A really busy January is over

I can't believe that it has been more than one month since I last wrote something in my blog... it seems that my work absorbs most of my productive time and many of the things that I would blog about are already posted in the Agro-Know blog anyway (by me).

Well, January is officially over and there were a lot of work-related updates: First of all, there is a new team member in the Marketing team (that I am leading - or at least I try to); Alexandros seems like a talented and creative person that is currently doing his internship in Agro-Know, helping me out with marketing-related activities, such as the social media and the marketing material (which needs a face lift, I have to admit). It is a challenge for me to guide him through the team's needs and provide him with the knowledge and space that he needs in order to deploy his creativity and fresh ideas!

Apart from that, I have been focusing my work during January on the branding- and marketing-related activities of a new product that Agro-Know plans to deploy in the next weeks/months. These activities include:

• the work on the product's logo with George, a talented, external (out of the Agro-Know team) graphic designer;
• the development of a Drupal-based landing page for the product with the help of an external team of web developer;
• the work related to the registration of the trademark of the new product (name and logo), in collaboration with the company's lawyer (Periklis, also a great guy);
• the development of a methodology based on the AARRR (Startup metrics for pirates!) in order to measure the acquisition of new customers and the conversion funnel (?);
• reading about SEO, conversion funnels, Call-to-action & conversion techniques, leads and copywriting and other unfamiliar terms and methodologies

This alone seems to be challenging, as it involves a lot of preparation related to work that I am not familiar with; however, getting to learn about such things helps me broaden my (already broad) knowledge obtained through my work with Agro-Know (including metadata & their management, digital repositories, information management, knowledge organization systems, linked data, big data, social media, open access & open data, etc.).

Last but not least, I am working on two publications (one for the Open Repositories 2015 Conference and another for the Open Knowledge in Agricultural Development (OKAD)) to be submitted in the next days and doing some work for the text for the website of the Wheat Data Interoperability Working Group of RDA (of which I am a member) and completed the Greek translation of the Pisa Declaration on Policy Development for Grey Literature Resources - a movement that I really endorse :-)

I have a feeling that February will be a key month for my work, as the deployment of this new Agro-Know product is expected and this will be affected in a high degree by my personal contribution. At the same time, my collaboration with my new team member is a stake that I need to win, as this will be a win-win situation for both sides; the team will gain a long-term new member and I will have more free time to focus on more high-level aspects of my work.