There is one clear sign of a vibrant and growing marketing team: it attracts more of the right people and sheds the rest.

In the digital marketing age, that means 3 things: digital and social business leaders who use analytics to drive their decisions.

Marketing leaders need to look around and determine if they are attracting these leaders of the future or if they are leaving  to drive the marketing efforts of your future competitors.

But what attracts the marketing leaders of the future?

The answer is simple: a culture and social business leaders who reward decisions based on data.

So I believe that in the future of social business, it is the nerds who will win: the matheticians, the technologists and  the digital data scientists.

Marketing Technologist and Ion Interactive President Scott Brinker (@chiefmartec) wrote yesterday about Nate Silver’s popular FiveThrityEight blog and his closely watched predictions.

He draws an analogy from Nate’s work on mathematical models and the ability to separate the signals from the noise to the analytical movement in marketing. He believes that digital and analytic-minded marketers are ushering in a new era:

with data scientists and marketing technologists increasingly influencing senior-level strategy and operations. In both worlds, this rise of this analytical worldview has made many of the “old guard” uncomfortable. But it’s hard to argue with results.

To me, that last bit is the most important: it IS hard to argue with results. And yet, how many decisions do you see based on, well, something else.

In another great article, Ryan Skinner (@rskin11) from Velocity Partners released his “Digital Marketing Leaders Purpose and Principles Memo.” Ryan talks about how we need a renewed focus on leadership and culture in order to succeed.

The digital marketing leaders purpose, according to Skinner? Marketing “brings the buyers.”

The principles include:

• Content marketing that actually helps buyers do their jobs better
• To “excite and inspire” future customers with bold ideas and integrity vs. marketing noise
• Less promotion, more usefulness
• Marketing always fights for the customer
• Customers control when, where and how they receive communications
• Marketing efforts will be data driven and the data is “holy”. Permission is paramount.

I was inspired by these two respected peers so I hope you check out their posts and follow their journeys as I do.

And as you look around at your organization, ask yourself if you are seeing more digital, social and analytical people join your team. Is it “revenge of the nerds” or do you see more of a “tyranny of the urgent” driving your marketing decisions?

Reprinted with permission.