Blog Republic

Marketing’s Magic T Method

by Darren

There’s an interesting post by Steve Rubel concerning The Magic T Method of Marketing. The concept can be summed up by one paragraph in the post:

Ok, my example is hoky for sure. But you get the idea. Use the mainstream media to build reach and social media to build engagement with a narrow subset of the larger audience.

Fine idea, but where did Google fit in here? They never used the mainstream media at all (or paid them I should say) and they’re the greatest success story of recent years. All of their customer growth came from their “engaging” users.

Most of the successful websites, in fact, grew mostly organically from web traffic. For sure a company who can pay big bucks to advertise extensively offline is an entity that can probably build a huge online readership, but engaging these readers requires web development and usability even more than it requires marketing skills.

But Steve Rubel is right about this much: marketers have to develop skill sets beyond the traditional ones they’ve been using. Although much of the game has stayed the same, technology is advancing rapidly enough that you have to stay on top of any new developments.