Managing Your Web Presence

I have a friend who is a pastry chef for a Las Vegas Strip hotel. Her goal over the past month has been to develop a web presence that will help her professionally in the highly competitive culinary industry. She faces very specific questions about transforming her day-to-day job experiences into publishable Web content. She needs specific answers pertaining to real-life "how to do this" because she is contemplating a seasonal project of building gingerbread houses for a charitable event. I recently sat down and told her to focus on what I called her line of business or LOB, a term I borrowed from my IT background. I told her to think of the project in terms of a planning stage, a design stage, an implementation stage and a follow-up. She is a professional chef of 15+ years but my project management terms appeared to her as "consultant overkill". I explained that using a project plan approach helps develop "multiple payoffs" in terms of content production for her "web presence". She patiently waited for me to provide more details. As I have mentioned in previous articles, my client wants to develop her professional "web presence" by leveraging her day-to-day chores; she doesn't want a second "job"!

I explained to her that marketing her professional skills was, in fact, a necessary part of her career in such a competitive industry. The way she handled typically day-to-day tasks not only "showcased" her own skills but might be of great interest and value to people who dreamed of entering the culinary field or were just curious about how a "pro" handled, say "making a chocolate cake"! I told her to divide each stage of her "project" into individual tasks or what I call a To Do's list. The tasks will typically arrange themselves in a sequence or linear order of execution. If there are off-shoots or divergent task, I told her to include them in the workflow especially if they serve a critical function in the over-all completion of the project. Otherwise, leave them as "cliffhanger" blog entries!

Upon completing the long task list of her project "workflow", I told her that she needed to take a step back and a second step to one side. I told her to visualize the project workflow as a full-length, multi-hour video movie. Some "scenes" in her documentary movie would stand out in a person's mind; call them key scenes in the "story-line". Movie producer/directors use story boards that elaborate on this "story-line". A story board is simply a collection of drawings or pictures that visually map the story-line scene by scene. She looked at me with glassed eyes but I continued. I told her that she needed to translate her gingerbread project (the extensive list of task ToDo's) into a story board. Her marketing multiple payoffs would be, for example, a blog with several weeks of entries, a series of 500-1000 word articles, and possibly a collection of 3-5 min video fragments of a "documentary movie" that showed key tasks about building a gingerbread village in real time. Her eyes suddenly lite up; she understood what I had oftentimes told her about managing her career as if she was running a "home based" business, exactly the way most successful career people do! I told her not to worry about the production issues but, instead to concentrate on her "line of business" workflow designing, constructing, and "plating" the gingerbread village. My goal was to show her how to build, with this one project, her "web presence", market herself professionally, finish her seasonal project, AND have loads of fun without ever taking off her white, fluffy chef's hat! Only time will tell if I was as successful as I hope she will be translating her everyday work into interesting online content.