As Search Engine Marketing matures into a globally accepted business discipline Marketing and IT teams are working together in new ways to accomplish company objectives. This is a partnership not without conflict. While Marketing teams are exploring exactly how their IT counterparts can help or hinder them, IT Teams find themselves in tough situations answering the demands of marketing and sticking to established company policies.

It is a new phenomenon for marketing folk to demand specific server configurations from IT teams to inprove search engine marketing. This is a step outside of the comfort zone for technical staff, after all, they are the experts and what does marketing know about a web server or administering a MS SQL database. And yes, they are the experts, however their responsibilities are bleeding into the marketing arena and they need to be prepared to take on these challenges. This is inevitable and every company is depending on their IT staff to step up.

Marketing teams are not immune to these growing pains either. As the internet becomes more and more the medium of choice, marketers have to learn their limits and their potential. Marketers need to learn about gigabytes, image resolution (other than 300 dpi), video size, web browsers and operating systems, website reporting, the difference between a page view and a unique visit. Markets must learn that they can not add twenty 150mb videos to their website without expecting it to effect the websites performance.

Large companies have already or are currently in the midst of this collision but smaller companies are just beginning to experience the challenges of these two core business teams stepping into new areas simultaneously.

Here are a few tips that can help ease the strains of this partnership.

For marketers:

• Be sensitive to IT staff, they are outside of their comfort zones and are likely to be resistant to your initial requests, plan on this
• Follow appropriate channels in making request
• Follow technical documentation procedures, ask for these up front and learn them, this may require some training but it is an excellent show  of good faith, may also be worth your time to learn technical process maps
• This is a no brainer: Explain the purpose and benefits of your requests to  I.T.  and be open to their recommendations, this will help foster team building and shared ownership
• Share the results: Make sure that technical teams are aware of the positive returns that their efforts are gaining whether it is increasing traffic, sales  or PR mentions

For technical staff:

• Be patient! and realize that the marketing team and your are after the same goal
• Understand that marketers are outside of their comfort zone and they need your technical expertise to ensure that requests are being implemented correctly.
• Realize that they cannot accomplish their goals without your help
• Do not try to tell marketing how to modify their campaign, make recommendations, but that is it. The marketing department has likely put plenty of thought into how and why and has access to research and business intelligence that IT does not.