Tech-Savvy and People-Oriented: Is “Geek Marketer” an Accurate Description?

The biggest value-add in the marketing world right now appears to be the fence-sitter: those people who straddle the line between all-out geekery and the world of marketing. Or as Steve Rubel calls them, the “geek marketers.”

These cross-trained specialists are fluent in both worlds and bridge them. They are marketers by trade, yet they also have a hard-core interest in technology and social anthropology. As curious individuals, they are constantly studying how digital advances are changing our culture and media.

Rubel is on the right track. But I see a much larger and more diverse group than the one he singles out. Some of the people he describes started as geeks and moved toward marketing once we got into the professional sphere. I fit under this umbrella, but I built my first website in 1995 and have been known to attend Star Trek conventions. It wasn’t until college that the marketing profession even entered my field of vision.

Moreover, I don’t really think of what I do as marketing. My professional passion involves forming relationships with people in spaces that matter to me and then figuring out how connect the people I know to value adds in the form of products, services, people and technologies. The goal in every interaction is pareto efficiency, everyone wins.

I’d say that what I do falls under the heading of what Rubel means when he talks about “geek marketers,” but I think a better term to describe the group as a whole is “relationship technologists.” We’re passionate about the way that technologies can facilitate relationships — between people and people, businesses and businesses and customers and brands. We leverage those technologies and our people skills to start conversations, build relationships and weave those relationships into lasting communities.

This all sounds a little touchy-feely when I write it out, but I think it’s the future of the way we do business.

[Via our wonderful friend Jim Turner of One by One Media.]

Welcome to our community! If you like what you see, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed!