Agile is about understanding all the work that you’re doing, having it defined to a very specific time frame and making sure that all the people that are on your team understand their roles and are executing against the things you’re trying to execute against.
What’s really exciting about Involver is we sit in an industry that’s experiencing a tremendous amount of churn and fluctuation, and I mean that in a very good way. Involver as a company sits at the tip of the spear in social marketing. The products we build serve a need that customers have to actually operate in this space. So for us, using Agile Marketing is incredibly important.
Defining the Sprint Process
The sprint is really a defined time period, where you understand the amount of work that you can accomplish and you define, as a team, the different tactics you’re going to execute during that time frame. What’s really important about the agile process and the sprint that exists in the agile process is that it’s a much shorter time period than exists in the traditional waterfall model.
So historically, if I wanted to create a campaign for the rebranding or relaunch of a new product, I’d have a six-month plus campaign planned, and I’d be planning to launch that campaign for maybe a quarter or two in advance of that. The difference with the agile model is that you say, “I’m going to execute against the first pieces for that campaign, and I’m going to do that over a two-week period, and then I’m going to identify what the interactions to those pieces are, and then I’m going to make changes to it from there.”
Involver & Our Customers
One of the things we’re always happy to do as a marketing organization is to spend time with our customers and prospective customers, and talk about the way that we run our business. We don’t think that we’re perfect, but we think we have a model that works incredibly well in this space, that’s efficient, and that’s effective.
One of the reasons that we are successful and seeing success as a team operating in agile is because we’re aligned philosophically as a company with the principles we’re trying to operate against, and that’s from the top-down. That doesn’t happen because your CEO says go figure out a new way to do business. It’s because your CEO and your executive team understand and empathize with the way the market has to operate and they empower you to be able to do that, and in turn, there’s no friction in the organization,and the marketing team to try and figure out ways to work to the CEO.
It’s kind of a really magical combination of an industry and of a time and a team that has a company that’s building a product where the Venn Diagram of those four pieces has 80-90% overlap.
As many of you will know from this blog and recent announcements, Facebook is replacing FBML with iFrames as its default mode for tab applications. While the change will enable users to create more consistency between their existing HTML web site designs and their Facebook fan pages, it does create a few challenges for brands switching over from FBML-based apps.
