DISCLAIMER: This post is my personal thought and not aiming any personal attacks to any party involved in it.
This post is a sequel to corporate blogging and I’d like to share one of my personal projects I was involved in. This was one of the first projects trying to incorporate blogging into the commercial arena. This project dated back to somewhere in March this year and took less than a month to be finished.
I was hired to help conceptualize, design and set up a corporate blog using MovableType. I still feel weird thinking back that we paid so much to just download a license copy so we could have more than a single blogger participating. But I guess that’s the business world when a piece of software becomes too good for its own maintenance.
The project however didn’t go as according to plan.
So what went wrong?
The company who handled it was part of the blame but the client that didn’t have a well-planned strategy, I need not say more. In all honesty, starting a blog as part of a marketing campaign for a new product wouldn’t work completely with just publicity on the Internet.
The numbers of broadband penetration in Malaysia aren’t exclusively high and even with the average number now, our targeted audience weren’t people who surf the Internet like others do. If the campaign was to launch a product between RM2.5k+, you can’t expect the targeted audience to venture online without any offline advertising. So what exactly went wrong? Well, it’s still a mystery if you ask me and the one person I know who could try sharing an opinion is Tim Yang.
He quoted that the reason of failure was the lack of thought put into its strategy. In honesty, if everyone knew of the tight deadline and the MIA of the client at times then of course there wouldn’t be a strong strategy. Take building a website for example; a commercial website would normally have a planned strategy before development. Venturing into the jungle without proper knowledge or analysis could kill you.
While being involved in the project, me and an ex-colleague spent countless hours in an office. We even had to camp it out there because we wanted to make sure the project ran smoothly not thinking of how the work might already be affected. Why did we do this? Because we aren’t being paid to deliver failure, we worked our a** off trying to pull this project off. So if anyone could blame us for being not prepared, think again.
One of my philosophies of being is that in an argument or debate, I don’t believe one party is totally to blame. Every party have their reasons and arguments. There need not be fingers pointing at a party or person as the problem. There could always be neutral ground if we thought of it from different views, but rarely do we do it because of its convenience. (wonderful creatures..us humans.)
In this case; it would have been the client, the company, the staff, the freelancer or the public. As affected as it was, this project should be used as an example to Malaysian companies saying that you shouldn’t jump into something without thinking it thoroughly from different aspects.
If anyone would like to know why sometimes I take longer to design a template?
I too need a strategy before working on it.
I would recommend advertising on popular blogs instead of start own blog site, like what BlogAds offering now.
Well, that’s one way of getting your blog known on the Internet. However, if your main targeted audience are local people who can afford 2.5k and you’re trying to create interest in that particular product..you still need offline advertising in my opinion.