One of my major gripes in this ‘digital’ business is the feeling of those on the outside that it’s easy to do – I sometimes ask the question about building a car… after all, many of us know how to drive and operate both a manual and automatic – but when it comes down to the workings of the internal combustion engine we are (in the majority) completely lost.
So let’s please apply the same approach to mobile applications, social media strategy, website development – just because the world spends almost 2 hours a day on Facebook, and probably most of their waking lives somehow connected to the internet, it doesn’t make them experts in digital and social strategy, user interface design and mobile development.
In the agency world, the misguided idea that a ‘traditional’ creative can somehow be turned overnight into a ‘social media ninja‘ is really a lack of understanding of the work that is done within the interactive landscape. The web may only have been around for 10 years, but the changes, advances and learnings that have come from it are enormous; 2 weeks of on-the-job training cannot start to compensate for this.
Please don’t forget that there are professionals in every business and sometimes, just sometimes, they know what they’re doing. Remember the car and how banal it seems in everyday life, if I asked you to design and build one from scratch, you might be stumped.
Thanks.
