Know your role. Does your organization have a structure for you?

Earlier this week, a good friend of mine and I were chatting about the way companies operate with respect to the people responsible for the marketing of the product. From what he said, it was remarkably like night and day in how an agency organizes its structure versus an organization in the client arena. With agencies, if you’re a creative, you’re dealing with the design and execution, but not the development. You don’t dare touch the development even if you know how to do it and the same holds true if you’re in account management or project management. Your role was constrained and you knew exactly what you had to do. No dabbling in programming, creating great design, or other non-position-related tasks. Everyone had their own specialty.

But from my experience working in the interactive arena, one person just can’t specialize. Everyone eventually wears more than one hat. From a marketing standpoint, the account manager may be called upon at times to do copywriting even though they aren’t as skilled as a full-time copywriter. But what if one does not exist? Someone needs to pick up the slack and carry on, correct? Well the same would hold true for creative. If the graphic designer staff is pre-occupied with other pressing matters, and YOU can do the work in a pseudo-decent way just long enough and then have the designers review your work, then what harm is that in there? Yes, it could seem that you’re trying to take away their roles and responsibilities, but it isn’t as if you’re going to move into their “territory” 100% of the time, but they could feel assured that they have a fall back on smaller projects you are capable of handling.

Marketing is a fickle industry. You’re going to need someone to manage the project, copywrite, design, develop, review, approve, etc. and many times with the way the jobs are going, the people who manage a bunch of said tasks are often the same people. In the days of the Internet, marketing has evolved and often times, those that manage projects are exposed to design and possibly some development work so why not have them help you out? I’m not advocating that they be put into those situations full-time, but if an emergency arises, shouldn’t you consider putting them to task?