Posts Tagged ‘Project management’

Striding the sidelines

Last week, while watching the BCS game between The University of Alabama and the University of Texas I was slightly stunned at the way that the eventual winner, Alabama, came out in the second half. After dismantling the Longhorns in the first half, the Crimson Tide essentially came out and played so conservatively that they nearly ended up costing themselves the championship. I’m not sure why teams do this — it is an affliction I notice at the professional level as well and it’s frustrating, and kind of boring.

So, what it is my point?

I suppose I don’t really have one.

Then what’s the relationship to marketing and advertising?

Games, like jobs have a beginning, middle and end. One needs to start strong and one needs to finish strong. The second half of an important game, and the second half of an important job are no time to go conservative. I say keep the pedal down as long and as hard as you can until you finish the job. You got to where you are by behaving (playing) a certain way. Don’t change it, don’t fritter away the opportunity out of fear of losing because you just may.

Built by and for pros

This is a release that I’ve been looking forward to announcing for quite some time. Please Feed The Animals, a  site where out-of-work advertising agency professionals can open a free account and post their resumes, work experiences, and  eventually, portfolios to connect with agencies that are hiring, has been released in Beta. The brain child of Erik Proulx, the site was designed and built by an all volunteer force of agency professionals. I provided project management and information architecture services as well as space on exUrban’s BaseCamp for the duration of the project. Through Erik’s connections, and mine, some of whom overlapped (unsurprising in a town as small as Boston) we pulled together Michael Durwin, Joe Morris, Liz DiPietro-Frazier, Amanda Talbott, Conor Feely, John Szalay, and Richard Haynie — rocking designers, all. Based in and around Boston, New York and Phoenix, AZ these folks designed and laid out the many pages that Skookum — who generously donated their staff’s time and is based in Concord, NC — needed to work their magic.

The designers went above and beyond and knocked the designs out of the park. From just a single, model template this geographically distributed team created 26 page designs (lots of forms and information presentation pages) that matched each other perfectly in terms of PFTA’s brand. This consistency is a true testament to their skill and their professionalism. As happens with a volunteer team of hustling ad-types the size and composition of the team ebbed and flowed as folks picked up paying gigs, but the design work was evenly distributed across team members and the bulk of the templates were completed in a few weeks — give or take some staffing ebbs.

The development and deployment of PFTA was a terrifically collaborative experience with plenty of spirited give and take, and a high level of trust that the pros on the team would make good decisions and do what was right for the job. The team did not disappoint. PFTA proved, yet again, the viability of social media as a connector (that’s how Erik and I met) and a tool that can be used to marshal resources and enable them to work together. Spread across the country, using email, cell phones, Twitter and a $25 per month, cloud-based-extranet/project management tool (two actually, Skookum has one as well) a talented bunch of folks brought to life a really cool idea. If I were a giant, publicly-traded-holding-company-owned-agency I’d look at PFTA as both a wonderful staffing resource but also a potential threat to my organization. The world’s biggest, most experienced agency is on the streets, and it has everything it needs to succeed and deliver value to customers. In a final, wonderful bit of meta-context, Please Feed The Animals was built by the people for whom it was intended: the talented, passionate, driven ad-pros who lost their jobs in the ad-biz blood-letting of 2008-9 (hopefully, it evolves into “just” a job site for talented ad folks, no more hemorrhages for a while, please). I am proud to have been a part of the genesis of PFTA, and completely thrilled at how well it turned out. May it be wildly successful.

Avoid the content trap

One of the things that I’ve found as a producer of marketing and sites for the web is that the most underestimated and misunderstood part of a job is often content creation. On many projects content is one of the hardest aspects of a job to scope. Certainly, one can scope number of revisions, estimated page counts, etc. — but there are all sorts of gray areas within content creation, especially on websites. Sometimes there is existing content that “only needs to be edited,” “or content that’s already been created but needs to be given “a consistent voice and tone” Unless these, and myriad other content-related are nailed down and discussed in depth prior to the start of the job they can be become morasses that sink a job. This is actually a larger topic than this post will cover, and I’ll come back to it at a later date. What I want to share now, though, is how important it is to not short-change your site development process by forgoing a copy writer or content creator and taking it all in-house. There are three reasons for this that I see and am happy to hear more from others, so please comment away.

1. Assuming responsibility for writing site content puts extra burdens on either you, the business owner (the person in a small business setting with the most knowledge of the company), or on your staff. Content creation can be laborious depending on the depth and breadth of the site being built. Your time and your staff’s time is better spent on core competencies and responsibilities like running the business, client management and new business development. Placing content writing responsibilities on staff or yourself means that full attention is given to neither the needed content, nor core responsibilities.

2. Professional copy and content writers are much more experienced with this type of work. This is what they do for a living, and by including them on your site development team you are tasking them with something that is their job and for which they are paid (see point 1 above). This professionalism and experience permits a writer to say things more succinctly and efficiently than you and your staff often-times can. A writer does not completely relieve you of responsibilities, you and your staff, will still have to collaborate and work with them, but mainly in an advisory and review capacity. Efficiency will be gained all around.

3. Creating your website, or revamping your website is an emotional process as much as it is a creative and technical process. Diving into a site build or site redesign will really force you to look at your company’s offerings and define your company in a very public way. This emotional aspect often makes site builds much more challenging than anticipated at the start of an engagement. Bringing in a copy writer or content specialist adds an objective third party to the process who can help to navigate some of the issues that arise when developing one’s site content. This objectivity is useful for the very reason that site owners and staff have biases (often positive, sometimes not) that can impact the copy and content creation process and lead to too much, diluted content.

Bringing an extra resource onto a job does cost money, and in the current situations all business owners are looking for ways to save money — we understand that as well as anybody. Often, budgeting for a copy or content professional will save you and your staff time, and money down the road. It will also help your site, which is a large investment to be the best that it can be and therefore help to better represent your company to current and future team members, the public and, even more importantly, to current and potential clients.

Late June into early July were some good weeks for the interactive side of exUrban, Inc. A bunch of  sites on which we’d been working have come online and I’d like to mention one, OpFocus, briefly.

OpFocus is a consulting company that specializes in SalesForce.com implementations, Crystal reports and Excel reporti automation. We delivered a WordPress-based solution that allows Opfocus to easily manage their content and have a blog. We used custom fields to load the picture of the guy looking at the screens and this makes it very easy to update. Each content block on the home page is a separate child page of the homepage so it is easy to update and maintain. We also built a custom, random comment generator widget that appears on sub-pages. This feature is fully styled to fit with the site’s look and feel and is easy to update from within the widget itself.

The benefit of WordPress for our clients, and one of the reasons that we use it frequently, is that it is an open source platform with a passionate and huge development community. As mentioned, the OpFocus site is widget enabled so the client is able to extend the site’s functionality over time and add a plethora of features that would either take much time and/or money to implement on another platform.

Services Provided:

• Project management
• Information Architecture
• Art Direction
• Front End Development
• WordPress Implementation