I was listening to a Q&A session with Seth Godin on the Marketing Over Coffee podcast today and Seth said something really interesting. He said radio was built for marketers. So were televisions, newspapers, and magazines. Without marketers and advertisers, these mediums would be finished. They would go out of business. The Internet, however, wasn't built for marketers. It was built for communications.
This got me thinking about why good marketers can struggle with how to use the Internet for marketing. It's not that they don't know how to do their job. It's that they don't know how to do their job with a medium that wasn't built for their job. I've seen really good old media marketers try to apply their expertise online and it fails. It just wouldn't work.
The Internet is a different animal altogether now more than ever in the social-media-web-2.0-new-media kind of world the Internet has turned into. You must engage differently. You must add value. You must think communications rather than marketing because marketing will happen from the communications rather than communicating only to do marketing.
You can't think old and do new. You can think old and do old or you can think new and do new, but that's it. Those are your options.