I totally agree with Beth Harte’s comments–so much so I wish I had written them. What Beth calls “fundamentals” I’ve been calling “fundamental dynamics,” but they’re one and the same. I am thoroughly convinced that the most important conversation for marketers to have right now is about fundamentals. “Everything” has definitely NOT been changed by social media. The things that have changed are *relatively* easy to see and understand. What’s not easy, but very important, are those fundamentals, because if you don’t know and can’t apply them, you’ll be less successful in BOTH worlds–new and “old.” Even more important is the fact that without grounding in the fundamentals, you can’t really judge what a new tool is useful for—and that skill is now absolutely essential.

In the past, marketing academics have done good work on some fundamentals, but it’s all badly in need of updating. I am trying to make it a focus of my blog to promote conversations and discovery around these principles, so that they may start to be codified. Given the pace of change, whatever is taught in the marketing courses of the future, it’s going to have to be refreshed a lot more frequently than once every decade or two (as it was when curriculum updating was chained to textbook production cycles).

To specifically address your questions, I would offer the following:
1. The most important thing that does not change from traditional to social is the urgent need to define clear objectives and strategies first, then create a plan to follow based on those and drive the tactics from the plan—not the reverse. In addition, as advances in social media marketing occur and a lot more marketing experiments are needed, all marketers—not just specialists—will need to call on the skill sets, expertise, rigorous adherence to test principles and math and science that are everyday routine for market researchers and direct marketers.
2. At a minimum the following ideas are (or soon will be) obsolete:
a) that there’s any benefit from operating sales and marketing as separate (or in some cases even “competing”) functional silos instead of as a single team responsible for each other’s success;
b) that there’s any benefit from operating marketing specialties as separate functional silos either. Even while marketing becomes more fragmented and specialized, with more complexity and more moving parts, the need to take an integrated approach is not diminished but greatly increased;
c) that simply by segmenting your target audience into six or eight personas or profiles you can achieve anything like the kind of mass personalization that customers want and expect. Relevance only exists in the mind of the customer and no marketer can divine relevance for them from thin air. You have to ask the individual, or somehow get hard research data that comes from the individual, or else all your assumptions are nothing but fiction.
d) that measuring your results by any metric other than business outcomes is acceptable.
3. With the emphasis on business outcomes will come the desire for predictable and reliable business results. Social media is about inventing new ways for people to connect, and it’s extremely agile. Both very good and very bad results can occur very quickly. But it’s not the speed nor going viral that’s going to be especially important in the future. Fast stunts and long tail activities both have their places and advantages. The novelty of one-time stunts will soon fade as businesses look for best practices that are sustainable, that can generate the same or similar results when repeated. The social media marketer will have to acquire skill and experience in all facets of best practices, and the scope of that will far exceed the limited set of popular tactics of today, which will soon seem positively archaic.
4. Compared to five years from now, we haven’t even begun to tap the potential of social media to help transform selling into a rich set of services, information and connections that truly make it easier for people to buy. Current work in this area is mere tinkering. Today’s college students are the ones who will really get to implement some truly great new ways of fulfilling this important potential of social media. We pay lipservice to the idea that the consumer is now “in control,” but we haven’t really given them very good tools for managing their own buying processes.
.-= Steve Parker´s last blog ..Fresh from the content pastures =-.

I totally agree with Beth Harte’s comments–so much so I wish I had written them. What Beth calls “fundamentals” I’ve been calling “fundamental dynamics,” but they’re one and the same. I am thoroughly convinced that the most important conversation for marketers to have right now is about fundamentals. “Everything” has definitely NOT been changed by social media. The things that have changed are *relatively* easy to see and understand. What’s not easy, but very important, are those fundamentals, because if you don’t know and can’t apply them, you’ll be less successful in BOTH worlds–new and “old.” Even more important is the fact that without grounding in the fundamentals, you can’t really judge what a new tool is useful for—and that skill is now absolutely essential.

In the past, marketing academics have done good work on some fundamentals, but it’s all badly in need of updating. I am trying to make it a focus of my blog to promote conversations and discovery around these principles, so that they may start to be codified. Given the pace of change, whatever is taught in the marketing courses of the future, it’s going to have to be refreshed a lot more frequently than once every decade or two (as it was when curriculum updating was chained to textbook production cycles).

To specifically address your questions, I would offer the following:
1. The most important thing that does not change from traditional to social is the urgent need to define clear objectives and strategies first, then create a plan to follow based on those and drive the tactics from the plan—not the reverse. In addition, as advances in social media marketing occur and a lot more marketing experiments are needed, all marketers—not just specialists—will need to call on the skill sets, expertise, rigorous adherence to test principles and math and science that are everyday routine for market researchers and direct marketers.
2. At a minimum the following ideas are (or soon will be) obsolete:
a) that there’s any benefit from operating sales and marketing as separate (or in some cases even “competing”) functional silos instead of as a single team responsible for each other’s success;
b) that there’s any benefit from operating marketing specialties as separate functional silos either. Even while marketing becomes more fragmented and specialized, with more complexity and more moving parts, the need to take an integrated approach is not diminished but greatly increased;
c) that simply by segmenting your target audience into six or eight personas or profiles you can achieve anything like the kind of mass personalization that customers want and expect. Relevance only exists in the mind of the customer and no marketer can divine relevance for them from thin air. You have to ask the individual, or somehow get hard research data that comes from the individual, or else all your assumptions are nothing but fiction.
d) that measuring your results by any metric other than business outcomes is acceptable.
3. With the emphasis on business outcomes will come the desire for predictable and reliable business results. Social media is about inventing new ways for people to connect, and it’s extremely agile. Both very good and very bad results can occur very quickly. But it’s not the speed nor going viral that’s going to be especially important in the future. Fast stunts and long tail activities both have their places and advantages. The novelty of one-time stunts will soon fade as businesses look for best practices that are sustainable, that can generate the same or similar results when repeated. The social media marketer will have to acquire skill and experience in all facets of best practices, and the scope of that will far exceed the limited set of popular tactics of today, which will soon seem positively archaic.
4. Compared to five years from now, we haven’t even begun to tap the potential of social media to help transform selling into a rich set of services, information and connections that truly make it easier for people to buy. Current work in this area is mere tinkering. Today’s college students are the ones who will really get to implement some truly great new ways of fulfilling this important potential of social media. We pay lipservice to the idea that the consumer is now “in control,” but we haven’t really given them very good tools for managing their own buying processes.
.-= Steve Parker´s last blog ..Fresh from the content pastures =-.