Everywhere in meeting rooms across the country, agencies, marketing groups and C-levels are talking up the need for their companies to "go digital" or "get digital" and in some places "be post-digital." Plans are hatched to hire more talent, to infuse the enterprise with a new culture, to become social and to follow the shift consumers have already undertaken. Campaigns are launched, offices are moved and everyone can sit back and pat each other on the back. Right?
Wrong.
Here's one of the reason's marketers are in such a frenzy. This is from Mary Meeker's great presentation on Internet Trends.
People have shifted their time to digital, but marketers have not. It's the combined fault of slow shifting agencies and even slower shifting marketing departments.
During the last two years almost everyone has jumped, or talked about jumping, on the social media bandwagon as a key digital initiative, for example. They look at Facebook's growing influence as proof that they should act.
But starting a Facebook page is cheap. Imbuing a social media culture in your company is hard.
The same Morgan Stanley report shows the how handheld computing devices (smart phones and tablet devices) will outsell desktops and laptop computers as early as 2012.
But naming someone as Chief Experience Officer is cheap. Imbuing a two-way, handheld, digital culture in your company is extremely hard.
I'm hope all this talk is necessary to get where we need to go. But I wonder, sometimes, if it's more of a smoke screen for not taking the hard steps needed to move forward. Words are free, but actions, budgets and change are not.