Some years ago, I wrote a piece arguing that IT Professionals and marketers have much more in common than is typically thought. In the popular conception, IT and marketing are cordoned off from each other, each group having a different lexicon and a different culture. This conception holds also that marketing and IT are in conflict with each other, marketing being a risk-taking organization and IT being the voice of constraint.
I continue to reject this notion. As marketing “digitizes” it is powered increasingly through IT. As IT gets a seat at the table, it utilizes the discipline of marketing to “sell itself” into higher levels of decision-making. Both are bound by a cost-cutting corporate philosophy and both innovate constantly to do more with less.
So, as I said in the article referenced above, I believe there are great synergies between marketing and IT. And companies like Intlock have developed solutions to bring these synergies to the fore.
Take the SharePoint Marketing Suite they developed – it is a perfect example of creating a common conversation between IT and marketing. Microsoft’s SharePoint was for its first several generations thought of as a great IT-friendly portal and collaboration solution. As Microsoft started thinking about expanding the reach of the SharePoint product line both outside the firewall but also to all departments within the enterprise, companies like Intlock developed solutions that extend the power of the platform into new domains, audiences, and scenarios.
Marketing monitoring, measurement, and management is one such core scenario – for which Intlock’s solution is built. As websites and other digital artifacts become a sine qua non for effective marketing, technologists and marketers start to converge; they need to be part of one conversation since their goals are aligned and their dependencies profound.
Take a peek at the SharePoint Marketing Suite. And let’s take the synergy out of the shadows!
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