Marketing, Road Trips and Hammers

So much has happened in the last 2 months. I launched a killer Twitter based fund raising campaign with the organization I work for Operation Smile. We flew to San Francisco and threw a launch party and then promoted it at TWTRCON, the first Twitter for business conference.

It was so amazing meeting the various personalities and marketing professionals who, like myself are trying to harness Twitter and (for the most part) use it's powers for good. It was also refreshing to discover that one can be valued for their ideas and ability to develop unique and dynamic strategy even while they may lack the technical mastery to fully implement. I was told an analogy of marketing days gone by when websites first arrived and it wasn't up to the strategist or marketing manager to write the code for the site but it was up to them to make it look great and produce.

AHHHHH sigh of relief. Because frankly these web tools are so vast and while I am working hard to master them and reading the masters to do so (you know who you are because you get my dm's and @'s)i sometimes get caught up in the tools and forget that i am skilled at the plans. My husband had yet another great analogy as I fretted in the car on a roadtrip en route to Bonnaroo at my lack of ability to get my apps to work on my Blackberry.

He said-every man has a tool set in their house somewhere, a hammer, a saw some sand paper. But do many of them have the forethought, creativity and drive to use those tools to really create something amazing like a piece of furniture or art?

WOW. pretty heavy stuff. I used to use the pencil and paper analogy but in the tech world this is even more illustrative. (the pencil analogy if you haven't heard me ramble about art is that you can give 50 people a pencil and paper and ask them to do something with it and the artist or creative thinker will create something magical while the others will right their name or play tic tac toe).

So for the rest of the road trip I contemplated the tools I needed to master, read my Seth Godin and Clay Shirky like a good little web marketer and felt excited about the evolution of my marketing and creative mind.

So we've arrived in lovely Manchester Tennessee where we are surrounded by what I can only dub "Faux Hippies". I just woke and started reading my morning blogs, still reeling from my road trip of web marketing exploration and home read this incredible blog post from Mark Olson which seems to echo many of the themes I was contemplating yesterday. "Groovy man"

I am so inspired and excited about this paradigm shift, where finally innovation and passion have equal places in the tool box as experience and technical skill. The constantly evolving and revolving nature of the tools we are using evens the playing field a bit as we're all learning them together.

So I guess for the duration of this "Social Media Strategy" road trip I'm on, I'll make sure I subscribe to the right RSS feeds, maintain a steady watch on the tool makers, keep an open mind and then continue to figure out more creative and incredible ways to use my hammer...