When I launched this blog in December 2006, I said the following in my “About” page.
I handle the marketing and communications for a tech company…
My areas of interest are integrated marketing, customized multi-touch, branding, experiential marketing, internal marketing, new media and how traditional businesses are actually using it (as opposed to how the early adopters and buzz builders allege they are using it), marketing v. Web 2.0, marketing v. sales v. business development, the new values of web analytics, marketing that falls outside the disciplines of B2C or B2B, and how to make a company marketing-friendly from the top down.
My market is a niche and my sales cycle is long, which means lots of trial-and-error can get costly, and there is little or no successful precedent. My job means conjuring creative workarounds to combat situations where traditional outreach isn’t an option.
So much has changed in just a few months! I have picked up a bigger piece now, and I still manage the marcom but as just one part of an integrated business development strategy. (I had actually begun absorbing a lot of the bus-dev in the spring anyway, hence the lack of posting… but now it’s officially under my purview.)
My areas of interest now are:
- Still branding, experiential marketing, anything being successfully executed outside B2B and B2C, and how to make a company marketing-friendly from the top down
- But, I have given away the internal marketing and web analytics, for the time being. There isn’t enough time in the day for me to consider those and also the higher priorities on my plate, so I’ve let other people pick that up. I still think internal marketing is incredibly valuable, though, and I could see myself getting involved one day in the HR department of a forward-thinking organization that was ready to use marketing techniques to support retention and recruiting.
- I’m still very interested in the concept of customized multi-touch — but after three quarters of increasingly positive execution (in fact, it has been a core development technique for TechSoft this year; I credit a heavy multi-touch strategy with the bulk of my company’s current pipeline in the US market), I feel that I’m more a teacher than a student on this subject. I’d love to prepare a solid case study on our multi-touch marketing in 2007.
- I no longer care much about the notion of marketing vs. Web 2.0. One year ago, it seemed that O’Reilly’s Magic Show was going to significantly change the way we reached out to customers and prospects, but I haven’t seen that borne out for me or my industry, and I think we’ve all just rolled forward. You either were already someone who cared about the philosophies that supported user-generated content, user experience, stripped-down messaging and community interaction… or you weren’t and you had to change. I was the former.
- New care-abouts are: learning how companies successfully integrate product and project management with business development… discovering ways that a technology company can survive a sudden critical loss of domain knowledge… what successful strategic partnerships will look like in 2008 and 2009… and how to function with agility within an organization that doesn’t prioritize agility.
And of course, I’m still focused on performing with karma and compassion, which has required an amount of sustained zen of which I wouldn’t have thought myself capable. But despite the challenge, it has to help make me a better person on the other side, I figure. I think of it as a kind of spiritual maintenance, which even the Decidedly Secular need on occasion. Use the muscles or lose them, right?
