I wish I could say it’s because I’ve spent my time busily squirrelling away on the project I was talking about in the last post. But actually, my ‘day job’ was just really busy this week. There was a heady mix of Scary Brilliant New Stuff and Really Dull Admin which is the way of most jobs. Sometimes the dull admin can be quite useful; it clears your head and allows the creativity room to ferment and produce cool bubbly stuff. It didn’t help with matters, however, that I was sick most of the week, culminating in a spectacular loss of voice over the last two days. Talk about frustrating.

Still, in the midst of all that frustration came some good. I have been having very early ideas for a social media based campaign. The metric – financial or awareness – will really depend on the ultimate message, which is something I can’t decide on my own. I’ve run some early ideas past my manager and she sees it differently from the way I do, but we all know how little the final product actually resembles the early brainstorming. I suspect in the end it’ll be a healthy marriage between my initial ideas and her 10-year knowledge of the charity. A winning combination, hopefully.

I had three main reasons for wanting to plan, carry out and evaluate a big, organised social media / interactive marketing push.

1. Because it’s time; I’ve built up with the smaller-scale, important everyday relationship building. People have now found us; it’s time to really find them, and the people who didn’t know they wanted to find us.

2. Because it’s healthy for internal buy-in into social media marketing. People are still a little confused by it, and a clear result based on a universally-acceptable metric is good for driving acceptance and understanding. Not to mention job satisfaction for us, of course.

3. To push myself; it’s easy to be good at our current level given my skills set and experience, but I always hold myself up to higher standards than I need to, because how else can you learn, grow and progress? Stagnation = bad, especially when you’re working in a world that will chew you up and spit you out as old news faster than ever. I love what I do because of the variety and freshness. I have to look for that in myself, too.

This is going to take time and careful planning because I know exactly what I would do if I were in a commercial enterprise with a big budget. I’m not, and that’s where the creative approach comes in. It makes it all the greater an achievement if you can get the results you want (or more than you dream of) with a shoestring and the joint innovation of a couple of minds with different but complementary skill sets.

I promise next time I’ll write about something I can give details of publicly…