The MultiThread Marketer. Doug Mitchell

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      Doug Mitchell Livestreaming at a Conference for Entrepreneurs

      Hey, Doug Mitchell here. Let me start by saying I’m absolutely NOT an authority on hiring marketers. In fact, I haven’t hired a single marketer in my 16 professional years. Does that disqualify me from writing this book? Read on and find out.

      I’m 39 and have been a Marketing Director and VP of Marketing over the last 11 years in start-up and early-stage companies. That means I made up my titles and did just about everything in those companies except hard-core coding and bookkeeping. (Isn’t start-up life great?)

      Start-up life requires agility and willingness to be uncomfortable. You’ll learn way more about topics you never imagined existed, you’ll fail, change course, and need to accept the reality that everyone is a part of the sales process. (Yes, even you IT prima donnas.)

      Some people are flustered by these things. I’ve literally seen people devolve from productive and successful to pained and stagnant due to rapid change. I’ve learned to thrive on change, embrace change, and, dare I say, I even need change. My wife would probably agree that I show all the signs of addiction to start-up culture and she’d be right.

      In 2007 I jumped out on my own. After a major course correction from iteration alpha (we listened to what the market wanted not what we THOUGHT they needed), my company became the Interactive Marketing firm createWOWmedia (www.createWOWmedia.com).

      But throughout my company’s growth, I never hired a single person. I made a conscious decision when I went out on my own that I wanted to avoid hiring at all costs, keep my infrastructure and overhead minimal, and run the most “virtual” organization I could — and I succeeded.

      As the concept for this book was being assembled in my brain in mid-2010, I started wondering what was next. I craved the ability to focus on one company rather than the deal-flow cycle in a small consulting practice. So I began the process of finding an acquirer.

      I wanted to write this book and actually live the position I was going to write about. In July 2010, I found a new home with a company right here in Iowa (BirdDogJobs.com) who was absolutely looking for my skill set and who was perfectly comfortable with my lack of Photoshop and Design skills. (More on that soon.)

      I also sold my company to one of the most amazing vendor/partners that I’ve worked with over the last couple years. Using the term “vendor” doesn’t really indicate how important Andrew Clark a.k.a. “The Brand Chef” (www.twitter.com/thebrandchef) was and is to my business.

      Andrew is now thriving under the brand createWOWmarketing (www.createWOWmarketing.com). Small name change, but new energy, new offerings, and he’s rockin’ it here in the Heartland.

       You may ask : Why write a book on hiring marketers when you’ve never done it?

      In essence, every time createWOWmedia landed a deal it was hired as an “Adjunct Marketing Department” to execute many pieces that involved many sub-pieces, all of which require specialized talent. After all, not every marketer or marketing department across the land can do everything right - right?

      I was acting as a a MultiThread Marketer for my clients. Webopedia (1) defines “Multithreading” as:

       The ability of an operating system to execute different parts of a program, called threads, simultaneously. The programmer must carefully design the program in such a way that all the threads can run at the same time without interfering with each other.

      The operating system is your brain. The programmer? You.

      The MultiThread Marketer must be able to execute many different parts, pieces, processes, and people in parallel while being cautious not to interfere with each other or degrade quality along the way. CPU’s do this to the tune of 520,833 MIPS, the M stands for Million as in Million Instructions Per Second. (2)

      If your company hires a strategic or MultiThread Marketer with a modern, robust, and just-technical-enough skill set, it will make success a far more likely outcome. The right marketing hire will enable your organization to marshal all the best marketing resources it needs to succeed in our modern, turbulent, and light speed economy.

      Make the wrong hire and your company will miss market opportunities, be outpaced by the competition, or worse. The MultiThread Marketer doesn’t merely fit the Jack-of-all-trades moniker. Rather he has a blend of long-term linear thinking to balance strategy and vision with hyperactive “Googlish” thinking that filters, processes, and executes at ludicrous speed.

      If you already have Marketing leadership in place telling you that your company, people, and brand just aren’t ready for today’s interactive transparency, or that blogs and Twitter are just hotbeds for negative comments, you have a much bigger issue to tackle. You’ve got a marketer on board who’s outdated and afraid to expose his weaknesses, to your company’s detriment. Your marketer has decided to take the blue pill versus the red pill. If this is your company, prepare to be uncomfortable.

       You may ask : Can’t I find all of this information on Google without reading your book?

      I scoured the web for all of the amazing free information out there on making the right strategic marketing hire. Much to my disappointment, I found mostly the same “How to’s” on the hiring process and superficial looks at skills and abilities. I also discovered that no one has truly defined the modern marketing skill set. From this void…The MultiThread Marketer book was born.

      So let’s get started and find out how to identify your next MultiThread Marketing hire to propel your firm to new levels of awesome.

      Introduction

      Welcome aboard! I hope you’re reading this book before making your strategic marketing hire. Why? Because in today’s economy and business environment, a key marketing hire can be the catalyst to new levels of success, or the blindfold that enables the escape of your greatest marketing opportunities.

      If you’ve already made a hire, I suggest you buy a copy of this book for him or her to do some self-reflection and evaluation. By identifying strengths and weaknesses, the marketer, along with her management, can fill in the gaps and make progress.

       Marketing Defined By Me

      Marketing as a profession is wildly misunderstood and mislabeled. Most employees, when queried on their definitions of marketing or marketers in their companies, would say things like: