18 February 2011

#IMCchat


Every Wednesday evening (7 p.m. Central Time in the U.S.) there is an hour of chat on Twitter about Integrated Marketing Communications. The moderators pose a question or topic for discussion and industry professionals give their points of view. You can follow it via the hashtag #IMCchat.

Better still, you can participate. It’s an open forum. On Wednesday I commuted home via train during that hour and spent the time on my smartphone taking part in #IMCchat. You can read the transcript here.

Forums like this can expand your horizons. One example this week was a familiar topic, consumer insight, being discussed in ways I hadn’t considered, from the point of view of PR experts and freelance writers.

Another good line of discussion centered on Six Sigma, the manufacturing efficiency process. I was interested because my agency has used its principles for project management in highly complex situations. The discussion explored whether Six Sigma is a way for manufacturing to be more consumer-centric.

I find in these discussions that fresh points of view challenge my own assumptions, and I wind up contributing to the conversation in ways I might not have before. That’s part of the process of self-improvement we all must undertake in the marketing business today. It’s not enough to do a better job at what we know, but to do a better job learning about things we don’t know.