In the words of 80s rocker Huey Lewis, in this digital age ‘it’s hip to be Square’. A Google Square that is. With the digital marketing landscape growing and changing at a lightning pace, marketers are presented with an ever-increasing number of new challenges and opportunities. To help equip me with the skills and strategies required to succeed as a digital marketer, I’ve enrolled on the six-month Squared Online programme, which has been developed by Google and built by the best practitioners in the business – and is delivered entirely online.
For as long as I can remember, digital technology has seemed pretty ‘hip’ to me. Back when Mr Lewis and the News were riding high in the charts, I (well, my Dad at least) was the proud owner of a BBC Model B computer, with 32KB of RAM and ground-breaking games like Castle Quest and Elite making me the envy of the playground. By 1990 I’d moved on to the Commodore Amiga, which boasted a whopping 512KB of memory and made its predecessor, the Commodore 64, look positively archaic.
Forward to autumn 1992 and, fearing that the addictive allure of classic footie games Kick Off II and Sensible Soccer would derail my studies, my Amiga stayed at home while I went off to uni, where I would spend three years either handwriting essays (which usually involved almost as much Tippex as pen), or queuing to use the over-used and quite often over-heating Amstrad PCs in the University Library. Files would be saved on a 3.5 inch floppy disk, and tough lessons in backing up data quickly learnt when the one disk with that 5,000-word essay on inexplicably corrupted, losing all your hard work. And it wasn’t just the computer technology that was from another era. With mobiles some years off, you’d be sharing a single phone with about 50 other rooms in halls – and not making it to the meeting point at the pre-arranged time could well mean no big night out for you on that occasion.
After graduating in summer 1995, I returned to Cambridge where I got a job as a temporary editorial assistant at a student publishing company. The first publications I worked on were a range of graduate career guides, which were to be sent to university career offices across the country, where they would be handed out to final-year students free of charge. Just before the guides were due to leave the printer, someone mentioned this new thing called the World Wide Web and asked whether there were plans for a website to accompany the guides and, if so, has the name of the site (complete with the then obligatory ‘http, colon, forward slash, forward slash’) been included in the publications? Cue blank expressions, followed by hurriedly produced stickers featuring the web address for some unlucky temps, including me, to stick on the cover of endless guides. My very first taste of digital marketing!
‘My digital life’ slide
The sites I use, and the platforms I use them on (I also own a PC, but it just doesn’t look as good as all the Apple stuff!)…
Squared Online video introduction
As part of the course, the Squares (as we’re known) are asked to create a short video to introduce themselves to the other students. Here’s mine…
Matt Tillett's Google Squared blog 