What skills marketers should possess in this ever changing digital era?

I had an opportunity to attend an innovative social media management platform launch event. This so-called “social media management tool for dummies” was designed for SMB business owners who have little social media management experiences and/or resident skills. The powerful tool will solve all headaches in the process of managing social media. What impressed me the most was that it can provide easy to follow action plans to improve the effectiveness of all social media channels based on backend complicated big data analysis. With the rapid development of new technology and maturity of big data analysis, I started to contemplate as to what skills, marketers should possess in this ever changing digital era.

Oliver Emberton described a human’s brain likened to a beach volleyball which contains numerous bees flying to all directions. Marketers today are overwhelmed in various online and offline campaigns and pull out their hair to figure out best practices and actionable plans to achieve demanding business goals embedded in an environment of substantial data and reports. In my opinion, focus is one of the most important skills marketers should possess. Oliver created a formula that illustrates the correlation between your achievement and your direction.

Your achievement = your potential/your directions ²

Focus/concentration is taking our mind off many things and putting it on one thing at a time.  One of the tips to control our mind according to Oliver is to take notes when we don’t really need to. For example, when we read books, taking notes would make our mind to focus on the content of what we read.

The second most important skill that marketers should have is creativity. When a reporter asked Albert Einstein do you remember the speed of sound in air. Einstein said that he needed to look for the information because he would never remember things that could be easily found via a simple search. Problem solving relies on the ability to think and creativity is much more significant than knowledge itself.

Michael Michalko, one of the highly acclaimed creative experts in the world

provided 7 ways to think creatively. Let’s take the following scenario as an example to explain his creative method:

May has a dog whose left eye is blind.

1. Think from a different angle - I am a dog whose left eye is blind. My master is Mary.
2. Visualize our thoughts - Mary always feeds her dog from the right side because her dog’s left eye is blind.
3. Practice the thoughts and learn from the process - Mary is sitting on a chair. Her dog tries to jump on her laps using its right side of the body because its left eye is blind.
4. Integrate different things together - Some of Mary’s friends seldom visit her because they are afraid of her dog whose left eye is blind.
5. Form some never happened relationship - Mary once took her dog to visit Jack and found out that Jack’s cat’s left eye is also blind, just like her dog.
6. Think reversely - if Mary’s dog’s left eye has no problem, Mary won’t need to spend a lot of time to take special care of the dog.
7. Think abstractly - When people face politics, they are like Mary’s dog. One eye can see, but the other eye is always blind.