Much of traditional marketing–the advertising part certainly–was fire and forget, you made and launched the ad then sat back and waited for results. It was static messaging. Then came the internet and advertising became dynamic. Slightly dynamic actually: readers of web pages as static as magazine layouts could now email comments. Radical at the time, viewed from today it wasn’t much.
Because then came broad band, Web 2.0 and social networking, MySpace, Facebook, Ning and LinkedIn (among others). Running an ad campaign on these sites required, well, work. The “fire” part, deciding message, choosing channel, designing the ad, setting it up and launching it stayed the same as always, but now you had to forget the “forget” part.
Much is written about the differences between the four generations in the office today, Traditionalists, Baby Boomers (me), Gen X-ers, and Millenials. About how they have different attitudes and expectations at work, how the former two use email and the latter use Facebook or how the older generations decry the loss of privacy inherent in Facebooking. All interesting but grist for another day perhaps. The divide I want to examine is about making a marketing campaign work.
Marketing department SOPs list tasks that need to be done, and in what order, then they use this during planning to make Gantt and PERT charts showing how long the task from start to end should take. Good stuff, but I wonder how many traditional companies have taken the time to update them.
I got the idea for this post while setting up a Facebook marketing campaign. Going back to my management consultant roots I was planning out the job (I like Gantt charts) when I realized that the tasks after fire were taking up more space on the page than preparing to fire. Much more. That is when the divide about work hit me: “how many Traditionals and Baby Boomers (and non-tech Gen X-ers I suppose) are aware of the work needed (to run a social networking campaign) after work was traditionally over?”
Imagine the conversation, the 22-year-old marketing assistant explaining that she needs all these hours, week after week after week, and the 55-year-old manager wanting to know when she will finish. Hearing “never” is unlikely to make him happy.
But never is the right answer. After “fire” comes fine tune, answer, build, reply, add on, edit, create, adjust, answer again, then repeat as necessary. Maybe the best idea would be to tell him that “I am building relationships with our customers, and relationship-building has no end, it goes on as long as the relationship lasts.”
Or as long as her job does. Like all relationship problems she and her dinosaur manager need to communicate, but that requires each try to see the other’s point. She has to wear dinosaur glasses, he has to put on tech-savvy specs.
