Perceptint Musings

With the continuing growth of digital marketing technologies, many companies are faced with the challenge of dipping their toes into new channels they may not be fully prepared for. Given the complexities of new channels like mobile advertising and social media, to move from a pilot marketing program into an official marketing protocol is a tall order.

That’s why I firmly believe that most companies need a digital risk center. This would be a marketing group that’s sole charter is to experiment with new channels and help guide the company through the potentially rocky roads without exposing the entire corporation to a greater risk. They are like the digital Sherpa’s, setting the ropes and ladders for the greater hordes following behind.

Here’s a quick list for how it could work:

1. Digital Risk Center is formed. Their charter is to identify new channels that might satisfy current marketing goals.
2. The group would have a separate budget from overall marketing. They would be responsible for vendor management.
3. From the first pilot of a new campaign, the group would be responsible for documentation and case studies of each new channel.
4. From the case studies, best practices for the organization should be developed. Once best practices are in place, the group would be responsible for partnering with the appropriate internal sponsors to turn the best practices into official marketing protocol.
5. As channels are approved and move through this process, the group would be responsible for assisting in the hand off of the channel to the larger marketing organization.
6. Repeat and rinse.

In this model, experimentation and learning are actively encouraged. One of the goals is to ensure that someone’s job isn’t hanging in the balance due to a lapse in judgment by their use of a new channel and subsequent failure. This model accepts that failure will occur, but understands that failure with learning’s can help the overall organizational health. It is also an acknowledgement by the company that they need to mitigate risk and create a method for keeping up with the ever-changing digital marketing picture.

What are your thoughts on this digital risk center concept? Does your company actively take chances or does your corporate culture wince from the thought? As always, your thoughts and opinions are welcome.

Until next time, may risk and the proper handling of it bring you and your organization the rewards they deserve.

I’m coming up on 13 years of working in digital marketing. It’s been an interesting ride that has only grown more complex and enormous. I expected that going in, but the sheer speed with which everything continues to lurch excites me still.

One of the skills I’ve relied most heavily upon, day in and day out, has been translation. Speaking the language of a technologist, while being fluent in the subtle art of marketing speak. It’s an ever evolving vocabulary of technology, emotion and synonyms. In the middle of it all, my job is striving to help my clients find the simplicity.

15 years ago, people in information technology (IT) and marketing only crossed paths during a desktop upgrade, or at the internal support desk when a virus had come into the office from a home diskette.

These two kingdoms lived off a host of stable practices built to handle their own tasks, supporting their own worlds. IT maintained the networking and infrastructure of the corporate beast. Marketing’s agencies and creative made sure the castle was strong and full.

Now IT and marketing folk sit across the table from each other enjoying a chaotic feast, as digital marketing has made them patrons of each other. Often speaking two distinct languages, they each protect their own territory while negotiating for parts of the other.

Binary code versus bountful boasts, a verbal standoff ending with dialectic phrases like IT’s ”server load” or marketings ”cost-per-acquisition”. In very large organizations, many of the same players from 15 years ago that ran the infrastructure or marketing of the old world are charged with running the infrastructure or marketing of the new world. Along the way, they’ve grown a myopic view of the organization. And the trick is, these two camps have to get along for organizations today to stay successful.

Translating effectively between the two is one of the keys to success in the evolving digital world. In the IT world, there is a strong code of formality, requirements and protections. In the marketing world, there are brush fires and then there are forest fires. As the corporate winds shift, so can the heat on marketing.

In my experience getting the two camps on the same page can be challenging, but critical for organizational success. It boils down to how information is shared and mandatory meetings. Mandatory meetings because these two groups need to remember that each begins life as a human.

Information sharing and translation is the next step. For marketers it’s agreeing to join the more detailed world of business cases, formal release cycles, project scoping and more. It’s patience and planning 101. For IT, it means understanding and helping better realize business goals and maintaining a nimble attitude all the while.

There are other needs too. IT needs to know that marketers understand the enormity of requests they make. It’s very easy to say you need to deploy a new mini-site and think that happens at the push of a button down in IT.

IT also owes it to marketing to provide a better education about the technology platform (i.e. the website, online functionality, future releases, etc.) and any technical limitations that IT’s requirement gathering foresaw. Not including nimble marketing goals and infrastructure support in IT planning is ignoring how the world operates today.

In the old world, the IT “cave” was the preferred habitat of engineers. A dimly lit by monitors cavern, only the trusted were allowed entry. It’s charter was organizational support and improved effeciency. It didn’t have to worry about being exposed to networks outside of their own, or how anonymous users might interact with their products and services. Only that the workforce was growing in effeciency and operating at new levels of productivity.

In the new world, the light is on IT at all times, and they’ve been given new digs. They maintain organizational support, but now also carry the burden of everything that’s connected publicly or privately through the Internet. They have a highly visible spot in the organization alongside stalwarts like marketing, sales and support. Success in the organization’s world is driven by executive summary and sharing information up.

Marketing has to educate the organization about how every group affects its ability to deliver. And sell IT on the fact that the floor is shifting often without their control. One day their goal could be new customers, the next about defending the integrity of the brand, the next a new affiliate strategy they have to implement with no time because they couldn’t work out a contract with their old vendor. Or, their boss just asked them why they weren’t building a Facebook widget?

A marketers toolset has grown quickly over the past decade, so it’s not like IT is alone in the pace of change. Direct mail lists, television, radio, billboards - the old toolset didn’t provide a highly traceable picture. Marketers relied on agencies and executives to weigh their success. If sales were up, marketing was doing its job. If sales were slumping, the agency was to blame, not the product or organization. They just needed a better marketing plan.

Today, every marketing campaign you launch online should be trackable in some way. The amount of data most marketers I know are faced with crunching through is enormous. Hundreds of campaigns generating thousands of data points, tied back into overall web site metrics, it takes an army of analysts to understand and get through it all. Organizations have to embrace the shift in skills needed to run successful marketing programs in 2008.

Running all of those campaigns on top of a well-oiled internal and external network requires that IT and marketing interactions must be crisp, clear and consensual. In the late 90’s, most meetings I went into were near standoffs between these two parties. Today the years they’ve spent together has made them more loving, but they still suffer from localized camp slang.

I have been lucky enough to have my skill-set put me snugly between these two worlds. Enough of a tech head to speak IT’s language, and enough of an impassioned marketer and writer to help marketers better understand the new world they’re operating in.

Turning a marketing goal into a use case, or taking a requirements document and turning it into an executive summary, I like being a translator in the middle of it all. And since things don’t seem to be slowing down, I expect I have a lot more translating to do to help this digital revolution roll along.

© 2008 Keith Boswell