The Soft Side of Online Marketing

November 3, 2007 |

One of the goals I have for this blog is to comment on the culture of Online Marketing and the people who work in this industry. The following comments are the result of Tony Wright’s blog post ‘Wear a Tinfoil Hat When it Comes to Your Employees‘.

The gist of Tony’s post is that, regardless of how much experience a SEO/SEM employee has, they may eventually become ‘rogue’ employees capable of sabotage and should not be completely trusted. He is obviously speaking from experience and goes on to provide tips on how to prevent disgruntled employees from cause damage to a paid search account and the company/client website. I agree that an event with an unhappy employee like this could potentially happen, but I completely disagree that you should not trust employees or Online Marketing professionals in general.

To give some context to my opinion, I had worked in the Management Consulting industry for several years before crossing over into the Online Marketing world. And prior to that I worked in the Retail Industry at the management level for a couple of high-end retailers. From my experience I can say with confidence that employees are by far your greatest asset and if you can’t trust your employees, presumably someone you had a hand in hiring, then who can you trust?

W. Edwards Deming is quoted as saying that “Eighty-five percent of the reasons for failure are deficiencies in the systems and process rather than the employee. The role of management is to change the process rather than badgering individuals to do better.” In the case of disgruntled employees, in order to prevent employees from getting to the point where they are so pissed off they become a threat to the company and client, it is critical to trust employees and put them in a position to succeed. Along with assigning people to the right job or set of tasks in order for them to succeed it is also managements responsibility to keep employees engaged in the process. If management is hiring bodies just to fill holes and churn out mindless work without the ability to contribute to the bigger picture then you are destined to run into the problems Tony has faced.

Now, are there exceptions to fully trusting employees working within a perfect system? Absolutely. And it is a valid concern for any industry. However, as it relates to the infancy of the Online Marketing industry there is another point to Tony’s post that concerns me. I would strongly caution against writing about a few instances where employees sabotaged a paid search campaign because they were allowed access to the account. Is it a reality? Sure. Will it continue to happen? I bet it will. And to be fair I think Tony’s post is right in heeding a warning about potential dangers. But the fact that this industry is still very young and is probably growing faster than it can handle lends itself to a need for a bigger sort of trust - a trust between clients and agencies or in-house online marketing departments as an integrated system. If Online Marketing professionals begin to get a bad reputation because of a few bad apples, trust for all marketers will begin to dwindle and the growth of this industry will be stymied.