There is a wonderful scene from the Broadway musical “The Wiz” (adapted from The Wizard of OZ) where Dorothy and her companions arrive in the Emerald City and find fickleness is the rule. People are constantly changing their clothing to a new color and pronouncing it to be the new “in” thing. One moment it’s blue and the next moment everyone is wearing red and wouldn’t be caught in anything else.

I’m often reminded of this classic scene when I read yet another evangelist preaching that marketers must dive into the latest and greatest channel or die. I must tell you, diving into any channel without taking a good look first is no different than leaping off cliffs into dark water – you are liable to hit some jagged rocks.

In the comments and tweets about MediaPost’s Email Insiders Summit, I detected some push back coming from some folks regarding the past year of push for mobile marketing. It seems now that perhaps not everyone is so sure that mobile is the marketing panacea it was once hailed as.

Is it perhaps possible that mobile advertising isn’t the magic lamp for advertisers? Of course it is. It is no more magic than email or search or social. The sooner we all stop changing clothes to be in with the hip crowd the better off we will be.

Jumping around to the newest and latest thing just because you read something on Mashable or saw a tweet passionately imploring you not to miss the latest greatest thing is completely counterproductive.

What are the business goals and what do your customers want?

If your boss is knocking on your desk and telling you that the future is mobile or social or even email marketing, you need to remember two very simple and magical questions which, unless your boss is Yosemite Sam, should prevent your head from exploding:

1. What are the goals?
2. What do the customers want?

These simple questions should give everyone some pause for thought and give you the breathing space to formulate a plan to accomplish whatever the goals may be. If you don’t have clear goals for any advertising channel, you are doomed. That goes for online, social, email and mobile marketing.

All things being equal a balanced strategy leveraging all the new shiny marketing channels with a healthy dash of traditional should work for you nicely.

Integration is a must

Start with your corporate culture if you are considering stepping into channels where you have not been before. Is it the right fit for you? Do you have the people on staff that can succeed in something such as social or mobile? And how will you integrate and combine them to interact with the cross-channel customer when, how and where he wants?

Build out your strategy in function of your business goals and customer behaviour. Be sure you have content/information to offer which people will want and then use social media and all other channels your customer use to promote it, make it easy to find, get it shared, make it engage people and drive traffic.

Participate in the online communities and interact via the channels your customers use and remember; listening and not talking is the most important skill any marketer has.

No single channel is a magic lamp. The genie is in the combination of channels in function of your customer.

Mobile is a part of it and an increasingly important one.