Millenium Marketer

{Image Credit: Eric Doner}

Last Friday, I attended participated in the Silicon Valley American Marketing Association‘s annual Board Retreat as a board member.

We are a group of committed marketing professionals now in planning phases to move forward with our mission: “Stay Connected, Stay Informed.” As the VP of Volunteers (fancy title for volunteer recruiting lead) I am responsible for replenishing the fuel to burn the midnight oil, or in other words, bring the team volunteers to help them drive their initiatives.

I left the day feeling really good about what we would accomplish within the next year and beyond.
***Update:Our team coach/retreat facilitator (who took the lovely picture) e-mailed me today to remind me that he didn’t just take a nice picture. Silly me–what was I thinking? So, to give credit to where credit is due, Eric did more than just take a picture. He facilitated us into the team exercises that got us to the point where we generated the ideas ourselves. That is the mark of a good facilitator, someone who gets other people thinking!” (Now back to my original musing…)***

Even though working virtually can give you great flexibility, I can’t stress enough the good feelings that come from actually meeting the people you work with. I doubt any of the jokes and discussions we shared in real time could be matched over phone conferences, e-mails and IMs.

Of course, the word “networking” is just as over-used as “social networking.” If it weren’t for SVAMA, I wouldn’t be able to refer to any real experiences…like when one board member good-naturedly confused two other members while introducing one of them during ice-breaker introductions.

We had a good laugh about it, and surely could not have had the same experience virtually.

Maybe this is also the reason for Lunch 2.0, Tweetups, Meetups and other non-virtual, non-owned and co-branded events rolling about vs. the traditional conferences and mindshare.

I was talking with some of my colleagues from the Silicon Valley American Marketing Association (SVAMA) yesterday and we were speculating on social media and how this arena is changing traditional media. Michael was saying that it’s actually not true that current media replaces old media–it just gets re-innovated. Radios didn’t get replaced by Walkmans, and even though we don’t use the old tapes format anymore, we don’t listen to music any differently than we did after Walkman. And books haven’t gotten replaced by things like the Kindle or Sony e-Reader and so far, it doesn’t seem like they will. It’s almost impossible to have a true “paperless office” even with cool tools made by Google Apps and Zoho but one thing that remains true is that innovation is constant and changing.

I’m no expert, but some good conclusions came out of our group conversation, but I keep noticing some of the same themes. The group I was speaking with were fairly knowledagable about social media. But in general, a lot of marketers aren’t sure how social media works and there a lot of fear surrounding blogs, social networks and such to use them as a marketing tool. I think we just need to get back to basics and remember some marketing 101: who is your target market and will the tools you want to use serve your business/marketing objectives?

Of course, it’s easier said than done, so feel free to post your thoughts on social media approaches and/or the latest trends in technology innovation that you see.