Originally I felt that the previous short profile page was sufficient information for its purpose. However, given that I rail against non-marketers in digital marketing, that limited page left me open to accusations of being a hypocrite [yes, I have received some], so it’s only reasonable I present some evidence on my behalf.
I have been described as both an expert and guru in Digital Marketing. However, that would be the opinion of others, not mine. Because I learn new things about it every day, I consider myself more of a scholar of the subject than a master.
So why am I sometimes considered an expert in Digital Marketing?
Well, I've been involved in Internet-related marketing in practical, training, consultancy, advisory, research and academic roles since 1996 ... and I have written thirteen
books on the subject. So ...
expert, or just more experienced than most? A one-eyed man in a land of the blind perhaps?
But let's back track just a bit. If - and it is a big
if - I am any kind of expert in Digital Marketing it is because I am first a qualified [a first degree in Business Studies and a Master’s in Marketing] experienced marketer [predominantly in retail/service] ... and digital marketer second. Indeed, I was a qualified, experienced marketer before the Internet came along. If you take anything from this page, take this paragraph. I think the issue is that important.
Indeed, it is this marketing experience that is behind my actually questioning the value of
some aspects of digital marketing for
some
organizations. Actually, I'll go further: for some organizations 'digital' offers little or even nothing ... as a result I am something of an
anti-digital-marketing digital marketer.
From 2003 to 2020 I taught full-time in higher education, but I was a teacher rather than an academic. I do not, for example, have a string of academic papers to my name. Furthermore, my books are practical in nature. You'll find very [very] few citations to academic articles in any of them - but plenty of references to practitioners' work.
I also have a collection of books in the subject area that would be the envy of most university libraries. Some of those books are current, some date back to the 1990s. All were written by practitioners, not academics. The best are featured in my list of
digital marketing books that are worth a look. So extensive is my 'library' that it was not unknown for PhD students to travel significant distances to get access to them ... and yes, I get the irony of PhD students wanting to read the wisdom of mere practitioners.
It was in the period '96 to '99 that I got involved with this whole Internet/online/'e'/digital malarkey, working with [strictly speaking, I was a self-employed consultant] what was then a very small company - but one that grew to be much bigger. This was practical Internet marketing at the sharp end, learning - and making things up - about the new communications medium and its impact on business and society as we went along. For example, I know a lot about domain names simply because I advised [and still do] so many organizations on what name to register and I know the basics of search engine optimization because I spent hours trying to get a domain name registration website to the top of the likes of Hotbot, Excite, Alta Vista, WebCrawler, Lycos, Infoseek, MetaCrawler and Yahoo! before the mighty Google came along.
Also during that period I spent a lot of time [oh yes, a lot of time] in front of Business Clubs, Chambers of Commerce, industry bodies, management forums, in-house company seminars and the like 'preaching' about Internet technology and how organizations must be ready for its coming - and then later, how to best match the potential of that technology with the needs of the organization and its customers. To put this into perspective for younger readers - I was telling businesses they should start to use email for communications.
Returning to the teaching side of things [I was part time from 1996-2003]: in 2000, the Computing School of the university at which I worked launched - what I think was - one of the UK's first Post Graduate Degrees in 'e-commerce'. Naturally, this was a computer science programme, but the research unit in which I worked - the Centre for Electronic Commerce [CEC] - was attached to that School ... and so I was invited to develop and deliver what I'm pretty sure was one of the UK's first business modules that addressed the various elements of e-commerce/e-business. The module -
Leading Edge Applications in e-Commerce - went on to be an option on 'Business' PG programmes [again, pretty much a first in the UK] as well as being delivered as a distance learning module - via the Internet, naturally ... another first?
At this point, it is worth mentioning - no,
emphasizing
- that I am
not
a computer scientist. I am actually bordering on being computer illiterate. Back in the day I used to deliver a talk called 'is that the on switch?' to stress that although I was introduced on to the stage as 'an Internet expert', I knew nothing about how computers work. Since 1996 to whenever my last class/presentation/talk was, I have made the point that I know how to use the Internet/digital technology for business and marketing purposes - not how write the coding to make the software work.
For more on my issues with computer scientists [I use the term techies], take a glance at my musing
what is it with me and IT? and another issue closely related to it ... that we have a problem with
non-marketers in digital marketing.
I have done more 'consultancy' than I care to recall. This has been mainly as a consultant [i.e. my own business], but also some of the work with the CEC was advising businesses - but in the capacity of an employee of the university. Recently, in answer to a question raised by an event organizer for some publicity material, I did calculate [guess :-) ] that the number of
consultancies
I had performed was more than 5,000 but less than 10,000. These could be anything from an informal chat offering advice to a one-person start-up, through website usability testing [a kind of online mystery shopper] to
creative negativity [a client's term, not mine] analysis for global brands and corporations. Indeed, I now seem to spend more time telling folk what
not
to do rather than what to do or how to do it. I am now in the fortunate position of being able to pick and choose what I do ... so the numbers have dipped in recent years from daily to weekly involvement - though my association with a number of online retailers sometimes requires more frequent action.
Similarly, I seem to have done more training than you could shake the proverbial stick at. This ranges from – in the early days – how to use email
professionally
[25 years later, some organizations could still benefit from this :-) ] through to the likes of developing website content and effective marketing applications of social media platforms [spoiler: there aren’t many]. Some of this has been on organized courses with individuals and SMEs, and some of it in-house training with managers and employees of brands recognised around the world. It's also worth reminding readers that my day job was teaching this stuff just about every week of the year - and my classes were all about application rather than pontificating over this theory or that. Whisper it, but I tended to stray towards the training end of the teaching spectrum rather than full-blown academic rigor. That my best selling 'text'
book used in those classes is actually presented as being useful as a 'self-help' book reinforces this notion.