DISQUS

Daniel Sevitt · 6 months ago

"to be more agile than media to level the playing field with traditional gatekeepers"

I'm suffering from mixed-metaphor-tosis.

Kat G. · 6 months ago

Excellent article Adam! After reading the opening paragraph, I exclaimed, "OMG! This is my life!" I work for a state college and I have done some freelance Internet marketing work for a state agency. These clients try to be open to new media--they understand it's essential in their marketing strategy. However, their conservative attitudes and extensive approval processes inhibit them from achieving success and the marketing results THEY desire! Thank you for articulating so well WHY these 'yesterday' attitudes about marking need to be revised!

PZ · 6 months ago

It's relatively easy to build an organization that is agile if it is a startup.

The question is, how do you make an established enterprise or organization agile? This is much harder, perhaps a follow-up post on how to make your organization agile would be very useful.

I think e-retail and commerce organizations have a much easier time of becoming agile than more traditional businesses like financial services for example.

Regards,
PZ

Graham · 6 months ago

Being Agile in your words means influencing the Social Web, so things must change when new trends start happening, be nimble, write, speak, your content(Social Media), and hopefully someone will take notice in your content marketing strategy.

Mike · 6 months ago

So, here we have an article written by someone who makes their living off the idea of new and creative ways to use the Internet. The key message here is solely to be agile. You probably use that in every presentation you do. The fact is that in order to protect the name and image a company and a brand has requires adherence to set of internal principles and policies. These must be protected and if that means that a review process must exist for published materials then so be it. The agility comes from how that process works and how a company chooses to communicate. And they don't have to be a media company to do that. Social media has its place, but that doesn't mean it has a place in everything we do that is marketing!

Kenny Laurie · 6 months ago

I completely agree; pace, transparency and agility are key at the moment, as the rate of news and trends increases.

Kat G. · 6 months ago

Mike-
I think you may have missed the point; the author is not promoting anarchy of policy and principles. He's simply saying that in order to be effective at the 'conversation' which develops so quickly on the web, being agile is essential and that going through 5 levels of approval to publish a response or any communication hinders that. He's also not talking about ALL marketing, he's speaking of the culture of the Internet and what it means to be successful marketing there. So if you just want to build your "BRAND" in a closet, I hope your target audience is senior citizens who still open their mail.

Dave Malone · 6 months ago

Good read, Adam. In the software development world, the Agile development methodology is used to break down the traditional business barriers, and all of the red tape involved in pushing the product from idea to production. As developers, the closer we are to the business (or decision makers in general), and the more responsive the business is in making critical decisions - even if those decisions mean significant changes in the requirements or development plans - the more agile we can be as developers. This is crucial to not only rapid application development, but a successful end product. If you can be agile, you will provide the services and results which the business needs to be a success.

Jamie Allsop · 5 months ago

At the moment companies need to try new things and come out of the dark ages, like you said in your first paragraph, companies who are not agile and have to go through the approval process are going to get left behind if they don't try new ways of marketing.

Brett Borders · 5 months ago

Great post! Agility is so very, very important. Kung fu-level agility is a necessity to surf the social web and get results.

Louis Halpern · 2 months ago

Interesting article. I also think that some individuals don't move quickly enough to utilise social media, which they should seeing the effect it has on their reputation.