It’s Probably under the ‘Preferences’ Tab: What I Figured out After a Year in Digital Marketing

by Ami Greko

This post is for everyone in traditional book publishing who has spent the last week staring in envy at your colleagues in digital—all of whom seem to be currently gallivanting around Austin. Real-life Foursquare and Danah Boyd’s amazing keynote alone should be enough to convince you it’s time to switch to online, just to ensure you attend SXSWi next year.

When I first transitioned from publicity to a digital marketing department, there were a lot of mistakes. A LOT. Here are the top four things no one thinks to tell you when you first make the switch to digital.

Teach yourself HTML already

One of the best presents I ever received—aside from a perfectly torn, vintage Krokus t-shirt, which is another blog post entirely—was a tip about this book: Head-First HTML with CSS and XHTML. Yes, there is a sassy blond on the cover. Yes, there are really dorky exercises. Yes, I promise it will teach you HTML in a month. You’ll be surprised the amount of backend stuff that falls into place after you finish.

Trust Google

A lot of publicity factoids (what major bookstore fiction buyer has a mother who loves books about Texas? Which New York Times reviewer is a secret geek that loves hard science in her fiction?) need to be earned the old-fashioned way, by years in the trenches and good old-fashioned experience. But most of your everyday digital marketing questions are more technical in nature, and can pretty often be solved by light Googling. Video editing questions, solutions to Dreamweaver drama, what HTML tag you need: answers to all of these are usually just a few keystrokes away.

Try it. Literally just type in the question that you have, and click on the first search result. I promise everyone will be impressed by the breadth of your knowledge.

It’s probably under the ‘preferences’ tab

Lest you duplicate my experience of being busted by a co-worker in the act of flipping off a laptop and swearing (this happened after an epic two-hour code-digging session in which I was merely looking for the way to turn blue header text to purple and could not find it)—when trying to change the look on your out-of-the-box blogging software, just begin at the preferences tab, and then work your way into the code.

Don’t get too dazzled by the technology

Yeah, it’s really cool to be able to build a neat-looking website. And the second I heard about QR codes, I wanted to run out and try them, too. There’s a PR advantage to being the first group out of the gate with a new product, but if you’re not creating something that’s genuinely unique and interesting, even the exposure from being first will likely be limited to the book vertical. Don’t get so taken with technology that you execute something half-baked—just because you can technically pull something off, that doesn’t mean that you should.