Geek Marketing

This morning, I listened to the "Blick über den Tellerrand" podcast, where Alex Wunschel gives us his thoughts and findings on the "Blogosphere, Podosphere, Web x.0 and User/Corporate-generated Knicknack". In one of his latest episodes, he interviewed Steve Rubel.

Steve Rubel is a PR expert and author of one of the most read blogs called "Micropersuasion". In one of his articles, published through his employer Edelman Digital, he lists nine digital trends for the future. One of the trends that caught my attention is "Geek Marketing".

In a blog post, he further explains the concept: Technology is moving so fast, that marketing divisions are increasingly hiring geeks to help them understand developments in IT better. A geek marketer therefore is a link between technology and marketing people.

Cool. That's what I've been doing over the last year or so. I just didn't know there was a name for it!

At Sun, we have a lot of geeks (they're mostly called "SEs" or "System Engineers") and we don't have much marketing (we'd rather spend the money on creating cool technology such as ZFS, UltraSPARC T2 or project Blackbox to name a few). But those few marketers we have, are really at the edge of the digital age. Starting from our long history of employee blogs, through our presence on Second Life to the Systemhelden.com portal (with the HELDENFunk podcast) - Our marketing people know what's hot and cool in the digital world, and how to engage the Sun geek communities to help them make cool stuff happen.

This fits very well with the book I'm currently reading: Dan Pink "A Whole New Mind". In this book, Pink argues that the virtues of the left half of the brain (typically associated with logical thinking) are not enough for today's global and networked world, in which left-brain work is increasingly outsourced to Asia and other emerging countries. In other words: If you want to keep your job, you better start thinking about your right half of your brain.

Right-brain work is quite interesting. Pink introduces six new aptitudes: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, Meaning are senses that complement the Information Age worker's logical skills and help him be successful in the new "Conceptual Age".

So, without knowing, by participating in all this video, podcasting, blogging and Web 2.0 stuff, studying better ways of doing presentations and gaming on a Wii, DS or a Playstation, we're actually training the right half of our brains.

Who knew work could actually be that much fun?

Edit:

Added a link to the actual Tellerrand episode. Bummer!

P.S.: The photo shows me in front of a lot of technology. I find this quite fitting the geek theme. The technology is actually a nuclear fusion reactor in Garching. Yes, the kind of stuff you see in superhero movies right before someone gets a new superpower. Didn't seem to work on me, though.

"Geek Marketing" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-05-20 14:10:28.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
geek marketing podcasting web2.0
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Posted by marketing on May 21, 2008 at 07:48 AM CEST #