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If you’ve attended any marketing conference over the last few years, you would likely have seen plenty of talk about tools and process and less about genuine creativity.

Sure, some extremely creative and ground breaking case studies would be shown. But too often they are presented to illustrate a series of mechanical tasks. “Brand X drove a 20% increase in sales with this innovative Facebook campaign from the best creative minds in the business. So here’s how you build a Facebook brand page…”

No, no and thrice no. And it’s not just conferences. So many blogs, books and more attempt to simplify complex and sometimes unique content marketing scenarios into “Ten Top Tips to Tripling Twitter Traffic”.

These have their place, but I think the discussion has been dominated with attempts to simplify marketing to a series of hints, tricks and tips “we can all do at home, folks”.

Science or art

When presenting these case studies there’s very little, if any, talk about the creative process that comes up with the ideas and a ton of info about the mechanics, the channels used and metrics gained.

It’s not surprising so many people think sending something viral is a simple and mechanical process. The discussion reduced it to one by forgetting everything that makes the content special in the first place. And it’s that special sauce that causes something to go viral, not some switch inside YouTube.

‘Content is King’ may be one of the most over used phrases in marketing history. But it is too regularly co-opted into arguing for quantity and scale than it is about quality. It is used to justify the reduction of content to a production line of generic blog posts and landing pages driven by keyword research, automated or mass produced for chump change in the hope sheer volume and persistence will outweigh the blandness of it all.

Creativity reduced to a science, not art. Content reduced to tasks, not ideas.

Not that the tools aren’t important. Of course they are. But it’s like presenting a case study on the novels of George Orwell to a conference of budding writers by discussing whether he used notepads or a typewriter to write Animal Farm. And then pointing to his book sales as evidence that typewriters are the way to go, before launching into a pitch for the Acme Typewriter company, “Come see our stand in the main exhibition hall”.

OK, maybe it’s not quite that bad. But the last few years have definitely seen far too much focus on the technology; the code, the meta tags, keyword density, widgets, bots, black hat, white hat and more in between. Everything presented as accessible to all, a box of tricks guaranteed to rain fortune down on your business.

Clicks are people too!

It is as if the arrival of internet marketing brought with it a contagious amnesia, causing many to forget that clicks are people too, that success or failure lives in the nuances between the numbers. Just as picking up the phone doesn’t make someone a communications genius, the tools are nothing without creative thought and genuine insight.

It’s not hard to see how this amnesia came about. The pioneers of online marketing were developers, not marketers. They built the tools and showed the rest of us how to use them. Therefore, the concepts underpinning online marketing were reduced to a language of zeroes and ones. I’m not blaming them; that’s what they do and do it well.

Customers were no longer people but numbers on a spread sheet, captured by a tracking code and stripped of all individuality except for whatever demographic information was deemed relevant in a shopping cart form.

In the last few years, marketers began to reclaim the customer. Now there’s more talk of ‘content marketing’, recognising the importance of message over channel. There’s less talk of clicks and more talk of people; with individual motivations, goals and behaviours. Less talk of hits on a page and more talk of what’s on that page.

Many businesses have a long way to go. Some are already there and have been for a while. Others may never ditch their obsessions with production line neuromancy, looking for push-button solutions. These last will continue to add to the graveyard of sub par corporate blogs, abandoned forums, ignored Twitter streams and unliked Facebook pages. Some of those businesses will die, wondering why the mechanics of online marketing failed them while writing it all off as an over-hyped fad.

The last decade belonged to the tactics of technology: the tools, the channels, the code. The next decade belongs to creative approaches to content strategy; what we actually say, why and how we say it.

And technology better get used to holding the door open.

Have you ever known someone who has a pet name for their car and talks about it as if it was a real person? If you’re like me, you think they’re slightly kooky for imbuing a pile of machinery with a personality and building an emotional attachment with it. But many businesses continue to hope all their customers are equally illogical by expecting them to form relationships with a brand while only providing them with automated machinery in return.

We know technology makes us lazy. Our tolerance for doing anything seems to have been diminished by our ability to outsource so many of our day-to-day tasks to gadgets, widgets, automated thingummies, machines, appliances and more. Now we’re impatient if the web takes more than a few seconds to load or if some complex piece of kit doesn’t work for us straight out of the box.

This desire to automate extends to the way we relate to each other too – and this is where it gets dangerous. Many businesses approach the web as a path to automated success and treat their customers as an inconvenience that can be outsourced to technology. With content management systems, email auto-responders, plugins and more, online business owners hope to avoid all that messy, time wasting ‘customer engagement’. Instead, they put gimmicks and technologies into their websites, plug it all into Twitter or Facebook, sit back and wait for the money to roll in with push-button convenience.

Just like an automatic car still needs someone in the driver’s seat to actually – you know – drive, the internet still needs a human to make it work. Understanding technology is not the way to online success. Being able to code websites or bend javascript to your will or design incredibly complex software means nothing if you don’t understand how people will relate to it and use it. And I don’t mean how you want them to use it – I mean the way they really will. They won’t push that button to do you a favour. They won’t befriend your brand or engage with your website if it fakes engagement with them.

Would you ever automate your relationships with your family and friends? Of course not. Imagine how your family would feel if the only communication they ever received from you was an email auto-responder message whenever they tried to send you their news.

Dear Mum/Dad/sister/aunt Mary,
Thank you for your message. I am happy to hear you are well/sad to hear about the illness. Yes, we should have lunch/dinner soon. Please select a date and time in the attached online organiser and you’ll receive a confirmation email if your selection is accepted.

Yes, ridiculous I know, but isn’t that how many online businesses approach their customers? Automated emails and preprogrammed clinical responses delivered by the machine.

You can’t automate relationships. If your customers want to communicate with your business, they want to really talk to someone human, someone real, someone who won’t just read from the company approved script or talk in corporate-speak after every word has been vetted by five departments.

Technology can help you connect with far more people than ever before in increasingly effective ways, but it doesn’t remove your responsibility to behave like a human being.