Creatures of Habit

I read somewhere recently - can’t quite remember where: it was one of those ‘make a mental note’ things - that, while marketers are embracing online in some respects, they’re a lot more cautious in others. What marketing folks are doing is e-mail marketing, e-newsletters, webinars, banner ads. What they’re not doing - at least according to the “thing” I read - is blogging, social media, twittering…

This is not particularly surprising.

The online approaches that are being embraced are logical extensions of what we were doing in the way-back. Direct mail:email::printed newsletter: e-newsletter. Breakfast seminar: webinar::print advertising: banner ads.

Sure, the delivery vehicle has changed, and that, in turn has prompted us to make some changes in what gets delivered. But basically, we’re on familiar ground here. We know what we’re doing - that PowerPoint preso for the webinar is really no different that what you’d have pulled together for a breakfast seminar now, is it? And we’re comfortable. Heck, we may be even more comfortable than in the past. (You can run that webinar from home wearing your PJ’s. For those breakfast seminars, you had to schlep from Cleveland to Tyson’s Corner to Dallas, and repeat the same things over and over and over.)

We’re also comfortable with the above new, but variation on a theme, tactics because we know how to translate them into success. Attendees. Click throughs. Etc. We’re still on familiar turf here. Nothing’s really changed all that much.

But blogging? Social media? Mashups?

This is, for many marketers, terra incognita. We’re not sure if that earth is round, or whether our Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria are going to sail right over the edge. And doesn’t a mashup sound like a place you could get hurt. And what is it, anyway? It sounds like an online moshpit. Yuck!

We’re also have less of a feel for how this stuff works. Sure, we know the mechanics of it. Set up a Twitter account and start tweeting away. What we’re less sure of is what this is going to do for us -and when.

Most of us are creatures of habit. Sure, we like to learn new tricks, but if we like what we’re doing, and we’re good at it, of course we want to keep doing it. Personally, I’d be just as happy if I could spend the rest of my career writing case studies, positioning documents, white papers, research reports…I’m not afraid of Twitter, I just don’t want to clutter my mind with worrying about it (at least not until the election’s over). But I also owe it to my clients - and myself - to keep on top of things. That way, I’m not making a recommendation just because it’s something I’m comfortable with. If I’m going to advise a client not to jump into that moshpit, errrrrr, mashup, I at minimum have to be able to articulate the pro’s and the con’s.

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