3 marketing topics to school yourself on this fall.

Labor Day marks the second start of a new year, an opportunity, as with the one in January, for a fresh start and self-improvement. As marketers, it’s a good time to take stock of what we don’t know, in order to stay on top of the latest innovations in accountability, effectiveness, and customer satisfaction.

Social media. It may seem obvious, but the proliferation of platforms, broad use of them for customer interaction, and still-experimental state of the industry can result in huge opportunities for you or colossal blunders. Study up to learn from past mistakes and to prevent your own.

Content marketing. Understanding the changes in creating intelligent dialogue with customers is a larger change in the marketing landscape in the past several years than even social media, which has merely accelerated the process. Marketing as a provider not only of information but also of unbiased value is a sea-change and must understood to be properly executed.

Mobile marketing. There are more mobile internet users online than desktop users. Understanding the needs of the mobile user goes beyond device compatibility. Get ahead of your competition because companies that do not adapt to mobile will suffer the same fate of the latecomers to the internet in the 90s.

There are many others, including marketing automation, search engine optimization (Google makes sure you are out of date almost monthly), and alignment of social and search. 

What others are you studying up on?

Zeitgeist 2008

Cover via AmazonI'm currently halfway through the book Click (the one by Bill Tancer, not Nick Hornby); full title Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters. Tancer, who runs the research effort at online market research firm Hitwise, analyzes search patterns from search engine data and addresses the often surprising results and challenges us about what we've believed about the psychology of consumers. So when Google printed this "Google Zeitgeist" for 2008 – snack food for stat brats such as myself – I had to look to see for myself what Bill Tancer spends his day analyzing.

Interesting is the country-by-country breakdown of top 10 search terms and the "How to" list. #2? "How to kiss."

Some lonely gamers out there, still.

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