I don’t think I am alone in being someone who has (or at least thinks they have) difficulty in connecting with new people and making new friends.  I know that, in my own experience, it’s one thing to meet someone and have a conversation at a party or event or some such, but it’s another to keep that connection going afterward.

Difficult but not impossible and often very much worth it.

As an example… I had the good fortune to be introduced to Aaron Reynolds during Fan Expo Canada here in Toronto a couple of years ago.  Aaron is the cartoonist behind the social media sensation Effin’ Birds and has a wealth of information and experience with marketing creative content not too dissimilar from my own.

Aaron and I chat regularly (humble brag) and he’s been incredibly giving of his time and wisdom as I try to build an audience for my comics and podcast online.  I even had him as a guest on that aforementioned podcast, the Handsome Genius Club Radio Show, for a very entertaining and informative conversation about the ups and downs of building your own brand.

Mutual friends and shared interests are a great inroad to starting a new friendship.  And finding someone who gets your most obscure pop culture references is priceless.  But over the past seven months, I’ve been on a different journey with a very new set of people.

Coming back to college, after thirty years away from school, to study digital marketing, I’ve been on a mission to become a social media manager.  It’s been a daunting task and not one to be taken on alone.  Marketing is largely about reaching out to people.  Obtaining information and delivering messages.  And finding work in marketing… in any job, really… is about fine tuning yourself as a product and selling that product to a prospective employer. Again, not a task to be taken on single-handed.

Luckily, fate took a hand and in my very first class on my very first day, I was assigned to a work group with Sydonnae Simon and Kenix Po.  Sydonnae and Kenix have become good friends and excellent project partners.  I’ve had excellent teachers across the board, but with my personal focus on content creation and social media, I’ve again, been lucky to have teachers like Rochelle Latinsky and Kyle Ashley who have made it easy to come to them for advice on both current projects and where I’m going in the future.

In addition, joining LinkedIn has and will keep me in contact with the students, teachers and lecturers that to whom we’ve all been introduced.  And those kind of connections can prove both personally fulfilling and professionally rewarding.  Sharing these blogs with one another on sites like LinkedIn is just one example of how to foster those relationships.  Maybe I will say something herein that entertains my contacts or sparks joy or grants them some measure of my vast wisdom.  And maybe their blogs will do the same for me.  And if we share each other’s blogs with others, maybe that entertainment and joy and wisdom will spread and new connections will form.  

I am currently in the process of searching for my third semester co-op placement.  Sifting through job listings on the George Brown College Careers site and on indeed.ca and Google and directly with some of the companies that have personally recommended to me.  As nerve-wracking as it is, it’s been made at least a little easier by having friends to share the experience and to help vet each other’s opportunities.

The internship I most have my heart set on (we all have one of those, don’t we?) was something discovered during a group mosey through Indeed.  And it is, coincidentally, the workplace of a dear friend, who has kindly written me a letter of recommendation.  I’ve also applied to internship with a professional basketball team in a league for whom my brother is the lead play-by-play announcer.  And for the corporation for whom I currently host discussion panels at a handful of their live events.

In other words, there have been people on the inside or adjacent to some of the best opportunities I have seen.  A hive mind to help with information and best practices when contacting the company.  People who, with any luck, know who’s who and can “put in the good word” on my behalf.

When it comes to making friends and fostering relationships, it really is something you have to want to do.  You have to want to take the chance and extend yourself.  Don’t force it.  Be inspired to learn more about someone and from them, as well.  But most important of all, when you have the chance to meet someone like an Aaron Reynolds or an Adi Montas or a Cathy McKnight and they have knowledge or wisdom or experience that you are interested in gaining for yourself, don’t be afraid to say hello.  Ask them your question.

If you are polite and sincere, most people will be willing to give you some small measure of their time to discuss their passion with you.

And, hey… you may actually make a friend.

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“What is strategy?”

“What does a Digital Marketing Strategist do?”

“Does a career as a Digital Strategist appeal to you?”

In her own words, Jennifer defined strategy as being about “answering questions and providing direction and evaluating things from different viewpoints”. As, “looking at [a project] from the customer’s point of view. [What] do we need to accomplish and what creates that right experience.”

American business management guru Patrick Lencioni lends cogent wording to an age-old analogy when he says “If you could get all the people in the organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.” And as much as it personally pains me to quote anyone who consistently donates money to Republican political campaigns, Lencioni is right.

I have often told people myself that life works best when you set a goal and work towards it. For me that has included wrangling professional wrestlers to stage live events and recruiting art teams to create graphic novels.

Jennifer gave the example from her own recent career of a client asking for a series of websites to be built and, without input from a strategist, the creative and tech teams went about building the sites. When the client returned and saw the work, their reaction was to ask what the decision making process for the sites had been. A lot of time, energy and money had been spent to create websites that no direction.

And hence, rowing in the same direction. Much like the coxswain, facing forward and steering the boat while the rowers face him or her as they set the crew’s pace, the creative and tech teams at an agency benefit from the guidance of the strategist, giving the project, and their efforts, direction. Setting a goal and working towards it with everyone involved on the same page… rowing in the same direction.

We get little tastes of this in our group project work: Each of us bringing our ideas to the table and discussing them before, hopefully, deciding on one course of action and divvying up the workload. But in a “real world” environment, with hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of dollars being invested and possibly dozens of people working on a project, the need for a strategist becomes more and more clear.

Someone needs to take the rudder (to continue the rowing team analogy). Someone needs to set the pace and watch over the team members to keep the boat moving efficiently towards the finish line.

Does this appeal to me, career-wise?

Yes. Yes it does.

But for now, taking my first steps into a marketing career, I need and am eager to put my book learnin’ into practice and gain the kind of experience in that aforementioned real world that I believe it would take to be an effective strategist.

CITATIONS

Lencioni, Patrick. “If You Could Get All the People in the Organization Rowing in the Same Direction, You Could Dominate Any Industry, in Any Market, against Any Competition, at Any Time.” Twitter. Twitter, December 4, 2019. https://twitter.com/patricklencioni/status/1202282969458565120?lang=en.

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Oh, how I long for those simple days of clearing your browser history before anyone came home to feel safe.

Privacy is a much more complex minefield to traverse, lo, these many years later.  With so many governments, businesses and private persons, all trying to gather and sort every byte of personal data they can scrape from the internet and the world at large, in order to gain a competitive advantage in whatever their field of endeavour may be, the individual desire to not constantly be surveilled… to keep secret that which we wish to have kept secret… to not just be another column on someone else’s spreadsheet… grows.

Dr. Ann Cavoukian, before, during and after her time as a consultant for Sidewalk Labs (a company owned by Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet), expressed concerns that the plans for a Toronto smart city would violate various tenets of her Privacy By Design Framework.

Sidewalk initially acknowledged the notion of being proactive not reactive to privacy concerns, the first point of the PBD Framework.  This much is inherent in the company’s hiring of Cavoukian, the former Privacy Commissioner of Ontario.  But, they then fall short in almost every other measure.  

This is particularly true in regards to the second and third elements of the Privacy By Design Framework: making privacy the default setting and embedding privacy in the design. 

Cavoukian called for Sidewalk Labs to automatically strip all data collected in the proposed 12-acre complex of any personal identifiers.  Dr. Cavoukian posits that anyone entering the smart city space should be able to do so without having to take any specific additional action to protect their privacy.  Sidewalk punted on these notions by saying that it could not police what other companies or partner businesses did with their copies of the collected data.  Instead of insisting that to any corporate partners agree to de-identify all information upon collection and before use, Sidewalk absolved it self of the responsibility by suggesting there needed to be an independent body to set privacy rules for the development. (Wong, 2018)

Later, Cavoukian would learn that Sidewalk’s initial plans, even before it partnered with Waterfront Toronto, included utilizing the smart city infrastructure to track people’s movements. (Coop, 2019)  This would definitely violate the sixth and seventh tenets of the PBD Framework: Visibility and Transparency and Respect for User Privacy.

By publicly partnering with Sidewalk Labs on the Quayside project, as it did in 2019 (Smith, 2019), George Brown College opened itself up to potential future damage to its reputation should data from the smart city be found to be misused or abused.  A loss of trust in the college could have damaged its ability to attract both the new students and business partners crucial to its operation.

I believe that the May 2020 decision to walk away from Quayside was made far less in the shadow of the then-growing coronavirus pandemic and more in the face of the criticism the project was receiving from influential names in the investment and tech worlds and pushback from Waterfront Toronto, the inter-governmental agency working on the project, to aspects of Sidewalk’s proposal. (Cecco, 2020)

Short of trapping oneself inside a Faraday cage, there is little that we can do in 2022 to avoid being a part of the informational ecosphere.  I am personally grateful that there are people like Ann Cavoukian dedicated to and advocating for our privacy.

References

Cavoukian , A. (10 May 2015). Privacy by Design The 7 Foundational Principles. Toronto; Ryerson University.

CBC. (2020). I resigned in protest from Sidewalk Labs’ ‘smart city’ project over privacy concerns. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t12UqYl5SA.

Cecco, L. (7 May 2020). Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs abruptly abandons Toronto smart city project.  The Guardian UK.  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/07/google-sidewalk-labs-toronto-smart-city-abandoned

Coop, A. (31 October 2019). New deal with Sidewalk Labs a huge win, says Waterfront Toronto’s privacy consultant.  IT World Canada.  https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/new-deal-with-sidewalk-labs-a-huge-win-says-waterfront-torontos-privacy-consultant

Smith, B. (28 November 2019). Sidewalk Labs signs letter of intent to collaborate with George Brown College.  IT World Canada.  https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/sidewalk-labs-signs-letter-of-intent-to-collaborate-with-george-brown-college/424542

Wong, N. (5 November 2018). Sidewalk Labs urged to scrub ‘treasure trove’ of personal details from its Toronto smart city. Financial Post. https://financialpost.com/technology/google-urged-to-scrub-personal-details-from-toronto-digital-city

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Ms. Berryman spent 13 years in the private sector as a retail marketer before moving into the public sector and she spoke to us about the importance of continually upgrading our skills and being nimble to maintain relevance in the marketing field.  The ability to multi-task and to “take on new [and] additional responsibilities” on any given work day is just a fact of life for the modern marketer, so the job, as a whole, demands the constant acquiring of new information and methodology.

This would be no less important in the public sector than with a private company.  To my own way of thinking, a public sector marketing position could vastly increase the potential number of people possibly affected by the information you’re tasked with conveying.  Where you may have once been pushing a new shoe to young hikers, you may now be trying to inform the entire community amount the status of hiking trails.  Or of water safety.  Or road works.  Or community health initiatives.

Knowing the audience you are trying to communicate with, how best to reach them and how to get them to involved in your initiatives make for a goal with an ever-shifting finish line.  In terms of digital platforms, this means taking a more holistic approach to things.  Making sure that owned websites work properly for multiple devices and platforms, that information is easy to find and updated, that you stay up-to-date on social media platforms and knowing how and where to reach your intended audience and that everything you do is measurable so that both current and future campaigns can be optimized to ensure maximum engagement.

Caroline defined social marketing for us as an educational campaign that can influence positive behavioural changes, benefit individuals and communities and sell ideas rather than just products.

In a case study involving the reclamation of a vacant piece of land that has becoming a dumping site for some ne’er-do-wells with the creation of a new wildflower meadow.  The meadow, which would attract pollinating bees and butterflies in the York Region city of Richmond Hill, and the project to create it, would hopefully become a template for similar efforts across York Region. The class discussed multiple ideas for getting the community adjacent to the site involved in the project.  From recruiting volunteers and holding contests at the local schools to producing both leaflet and social media campaigns from the surrounding neighbourhood to community events at the site, we pondered what could be done efficiently and effective to educate and engage with the populace who will undoubtedly benefit from this green project.

The idea of communicating with an actual physical region (a town, a city, a province) to hopefully share information that will benefit them and their neighbours… information that keeps them safe or healthy or entertained or educated… that hopefully strengthens them as a community… is a very appealing one and, as this lecture clearly showed, no less creative,  challenging or personally fulfilling for being in the public rather than private sector.

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He explained that the digital marketer’s responsibilities are often confined to knowing the best placements for media and driving sales/conversions on one channel.  In contrast, performance marketing aims to take the entire customer experience into account.  From helping decide what products to feature in the campaign to mapping out the campaign on multiple channels to guiding the customer’s journey through the decision-making funnel to even ensuring that the products that appear in the company’s advertising are on display in the front window of the brock-and-mortar locations if and when the customer is persuaded to come and shop.

Throughout the ongoing pandemic, the value of a performance marketing mindset has only grown.  How do you lure customers into your physical store when gathering restrictions and public health warnings make those in-person visits a much rarer thing?  How do you make the online version of the consideration and buying process as easy or attractive as the in-person process?

Performance Marketers have a number of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) they can point to to evaluate the success of their infrastructure and campaigns.  Digital KPIs like Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) and Cost per New Client Acquired and overall KPIs such as gross or net sales will bear witness to the marketing team’s efforts at refining the marketing message, optimizing search engine optimization (SEO) and retargeting, and creating a full-service and user-friendly purchase process.

As someone who’s goal is a career in content creation, when I review what Mr Michel imparted about the “digital media journey” behind the scenes at Harry Rosen, my instinctual focus is on “developing digital-first creative”.  But, as Paul said, this is done collaboratively and its done best once the marketer has followed through the proceeding steps of the journey to learn about the company’s customers, be aware of ongoing macro-trends, develop a KPI strategy so that we will know if what we are doing is producing the desired results, and testing our creative ideas before nailing down a final strategy.  It’s also important that the journey does not end with crafting the creative but continues on to how it is deployed, how it is integrated into online and in-store selling and knowing what has worked and not worked to adjust the current campaign and influence future efforts.

This holistic view of the marketing process is a logical evolution of the industry.  It encourages complete and consistent messaging from the company to the customer.

A case study, based on the lecture, helped us understand this holistic view.  From defining who our marketing plan’s target customers would be, what they wanted and why, deciding what our goals would be and then crafting a message and deciding what media we would use to deliver it, we experience the start of our own media journey.  The case study also started the thought process of how to improve the online sales process, how to bolster the in-store experience for brick-and-mortar locations and how we would measure the success of our efforts.

And while what we were presented with is a sizeable increase in the breadth and width of what a full-time career in marketing could entail, it was also an eye-opening look at just how much is involved in guiding a property through a successful marketing campaign.

(featured image via Harry Rosen website)

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