Ah, the great dilemmas: cat vs. dog, steak vs. chicken, blonde vs. brunette...and the one I want to talk about today: automatic vs. manual.

Before you start thinking about cars, let me remind you that this is a marketing blog. The question is, should you automate your business, or run it manually?

Several factors come into play when deciding whether to automate. Let's start off with an issue Ray Edwards raised today...

The Human Touch

Customers are seldom impressed with how well you are able to remove human contact from every transaction.

People are always amazed at a personal touch-even as brief as a two-minute phone call, a handwritten note, or an e-mail that was clearly personal.

On the one hand, this is very true. Sure, you could hook ELIZA up to your helpdesk and automate your tech support. But your customers aren't going to be too impressed by this:

Customer: Every time I get to the end of the installation script, I get an error message saying, "a type 7 error has occurred. Aborting installation." What should I do

ELIZA: How does it make you feel when you get an error message saying, "a type 7 error has occurred. Aborting installation"?

On the other hand, customers expect (and prefer for) other things to be automated. When you buy a digital product, are you impressed if the merchant emails it to you manually? Heck no. You want a download link on the "thank you" page.

Intelligence

Similarly, as I recommended in my book "How To Build and Operate an SEO Content Factory" (download the PDF or mobipocket version), you should automate grunt work, and do the things that require intelligence manually.

And don't forget that "grunt work" includes the parts of brain work that don't require your brain. For example, blogging requires intelligence to come up with the words, but you can use blogging tools to automate the creation of the page, linking of pages together, pinging, etc. You can even use automated transcription to replace typing if you prefer.

None of that detracts from the human value of content creation -- in fact, it empowers you to do more of what automated tools can't.

Skill Level

Getting back to cars, when I was first learning to drive, I had two choices: my mom's automatic, or my dad's stick shift. Which did I use to practice and take the test? It was no contest -- the automatic.

Later, as I gained more experience, I discovered that manuals are a lot more fun to drive. No matter how good a car gets at recognizing when you're asking it for more power vs. fuel efficiency, it'll never read your mind and start giving you power in advance. Besides, there's something primal about the closer-to-the-metal control you have when you're the one shifting the gears.

Similarly, when building web pages, if you wouldn't know an HTML tag from Adam, a visual editor is best. But once you've gained a little experience working under the hood, if you want clean, fast loading HTML, or if you need to break the assumptions of the visual editor, manual is the only way to go.

The same concept applies in marketing. Some things are better done manually. But that doesn't mean you should do them manually from the beginning -- just that you should make a plan for learning to do them manually once you've finished taking care of your first priorities.

In the end, the answer to the "manual or automatic" question is the one Deion Sanders gave in this old ad:


So here's the next question: "Like" or "+1"? (Both are appreciated :-)