to solve issues. To highlight the reality, one example we used was of a major bank that had an outage. The twitter feed was brutal and fast, while the institution was hardly aware of the reaction. Competitors on the other hand, were all too happy to use the event as an opportunity to poach customers. All of this happened in a matter of days. Was it someone asleep at the switch, or a completely vacant strategy? Another example involves a proactive marketing move regarding a parking job and a free car.

Overall, we recognized that the old yesterday approach of relying on a few channels to market a company and its products is insufficient. A multidimensional approach that requires a working knowledge of the tools of the trade as well as the technology is what is needed most. It also means an opportunity to think outside the box on with the ability and authority to react. I expect that for large organizations to do this well, they would need to practice and allow for snap decisions instead of having much larger and embarrassing fire drills to deal with problems.