I had this very interesting conversation with a client of mine last week on companies, people and digital mindset. I was not very clear on how to define this digital mindset, because it could be anything is it technology, or understanding consumer or is it just a way of working in this digital age. After a lot of digging around online for articles written by the intellectuals, I think there are 3 things that define having THAT digital mindset:
1. Data, Data and Data
My view is that people in marketing teams, are actually afraid of this mindset because of Data. Because now everything you do as a person or team can be measured, and that means its about measuring yourself against hard data. I feel a digital mindset is when we get rigorous with this aspect. Unlike analog days, when every data point needs time and power to get, Today data is so much more freely available that its just about the process of being creative in using this data. Every person in the company needs to know the dataset that they need to track and that data set will define their job, be it HR or Marketing or Sales. The dashboards will then make it easier for them to basically do everything that they need to go through their work.
2. Experiment, Fail and Learn
The digital mindset means to experiment and fail faster if you have to. In the digital age, we cannot survive without trying and failing. One of the key problems in the old form of marketing, is that teams spend so much of time developing one campaign which may run for 2-3 yrs, and organisation is dead by the time they understand that data is not on their side in the sales sheets. The digital mindset needs you to keep experimenting, needs you to not work on whims of people and teams, but research with live data be it social or FGD’s. For this, everyone in business needs to be taught digital ways of working be it running those quick surveys for decision making, or collaborating using basecamp. Failing is nothing new in the valley, and that needs to resonate in how you work everyday when you can fail, measure and then move fast to do the right thing, because you might never know when you become the next blackberry read How they blew it .
3. Think Technology and don’t rely on IT teams
I think the guys who really do not have the digital mindset are sitting in the IT teams, because they make it more difficult for people to be digital in large enterprises. They block accesses to tools, they think cloud is not secure, they feel the new age is actually taking away powers from them when every data point request needed a ticket to be raised by the business team :). The mindset of being digital requires a person to not limit one to all this crap and ensure that they know technology and atleast try to understand the basics so you dont need to rely on someone to process a report for you.
So the question for us now is, if everyone does this what does a digital marketing and business person do then? I think what they do will get more specific and they become the growth hackers :).
The Digital Age 