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You Pick – Thought Leader vs. Practitioner
Holy cow! Clearly Thought Leader vs. Practitioner was quite the burning topic. But, it also seems like people are getting bogged down in names and favorites. You have your Brogan defenders and I have my Sharpie biases. Seriously and honestly, I’m obsessed with how Sharpie has integrated their brand into the social web.
So… let’s take away all the names. Let’s play in theory and thoughts 
with this scenario:
I’m a client/advertiser. I’m looking for someone to put together a complete Mobile Marketing program for my Brand (yep, I’m even taking social media marketing out of the mix). I bid out the project. The following two bids come back:
Bid #1 from Thought Leader A: Proposal is great. Theories, ideas are spot on. Thought Leader A even has an existing platform for me to use. But then, I ask for a client list. No relevant experience and/or clients. No understanding of how I house my customer data or my Point of Sale (POS) systems. Bottom line: Bid #1 has the ideas. It talks the talk. BUT, it’s never walked the walk.
Bid #2 from Practitioner B: Proposal is great. Theories, ideas are spot on and similar to Bid #1. Bid #2 has an existing platform as well. They also have similar industry experience AND they understand my POS system. In fact, they’ve linked to it for other projects, so they know some of the ins, outs and potential quirks. Bottom line: Bid #2 has the ideas AND the experience. It talks the talk AND can prove it’s walked a similar walk in the past.
If cost was the same, I’m choosing Bid #2 aka the Practitioner. Which bid would you choose? If you chose Bid #2 as well, why and how is this different from choosing a Social Media Marketing Practitioner vs. a Thought Leader?
Posted in Interactive Media, Marketing, Mobile, Social Media
Well, Microsoft agrees with #2 – they’re partnering with a company with a lot of HISTORY (Yahoo).
#1 is the Mark Zuckerberg approach: Let’s TRY this! … and if people like it, GREAT; if they don’t they’ll tell us (they said: “beacon sucks”; I think beacon was a great idea: http://gaggle.info/post/141/on-the-web-its-freedom-2-publishing-0 😉
I could post tons of quotes here about taking chances, having the guts to try something new, but actually doing so is very risky. Although during the Renaissance and the Reformation, many people were burned for disagreeing with the Pope, we primarily remember the few who survived and became heroes despite the Pope. Likewise: “business as usual” is far safer than working out of your garage. And there was an interesting note in Jeff Bezos’ youtube video from the past week: “Is that your mom? That’s not my mom….” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA
Fundamentally, I think the issue you’re talking about is trusting someone else’s expertise. This is something a friend and I have been discussing in a community podcast we started a couple weeks ago ( http://CastLine.ORG
— see especially http://www.blogtalkradio.com/domains/2009/06/19/TeleCast — we started it as a daily “open microphone” styled “podcast hotline” (that’s where the name comes from).
OK, now I’m rambling. But perhaps my main point is that TODAY, sticking with history might not be a good recipe, or else you might go down the same path as traditional publishing (complete demise). Likewise, I think that advertising model that worked for Google for a while (and which they actually adopted from earlier work by others to develop a PPC auctioning model) is showing signs of breaking down due to a lack of RELEVANCE (which is a very specific concept in the field of information science + information retrieval — and is often misused by people who are not very familiar with search technology).
OMG, what an epic comment – I better shut up now before I become labeled a scatterbrained nut from an ivory tower with no practical experience whatsoever. LOL — well, in fact I’ve been around the block a couple times!
😉 nmw
All great points. You’re right, going with the same old / history, isn’t always the best route.
However, if you’re choosing between an agency that’s used let’s say Facebook Connect in a few projects (whether or not their relevant to your industry) vs. an agency that has NO experience coding to Facebook Connect, etc., but just thoughts about it, which one do you choose? Me, I’m choosing the Practitioner.
Mark’s project was “let’s try this,” but he had coding experience before going down that path.