The QASymphony team at our first user conference
Today I celebrate my one year anniversary at QASymphony. Time flies when you’re having fun. And it really has been fun. Challenging but fun. Joining a startup was a big move for me.
Since I graduated college in the mid-90s, I had always worked for or with big enterprises. When I was an “adman”, my clients were P&G, GlaxoSmithKline and Volvo. Then when I went client-side, I worked for AutoTrader which was a $1 billion company and PGi which was a $550 million public company.
But, I was always lucky in my career that I didn’t have the traditional “big company-type” jobs. Ad agencies are very entrepreneurial environments even when you’re working with big corporate clients. And both of my client-side jobs often felt like I was working at a startup. Except I had pretty big budgets to play with.
And I was always happiest at work when I was building things. Whether it was a new marketing program or team, that’s what really got me excited about coming to work every day.
So, when this opportunity came up at QASymphony, I jumped at it. I walked away from a stable position at a big company where I managed a 25 person team to an early stage startup where I managed 2 people. But, I haven’t regretted it for one second. In fact, this has probably been one of the most exciting and fulfilling times in my entire career.
In the past, the role of a marketer was much simpler. Marketers would work in the comfortable silo of the marketing department. We didn’t have to spend much time interacting with other “less-important” departments because we were the kings of the castle. The builders of the brand. The generators of leads. Life was good.
Wow, have things changed. Today, the role of a marketer is increasingly complex, requiring more cross-functional collaboration than ever before.
The concept of building a brand has shifted to “managing the customer experience”. And that experience goes way beyond just a single TV ad. It touches departments across the company that marketing may have never had to deal with in the past.
I was watching an old Jeff Foxworthy stand up comedy show and he does a great bit about the reasons “you might be a redneck”. A few examples:
If you think “loading the dishwasher” means getting your wife drunk, you might be a redneck.
If you ever cut your grass and found a car, you might be a redneck.
If you own a home that is mobile and 5 cars that aren’t, you might be a redneck.
I thought it might be funny to swap out “redneck” and replace it with “digital marketer”. So, here’s my list of the 18 reasons you might be a digital marketer:
1. If you’re a guy and you wear jeans and a blazer every day, you might be a digital marketer.
Here’s a nice blog post by ascendixre who talks about my recent presentation at the Dallas Digital Marketing Summit from December 2014. Great to see people taking content from these conferences and applying them to their jobs.
Here’s a tough question to ask yourself: Are you the right “fit” for your company?
If the answer is yes, my guess is that you’re probably pretty happy at your job. But, if the answer is “not sure” or “no”, you’re probably very unhappy, even if you work for a great company.
single-minded proposition 
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