Outsourcing isn’t just for IT anymore…

This afternoon a few of us had the opportunity to hear William Hurley speak in Austin about Social Media Marketing. He had a very unique presentation style and his thoughts on crowdsourcing were quite notable. What struck me as odd about the conversation had nothing to do with the presenter, but more about the attendees. In a crowd of maybe 50 people it appeared that at least 12 had a question or a hand raised at a given time. As these people began to ask questions – I could tell they were intelligent, quite intelligent in fact, they just didn’t have anyone internally to bounce ideas off of, so this forum of sorts was a roundtable for them. Some of the questions asked seemed to divulge some of the secret ‘sauce’ that I thought marketing groups liked to keep under wraps, while some of the other questions posed a naiveté that you would hope someone heading up your marketing efforts wouldn’t have.

In-house marketing is not much of a given any more these days, with companys outsourcing marketing along with IT, Human Resources, Finance and Administration functions. For the participants at today’s seminar it appeared that working in-house kept them away from other people who worked in the online marketing trenches, and made it a best practice to keep with the latest happenings in the search marketing space. In-house staff are often generalists, and if they were once well-versed in Pay Per Click, Email Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and/or Social Media how do they stay up-to-date? Who do they ask questions? And what support do they have?

There are many advantages I receive from working here at Leverage Marketing and one of them is the people I get to speak with everyday and bounce questions and ideas off of. Another advantage I see is that we have the opportunity to go to a variety of training events and our customers marketing efforts don’t falter – because we have the staff to account for trainings, vacations and the unforeseen swine flu occurrence.