As I continue to navigate my way through the world of digital media, marketing, and advertising at a speed which rivals oil spilling out of BP’s well, I decided to take this opportunity to pause and reflect. Part of reflecting is realizing that blogging for free sucks. Regardless, I must keep at it because it’s good for my site’s SEO. Also I’ve pretty much given up on my dream of playing in the NBA. For some reason they don’t send scouts to the LA Fitness weekend league. Anyway, I recently attended a marketing seminar the topic of which was online reputation management. As I sat there listening, my brain slowing down from a day’s worth of sem metrics analysis, I realized I was missing game 6 of the Celtics Lakers, and also that I need to sign up for Toastmasters.
Toastmaster is a public speaking course. Something I’m awful at. I’m afraid I will stutter, mispronounce words, or forget what to say next. If I mastered that skill, maybe in 10 years I could get paid to speak at a seminar or a family dinner, probably not though. Still, public speaking is not what made me pause. It was the content. Seems like a lot of it is the same, presented differently, by different people. Of course there are different topics and products but everything boils down to a few key principles.
Is it possible to over-consume information about an industry? During the last 4 to 5 years I have read countless tech blogs, white papers, newsletters, case studies, tweets, facebook posts, magazines, newspaper articles (not the actual paper, the app kind), and pretty much anything else that’s readable and has to do with digital media. I even listened to a few podcasts. Oh and books, I’ve read books, aka longer tweets. I’ve read anywhere from 5% to 90% of books such as The Groundswell, Positioning, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Free and The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, Crush It, Don’t Make Me Think!, Advanced Web Metrics w/Google Analytics, and have casually flipped through the SEO Bible. The best though is Sh*t My Dad Says. These are just a few that I’ve even read a page in; a lot of others are still sitting around my house in physical or digital form, waiting to be opened. In addition, I’m a few months into USF’s Masters Certificate in Integrated Online Marketing program. Plus, for my 9 to 5 I do “digital things.” Have I consumed enough information about our industry to become an expert, not even close, but enough to draw some conclusions – sure.
Conclusions: 1. Books, blogs, conferences, and seminars about digital marketing will have similar content – how you interpret and apply it to your own marketing strategy is the key. 2. Most books about social media can be shortened to 3 chapters from 15 or 20. 3. Digital is easy to grasp if broken down to its core principles. 4. Some advertisers are secretly hoping for a return of the newspaper golden age, so they can keep saying “when I run in the paper my phone rings but online gives me nothing” and it actually might not invoke giant belly laughs.
Sometimes we tend to over-complicate many aspects of digital, which in turn confuses ourselves and our clients. Here’s how I see (although you might not) the most popular and effective online solutions and their core benefits:
Community + (engagement x listening) = Social Media For Business
(Research + Testing + Optimizing) x Budget = SEM
Revenue – Cost / Cost x 100% = ROI for SEM (actual formula)
Links + Tags + Content = SEO (this one might be a bit more complicated than that 
)
(Online Display Banners + Audience Targeting) x (Creative + Call To Action) = CTR + Conversions.
Mobile Display = Same as above except in smaller ad size
SMS = Relevancy + UVP
