Five Gartner Digital Marketing Posts that Influenced My Thinking in 2013

2013 was a big year for Gartner for Marketing Leaders. We published a raft-load of research, débuted the Digital Marketing Transit Map, advised clients daily and—in the heat of it all—somehow managed to publish a couple hundred blog posts. Phew.

In 2013, my GML colleagues inspired me daily, but here is a sample of five posts that really stuck with me over the course of the year. They are, in no particular order:

1. “News of the Death of Paid Media is Greatly Exaggerated,” by Andrew Frank (@acfrank)

It’s easy to get all lathered up about the disruptive potential of earned media to democratize audience reach. But, as Andrew Frank reminds us in this post, while “the industry’s tendency to focus on exceptional success stories can skew perception … most mature marketing organizations [recognize the rarity of viral content and] prefer to pay for predictable results rather than gamble against long odds with pure viral content.”

2. “The Twilight of Unsponsored Truth,” by Marty Kihn (@martykihn)

Like me, my colleague Marty Kihn is a bit of a word nerd. Also like me, he has a tendency to get nostalgic about a time when well-wrought prose was a reliable currency of trade. No longer, according to this mildly dystopian post on what he calls “the twilight of unsponsored truth.” But, despite its mournful tone, he leaves us with the vague suggestion that these structural changes offer hope for renewal, as word nerds find new professional paths and light shines on unsponsored truths in new and different ways.

3. “Solve the Challenge of Content Marketing, SNL Style,” by Jennifer Polk (@jenpolk1)

For content marketers, nourishing the supply chain with rich creative output can be daunting. How do you feed the beast every day? My colleague Jennifer Polk says to do like Saturday Night Live does: Ask everyone to write. Better yet, make it part of their jobs. She reminds us that SNL has sustained its streak of 745 shows and 37 Emmy-winning seasons by spreading the creative burden across the cast members who must all write and perform. That may well be the answer to the content marketing bottleneck.

4. “What Marketers Can Learn from My Leaky Faucet,” by Julie Hopkins (@julierhopkins)

That a picture is worth a thousand words lives among the canon of clichés we’re taught to steer clear of in our rhetorical worlds. Of course my colleague Julie Hopkins knew better than to use this tired phrase, but still managed to impart its essential wisdom for any social marketer: commerce and community are catalyzed by pictures. She says that Houzz is one high-profile example of a community that’s proven the theory. If you ask me, Houzz is proof that the true potential of social commerce is far more than ads in a social stream; it’s all about the eye candy.

5. “Why CMOs Shouldn’t Shun Failure,” by Richard Fouts (@rkfouts)

It’s become fashionable to make peace with failure, where leaders embrace small defeats as key enablers of larger success. But I think more leaders embrace this idea in name alone, failing to truly inculcate risk-taking into a culture and allowing failure to continue on as the ultimate career cul-de-sac. In this short post, my colleague Richard Fouts reflects on his conversations with Adobe CMO Ann Lewnes who has made experimentation—and failure—important steps on the path to progress. She says, “We conducted a dozen experiments last year. Some of them were spectacular failures. Some were abandoned, others spectacularly succeeded after being reworked. But I’m okay with failure. We learn from it, and through our misfires, we come across new findings that we weren’t even looking for.”

You can read more from the Gartner for Marketing Leaders team here.

Source : http://blogs.gartner.com/jake-sorofman/five-gartner-digital-marketing-posts-that-influenced-my-thinking-in-2013/