A lot has been written on social media and social media strategies and optimizing social media tactics for the tweetisphere while nurturing automation mines the whole blogistan via SEM, I mean SEO.
Who’s kidding who? One aspect of marketing that’s unlikely to change is that word of mouth will remain king. The question is who’s word and who’s mouth. More importantly is the meaning of that word which is really the other 3 Ps beyond promotion.
So if we simplify, the cloud means marketers can scale. The old guy in me thinks “so we can scale up bad marketing to fail more spectacularly than ever before–this is great!”
OK the young guy is back and thinking “could we think ahead a few steps based on the competitive landscape, the assumption of other smart people and known histories/models/trends/etc. to pick a slightly visionary point from which we tightly define our product/service, price strategy and partnership priorities so that we win round one of scaling up?” The young guy is more optimistic and complex than the old guy…….
Yes we can. Yes we can. Yes we can. This is exciting! It’s fun again to market technology (think 1997). Note to self: business cycle peak in 3 years, don’t get greedy.
Having evolved many things in my career, I warn strongly against evolution as it relates to the cloud. By the cloud, I mean supplying it, using it or creating it to challenge traditional technology and service stacks.
If the cloud means consumer marketingesque and technical supercomutingesque scale, then you don’t have the time or even ability to evolve there. You just need to go there. Now. Pick your 2 year vision point and make some product, pricing and partner decisions. Don’t worry about tweeting until your management team is on-board and agreed with those.
What the cloud means for marketers is simultaneously a new technology stack, marketing medium and set of business problems to address. If we think about any of the big tech successes, they happen when a new software application meets a new hardware platform to solve a very specific known problem and with a potential to break out of the initial business model in a huge horizontal way. So with cloud we have the new hardware platform, with SaaS we have a suite of new applications, we have enough specific data management problems to choose from so now all we have to do is think about interesting horizontal spaces.
The cloud will be harsh and fun for marketers. It will force marketers to actually lead their companies and not just support the sales and engineering teams. It will force marketers to define and couple all of the Ps, not just improve a few. It will force marketers to not be the ‘marketing guy’ but the business guy. It will force marketers to bring their management and first-line managers into marketing.
You can evolve to those forces or you can accelerate by embracing those forces.
What the cloud means for marketers is Big M marketing with brand frosting and sparkling social candles.