On Breaking Down Silos (Whatever that Means)

Confession time. I am not really a marketer. I’ve been working as a marketer since 2008, including some time writing for the (I like to think) prestigious Moz Blog, but I am not one of you. And that is a good thing.

I’m not saying there is anything wrong with marketing or marketers (some of my closest friends are marketers). I am saying there is something wrong when we only talk to people who do the same things and speak the same language we do. And although I know the number of marketers who will read this is rapidly dwindling (from the slightly academic title to this meandering intro), I promise there will be a payoff to sticking with me.

Jargon Isolates Us

Has it occurred to you that anyone reading this article who is not a marketer or working in corporate America may not even know what “breaking down silos” is? For them, the title might conjure some image of a man taking an axe to one of those gorgeous, tall buildings out on the plains as a stream of freshly harvested wheat cascades over his head.

The language we use can build walls around us. I’ll admit to using this wall at dinner parties when I don’t want to talk about what I do. Phrases like “software as a service for search engine optimization” make non-marketing minds boggle and I get to talk about literature instead of SEO.

At work, though, those walls keep our teams and our companies from doing their best work. When a developer tells me the problem lies with a “new DB ring” or a designer suggests we adjust the kerning to improve the headline, I am lost. Unless I get my Google on, the conversation quickly peters out and I’m much less inclined to ask questions in the future. The same thing happens to them when I tell my co-workers in other departments that we need “a solution for transferring to a new ESP.”

“Ours is a world of intellectual fragmentation, in which exchanges between and among fields have become increasingly difficult.” — Siri Hustvedt, “Excursions to the Islands of the Happy Few”

This failure to communicate makes innovating beyond our own disciplines difficult. We can only know what we know.

We are capable of speaking without jargon. In a story about Brains On, a podcast about STEM topics for kids by kids, an interviewee commented that when people with technical expertise are asked to explain what they do to kids, their language shifts to something that still conveys those abstract concepts but in a way that non experts can understand.

The Case for Subject Matter Expertise

Subject matter experts (SMEs) are very important in any industry. They truly and deeply understand the problems and questions. They “get” the technology and the jargon. And because of their extensive knowledge and experience, they can tunnel into the nitty-gritty details and discover and recognize the industry-relevant gems along the way. If Dr. Pete didn’t regularly tweet his close observations about what’s changing on search engine results pages, I’d know a lot less about SEO.

In reality, though, most of us are not SMEs. We don’t have the time, energy, or permission to dig to the very roots of our disciplines. Instead we’re “T-shaped marketers” — people knowledgeable in one marketing discipline and conversant in others. This gets us by in our day-to-day work and when we need to understand more than that, we seek out those SMEs.

The Limitations of Subject Matter Expertise

But SMEs need air, too. Otherwise they suffocate in their academic silos.

“A man who can lay claim to knowledge about some categorized bit of the world, however tiny, which is greater than anyone else’s knowledge of that bit, is safe for life: reputation grows, paranoia deepens.” — Sir Stafford Beer as qtd. by Siri Hustvedt

As a child of academia (father, grandfather, cousins, time spent working for a university), I know more about the smothering effect of burrowing too deep than I’d like.

As important as SMEs can be, if everyone was one, we couldn’t communicate. We’d hold up our jargon-laden tomes of expertise and not be able to share most of that knowledge outside the narrow slices of our disciplines. We’d spend our time defending ivory silos without any common language to form alliances. We’d be alone, working toward our own ends. And that means we could only be as smart as we each are, individually, because there would be no one who understood enough about what we were doing to see through any blind spot we might have. For more on this, read Matthew Lavoie on the problem with the genius designer.

Of course that’s a worst-case scenario. What’s more likely is that we build little nests of people who share our jargon and care about the same things we do. Some of us create content. Some track social. Some build links.

But if the social people only talk amongst themselves about the latest platform, the content creators miss out on what the audience wants. If the content creators are too busy word-nerding to talk to the link builders, it’s difficult for those link builders to know what assets they’re working with. And if the link builders are too busy sharing the latest link building email templates with each other to talk to the social team, both teams are missing an opportunity to build relationships with link prospects.

Even worse, all these teams are missing the opportunity to look at what they’re doing from an outsider’s perspective — which is the best way I know of to avoid groupthink and to find new efficiencies in our work.

“[Expert cultures] attain their own logic (as well, of course, as their own life, esoteric in character and endangered in being split off from ordinary communicative practice” — Jurgen Habermas as qtd. by Siri Hustvedt

Bridges to New Ways of Thinking

All of this has me thinking about the best way I can use my non-marketing self to contribute to our marketing community. No matter how much I try, I am not a marketing writer SME like Ann Handley or a content strategy SME like Kristina Halvorson. I’m fascinated by what works and what doesn’t in both fields, but I don’t have the focus to dig all the way into one or the other. Plus (despite my over-use of “SME”) jargon gives me hives.

If I were to be a SME in anything, it would be in the way words and sentences cause a reader to feel. But, as much as I explore that in my literary writing, it’s not very lucrative, and I find I’m much more interested in connecting disciplines than exploring one to its fullest extent.

The best thing I can offer to the marketing world (and to myself in the way of finding fulfillment and a paycheck all in one place) is a blend of my interests in marketing, content strategy, writing, and meaning-making.

So this is my announcement. Soon I’ll be embarking on a new and exciting project for Moz (and for me). I’ll spend less time writing about best practices for email subject lines, and more time investigating the non-marketing fields that spark my synapses. I’ll read into disciplines like psycholinguistics to see what I can learn about the way people use and interpret language on the web. I’ll explore the science of empathy. And I’ll follow any other exciting tangents that might help content marketers (and me) get a new perspective on our day-to-day work.

Ideally, I’ll discover insights that can provide real value when applied to marketing so I can write more posts like “Manufacturing Serendipity: How to Create Content that Captivates Your Audience” and fewer like “7 Reasons Inbound Marketing is Like a Snowball Fight.” In time, I hope also to do my own research at the interstices of linguistics and marketing (maybe with a little literary theory thrown in).

“Specialists in one field can make reductive hash of another they know less well.” — Siri Hustvedt

Because I will not be a SME in any of these fields, I will try always to be humble and honest about what I know versus what leaps I’m making. I hope if you know more than I do you’ll help me learn by calling bullshit when I jump too far or in the wrong direction.

Go Do You

If you are on the SME track, go for it. Because yours is the cultural ideal we’ve aspired to for so long, you don’t need me to encourage you to investigate or to tell you that you can teach us new and exciting things about your field.

However, if (whether by inclination or talent) you are not destined to be a true SME in your discipline, you still have something important and unique to contribute. Dig deep into yourself and think about your non-work interests. Instead of reading another book or blog post that restates what you and your industry already know, read about something else you’re passionate about and apply insights from that field to your daily work.

“I, too, often find myself in a closed world, one in which I make assumptions about common knowledge only to discover it isn’t common at all.” — Siri Hustvedt

Put another way, how can the things you do in your free time instruct and improve your work life? Maybe you’re a gardener as well as a content marketer and your understanding of seasonality can help with campaign planning. The next time you’re talking with someone from another discipline, use a gardening analogy to illustrate the lifecycle of content creation. Or you’re a fashionista and social media manager who can use that trend-spotting eye to anticipate the next breakthrough social network and also use your appreciation of aesthetics to communicate with the design team on their level.

As Siri Hustvedt writes, “Islands are everywhere, even within a single discipline.” Add some real unique value to your company and your industry by being someone who bridges those islands, demolishes those walls, and busts out of those silos.

Bring the parts of life that make you light up with joy into your work to become one awesomely unique team member. You might find a shared language and passion and connect with people you’ve never connected with before. Think of all the amazing projects and products you can build… together.

In case you hadn’t gathered from the extensive quotes, this article was inspired by Siri Hustvedt’s gorgeous essay, “Excursions to the Islands of the Happy Few,” in her book, Living, Thinking, Looking. Just one example of how exploring one topic can illuminate another.