Jaime Polo's Blog

During this summer I have been defining all the procedures of the production department. It has been very interesting due to its importance when growing the company. The best way to define them is by doing a project and writing all the actions carried out during it. This method takes up a lot of time but it’s a good investment for the future.

I don’t think many service companies have their own procedures manual in order to make the company more efficient. The fact that makes you focus your best resources to the most important actions is fascinating. Dividing the process in smaller steps increases productivity and reduces costs.

Having once decided to create a Social Media Consultancy, that was the time to clearly define the service. I have always thought that the most important thing at the beginning was to define the mission and the vision of the company. But, since you are only doing one thing and, specifically, a consultancy, there is not too much to set.

We started defining the service, and it was specially strange because if you want to grow, you have to set every small aspect of the service in advance. That is what we did, we clearly defined the service and we agreed to write different internal handbooks that will help future employees understand what to do in every step of the process. It is really important if you want to grow, using this method, a new employee arrives, you give her the handbooks and she can start to work immediately. You save money and time training her if you hadn’t these tools.

In November 2009, TICTarragona (which I am a member) held a conference about mobile Internet. We had a great time those days and, during the breaktimes, we spoke about different things of our lifes. It was the first time we spent so much time together. There, different ideas came up, and one of them appeared in David Serra’s mind. His father was a successful advertiser, and his former clients told him that advertisement hadn’t ever been the same since he retired.

Thanks to new period of Social Media, David thought that he would love to use those clients to reinvent advertisement in Tarragona, and to make them succeed with online marketing strategies. We didn’t talk about it during the next two months due to Christmas and New Year’s Eve. But, in January 2010, we decided that the moment to start this new venture had arrived. We organized different meetings in order to define what we would do. One thing was sure, the team was made up by Juanjo Ferrer, David Serra, Jaime Polo and our advisor Jordi Planas.

This team has the power of creativity, the power to bring new ideas to Social Media because David Serra is a movie scriptwriter and Juanjo Ferrer is a movie director. They put brilliant ideas for our clients.

The most important thing I learned during this first project is that if you don’t push hard to make ideas become true, it is impossible to achieve your goals. You have to set deadlines and work hard. Fortunately we succeeded.

Recently, Facebook announced a new feature: Community Pages. In my opinion, this is a turn in their business model. It was only based on online advertising and I expect they will be charging for owning an official fanpage. With so much companies around the world, and with more than 400 million users, business will be willing to pay that money for being there, and using all the features available to increase their sales.

Pay-per-click is not profitable enough. As people gain experience online they become aware of frauds and they tend to reduce clicking on advertising. As well, visual advertising becomes invisible as users visit the same page more and more. In conclusion, the probably new Facebook’s strategy is reasonable.