You may know that physics has a rather interesting problem.
In layman’s terms (meaning I can get this ever so slightly wrong), there are;
a. well understood laws for large objects – bigger than an atom – called relativity, and
b. well understood (if not quite complete) laws for very small objects or particles in ‘quantum’ level physics.
And, these laws are mutually incompatible.
Up until 50 years ago, physicists were making brilliant progress, assuming that all was going swimmingly well, and but for a few pauses, discoveries of the 18th century were being developed and were informing the next logical theories right through to the point it all just….got really confusing, and nothing worked.
Even Einstein spent his last thirty years looking for something that would bring it all together, but ultimately he came up blank.
Marketing has similar issues.
As our friend Seth Godin says, mass marketing has worked fine, making its inexorable progress through the TV industrial complex, right up to the point where things got very small. Channels, readership, circulation, user bases, blog posts (twitter) and attention spans (I must get to the point), well, they have all shrunk immeasurably.
Suddenly, the old rules don’t work any more – in fact they’re more confusing than anything we could have possibly imagined. Just like our physics.
We’re dealing in fragments.
Fragmented tasks, fragmented communications, markets, job descriptions, jobs, economic realities, projects, product life cycles and fleeting fads, microscopic opportunities. Higgs Boson PR anyone?
Are we truly going to end up marketing on a one to one basis? Hasn’t anyone got a chaos theory we can use to put this together? Well, there have been a few viewpoints around one aspect – SEO vs PR. All from one conversation on a social network. Now there’s a promising start.
Jed Hallam, SEO and Public Relations
Stuart Bruce, Public relations is about reputation
Stephen Waddington, good summary from a technical PR perspective
Julia Shuvalova, you need every digital marketing skill in a perfect world (including the higgs boson perhaps)
My two penneth, at this stage, is that this seems like a classic big bang confluence of ideas, skillsets and job descriptions. A Large Hadron Collider…especially when you include communications technology, which is driving all this together (in circles perhaps). Convergence.
Industry vs techniques, pah, so much fluff to me. Where do we all come from, and what is the meaning of life? Is there a dog after all? Which particle of the marketing atom are you?
Forget whatever industry you think you’re in, it is about sales, marketing and relationships. But not necessarily in that order.
As an aside to my PR friends, isn’t reputation management only necessary when you’re not able to control your product or your people….oh wait, what? we can’t do that?
I do have some string theory, I’ll have to post soon, but I’m getting the feeling the attention span is ‘gone’, and we’re all moving on to the next big passing phase. So I’ll stop for now.
Any more views you can point out, the more the merrier.
