• by Kendall Allen , April 5, 2010

During these industrious times, most of us are fairly diversified, if not by outright pursuits and projects, then by focus. We may play in several arenas all at once, and this traversing begets an array of team environments and collaborations.

This is my life as well. And, most quarters of the year, I would not have it any other way.  I thrive on the constant mix, for better or for worse. Awash in whimsy this weekend and up for a light write -- I've been mulling the contradictions we see around us every day.  In no particular order:

1. Media professionals referring to a medium as "emerging" when it's long since emerged and gained maturity or in fact existed in earlier incarnations.

One of my favorite random reads on this theme can be found on Social Media Rockstar, where the writer, Brett Borders, points to very specific examples of what we may interpret as social media. One example: "Phone phreaking, or the rogue exploration of the telephone network, started to gain momentum in the 1950's. Phone phreaks weren't motivated by fraud, but rather, they were technophiles and information addicts trapped in a telecom monopoly long before Skype or "free nights and weekends" existed."

2.    Marketers who assert a need for performance, return on investment and guidance based on analysis -- yet won't take even the most basic steps to properly track and measure what they are implementing or paying outside parties to implement for them. More often than not, it's internal politics around the queue outside the webmaster's door.

I have had to support countless clients through their pitch to get to the front of the line on getting the right tracking installed, navigating internal politics around site ownership and accountability.

3.    The agency or purported marketing professional who uses the "strategy" word and professes that all of his or her recommendations come from a long business history and learned "marketing" point of view - but whose every document or offering during meetings dwindles into a litany of cool ideas, tactics and ad placement speak. The unsettling reality, of course, is that your tactics must be strong -- and they often consume much of your available time and energy -- if your strategy can prevail.

On this weekend of whimsy, I poked around a little bit outside our industry for applicable insights. Of course, I ended up on a chess blog, where this comment caught my eye: "I am probably the best example you could hope to find of a club player trying to run strategically before they can walk tactically. I used to play like beginners should, all open games and swashbuckling attacks, but then I saw a striking positional game ... which has been my ideal ever since."

The blogger then quotes another gent, Dan Heismann, with something to say on the matter: "It's not that chess is 99% tactics, it's just that tactics takes up 99% of your time."

4.    Our expressed distaste for Powerpoint and one-way communication on panels intended to be "interactive" -- yet our relentless passive reliance on these, especially when pressed for time. You may have been part of this dysfunction and have certainly been on the receiving end, attending panels where you've paid dearly only to endure a sequence of "decks" that clearly are canned ready-to-wear material by the presenters.

5.    Rampant talk of innovation without an understanding of what constitutes innovation. Adam Broitman of Circ.us has done some important thinking and framing on this point. In a piece recently written, "The 3 Pillars of Innovation," Adam offers this: "It is fair to say that as digital marketers, it is our job to experiment with new platforms, but the true strategic mind does not start with technology -- true innovation originates with creative ideas. At its core, innovation is about ideas."

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