Marketing for Managers Interview
Nick Pitsch is working towards a Management degree and is taking “Marketing for Managers” as a required course for his degree. He had an assignment to interview a marketing professional and was referred to me. It was fun doing this interview with him. His writeup was nice (I’m sure he’ll get an A+ for it!) and he agreed to allow me to share part of the interview with you. I share it with you in hopes you might catch some of my vision for Internet strategy as it pertains to marketing.
Mr. Rob Williams is the owner of Orangejack.com. He terms his position as “Internet Strategist”. Rob states “To me it’s more important to have a plan to use the Internet well. It comes from a marketing/communications perspective.” With a management major in college (with a marketing emphasis), he saw a niche in the marketplace for providing business people with more than the usual “create a webpage” services. Social media (blogs, FaceBook, etc.) and search engine marketing are relatively new concepts, and his aim is to help business owners harness these capabilities to further their business goals. He counts among his experiences traditional marketing approaches including brochures, newsletters and the like.
One of the challenges Rob related was that small companies just do not see the value of an internet strategy – many are satisfied to have a website and that’s it. A web presence only might have been sufficient at one time, but there are more possibilities today. There is value in knowing what options are out there and how to best target them – this takes a strategy. One important distinguisher is newer internet media are not the one-way communications channels of the past, (e.g. newspapers, radio, TV, etc.) – having a only a website is a similar mindset. Social media allows for word of mouth to emerge as a marketing approach on a scale never before possible. Just how to harness this possibility is his focus.
Rob went on to explain that the success of the president-elect proves the potential of social media. Barack Obama used social media very effectively in raising funds – this was key in his election. Rob contends he can provide that leadership in the social media directions as part of a full strategy. His final comments were telling as to the future of this business: “The competition for this is growing, but right now it’s fairly young. It’s only bound to grow. The way the internet can be approached now is so wide and varied that there needs to be more attention paid to it as a full strategy.”
