Work History: Web Production Manager

This post is part II of a series in which I talk about my professional experience. See also Part I, where I talk about being the publisher of an interactive literary magazine.

My last full-time gig was as Strategic Program Manager at Federated Media. In a nutshell, FM is a business broker for the most successful blogs in the English language; blogs like BoingBoing and Mashable. If you are a big corporation, and you want to get involved in this crazy social media thing that all the kids are talking about, then FM is the company to help you.

As an SPM, I was in charge of planning, executing, analyzing, and optimizing social media marketing campaigns. These campaigns always involved “conversational marketing,” which is to say, a sponsored (but organic and non-directed) conversation among the demographic important to the sponsor. Often, these campaigns would involve the creation of a new media property of some sort. My role included the following responsibilities:

• Assessing the feasibility of the project.
• Calculating profit/loss, and approving the project as profitable.
• Scheduling all aspects of production.
• Choosing appropriate resources, internally and externally, including designers and programmers, and being the primary arbiter of their work.
• Acting as the primary operational point of contact with any partner organizations involved in the project.
• Acting as final arbiter on custom content.
• Making strategic decisions about how to promote the campaign through other social media platforms.
• Evaluating the success of the campaign, and reporting on it both internally and externally.
• Optimizing the campaign at all levels: design, development, promotion, content, etc.

As an SPM, I was somewhere between a senior project manager and a web producer. My work at FM was a good precursor to my work on Revolving Floor, and was a natural sequel to my work as a media buyer and planner, to be discussed in the next post.

I am currently seeking contract work. For more information, contact me: miconian AT gmail.com.