Brandthony

It’s funny. I used to read a lot of social media marketing books. Hell, I even recently helped research one called microMARKETING (which is awesome and you should totally read, thus negating the point of this post…but I digress.)

But as I’ve mentioned in some other recent blog posts, my most recent fascination has been in investigating other areas of the marketing ecosystem. Books dealing with sociology, economics, brand marketing, psychology, anthropology, etc.

I know, it sounds a bit egotistical, “I don’t bother with social media marketing books…” but that’s not an accurate interpretation of what I mean.

What I mean is that I find so much more value in reading about topics that can be related to what social media marketers do. Sociology and psychology examine the mindset of people and their behaviors in community settings, particular when put under social pressures. Economics and brand marketing do good jobs of explaining the cyclical nature of business and how some brands have lasted while others have passed. And on and on.

I think it’s important that we all study those fields on the periphery of what we do through social media channels for the businesses we’re tasked with helping. It opens your thinking to so much more.

Such expansive thinking is infinitely valuable and I was reminded of it today in a NY Times article called “They Did Their Homework (800 Years of It)” about these economists who studied 8 centuries of economic crises in 66 countries.

In short, our economic doom was predictable if only we opened our minds to more:

“Everyone wants to think they’re smarter than the poor souls in developing countries, and smarter than their predecessors,” says Carmen M. Reinhart, an economist at the University of Maryland. “They’re wrong. And we can prove it.”

“The mainstream of academic research in macroeconomics puts theoretical coherence and elegance first, and investigating the data second,” says Mr. Rogoff. For that reason, he says, much of the profession’s celebrated work “was not terribly useful in either predicting the financial crisis, or in assessing how it would it play out once it happened.”

In the past, other economists often took the same empirical approach as the Reinhart-Rogoff team. But this approach fell into disfavor over the last few decades as economists glorified financial papers that were theory-rich and data-poor.

But in the wake of the recent crisis, a few economists — like Professors Reinhart and Rogoff, and other like-minded colleagues like Barry Eichengreen and Alan Taylor — have been encouraging others in their field to look beyond hermetically sealed theoretical models and into the historical record.

“There is so much inbredness in this profession,” says Ms. Reinhart. “They all read the same sources. They all use the same data sets. They all talk to the same people. There is endless extrapolation on extrapolation on extrapolation, and for years that is what has been rewarded.”