Social Media Domination

This morning I had coffee with Chris Baggott and it was a great discussion of the marketing technology landscape. For online marketers, technology used to be (and still sometimes is) a huge hurdle to overcome. Every marketer needed a technology guy in his back pocket to make things work.

Some companies succombed to the technology hurdle by moving online marketing into their technology group rather than keeping it within marketing. No offense to my tech guys, but rendering HTML is not marketing - there's a true art and sophistication to marketing.

Multiple touch points, consistent branding and messaging, compelling content... and a long-term strategy to lead visitors into an engagement with your company are all key. They all deal with communication and motivation, not technology.

That meant that technology wasn't always an enabler - it was actually a speed bump that every marketer had to overcome. Marketers needed to learn about search engine optimization, landing page strategies and usability, integration, API technology, security, privacy, etc., etc.

Luckily for marketers, tools have been invented to overcome those speed bumps. Chris reminded me of ExactTarget's roots. The naysayers when ExactTarget started spoke about the cost of the service and that anyone could go start a Listserv, add a bunch of plugins and get the same service.

That meant that marketers had to learn or work with technology experts to enable email marketing. A speedbump.

What ExactTarget did was overcome the technology speedbump and provide an email marketing service that the marketer could use out of the box. That's why, in this recession, ExactTarget continues to grow rapidly and successfully. They enable marketers to leverage the technology without needing to manage it.

This is what I was referring to when I wrote about getting out of the SEO weeds. We want our clients executing marketing strategies, not worrying about whether or not their comment plugin is working correctly, whether their host can handle the traffic, what SEO plugins they have installed and whether or not they work, how SEO algorithms are changing, whether or not to use meta, alt, title tags, etc.

Compendium Blogware is a SaaS platform that enables marketers to leverage blogging and all of its advantages (human touch, engagement, marketing, search engine optimization, RSS integration) but without the headaches of technology.