This mate of mine went and did a one-day seminar in Sydney on viral marketing. There were some impressing names in the line-up. And they had some impressive things to say about how they made some marketing concept go viral.
So now my mate is all about viral marketing. Despite being a journalism student at uni. He doesn’t want to work at Maccas to get himself through uni. He wants to be a viral marketer. So he set up a website, got a Facebook page and made some business cards.
He’s now a “viral marketing expert” despite having never set-up, run or been successful at a viral marketing campaign.
If you’re in business, you’ve come across people like this. No qualifications. No track record. No experience. Just a hell of a lot passion for this week’s hot marketing buzzword.
I call them “one-tool-wonder tools.” They literally have one trick up their sleeve. And you can generally spot them from a mile off, because they spend a lot of time and energy telling you how bad everything is that they are not selling. Kinda like people in to paleo diets. And Thermomix machines.
You’ll come across them in digital stuff all the time. The dude selling Google AdWords alone will spend as much time rubbishing Facebook ads as he spends telling you what’s good about Google, despite having precious little experience actually using Facebook Ads. The WordPress “expert” will bad-mouth anything that isn’t WordPress… probably because she’s never used anything else.
The TV rep will spend time not only rubbishing other TV stations to you, but will gleefully shit all over radio, the NT News and bus advertising too while they’re at it.
And no medium is immune. We’re all battling for every dollar business has to spend. But no one of us has all the answers. I guess that’s why media agencies are a thing. You can chase around 3 TV networks, 2 radio stations, a newspaper, a bus-back company, 25 Google AdWords providers and 57 Mummy-bloggers who know how to install a theme in WordPress, or you can go to one place that will charge you a premium to do most, if not all of that.
I am no authority in all this, but seriously, you don’t go to a plumber to ask about air conditioning do you?
So you can’t rely on a radio sales rep to talk to you about marketing. They only sell radio spots. And sometimes website ads. But nothing else. Same with TV. The newspaper does have a Google AdWords and Facebook Ads product now as well, so they’re a bit better versed in general marketing than most, but they nothing about TV, radio or websites.
But what you need most, is to talk to someone or a range of someones who can give you a bigger picture of what’s going on in local marketing, rather than walking in with a bag of packages that they have to sell because that’s what the company told them to sell.
Make no mistake, no media sales rep or one-tool-wonder has any concern for your business short of wanting to make sure you’re around next month to help them to make their budget for the month and get their bonus.