Digital marketing is a little hard to describe.

I was trying to do it at a gathering a few days ago.

And my new friend really wanted to know. The non-profit she works for, which is trying to save thousands of acres of ancient forest in Canada, and is backed by a well-known foundation, wants in the baddest way to play at the edges of the Web and engage people who care.

But how is it done? The marketing people who had tried to pitch them so far, she said, had been almost strangely vague about what they would do. They were not vague, though, about what it would cost. And, of course, that’s not a deal anyone wants to make.

I love that about digital marketing - it doesn’t exist; it’s not a thing. You make it up depending on what your company is trying to do. In other words, you actually have to be a little creative.

The guidebook, though, definitely does exist as a bunch of principles and insights (i.e., “relationships form quickly on the edge” - Hagel). You then have to blend them with webby technology (e.g., Tumblr) . . . and blend that with your own strategy (preserving a forest).

How you pull it all together to do digital marketing is something an outsider can only guide you through. It’s important to have the right guide (who is using the right guidebook), but more important is that once the insiders know what’s up that it’s them who connect the dots.

Or think about it this way: digital marketing is simply a gesture of what the organization is thinking, doing, trying every day. It has to be because that’s the only way people on the Web are going to throw some attention your way. It has to connect, right?

One quick example. Seesmic is a video-sharing community that’s got a lot of potential and is trying to get off the ground.

So they partnered with Disqus, which is a comment-sharing community (which I use on this blog), to offer people the option to leave video comments. It was super fun to try it out on another blog where comments flow day and night.

It showed off what they do in a highly visible but non-intrusive way that used the modularity of lightweight technology to engage people who want to try stuff like this out (and give their opinion) and can toss it out to their own networks like I’m doing through this post.

The payoff is big in that I knew about Seesmic before they partnered with Disqus, I even had a beta account. But they got me to use their service - understand it - in a serendipitous way. That’s digital marketing.

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