First Interview
Eric Kozlik
Digital Content Manager
Price Benowitz, LLP
“Well, I believe that competency-based certifications are important to any industry where quality is something that people are concerned with. The tricky thing about marketing is that it’s a little bit difficult to sometimes operationalize those competency-based benchmarks, so to speak.”
Second Interview
Robyn Fischer
Paid Media Director
Be Found Online
“At a smaller company, I think it’s for me, at least, it’s very important (certification) just because we know what everybody’s capable of at this point. We know if we get a new client who to go to and who can own it and do a good job.”
Welcome to Take Ten, OMCP’s podcast where we spend 10 minutes, more or less, talking to online marketing thought leaders, educators, and career professionals about training and certification with hosts, Jane Flint, and David Temple. These interviews took place at Pubcon where you can earn PDU’s for certification extension.
First Interview
OMCP: Hi, I’m here at Pubcon just talking to some of the Pubcon attendees. Tell us your name, your title, and what company you work for please.
Eric Kozlik: My name’s Eric Kozlik, and I am a digital content manager at a law firm in DC. It’s called Price Benowitz LLP. What I do there is I basically orchestrate the content efforts for our marketing department by utilizing outside writers, in-house writing, and in a number of in-house content curation methods. The goal is to populate our sites with high quality content. It drives users to our sites, and that’s sort of our constant effort.
OMCP: I imagine with law firms they do have a lot of content needs, depending on the practices they have. Tell me why you came to Pubcon.
Eric Kozlik: I came to Pubcon because… I should probably start by saying this is my first year. I’ve never been to Pubcon before, but the managing partner who organizes our marketing efforts is a big proponent of Pubcon. And so he arranged for us to come out and to attend some of these great sessions. And so I’ve just been here gleaning in the content room, but I’ve also been able to take advantage of the keynotes and some of the other perks just being at a conference like this.
OMCP: What do you think about the need for today’s online marketers to understand the other disciplines other than just, for instance, content marketers, understand, at least, foundationally SEO, PPC, and things like that?
Eric Kozlik: One of the things that happens, I think, when you get a basic understanding is that when you come to a conference like this where there are people who are operating at a very high level. One of the things that you’ll notice is how different industry standards across disciplines. So in law, for example, there’s very specific ethical rules that there might not be in other disciplines or other markets, I should say. And that affects along with a number of other factors, this affects the way that we do our marketing. One of the things I found is that by attending some of these sessions we’re doing a number of the best practices. We’re doing a good job, and then some of the things that people are suggesting just don’t apply to us.
On the other hand, that’s why you come to these things is to learn what you’re doing right, and then to see if there are some people with some great ideas that you’re actually not taking advantage of already.
OMCP: That’s a good point. Other than conferences like Pubcon, how else do you and your team stay abreast of the latest in online marketing?
Eric Kozlik: We’re very active in the literature. There’s a number of websites and blogs out there that I try to stay abreast with. We use a number of Moz tools and various tools that are setting the industry standards. As they evolve, we stay on top of that. And the other stuff that we do is we have a few outside consultants who are very active when we do decide to make changes or try and improve quality of certain aspects of the marketing efforts. Those outside consultants do give us a wealth of information as well.
OMCP: How important do you think competency-based certification is to our industry?
Eric Kozlik: Well, I believe that competency-based certifications are important to any industry where quality is something that people are concerned with. The tricky thing about marketing is that it’s a little bit difficult to sometimes operationalize those competency-based benchmarks, so to speak. So I think it’s very important to the industry, but I think even important is the developing competency-based certification that actually does what it intends to do. And does that in the right ways for the different disciplines, I think, because as we discussed, legal marketing is different from the food and beverage industry and different from tech space. So I think that any sort of certification should necessarily include almost the liberal arts approach to dealing with those different spaces in markets.
OMCP: Well, thank you very much for your time.
Eric Kozlik: Thanks.
Second Interview
OMCP: I’m here with Robyn Fischer, the Director of Paid Media to Be found Online. Hi, Robyn. Welcome to Take Ten.
Robyn Fischer: Hi, David. Thank you for having me.
OMCP: Robyn, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.
Robyn Fischer: Like you said, I’m the Director of Paid Media at Be Found Online. So I have a team of about 15 people working on all of our paid media accounts, including social. Across the gamut we have small businesses and large retailers nationwide, even international retailers that we work with.
OMCP: Robyn, tell me about Pubcon. What did you speak on, and how do you find Pubcon as a conference?
Robyn Fischer: I’m speaking on shopping and merchandising. So setting up your feed to reflect what merchandisers do in the store. And I found Pubcon actually through…it’s been a conference that a lot of my co-workers go to. So it was just something that interested me, and when the time came to submit the application I was ready to go.
OMCP: What do you think, as far as today’s marketers, understanding a little bit of each discipline? For instance, search, social, content marketing, to at least have a foundational knowledge of that? Do you think that’s important, even if they’re going to work in only one discipline?
Robyn Fischer:Robyn: Actually, we do cross product training. So we make sure that if somebody is specific on social they understand display, they understand search standards, organic content, social, everything.
OMCP: That’s great. And other than coming to conferences like Pubcon, how else do you keep your team up to speed in training and education in the online marketing world?
Robyn Fischer: We have internal gurus they’re called so people that are specific and they know about a lot about one area, and we do crossing trainings. We use demi trainings quite a bit, conferences a lot. We have internal team challenges, I guess you could say. So who can get certified first in something and you’ll come in…I think last time we did a bruket.
OMCP: How important do you think that competent-based certification is in our industry today?
Robyn Fischer: At a smaller company, I think it’s for me, at least, it’s very important just because we know what everybody’s capable of at this point. We know if we get a new client who to go to and who can own it and do a good job.
OMCP: Well, thanks a lot for your time, Robyn. It’s been a pleasure.
Robyn Fischer: Thank you.