Digital Citizen's Arrest! Digital Citizen's Arrest!!

As someone who used to be a Digital Tourist, I am now encouraging everyone at our B2B marketing agency, as well as our clients to become engaged and enlightend Digital Citizens.

Chapter 12 of the book Inbound Marketing describes a Digital Citizen as “a person that is very familiar with the web and speaks web fluently.” Some people are practically born with this citizenship and it comes to them naturally. Others, like me, have to work at it.

When testing your staff and/or prospective employees, for Digital Citizenship.There are a few questions the authors of the book recommend you ask:

What RSS reader do you use? Can you show it to me?
What blogs do you read?
Do you rank first for your name in Google?
Do you use Delicious? Can you show it to me?
Do you have a blog? Can you show it to me?
Do you use Facebook or LinkedIn? When was the last time you updated your profile?
Do you use Twitter? Can you show it to me?
Do you have a channel on YouTube? Can you show it to me?

If this sounds foreign to you, don’t worry.

If I’d taken this test a year ago, I would have failed it miserably. You don’t have to be a born braniac to develop the skills and knowledge you need to pass inspection and start lifting your marketing results.

I am a true believer in inbound marketing, especially if it’s implemented strategically along with more conventional outbound marketing efforts and centered around a dynamic business website at the hub.

Ask anyone at MLT Creative and they’ll tell you how adamant I am that they actively practice what we preach to our clients. I encourage them to stay active across multiple social media, contribute to our blog and to follow and engage with other experts in the field of B2B marketing.

I think we all should keep learning–and that means you too.

Whether on the client side or agency side of things, if you’re in marketing and want to outthink and outperform your competition, you need to know all you can about inbound marketing. It’s not easy to keep up. But it can be fun.

Lately, I’ve had a good time declaring a “Digital Citizen’s Arrest!” on any employee who’s been inactive on social media or blogging. I publicly shame them via email, a Twitter post, or maybe even call them out in a creative swirl session in front of everyone.

I’m not sure if anyone here finds this is as funny as I do, but hopefully you get the point.

This is the most exciting time ever to be in marketing, and it’s no time to pull an illegal U-turn like Barney Fife.

Here’s some ideas from two of the B2B braniacs and maniacs I learn from.

Recently B2B creative Doug Kessler of Velocity Partners asked and answered the question, “How often do you need to publish content to do content marketing right?”

B2B copywriter Joan Damico posted another article advocating a great idea: Create a customized B2B Marcom Tool she calls your Conversation Calendar.

What are you doing new to drive your marketing efforts this year?

Are you being a good Digital Citizen?