Combining their thoughts with what I've seen over the past 15 years in the online strategy space working extensively with corporate marketing functions, I'm developing a full white paper and calling my recommendations MPG -- Message, Platform, and Governance. MPG, ROI, so similar, no?
Message
Fundamentally, what are we trying to communicate, and to whom?
The entire online space has exposed a major flaw in many marketing departments: there are not enough skilled resources to craft meaningful content across the many platforms that need regular care and feeding. In the old offline world, a marketing group only needed to put out brochures from time to time, and maybe assist their agency in developing TV or a print ad that would have a paragraph or two of content if that.
Now, though, someone has to create multiple web pages about each major product or service, be interesting on Facebook, respond appropriately on Twitter, write emails.... etc.
Platform
In another era, there were only a handful of platforms, most of them not requiring much from a marketing group:
- The actual production of brochures were done by a printer
- An agency took care of the TV, print, and radio media, asset creation, and distribution.
- Another agency did all aspects of direct mail.
Now there are quite a few aspects of online that require marketers to possess production skills -- web content management, email, twitter, Facebook postings, blogs, message boards.... The list is pretty long.
Governance
The Internet has forced organizations to definitively show one face to their customers, and has also made marketing and IT discover each other's worlds. These two factors have created a broad range of ownership and responsibility issues.
I'm working on blowing this out to a full white paper. Stay tuned.
