Paul Gillin is an independent consultant, author, speaker, writer and Enterprise Editor at SiliconANGLE. He has made his mark in the industry during an impressive career spanning all the changes of the past 30 years - from his time writing for Ziff Davis, to his years as editor-in-chief at Computerworld, to his work as one of the founders of TechTarget. Paul is also the author of five books and more than 300 articles on the topic of social media and digital marketing.
In this conversation with Look Left’s John Moran, Paul shares his insights on many of today’s leading issues. Highlights include:
- His thoughts organizational digital transformation -- it’s not just a buzzword: “It’s about making a company more digitally driven, customer interactions being through digital channels, and more importantly, making decisions based upon data, rather than gut instinct. And that’s the big hump, if you will, that many companies have to get over, because they’re so in tune, they're so accustomed to making decisions based on experience, rather than what the numbers tell them.“
- On writing in the digital age: “Now, so much of the data that you need is just available a search away. It really has enabled long form reporting to be done more quickly now because we can access information that we need so much faster than we used to. On the other hand, we’re all expected to produce a lot more than we were….15, 10 years ago because simply the pace of news has increased. I can remember the days when I would write three, maybe four stories a week, and now we’re expected to do two or three a day.”
- Why marketers should be giving as much thought to psychographics -- a customer’s motivation -- as demographics: “You talk to the marketers and you’ll say, ‘Tell me about the audience,’ and they’ll start talking about their buying power and about their title, and what I want to hear is what motivates them, what gets them up in the morning, what excites them, what do they worry about, what keeps them awake at night, what makes them successful? Those are psychographic issues, and if you can approach prospects on that level, I think you’re going to have a much more successful engagement with them.”
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