Marketing Guy

The times they are a changing

2008-04-24T22:42:00Z

I was recently looking at the tech preview of a site called TaskMarket. This is a marketplace recently launched by Microsoft to connect freelancers directly with businesses and it got me thinking about how internet market places are changing the way we work as marketers. Consider the case of launching a new website to be the destination in a marketing campaign for a new product or service. This is something I am sure many of you have worked on before and in fact may be doing right now. A project like this is multi disciplinary in nature. You need a combination of skills covering marketing, product management, copy writing, web development, graphic design etc

In the past there were two main approaches you might have used to assemble such a cast of characters

In house – If your company is large enough you might be lucky enough to have the resources you need for the project internally. You would bring together a team with the right skills and get cracking.
Outsource – If your company is smaller or some of your key assets dedicated to other preexisting projects you might go ahead and bid the work out to an agency. A typical agency will have a large pool of freelancers in the different disciplines and they will put together the right team and get the job done.

In many industries the internet has helped cut out the middle man and flattened the way people do business. This is also true of marketing and the emergence of labor marketplaces allows you easy direct access to free lancers. This opens up a third choice for you empowering you as marketer to crowdsource your projects. Essentially this means you can choose to easily and cost effectively bid out components of the project as you see fit. Don’t have get copy writing? Bid it to the marketplace. Don’t have web design in house? Bid it to the marketplace. You get the idea.

While TaskMarket is just taking its first baby steps there are other more established sites that have already achieved critical mass. Take a look at guru.com for a robust example of a freelancer market place. They have in excess of 100,000 free lancers across a multitude of skill areas. I will certainly be keeping my eye on the development of these marketplaces and considering them as a tool in my arsenal when it comes to cost effectively delivering my marketing projects. How about you?

The Naked Business Part III - The site update

2007-05-21T23:07:00Z

Last week we released a minor site update we have been brewing up for a while. It includes the following

The display name (screen name) and username fields have been merged. This means that you will now be able to modify your display name, and should remove some confusion in the signup process. The server settings have also been changed so that the display name is displayed instead of the username.
The old poll has been closed, and a new one started. The results of the closed poll are displayed in a separate section on the right hand side of the home page. The closure of the poll means we officially are called the Finance Forum!
The hero graphic for authenticated users has been updated to a nice shiny new graphic.
A flash demo has been added to the site, this shows you the features of the site and walks you through what can do in the community. This is linked to from three places:
a. The hero graphic for authenticated users
b. The welcome section on the top right hand side of the home page.
c. The “How do I join?” section of the Join Now page.
The layout of the forums home page has been changed to give prominence to the forums (the Shortcuts, My Discussions, Active, and Unanswered sections have been pushed to the bottom of the page).
The layout of the home page has been slightly changed with the Popular Tags section being moved above the Active and Unanswered sections, and with the addition of the previous poll results section.
We added some back end goo to enable us to do reporting on the demographics of the members so we can figure out better content etc for you

We hope you like these changes as much as we do.... more to come in July...

Naked Business Part II – The Team

2007-05-09T22:18:00Z

Continuing my behind the scenes look into the community let’s talk about who the team is and what they do. To set the stage we have a core team of 6 people working on this project spread across Redmond, WA; Fargo, ND and even Hettinger, ND! Although we are all US based today we have pretty diverse backgrounds including an Irishman, a Mexican, a Kiwi and of course a few from the USA. We meet weekly for 1 hour on a Monday at 1pm PST to talk through plans, make decisions and review progress on our individual workstreams. In terms of the roles on the team we have the following (semi official Microsoft definitions included)

· Program management (Carlos, Redmond) - Leads the technical side of a product development team, managing and defining the functional specifications and defining how the product will work.

· Software Development (Gerry, Redmond) - Codes and designs new software, often collaborating as a member of a software development team to create and build products.

· User Experience (Zach, Redmond ) – Works closely with development, usability, and visual design to create rich and useful user experiences in many forms and different mediums.

· Product Management (Shane, Fargo) - Creates the road map that takes Microsoft products from conception to launch, then monitors their impact throughout the product life cycle.

· Product Marketing (Liz, Hettinger) - Develops and implements marketing strategies that drive faster adoption and deployment of products and services.

If I had to boil it all up and deviate from the official descriptions I would say this captures it.

· Carlos –He writes the specs that make the whole world sing, manages the overall process and keeps the trains running on time in the dev side of the house

· Gerry – We feed him Guinness and he writes the code

· Zach – Designs a pretty and usable place for us to put everything (Shane helps with this too)

· Liz – Organizes content, makes sure people know the site exists and keeps the marketing folks focused

· Shane – Is a non traditional product manager and in fact does many things across all these areas including html, specs, production, UX etc

And then there is me falling into the official category of management overhead. I do also try to make sure no question goes unanswered on the community.

Next time I will dive into the outcomes of our latest weekly meeting and some of the discussions going on around future developments etc.

Naked Business – The Premise

2007-04-25T18:23:00Z

I am a long time reader of Wired magazine and they recently published a very interesting article entitled “The See-Through CEO”. It discussed the increasing trend in business today to use web 2.0 approaches including blogs and communities to get businesses closer to their customers in a very transparent way. It got me thinking about the work our team is doing here on the Finance community front and the dialog we are building together in our community. I thought it might be fun to apply the premise of the article to the process we are using to develop and enhance this community. Specifically I am going to write a series of blogs that give you insight into the team, our process and the plans and decisions that affect the community. That will allow you to follow along with what we are planning and also to provide input and thoughts via leaving comments. Hope you will find the series interesting and give us some insightful feedback.

Finance Community Coming at ya...

2007-03-10T23:26:00Z

Well here we are at a little show called Convergence 2007 with 8,500 of our closest friends. For me personally it will be my 5th and it is always so much fun to reconnect with old friends and make new ones. This year our team also has the honour and priviledge of launching this Finance Community and bringing the spirit of Convergence online 24 x 7. Communities of course are about the people that make them up and we hope those of you in Finance roles will get involved and shape it into what we know it can be. For those of you on other roles watch this space...we are planning on bringing others online later in the year.

Thanks to the team that worked with so much passion and talent to make this possible. In no particular order Shane, Gerry, Carlos, Liz, Zach, Bill, Trent, Guillermo and our friends at Telligent.