Communists, Engineers and Social Media (part two)

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Before making the move to consulting, I worked for a non-profit comprised primarily of engineers with a few marketers and a few engineers who wanted to dabble in marketing. To be honest, some of the engineers had great ideas and brought a useful degree of discipline to most of our projects. But some engineers just could not make the jump from engineering to marketing.  

One of my biggest on-going battles was with social media marketing. The marketing professionals on our team knew that social media marketing was the up-and-coming trend. They were all for funding social media marketing projects. The problem came from my board of directors, comprised almost entirely of engineers.

Knowing well the level of detail required to make my board comfortable with the success being achieved by marketing projects, I reported some pretty compelling metrics.   

YouTube, in particular, was yielding some great results. Compared to similar videos (for example, the YouTube videos being posted by a Fortune 100 company on our board of directors), we were a "run away success." (In the interest of full disclosure, I am only talking about 1,500 hits a year, not a viral success in YouTube terms. However...) We were getting twice as many hits per month as the Fortune 100 company was getting in a whole quarter. Additionally, we were reaching people in over 40 countries and in almost every state in the USA. We were getting plenty of positive comments and even a few decent questions. Our long standing desire to reach out to the end consumer, and to educate them on the benefits of our technology, was being achieved.

I requested approval to start promoting the videos to drive traffic. To my astonishment, I was told to cease and desist.  Even after reporting some very positive feedback from a respected marketing consultant, my board continued to discourage me from posting new content.  

The reason? "No one should be going to YouTube for technical information."

OK, I laid the facts out. Engineers are supposed to be governed by facts. We were being successful by every metric. Still, it did not fit within a reality they could accept. Things were not supposed to work this way. Rather than seeing that we could go to where the people are looking and provide accurate information, they felt that we were encouraging people to look for information in the wrong place. 

Just like facts were ineffective with the Romanian judge,  facts are not going to be enough to win all your battles in the workplace. Engineers and C-level executives are supposed to be influenced by facts but if the facts make them uncomfortable, expect resistance. They are missing the point and you will need to help them see the validity and value of a new reality.

We will dig into that in future posts. 

James Snider is a marketing consultant, responsible for developing the 3.4 billion dollar 1394/FireWire market. James has over 16 years of marketing experience with 7 years working for Fortune 100 companies, 8 years as executive director of a non-profit and, since the summer of 2009, as a strategic business development consultant.  www.linkedin.com/in/jamessnider

Communists, Engineers and Social Media (part one)

I have a friend who grew up in Romania during the rule of Communism. As is the case with others I have known who are familiar with life behind the Iron Curtain, he has plenty of stories that amuse and confuse me.

One came to mind the other day.

There was a man in my friend's home town who accused another man of stealing a significant number of potatoes from his field right around harvest time. On the date of his trial, the accused entered the court and when asked to present his case, the man simply said, "I could not have possibly committed this crime. There were no potatoes in the field on the day I supposedly stole them."  

Of course, the accuser knew that there were potatoes in the field on the day the crime was committed. In this agrarian community, everyone (even the judge) knew when fields were harvested. This pathetic line of defense was surely going to land the accused man in jail.

However, the accused produced a copy of the official Communist newspaper for the region which stated that the harvest had been good that year and that the farmers had been efficient and had every potato in the barns two weeks early.

According to this official, state run, news source, the potatoes were in the barns a full week before the crime had supposedly been committed.

Whether it was sloppy reporting or if the government officials had seen some political advantage in exaggerating a story about the good potato harvest, this judge was not going to question the veracity of the local paper or the Communist officials quoted in it.

The man was declared innocent.

What does this have to do with engineers and marketing? I will cover that in my next post. 

James Snider is a marketing consultant, responsible for developing the 3.4 billion dollar 1394/FireWire market. James has over 16 years of marketing experience with 7 years working for Fortune 100 companies, 8 years as executive director of a non-profit and, since the summer of 2009, as a strategic business development consultant.  www.linkedin.com/in/jamessnider