Personally, I am mostly coming from a social media perspective because that is my responsibility. I am volunteering my time, an intern if you will, so what I can accomplish as an individual in the time I give I am sure you can imagine goes only so far. Social media, from an organizational perspective, requires a team. Regardless of that I simply came in without much understanding of marketing, branding, and social media. The blog resonates with me because in trying to educate myself the words were confusing, often times felt meaningless, and seemed as though they were thrown around to make the person disseminating the information sound like a know-it-all (for lack of a better word lol).

I came to realize that all those big words didn’t mean much, what I really needed to do, before I could ever reach out for donations and funding needs online, was to build relationships and increase brand awareness. For a non-profit that is central. Once that has been established and you have a large social network then you proceed with fund development. Again, this is all from a social media perspective so maybe it belongs in a different blog. Either way I appreciate both your opinions and took a lot away from what you both had to say. As a sociology major I am swimming in uncharted territories for sure :)

I will accept your British-isms sir (Some of my favourite digital marketing professionals are British actually) and must confess I’m a terrible speller, which is one of the reasons I am not a marketing professional NE guru as Tracey suggests. I rely on Microsoft for all my spelling needs, but being Canadian I share your pain in their frequent disregard for colloquial spellings.

I never have a problem with verbose (I’m accuse of that often) but I do think you’re full of shit, though I believe that as digital media professionals, we are largely all full of shit, self importance and suffer from mild messianic complexes which often result in rants like these (again, guilty as charged.)

And an additional note to Tracey, you may be working in the not for profit sector, but you are mistaken if you feel that your marketing activities are not bottom line driven. You need the donor community to believe you are doing good works so that they will choose to direct their charitable budgets to supporting your cause over someone else’s. Similarly, you need marketing to drive usage of your services so that you can achieve your organization’s stated goals. If you aren’t thinking about how to measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts in delivering on the organization’s bottom line, then someone is paying you to hang out on facebook, which is ok, but it’s not marketing.

I’m really not as much of a troll as these posts sound, but happy to have stimulated some discussion. Isn’t that what rants are for?

Personally, my approach to marketing may differ compared to for-profit companies because I work for a non-profit. Our aim “is to talk to people, and hopefully, on occasion, get them to talk back” because we are trying to re-brand ourselves for the general public. We need dialogue, discourse, and new relationships to grow.

When I took on the role of managing my organizations social media platforms I didn’t know much about marketing and utilizing social media to do it. I scoured the internet for articles, blogs, and webinar’s to help me understand how to use social media for my organizations benefit. The language was often flowery, empty, and confusing. So while Richard may be focused solely on sell, sell, sell, I think marketing is about relationships too.

“Where there is confusion, there is money to be made.”
I’m not trying to sell anything here ;-)

“two spelling mistakes in one sentence does not sell a marketing professional”
Whilst I can’t spot the mistakes myself, I’m more than happy to correct them. Spelling never was my strong point! Though it may do to point out that I’m in England so will use S over Z where ever possible, and whilst single s in focussed is generally the norm, a double s is acceptable, and I prefer how it looks so chose to spell it this way. I’d also like to point out I’m not really trying to “sell” myself. Just sharing my thoughts.

““As an industry we are so focussed on intellectualising what marketing is trying to do, rather than actually doing it. ” your whole post can be characterized in exactly the same terms you are deriding.”
I do of course suffer from the complaint of often being excessively verbose, but a distinction should be made between using concrete words such as intellectulise, which have clearly defined meanings in any given context, and the pseudo-intellectual language of marketing buzz words, which do not really mean anything in any context.

I never state that I am not full of shit, and quite often openly acknowledge this. Such as with my constant use of “we” when describing the problem.

Thanks for taking the time to comment, I honestly do appreciate it, even if you are effectively saying I am full of shit. Can’t please everyone I guess.

Actually, the real aim of marketing is to drive sales and increase revenue.

“Where there is confusion, there is money to be made.”

This statement rings true especially when you are the one selling clarity.

“As an industry we are so focussed on intellectualising what marketing is trying to do, rather than actually doing it. ”

1. two spelling mistakes in one sentence does not sell a marketing professional and 2) your whole post can be characterized in exactly the same terms you are deriding.

I love the post modern irony thing going on here. A comment on a comment on a comment. Perhaps I too am full of shit, but at least I’m not pretending I’m not.