Silver Square

I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let… okay, I can’t keep a straight face while typing lyrics to the Whitney Houston classic, Greatest Love of All.

I was approached this week by a college student I know who needed to interview someone currently working in the field he wants to pursue after he graduated. It’s a class project. (Three more classes to go. Nose to the grindstone, Joe.) The questions were pretty good, so I thought I would share them here. The answers give you a little insight into what I value and what it’s like to work with me and the rest of the Silver Square team.

What kind of training and or education would best prepare me for this type of work (New Media Director)?

I learned most of what I do every day by diving in and getting my hands dirty. Find a cause that you care about that you want to volunteer to help with their website, social media, or an email campaign. If no opportunity is speaking out to you: make one. I built a site about movie reviews for no other reason than I wanted to. I developed a lot of skills and a valuable portfolio piece in the process.

How do you and/or your team approach each project…do you have any specific steps that you follow during the creative process or development of a project?

You have to be flexible with your process because every project is going to have different demands, but there are some common threads. Start with identifying the goals for the project. If you are creating a website, what do you want to see happen? Should a visitor be making a purchase? Giving you their email address? Leaving a comment? If you don’t figure this out first, you’re mostly just creating a site to amuse yourself.

Once you know that, you can create a design to help you meet that objective. Then you get approval from the client. Build it. Measure if what you created is successful at meeting the goals you set.

How involved are you in the creative and development process?

I work on a small team where everyone is involved in identifying goals and brainstorming solutions. We have a couple of jaw-droppingly talented designers who take the ideas and turn them into a tangible design that marries beauty and functionality. There’s a little back and forth as we talk about how the elements of the design can be translated into web, email, or whatever medium we’re using. Then I step in and code out the final design.

What financial risks if any did you take in starting your own business in this profession?

I first started working with Silver Square as an outside contractor. I was still operating under the web design business I had created. When I first started that business, though, I took an enormous pay cut. For the first year of my business I was pulling a lot of money out of my retirement accounts and paying some painful fees in the process. It was brutal.

How have you or the company changed or improved since it was first established?

We’ve had to keep up with the ways rapidly advancing technology has shifted the world of marketing. Social media has certainly been a part of that, but I would place just as much (or more) of the blame/credit on streaming video becoming easier and more practical and the strides made with online analytics.

We’ve had to learn how to pick up and implement new ideas very quickly. It just keeps happening so fast. I have to study and learn more now than I did when I was in school.

How do you view competition?

If you are viewing someone as your competition, it means you haven’t dug deep enough to find out how you’re different. Everyone has a different offering. You have your own skillsets, style, and resources.

Now potential customers are going to view you and some other people as competitors. It’s your job to help them see how you’re different and why those differences are important. Otherwise the job is just going to go to the lowest bidder. You definitely don’t want to be lowest bidder.

Any advice on networking?

I advise quality over quantity. You don’t need to know a ton of people if you know the right people. Part of that is my personality. I’m not someone who enters a room shaking hands and kissing babies. I’m a little more reserved, but I know of people who are happy to network with anyone and everyone.

Knowing someone isn’t enough, though. You can collect a fistful of business cards at a networking event, but then what? How do you make someone want to help you and send business your way? You help them first, of course. So when you’re meeting people, be listening for what their problems are and try to connect them with people that can offer solutions.

What skills or characteristic traits do you feel have best served you in this type of work?

I’m willing to teach myself. I’ve taught myself new programming languages when I had the opportunity to work on a project that just had to be in a certain language. When I don’t know how to do something with Javascript or a database query, I just keep hammering away until I figure it out. I search on the Internet. I do trial and error. I’ll do whatever it takes to make the code do what I want – or something else equally cool.

You can’t always sit back and wait for someone to publish a book on how to do something. Once it’s easy to learn something, everyone will be doing it.