About this blog
I work for a large graduate careers service which in turn is part of a rather distributed UK University (not the OU!). I originally arrived three years ago to lead our information, online and research teams. My remit since then has expanded to include all our commercial activities. I wanted to find a place where I could apply the stuff I’d learned doing digital marketing and building large-scale online user experiences for (initially) BBC Online (back in 1997) and then a couple of medium sized new media agencies and so far, it seems to be working out.
We’re a small organization with charitable status but smart use of the Web enables us to punch well above our weight. The biggest value we deliver to our client institutions and other customers seems to lie increasingly in the work we do online - vacancies systems, information delivery, intranet, our incoming e-advice service and an ever-growing array of digital marketing of our products, publications and offline services.
For me, it’s starting to feel like another case of “right time, right technology”. I stumbled into internet work in 1995 and was instantly hooked. I dropped out seven years later, disillusioned by one too many lumbering behemoths of projects for yet another lumbering behemoth of a corporation. But the wave that seriously started to break a couple of years later offered a new model of getting things done. Social networking, Web 2.0, web service mashups…it all provides an array of free or low cost services to small businesses or poverty-stricken NFPs that make doing business on an increasingly level playing field possible. Big corporations will always be able to afford the big billboards - but there are ways in which on Facebook, everyone is equal. The interesting part is proving it. I’m also working through an MSc in Organizational Behaviour at Birkbeck, University of London.
By the way - anything written here is entirely my own opinion and not that of my employers…
