I have a saying that makes people pretty uncomfortable in marketing communications: If you’re  doing today what you’ve done one year ago, you’re in a rut. You’re not moving the needle. Your competitors are passing you by. 

To many of us, this may sound obvious, but if you look at what people are doing, and even how job descriptions are worded today, they look like they were written ten years ago. "Must be demonstrate strong writing skills, including writing biographies, press releases, PR letters, powerpoint presentations and edit newsletters."

My favorite, is of course the sentence somewhere below the line says ‘must be an out-of-the-box thinker’ that says, without any irony: ‘Must adhere to departmental, corporate, and strategic guidelines."

My point is that job descriptions need to march in tandem with the rapid movements in marketing and technology. Strike that. Job descriptions should leap ahead of what’s going on in marketing and tech. A few years ago Google, Del.icio.us, search engine optimization and RSS readers never existed. Even as we drool over the possibilities of YouTube, there are tools like MetaCafe coming over the horizon. In  Second Life (thanks to Steve Rubels link) over one million  people have registered. Some of these are big name companies such as Reuters and the BBC. Surely finance companies, universities, and hospitals will follow.

So, if we are not getting our feet wet in these realms, and still clinging to ‘collateral’ development and  writing the brand  guideline book, we are obviously  in a time warp. 

What are you doing today that you were not doing 365 days ago?