best choice in a given circumstance. And even more so if you are working in an environment Timing beats of driven employees who often just want to show you how they ‘nailed it’. Be aware of that. In our agile marke- perfection. ting engagements, we also advise the stake- holders not to beat an action to death. If it is 80% ready, Be agile about just get it out there when the opportunity is ripe. This, of We were agile about our own agile marketing course, mainly applies to larger and composite marketing your agile too. We saw it as an experiment. We first started projects. Some projects, situations or industries are unfit marketing to work with a group of volunteers, very much for this approach. You cannot complete 80% of an airplane aware that this was an initiative that might fail. and then try and see if it works. We will also never ask a Once we’d gathered enough information about copywriter to finish 80% of a blog article and then post it. the ‘as is’ situation of Corporate Marketing and felt we knew enough about the agile prin- ciples, we started with just one small bet. We chose one specific project and conducted a It will work in a situation where a website is fully functional pilot, doing all the things we had learned and trying out different things along the way. And and flawless on the content side, but might for instance when that project worked out, we did another one and before we knew it we became ‘official’. miss two non-essential pages. Or it might in a campaign Instead of a volunteer army we built a full time organization with dedicated engagement for which we have a folder, a website and a social offen- managers on staff. And then we started enabling more and more engagements, involving sive ready, but for which we are still waiting for a longer more and more business owners and marketing experts. white paper. We’ll just get them out there and add the white paper in the mix later on. In the (agile) spirit of honesty and transparency, we have to admit that it was a rocky road at first. As we said, most people tend to get extremely uncomfortable when it comes to change. 33 Timing is everything in marketing today. You have to We are not kidding when we say it: some of our colleagues actually used to duck away when balance that ‘missing’ 20% against the window of oppor- they saw us coming in the halls. They feared we were going to tell them how to do their job. tunity, when you can make the biggest bang. Does this They thought we were going to monitor them or cause them to lose precious time. We were approach scare people? Yes. As we said, it is human nature perceived as “Red Tape”, inhibitors to getting the job done. We were not necessarily the most to try to get it ‘just right’. It’s just that it’s not always the popular folks at that point in time.