Tuesday 18 August 2009

My mission: design a strategy

What actually convinced me to start this blog was my manager who asked me to give a ‘new angle’ to our on-line strategy.

Don’t think I’ve mentioned it yet, but I work in on-line marketing for an automotive company in Spain. I deal a bit with everything, but most of my time I take care of content management and search. When I say ‘I deal a bit with everything’, I actually mean ‘I sometimes get lost in everything we do or try to do’. As an example I’ll try to explain how we organize our web-activities and you’ll see right away how you can get lost sometimes:

We currently run our web activities between a couple of departments in our organization. We have 3 agencies helping out: media, creative and digital. Our corporate site is hosted and developed in our European headquarters in Brussels, who get their work split between a marketing department and an IT unit. We do translations and local adaptations here in Spain, and we run and develop some local sites and applications from here, through our digital agency which gets support from our systems department for hosting.

Anybody still following?

Now if that quick introduction to how we run our web-operations went a bit too fast, then I completely understand. It’s not straight-forward at all, and many times this leads to confusion, misunderstanding, inefficient work. It just does and I’m sorry about this.

Organization is just 1 example of how difficult this job can be. I don’t believe that it’s actually a problematic issue for our company – everybody knows what to do and does a great job. Don’t get my wrong when I used this example. The point I want to make is that I (or anybody for that matter) can get lost some times.

So when my boss asked me to give a new angle to the overall on-line strategy, I started thinking. I got lost quite easily. So then I started writing things down a list – I ended up with an endless list of ‘important’ and ‘strategic’ topics. I tried drawing some structures, ideas, models. I didn’t get very far, it felt like I needed at least 1 more dimension: drawing in 2D just couldn’t express all what we are doing or what needs to be done. It had to be at least in 3D or even 4D!

So then this idea came: let me write it all down in a blog. Reading blogs have been helping me so much these years in finding answers to problems, and has inspired me very much … maybe writing one can make me organize everything that working internet means for me. In this blog I can organize what we’ve been doing, what I have seen around, people who have influenced me. Things I like, things I don’t like (and why). Things we should do, things we shouldn’t do. Things we try out and what the result is.

There it is: a means to an end. I write this blog to work on our on-line strategy. And in the long term I hope it will help me to learn, to test and to improve.

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