I personally don’t have to go too far back in time to remember when having a landline in your house meant you were posh and watching Tomorrow’s World was like a fantasy show. Who would have thought in such a short period that practically every person would be holding a rectangular piece of plastic and glass that would let you communicate with your family and friends while on the move, take photos, videos, watch movies, play games, purchase your much desired items and even run a business from.
Having worked in the Online Communication world for over 10 years in the NGO sector I felt I needed to up skill and come out of the cocoon I was so used to so I could learn what was happening in the digital marketing world in order to benefit me in my career and hopefully learn a few things I could apply to my current role. So I signed up for the 12 weeks of a Special Purpose Level 8 course in Digital Marketing in CIT.
To say I started with excitement and trepidation is a bit of an understatement.
During the course I could often be heard muttering the words; wow; no; what the?
I thought I had a relatively good level of understanding of the online digital world but I soon learnt I had moved from a baby swimming pool to the wide-open ocean of the Digital Marketing World.
For many of the lectures I came away dumbfounded by how far the digital world had come and the advances being made and if I’m honest some quite scared me, maybe Tomorrow’s World wasn’t too much of a fantasy after all.
So the reality is we are living in a world where, I believe humans are evolving to have short attention spans, and in order to nudge our way into this attention gap we need to walk the Internet strands of the “world wide web” to relay our messages.
My first assignment “Moving From Real World To Digital (And Back Again)” was a case in point where digital marketing is hitting this fast moving audience. I focused on NFC (Near Field Communications) and through researching this along with competing technologies was astounded by the vast array of avenues, which can be used to reach consumers, the public and other businesses.
From there we covered subjects like social media, analytics, keywords, blogs, website, the list seemed endless but for me the best part of the course was bringing all of what we had learnt together and work with real companies to implement digital and social strategies.
In those 12 weeks I have come away having learnt so much but I also realise how much more there is to know and learn about. While it’s often said “we are being driven by the digital world” the one thing we should bare in mind is that all of these advances are being created by the human mind, for now!!
The times are, well, changing…
Moving from Real World to Digital (And Back Again)
