Social Marketing as Project Integration

October 21st, 2007 at 07:51am Lance Bennett Permalink

We have recently (October 2007) added a member of the team (Adriana Gil Miner) to begin a marketing plan to attract more community youth organizations and individual teens to our digital media project, Puget Sound Off. Her approach was to interview every member of the team while adding their inputs to a powerpoint file that covered the project vision and its intended audiences and outcomes.

The process proved incredibly useful, as she illuminated areas of (understandable) differences among the organizing partners in terms of goals for the project. We also identified areas of the site design that had not been clarified sufficiently for the tech developer (Samantha Moscheck) to proceed with finishing the site plan developed by teens in our summer of 2007 design program.

This experience suggests to me that introducing an experienced marketing person into the process fairly early on can help focus the vision in terms of better specifying: the goals, the definition of audience, the prouct features and functionalities, and ways of presenting it to different user groups with different needs and interests. The marketing process helps the project management team think about its evolving story about the project, and this, in turn helps explain it to others, and to see the physical design in terms of what is being emphasized and what is missing.

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