I attended a conference this week on the future of digital marketing, run by Econsultancy who are renowned for their training, seminars, conferences and networking events for digital marketing and e-commerce professionals. It was well worth a day out of the office, the agenda was busy, short ten minute slots, with speakers from various sectors which made for an interesting line-up. The opening keynote by Eric Frenchman, online consultant for John McCain in the 2008 US Presidential election, demonstrated the 24/7 nature of online marketing, how quickly we can react and act. The closing keynote by Ian Jindal, e-commerce and digital marketing guru introduced us to, among other thought provoking ideas, “epiphenomenology”.

What was interesting though, was that each speaker was given the brief of presenting on the future of digital marketing, and specifically within their industry. And each speaker struggled with the theme, practically apologising for not really being able to provide the answers let alone predictions. Why? Because it’s impossible in the world of technology we live in today to predict more than a few months into the future. You only have to look at the Twitter phenomenon. Even six months ago, a vast majority of not only companies but individuals had never heard of Twitter, let alone dreamt of introducing it as a sales and marketing tool. Low and behold if you’re not twittering these days you are probably being twittered about behind your back for not keeping up.

However this also got me thinking of how we are so easily influenced and will jump on the latest bandwagon without a thought of what we really want it to do for us. Keeping up with the Jones’s is very much alive when it comes to marketing and more specifically technology trends. Dell this week announced they had earned over $3 million through Twittering. However if you look at the Dell business model you can understand why. On the other hand a company that one, does not have the brand awareness of a multi-national like Dell and two, requires a detailed sales process will find themselves struggling to convince the CFO that investing in a full time Twitterer was a good idea.

So how does a business determine which elements to adopt and which to gracefully decline (for now anyway). By asking questions like what are our goals and objectives and are we looking in the right places to achieve these; where are the people I need to be influencing, at what stage of a sales process are they and what do they want to hear from us? If our customers are not on Twitter or Facebook then why should we waste our time using these as marketing tools. All too often, marketers and sales people spend their time telling customers and more critically prospects what they think they want to hear and not what they actually want to hear.

What we need to be doing is listening!