What is Digital Marketing?

Lesson Learnt from Digital Marketing Expert with The Most Fabulous Hair that I’ve Ever Seen

People are crazy about digital marketing. I remember when I was working,  my boss was sort of obsessed with digital marketing. He was spending billion dollars to pay so called ‘famous digital marketing agency’ in my country just to manage our Twitter and Facebook page. There is also significant growth in academic perspective. From what I observed almost every reputable college put Digital Marketing as their curriculum. But we forgot, the most fundamental thing: what actually is digital marketing?

I asked my relatives about how do you define digital marketing and everyone have their answers

1. My sister said digital marketing is how you can get as many as followers as possible, how you can get how many likes, and how many post/tweet you generated.
2. My colleague who served as Digital Marketing Manager is his company told me that he’s basically doing activities on how to leverage digital platform to engage with their customers and generate revenue.
3. My Parent said digital marketing is how She can buy something at very minimum price

See everyone have their own versions!

Nothing’s wrong with all above the answer. But what we can drew from above definition digital marketing is complicated. It’s not like Math, Grammar or Chemistry who has the exact correct answers.

For me, Digital marketing is ART.

Just like pieces of art, it requires mastery and intuition. It takes time to nail it and yeah, it’s expensive.  It let people have different interpretation and meaning. Imagine when you look at famous Davinci’s Mona Lisa painting, you may think that she was smiling but actually other  people  believe she was sad.

Same thing on digital marketing just because you believe it’s right doesn’t mean it’s always right

For example, in 2012 McD launched campaign #McDStories and paid million dollar to get Promoted Tweet. What company expect is that people will share good story about their products and or service. But it turns out backlash. In fact, people shared the horrible thing when they ate McD.

From above McD case, we can see who expect that million dollar of investment turns out to be wasted?

Anyway, I will be taking Digital Marketing course this Spring at NYU. Something that I have been waiting for. I hope that I can get the most out of it.

I’ll keep you posted.