Making a Brand – My experience with DigiWhirl

Make your own smiley! Pic source: Flickr: kipbot

When I first started DigiWhirl, I was like an athlete just waiting to flex some muscles. I took up whatever project came my way because I understood that each project is unique and it would give me some experience. Also this ensured that there was a continuous flow of money into the company. I went the usual way of getting projects hiring and then taking more projects. This grew the company to a team of 10 people, it was good to see the team grow to double digit figure, but by this time things had become very difficult for me. I was mostly managing recruitment, HR, finances, business development and hardly getting any time to do actual social media marketing which was what I was really interested in. Even though I was gaining immense experience in all these functions, a lot of structure in the company was simply lacking for me to manage the team with the level of success I would like. Moreover, we had a few clients which we didn’t like working with and few of us just wanted to discontinue their work and a host of other thoughts.

At this point I felt like we had a brand crisis, even though we were getting projects I just wasn’t happy with a lot of stuff in the company. Bringing in the necessary structure and finesse would mean too much restructuring and even then the model was simply not scalable. I wasn’t happy with the prospect of me slogging for next many years just to keep the company running on larger scale. Its when we decided to scale down. I decided – let me do what I am happy doing – which is managing social media for my clients. We went to a small team of 3 or 4 and pretty much handed over most of our work to the clients to be managed in-house. We stopped all business development and launched an inbound marketing plan. The simple funda behind it was that if we are a social media marketing company we should have a kickass social media plan to fall back on!! We came up with couple of ideas for social media consultation, training people for social media marketing with some sustainability, so that we don’t just get stuck managing a single account for months without end.

In a few weeks we got some calls and we took up new projects. We have been implementing our ideas of in-depth strategy roadmap and that has worked well. We have also been involved in training human resource for companies this way we can handover the project in a few months. I am now happy with my company as it is going well. While we were working on these aspects there was unsurity about what we would be doing, whether things would work out and there were many devils calls where people came up with random offers which were contrary to our goals. I got job offers, affiliate marketing offers, lucrative long term social media management projects which we turned down…. but I realised that it was important to stick on and persist in our ideas otherwise I would land up back in square one just doing stuff that simple wasn’t going where I wanted my company to in a few years! After a few months now I can see a brand DigiWhirl shaping up and as I go further on I have ideas about how to take it forward and build on it to make a company I am actually happy with!