The Day Job

My regular readers will know that I've recently started a new job, and whenever I read people's blogs I'm always intrigued to know what it is they do to earn a living. So I thought I'd share what I'm now doing.

My new job is working in Marketing. So what do I do exactly?

First let me tell you a bit abut the company. It's focus is in corporate sustainability. This basically means that businesses need to be thinking about the effects they have on the world - not just the environment but economic and social impact too. This used to be very much about the company just "doing good" and taking responsibility. However, nowadays it's also about shareholder value and decreasing the costs of your business.

Let's look at an example; Starbucks. When Starbucks make a cup for a takeaway coffee they have to consider the whole chain involved in making that cup. Were the people paid fairly? Were the resources sustainable? Is this information positively representing their brand? There are so many factors to consider to ensure that they aren't hurting anyone or anything in the process, they are seen by their customers to be positively contributing to sustainable development and are keeping costs for themselves to a minimum.

In this day and age of the wonderful internet, if a company is behaving badly it will be spread across the social networks like a bad rash; trashing their reputation in a matter of mere days or even hours!

So back to my company and what we do. We seek out the people who know what they are talking about on this stuff and place them in roles throughout all of the different industries. We have a lot of lovely knowledge of who is fabulous and what, and where they'd best be suited. It's a pretty exciting business, and I'm really looking forward to getting my teeth stuck in to all the issues going on in the world.

In my job I'm in charge of all the Marketing for the company. This means everything from establishing a clear brand, to launching and maintaining 4 different websites. I'll also be putting together marketing brochures, support documentation and running the company's social media. At a basic level it means thinking up ways of how we can make the company look it's best and how we can shout about ourselves.

My day to day tasks include writing copy, optimising the website for SEO (search engine optimisation - this means getting your website to rank higher in the search engines and for relevant terms for people to come to your website and do something you want them to do), organising design for marketing literature, analysing stats from the website, tweeting, writing articles on sustainability, ensuring consistency of brand across all internal documentation, coming up with ideas on the best way to share information within the company. The list goes on.

So that's it! That's what I do. What do you do for a living? What does it entail? I'd love to know!