What does a marketing technologist actually look like?

To paraphrase Forrest Gump, “Marketing technologists are as marketing technologists do.”

Or maybe that would be Forrester Gump? (Or Gartner Gump?)

Pardon the slightly silly intro. I’m a little giddy here on the eve of the inaugural MarTech conference.

Whether you’re coming to MarTech or not, here’s an opportunity to participate in a crowdsourcing exercise for our community that will help us shed more light on the emerging profession of “marketing technologists” — and be entered in a drawing for one of three brand-new iPad Minis.

Click here to take the survey now.

Sheldon Monteiro — the über marketing technologist CTO of SapientNitro, who participated in a fascinating Q&A with us earlier this month and is one of our featured speakers at MarTech — suggested running this survey so that we could all better understand the profile of “marketing technologists” today:

• What educational backgrounds do we have?
• Who do we report to in the organization?
• Do we work on the buy side or sell side of marketing technology?
• What skills do we have?
• What skills do we think we need?
• Are we excited? Stressed? About what?

Sheldon took the initiative in designing this survey with Decision Analyst, a marketing research firm. SapientNitro sponsored this effort — and is providing the three iPad Minis for the drawing.

However, the results from this survey will be freely shared with the community and published on this site. Even if you don’t participate, you’ll be able to learn from the outcome. But as part of this community, we hope you will participate. Your individual answers are completely confidential and will be maintained in a secure data center run by the analytics specialists at Decision Analyst.

It is a 10-12 minute survey — not too long, but deep enough to extract meaningful insight. While the questions are very straightforward, please read each choice carefully, as there are subtle aspects to what we do that’s important to capture.

Ready? Take the survey here. Thank you!