Wednesday, April 15, 2009

I need new skills. You do too.

Even though I run my own company I feel I still must answer to my employees, clients and colleagues. Everyone is counting on me to keep up with what is new in communications, advertising and specifically direct response marketing. A ton of pressure right? Yes and no.

I realize there is no way for me to be the most knowledgeable about all the new developments and things that are on the marketplace. But I do strive to know enough to be able to discuss what’s going on with those that know more than me (there are a lot of these people).

Engaging smart people in conversation is easier than you might think – social networks, twitter queries all enable me to find a little just about anyone - unless they mask their identity or choose not to engage. Even then you can find things out about people.

So I have developed new skills - blogging, reading social media data, trying to help clients realize where they should be engaged in both new and old media which requires me to know more things about new and old media. I don’t know how to write HTML code or any code for that matter but would be interested in at least better understanding the difficulties and complexity – after all our company has developers that do these things but they remain sort of a holy grail to me since I just have no clue.

What I know most of all is that I will continue to have to learn new things. This results in reading about the same thing in multiple places (the internet is the home of the derivative article and viewpoint) which is a total waste of time. The internet is also a great place to waste a lot of time.

You can never be tired of learning new things. You can be tired and not feel like it sometimes. But you, like me, need new skills. Skills you will need tomorrow and beyond. Why not start today?