David Armano is the VP Experience Design for Critical Mass. His writing has been tremendously influential on the topic of social media’s impact on marketing.
In a short article published this week in Advertising Age, he discussed the impact his blog has had on marketing himself and, more specifically, how blogging and other social media would suffer as marketing initiatives were they to be subject to a conventional marketing process.
I've been thinking about this for a while because after having some exposure to large organizations, it occurred to me that there is a desire to do more "unconventional marketing" but the machine that's in place is actually "conventional" -- all the things that have been done in the past. For example, it's common and understandable for the "What's the ROI?" question to be raised during an unconventional marketing initiative, but that question could derail the entire effort before it has a chance to ever get off the ground. Sometimes the ROI is simply insights and lessons that are gleaned from actually doing the initiative. Other times, the direction of the initiative changes midway through in unexpected ways that could not have been predicted. Many times for the better -- let's not forget that Twitter was never meant to be what it ended up being today.
This terrific visual David created outlines the contrast between the conventional and the unconventional.
Comments