If you haven’t read the 2010 book “Rework,” by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson you should buy, rent or borrow a copy today and read it. It’s a light book, and it will teach you a lot about work in 2015 and what the 21st Century has in store for all of us.

There is one chapter that talks about how accounting is a department and marketing IS NOT a department. It rings more accurate than anything and here’s why:

• Everyone who works now with the advent of communication platforms is a “marketer.” If you try to control this, do something more special and unleash everyone’s inner beast to help them bring more attention to your product, service, people, thought leadership, etc. The more people who share what we do with our products, the better. Just like there is no marketing department there shouldn’t be a “social media department” or “team” either. No one team owns marketing or social anymore. In fact, the best companies realize their customers own these. Company employees simply measure the customer pulse and design engagements to help with objectives.
• Marketing is a 24/7/365 activity. That doesn’t mean you stay up forever like a robot. No, you unleash word of mouth and build marketing into your products so that people who are your customers help with driving discussion on how useful your product is.
• Every time someone uses your product, it’s marketing. We forget this a lot in the tech world. “Oh, we’ll fix that next week.” Bye, bye, 10,000 customers! If you can’t build or maintain a good product, don’t build one at all.
• No amount of marketing will save poor products. “You can’t polish a turd.”
• Who cares how much brand value you have in some customer identification survey/poll? Those are vanity metrics. You’re only as good as the next time a customer uses your product and tells their circle of friends about it. No amount of brand marketing will help in this area. Brand marketing is a linear practice that made sense when communications were one-way. Emerging mobile media and social networks destroyed that outdated model over eight years ago with the rise of Facebook and Twitter.

Marketing isn’t just a few things you do a year to show a bump in numbers in a graph on some PowerPoint presentation in a meeting. Marketing is the total of everything you do.

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