Honestly. Where do you learn about marketing better?

First, a bit of background.

A couple months ago I was sitting in a nice comfy chair, marketing away, when an email arrived explaining that there was going to be an all hands meeting in an hour; attendance was required. What unfolded during that meeting was widely covered, including this article in the NY Times and, long story short, Gigaom the VC backed company that had been my home ceased to exist.

From that point, a once part time project, has since taken over my life and become my new home: Market Meme — the community powered database for technical marketers.

Marketing better.

During my career as a marketer, I have worked for a diverse group of internet publishers and media companies and learned tons about what makes great content tick, conversely I also experienced many of the deep flaws in current online publisher models.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the marketing world. Promises are being made from #martech vendors, publishers, guru’s, ninjas, hackers and consultants saying that technology will solve our problem, but it isn’t working. And ultimately, there are a lot of companies making money off marketers’ inability to solve problems.

So here we all are as marketers, stuck in the middle of everything.

Bad information sources and seemingly unattainable expectations for what is possible. That is why we decided to build Market Meme: to build the best possible marketing technology resource. We want to help marketers find the products, content, people and ideas that will help them do their job better. Basically, we want to help marketers answer their questions and solve their problems.

Before we get there though, as they say, you have to know the past to understand the present.

To understand the information challenges marketers are facing today, it is important to look at the two main models that are prevalent for producing and distributing marketing content and the latest model that is emerging. It is through the type of content that marketers are consuming, that we started to understand what Market Meme is trying to fix.

The old way.

The first source of marketing information comes from traditional publisher-controlled distribution models. The publisher chooses who gets to create content and what to distribute. Marketing vendors and VIPs at big traditional companies tend to benefit from this model, and in general it is safe to say that the model is ‘pay to play’ — there is a whole ecosystem of B2B sites, conferences etc. to support this model.

The newer way.

The second major source of information comes from influencer-controlled distribution models: marketing tech vendors, ad agencies, authors, consultants, internet famous marketers and the likes. This group is really controlling the conversation around marketing at this point in time, and while this group of folks does create some great content, it is often only surface deep and their ultimate solution is often to pay them for their help.

While the two groups above are the main sources of marketing content right now, there are new models emerging that are much more democratic in nature. It can really be seen in action at places like Medium. These platforms let anyone create content, like social networks, but also provide a model for distributing the best content to wider audiences through their social and email distribution channels.

The better way.

At Market Meme we think that the new democratic model is the solution we’ve all been waiting for and is a key principle that we are focusing on — it doesn’t matter who you are or what you do, if you are producing awesome content that solves difficult marketing problems, we want to help distribute it to the right audience.

So our first goal is finding awesome marketers who want to move the marketing conversation forward. We strongly believe that by recruiting a strong group of tactical, technical, no bullshit marketers at the beginning, as well as excluding self-promotion, we can get around this.

We need help.

If this sounds like something that you want to help with, you can start right now by helping us build the first-ever community powered database for technical marketers. If you have a great piece of content you created, or just found something that made your job easier, please let us know (share something awesome on twitter and tag your tweet with #marketmeme.

We’ll make sure you get the credit for doing what you do best and every week we’ll be compiling a list of the best content and distributing it in the community’s weekly newsletter.

Much more to come, stay tuned:
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