August 20, 2012 13 Comments

Marketing and Communications Are No Longer Just About Talking Well

Cat or Alien?

For a long while, the professions of marketing and PR have been built around one’s ability to convey messages in an effective way. Marketers exist to help sales fill their funnel. PR has a few different jobs, but you can bundle them loosely into “communicate a message or position.” (Those who bother to quibble with the rough sketch definitions I’ve left here are the same kind of people who probably said, “That’s not really a glacier smashing into our ship; I’d call it an iceberg.”)

Where Are You Spending Your Time?

If you are like most every marketing and PR professional in the world, your company (and thus, you) are shifting your efforts to the web. You might not have all your eggs in this basket, but if you just go back a few years on budget allocations, you’ll see it quite clearly: money, and thus you, are moving to the web.

Now, how technically proficient are you? If you answer, “I can tweet, and I can update the Facebook page,” and you’re smiling like you’re on top of your game, maybe not so much. You see, that’s typing. Most folks can type. Not well, it turns out, because very few people bothered to take typing lessons (though we all have jobs that require typing), but hey.

The Rise of the Technical MarCom Specialist

What will be required of your job in the coming months? (One could answer that it’s pretty important to have all these skills a few years back, but let’s just roll forward.)

You’ll need to know how to:

  • Shoot, edit, annotate, and upload video content.
  • Track short link stats and data, including creating different links for different platforms.
  • Configure and read the reports of listening technology like Salesforce Radian6 and Trackur.
  • Manage an acquisition database (that which comes before CRM), to help feed lead generation.
  • Edit simple HTML for blog posts and the like.
  • Read and interpret Google Analytics.

If you’re able to do all this, give yourself a pat on the back. If you’re not exactly feeling savvy about it all, start paying attention to the free and inexpensive learning opportunities you can find on the web. There are plenty of people offering courses or webinars or whatever about all this. It requires that you actually take a moment and do the work, though. You can’t just wait for the boss to invite you to learn it. Hint: by the time she or he comes to tell you that you need this kind of knowledge, they’ll be introducing you to your replacement.

That’s Obviously Not a Full List

By all means, you can add a few dozen more technical skills to that list, if you’d like. But my point is the same. Technical skills are now a backbone requirement to what you’re doing as a marketer or PR professional. Not every single eentsy weensy little task needs these skills yet, but how soon before they do? Will you be ready? Are you already?

Because when I’m speaking with the professionals at many organizations of late, there seems to be a high concentration of people who know how to speak the language, who know how to talk in terms of tech as it relates to marketing, but they still can’t really play a note. It’s time to get that rectified.

The Future Is Now

Maybe you or your company aren’t there yet. Maybe you’re still back in the “Think we should have a blog?” conversation. Pick up any newspaper (if yours still exists), watch any TV channel for 40 minutes in a row, and you’ll see the signs of this digital world encroaching on yours. Go to your local flea market and watch them use Square to handle your payment. The future is now. Are you ready?

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  • http://faleafine.com NEENZ

    I’m wondering (out loud), should large companies rush to choose a dongle (I know, I recall you writing that the word should not be used) or begin collaborating with mobile carriers?

  • http://twitter.com/theJoeSweeney Joe Sweeney

    Great post to start the week with Chris!

    Lots of good content here as well as a good reminder on a few tech skills I/we need to brush up on – will definitely share this with my team.

    Is there a program you recommed for annotating video?

    Thanks,

    Joe

  • http://www.bellawebdesign.com/ Desiree Scales

    I see a couple holes I need to fill, but you missed one important aspect Chris. Good writing skills including editing knowledge. I don’t care what else you do, those come first. If you can’t write a compelling blog post or even a compelling tweet without using abbreviations, you’re toast.

    • http://twitter.com/SteveS1 Steve Schildwachter

      Agree, Desiree. Good writing is actually 50% writing…and 50% editing.

  • http://profiles.google.com/rksocialmedia Rich Klein

    Chris – Good morning and thanks for the insightful post. Although I still do work in “traditional” public relations, I knew I’d be left behind if I didn’t think differently about marketing and PR. That’s why, for example, I learned how to produce/distribute videos & now include them in every client plan. And as soon as Google Hangouts on Air was released, I decided to take advantage of this new technology by creating The Crisis Show. I don’t think I would have taken that risk if I had not read “Trust Agents” first. So thanks again!

  • Ford Kanzler

    I’m hoping your don’t really believe your headline to this post and just said that for shock effect and reader involvement. A useful spur to those not into continuous learning.
    Agree strongly with Desiree above. Since you write partially for a living, imagine you do as well.
    Would also suggest some other areas for continuous development: critical thinking, researching/curiosity, reading, broad-based interests, interest in human psychology, understanding of and ability to create strategy, remaining a student of business, which perhaps encompasses your point.
    The technology tools are changing and we need to keep up or know where to find the technical help to execute programs. That’s been true for some time. Being a full-time technician isn’t marketing or PR either. There’s a bit more to it than that.

  • http://twitter.com/SteveS1 Steve Schildwachter

    Really like this post, Chris. We live in an era where anyone working in communications must be a generalist and a specialist. Two reasons: (1) At some point, all communications channels must serve the same objective, so good peripheral vision is important. (2) The landscape changes so quickly we all need to be well-positioned to shift job duties quickly — which means having a diverse skill set.

  • Andy Beal

    Thank you Chris for your continued support of Trackur!

  • http://www.contently-managed.com/blog Craig McGill

    A cracking post Chris but you miss out the important part – people who can do all that, what sort of salary should they expect? And equally, what should firms expect to pay for someone who can do all that?

    • vperrante

      Hi Craig! I don’t think Chris has missed out on ANYTHING! I think it’s a wake-up call for old-schoolers. I’m not sure if you’re on the employer or employee side of the marketing business, but in my experience, any old-schooler (like myself) who thinks s/he is grandfathered into the marketing world just because we were here first has got another thing coming. The influx of young “new-school” talent has completely changed the game and when they come knocking we better have an appropriate greeting and a really good plan before we answer the door.

  • Paco Ferrer

    Hi Chris, thank you for giving me insight about my work. I’m new in Marketing, just barely a year and I really want to make an impact here in this company. Right now they’re relying on me to help improve and lift up this company. Do you have any suggestions on what to explore on to become a flexible and diverse marketer?

  • OBVAVirtualAssistant

    What I liked the most is “The future is now.” Great post.

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