Geek Marketing

Reading Steve Rubel’s ode to the Geek Marketer I was struck by how my own role over the years has echoed the characteristics he talks about. I’ve often had to sit between groups, bridging the knowledge and experience gap, so much that for many years I’ve described my job as a translator. My last job meant I dealt with internal marketing teams, internal and external technical teams and external advertising/marketing agencies - Diageo had the set up where the agency designed a website and built content and presentation layers but Diageo actually built the websites and managed the back-end code. Not necessarily the best way to build marketing websites, which meant there was a lot of work co-ordinating between different teams. Coming from a Geek background, I rapidly had to learn the marketing aspects to be able to talk to the brand teams and learn to couch digital terms in marketing speak. I was always having to come up with new analogies and metaphors to describe the things that were being built - or they should request the agencies to design. RSS feeds, blogs, portable content, interaction, engagement, all of that stuff. Today, I get pretty disappointed when I get to a Diageo brand website and they are not doing things I spent months educating them on, but that is what you get when you have continuously changing brand team and agencies

In my current role, a geek marketer is what I play the most. I’ve come at it from the different direction to Steve - I’m fairly fluent in geek and have a hard-core interest in marketing. With no advertising background I had to pick up the lingo pretty quick (as Steve says, they love GRPs - from my perspective they are just made up numbers that everyone agrees on because they have been there for so long. They do not really represent people watching or interacting with an ad). A lot of time is spent explaining things - for example, why someone with a blog would write about your product without being paid either in cash or in favours (as the PR world often works).

Tara Hunt has written her take on the role. As I read it, Tara describes the activities of a particular type if geek marketer, those that work primarily in technology companies. For different types of companies, such as the CPG ones I tend to work with, there’s a different set of requirements. One of the commenters on Tara’s article referred to moving to a mass market and this hopefully addresses some of the points that you need to consider when ’starting’ with mass markets and moving them closer to geek marketing.

• Understanding the tools intimately. This is true for anyone in this area, working online. When dealing with a more traditional CPG company, then a new layer of understanding is needed. The challenge is to know is how community connection, online marketing and advertising work with the more traditional advertising tools, such as TV, print, direct mail etc, how they enhance them, how switching a small amount of the multi-million budget to ‘new’ media can enhance the results beyond expectations. Here we are talking both paid media advertising, sponsorships and partnerships that drive mass awareness combined with the more conversational marketing, such.
• Handling the feedback. Geek marketers can introduce new ways of getting feedback. Traditional companies are used to getting feedback all the time, they can do focus groups and in-market research until they drown in it. But getting the unprompted feedback, through contact with customer service groups, through blogs, message boards, looking for general sentiment, is a different matter. Much of it is unfocused, buried in other places and the tools to learn about it and collate it need to be understood. For many, stepping into this world, going out and commenting is a huge challenge; starting up a blog or the like to solicit feedback even bigger. A geek marketer has to educate how to find and respond to such distributed feedback.
• Speaking from the customer point of view with an understanding of engineering. I feel this point is definitely applicable only to working in tech companies. As a geek marketer I can grasp how web aps are put together, it does not mean I know how tissue or shampoo or nappies or drugs are put together – or that I need to. In CPG companies, there is less opportunity to deal with the manufacturing side, the need is to deal with the marketing teams and educate them how the digital world works.
• Raising social capital. Agree entirely with this, both online and offline, although as a geek marketer you are more likely to be involved in the online areas, not necessarily in areas such as grant giving or offline group sponsorship which are often dealt with in an area completely different, and organizationally separate, from the marketing teams. Understand how they work before approaching them with a plan.
• Integrate Marketing holistically. Getting your voice heard thoughout the process of developing briefs, strategy, communication plans etc is essential. Looking at digital as a core part of the work instead of something that is tacked on later has often been a problem, but seems, slowly, to be decreasing.
• Provide or maintain nerd values for the orgainiation. Tara talks about ‘doing well by doing good’. See the comments for raising social capital – it’s possible but you’re usually working across the huge chasms between the silos. Nike is an example of a company that combines the two well; Diageo has done some excellent work, but it’s rarely tied into brand marketing.
• Personal trainers. For me, this is often the biggest role. Talking again and again and again with the more traditional marketers until the light dawns and they realise what they can do. Potentially, then you can spend a lot of time reining them in as ‘they get it’ which means they want to do lots of stuff that may be inappropriate!
• Being agile. Doing this type of stuff means that you do not have to necessarily build huge pieces of content, big message baselines, wait for approval for every single word and punctuation mark. Set up the guidelines for what you can say, what you can’t, what you need to get Corporate comms approval on and leave yourself room to converse with your customers, react as needed to their wants and needs. Educating the legal and PR team as much as possible and get them involved so they feel comfortable that you are not going to so something silly.

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Looking a mass marketing, Ben Metcalfe has a great article examining Apple in their current moves, calling it jumping the exclusivity shark. Price drops, heavy email marketing (I received 3 emails this weekend for the new iPods) are all indicative of mass marketing for a mass audience. Apple have always done mass advertising, with their TV ads catching the eye since the early days. IThey have rarely done community marketing, even though the audience has been niche, calling on heavy geek marketing skills. Now they are taking it up a notch, really driving the volume and moving outside of the geek fanbase. In their case, I’m guessing they are going to still need the Geek marketers they have got but beef those skills up with more volume-based concepts.