I'm not sure if the medical profession will agree I think AOS or ‘Acronym Overload Syndrome’ should be a recognised condition.

Unfortunately, I am now old enough to remember what ‘marketing’ was like not just before the web arrived but also before computers arrived.

While we might like to kid ourselves that things are game changers, revolutionary, fundamental shifts etc, if you distil them down to the pure basics of what we do and how we behave, there is very little difference from the essence of marketing in the 1980s to marketing in the 2010s.

Based on experiences across quite diverse sectors, from the construction industry to the cookware retail, I have seen repeatedly that ‘marketing’ is the process of ‘making what you can sell’ versus ‘selling what you can make’.

So, when organisations start talking about how the social web is leading to a fundamental shift in marketing I am really struggling to see what is different today versus 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago.

This phrase, ‘actionable insight’ which appears popular right now could equally be described as finding a needle in a haystack. How has this become any easier with the growth of social media because all this seems to do is add more hay?

As a marketer in the 1980s it was my job to talk to people about their needs, listen to what they had to say, cross-reference to gain a fuller understanding and then use this insight to create the right messages and communicate them at the right time. Just because everything is now speeded up and scaled up with ‘progress’ doesn’t mean that the fundamentals have shifted at all. In essence, we are still going through the same process of ‘information management’ only a lot more of it is digital these days. In the 1980s I was an analogue information worker and in the 2010s I’m a digital information worker.

Then we come to this bizarre idea that providing good service to someone via the web is somehow mysteriously different from providing good service to them via any other channel. It’s not. Providing good customer service is a process of understanding expectations and then making sure you take actions to exceed those expectations and therefore delight a customer. A delighted customer will then spread the word and a disgruntled customer will spread it even further. It was ever thus.

The real challenge for those in marketing roles today is to make sure the online channel is as integrated as possible into the organisation’s systems and processes so that it is simply the accepted and natural way to manage information and provide good customer service.

What is particularly unhelpful in these efforts are descriptions and acronyms that continue to make the web out to be a special, separate domain – the domain of technicians and one that requires a myriad of specialist knowledge to operate in. This is guaranteed to make the already hard task of empowering others to manage web content and use the web effectively for good customer service, all the more harder.

The more we can focus holistically on ‘information management’ and ‘customer service’ the better chance we have of exceeding expectations and creating happy customers. So please, let’s stop trying to reinvent information management, customer service and, indeed, marketing and let’s just call a spade, a spade.