Nothing like a major national recession to really focus the mind, especially when it gets personal.

My news: Today is my last day as Marketing Director for WebJunction. Like so many organizations in this day and market, WebJunction is trimming down for the long and challenging journey forward. My role, along with those of several other great folks, didn’t survive said trimming.

Anytime a major life experience comes to a close, I like to take stock of what I learned from it and how that may help down the road:

  • Managing a team with a diverse mix of roles (sales, analytics, communications, program management), both local and remote (talking about Kit, aka “The Detroit Office”), was both a joy and an immense challenge. One of the best learning experiences of my career, hands down.
  • The library field has an extremely impressive array of forward thinkers and experimenters around social media – creative and risk-taking professionals who are trying to drag an entire profession (industry, really) into a new era. Librarian bloggers might fly under the radar screen of most folks in the tech world (they did for me before I joined WJ), but I was both surprised and delighted at all the awesome thinking, blogging, and challenging of the status quo that goes on in the “biblioblogosphere” (a term that many cringe at, but hey, it works here). Many have a permanent spot on my blogroll.
  • Every industry has their anonymous flamethrowers, and the library world is no different. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they do serve a distinct and often useful role.
  • Explaining to people that you “work at a non-profit that sells things, in order to fund itself…just like many hospitals” is often vastly easier than leading with “it’s a social enterprise”. The latter may be sexier, and easy to look up on Wikipedia, but the former definitely passes the plain English test.
  • Rebranding an entire organization, while rewarding, is a grueling process and should only be undertaken if you absolutely HAVE TO. Oh, and despite the prevailing trends, taglines really do help clarify the brand, IMO. It was a mistake not developing one.
  • Pricing strategy is equal parts art, science, and voodoo, it’s incredibly hard, and it’s perhaps the most important thing you’ll tackle in the marketing mix. If you own pricing for your company, I guarantee it will keep you up at nights.
  • Cultivating internal account champions within major customers, *after* the sale and deployment, is just as critical as winning them over pre-sale. Without those internal champs, utilization of your product may lag and the renewal or upgrade conversations down the road become that much more challenging. WJ has a stellar team (Rachel, Zola, et al) focusing on just this, and the results were awesome to see in realtime.
  • When you manage the complete portfolio of marketing and sales in a small company – from lead gen to PR/marcom to branding to sales results, pipeline management, and forecasting, and all the messy stuff in between – it’s hard to keep the need for a coherent social media strategy front of mind. No matter how critical you know it to be to an organization’s long term success, when the quarterly revenue forecast comes calling it’s tough to focus on social media planning. My experience at WebJunction just reinforced for me how critical it is that a social media strategy clearly ties back to concrete business objectives, and constantly adjusts to the short term realities of the organization, in order to stay on the top of the priority list.

Many lessons learned, and lots of great relationships built in the process. To anyone at WebJunction or OCLC reading this, thank you for the great experience and I can’t wait to see what you do next.

What’s next for me? I’m pursuing a few possible new directions, and will spend a bit of time catching up some side and home projects. If you or anyone you know is in the market for a community marketing professional with a diverse career background, a focus on tech, and loads of experience at Microsoft, give me a call! (or email, or tweet…)