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In order to prosper in the digital world, a marketer must be able to do many things other than write brochure copy, close a sale, and provide caring customer service. These five activities also apply to meeting the course objectives.
Manage Digital Information Just as we all have our own way of organizing our desks and drawers, so we have our own way of organizing our PCs. That's what the P part is all about. To do well in this course, you need a way to organize and move digital files on and between all your computers -- whether at school, work, or home, whether desktop or laptop. Also, back up your work frequently. I can't stress that enough so I'll just repeat it: make regular and frequent back-ups of all your work. Please note potential compatibility problems: operating systems, file formats, software applications, and disk sizes. Think through the logistics in your personal situation and let me know if you foresee any problems. There's no one right way to manage digital assets. For most of us, the premium is on speed. How little time do we have to spend rooting through our directory structure or searching for the correct file or working around the incompatibility of proprietary file formats? If you think you're spending too much time,
Explore and Discover We use bits for things we already did well with atoms before we got on-line. For example, email can replace snailmail. We can repurpose marketing brochures to the Web. We can digitize old media to make presentations and digital movies. We use networked bits -- hypertext, hypermedia -- for things we didn't do well before. Research is comprehensive, quick, and very cheap. Entertainment is interactive. Marketing is glitzy. Contact with your professors is quick and convenient. I want you to focus on using new media, not just digitized old media, to do things you hadn't even thought of doing before you got on-line. Broadly speaking, how can you use the many-to-many medium of the Web to build community and market goods and services? The dreaming part is easy. The hard part is making decisions. What can be done?
Tolerate Ambiguity Listen to my students:
Whew! This course is not the kind where there's one right answer to every question. In fact, for a lot of questions in marketing and new media, there are no right answers ... just like real life. With an MBA, you will be expected to both lead and follow under such conditions.
Think Big Transcend your and your organization's concrete situation into an intelligent awareness of broader, often abstract, contexts. A good test is the ease with which you can draw valid inferences from articles in the news. For example, do you understand why the Justice Department is so upset with Microsoft for bundling the Internet Explorer browser? Do you understand how the DOJ's pursuit of Microsoft affects your ability to send email to your boss? Your big thinking helps us hand out the plaques. In second grade, it was a gold star on your forehead. In real life, big thinking helps the boss distinguish who gets promoted. Much of this course will help you see the big-picture trends and forces that are shaping a big shift in marketing.
Assess Yourself
Do not assess the course or the instructors or your classmates or the Web site. Assess yourself. Keep track of your process and your progress.
After you have completed all the other work for this course, use this journal to write a more formal self-assessment, which you must hand in before we will give you a final grade. That self-assessment should in great detail tell us about your progress toward the objectives. It should also tell me in even greater detail what you learned that's not on that list of objectives. Perhaps it should be on that list? Toolkit Software Competencies The speed of innovation is breathtaking. It was only four years ago that the first Web browser, Mosaic, was avaiable for free download from the University of Illinois. Now your Web browser is the door to the biggest collection of information ever. The number of features is mindboggling. You'll never use most of them. The convergence is bewildering. Front Page is so much like Word that you have to assume they'll become one program very soon. With digital TV on the way, NBC will not long survive if it thinks it's in the broadcast business. Okay, you'll never know everything about everything. You'll
never know everything about one thing. You will, at best, know something about some
things. So you have to pick and choose. As of spring 1998, you need a raft of software skills to market with new media. We've grouped them by categories so you can better isolate your options and keep up with the changes that that make specific toolbar-and-menu skills obsolete. As soon as you learn them, you start to realize what else you have to learn. This list stops well short of the P-word (programming, ex: C++, Visual Basic) and just short of scripting (ex: Perl, JavaScript). It assumes a point-and-click interface to avoid geeky command-line stuff like UNIX. However, your usefulness as a marketer rises dramatically if you can program, script, and speak a little Geek. It's very similar to English, so give it a try! If you are competent with all of this software, you will be an asset in any new media development project.
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