Reading Reflection No. 2

Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan is a book that was published in the year 2009, a time
period marked by the significant takeoff of social media. The book itself revolves around
running a business and marketing that business correctly in a world that is ever changing. The
book explains that Marketing is one of the most ambiguous concepts there is in business
because of how often it changes. It can be a Tuesday during a normal week and there is some
huge trend that the entire population of the world is losing their mind about, and by Friday,
that trend can be laughed at by half of the people who were losing their minds over it.
Halligan’s book focuses on the fact that in order to successfully market your business, you
need to use all of the tools at your disposal to not keep up with your consumers, but constantly
stay ahead of them. While this book focuses a lot on google, blogs, and social media, which are
all still relevant, it is a bit dated in the mannerisms in which Halligan talks about using them.
Regardless of the ways in which he uses them, his points make perfect sense. Using platforms
like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to market have become some of the biggest factors in
creating products that thrive in a technologically based world. Halligan makes the point that not
only should you use every platform to your advantage, you should always be thinking about the
next biggest thing and what is going to catch peoples’ eyes.

This book connects with my ENT3003 experience because it is all about fast paced thinking. The
main premise of this course revolves around being one step ahead of everyone else to create
and idea to help benefit consumers. While the book is focused on marketing, the conceptual
ideas are the exact same. Everyone should be focused and planning on the future so that they
can continually be ahead of the technological curve.

With so many marketing platforms at our hands in today’s day and age, my activity would
revolve around using three different platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) and seeing how
much interaction they get with different types of marketing plans through a website like
Hootsuite or something similar. If you were to have students create different marketing plans
and place them across all three platforms, they could see how effective they would be
individually on each platform through data created by Hootsuite.

My biggest “Aha” moment came when I really realized that general push marketing techniques
are basically gone forever. Yes, you will see a general newspaper ad here and there or a flyer in
Turlington, but when it comes to full blown marketing campaigns, no one is spending money on
anything that is not technologically revamped. Our everyday shopper is now deeply delved into
online shopping and browsing, and gets most of their ideas from the internet. Companies
spending money on traditional marketing is over. The new traditional marketing is going to
revolve around technology and social media platforms. Mom and Pops diner is unfortunately
going to have to keep up with the times in the world we live in.