Staffing a Digital Business

Affino gets asked a lot to recommend and advise on Digital Business Personnel. Even though for most businesses the digital side is growing in significance - both in terms of business impact and revenue generation - very few companies have a dedicated digital department or division. Most companies re-utilise existing staff to a large degree, but only very loosely write new responsibilities into existing job descriptions. The digital realm is often designated as ’additional duties’, and frequently takes a secondary level of importance. Most companies are also relying on part-time, 3rd party and contract staff to fulfil those new / additional roles, which can lead to a number of operational problems - including poor levels of service and unresponsiveness.

Most companies need to get better at writing the new roles into job descriptions and allocating dedicated personnel and resources into that side of their business. Here follows a list of the 10 key roles which are needed to run most digital businesses successfully:

Digital Manager / Webmaster / Web Manager

This is the one person primarily in charge of your digital business/es - they are responsible for defining the overall customer experience and managing customer access. They are also responsible for ensuring that all the functional aspects of the sites are maintained, keeping the sites up and fully functional.

Editor

Person/s responsible for tone of voice, content and context of sites / digital business.

Photo Editor

Person/s responsible for selecting / providing / formatting site imagery - usually some degree of Photoshop skill required here at the minimum.

Contributor / Copywriter

Person/s who create / originate all text elements for sites.

For smaller businesses the above roles may be handled by as few as 1-3 staff members. For larger businesses, the following additional roles may be required also:

Commercial Manager

Person in charge of key commercial activities - Advertising, Promotions and principal connected revenue streams

Ecommerce Manager

Person in charge of sales revenue streams - selling products and services, occasional overlap with Commercial Manager

Community / Customer / CRM / Contact Manager

The Customer Experience manager for larger sites. Responsible for responding to and overseeing the key customer contact activities on-site.

Marketing / Social Media Manager

Another role which often has some degree of overlap with Community / Customer Management - responsible for the brand experience / look and feel, occasionally customer experience and promotions too.

Designer

With Responsive Design, it really helps to have someone on the inside who knows how to customize your site design through clever use of CSS and HTML5

Content Manager / Curator

Site content now covers all kinds of different types beyond text - including infographics, video and guest bloggers and vloggers. When a site gets to a certain level of critical mass, it is probably timely to bring in someone to coordinate the various content origination / production streams.

The above roles are more specialist roles depending on the make-up of the digital business, and often consist of quite distinct variations of overlap - meaning a number of the roles may be combined to suit the business in question.

At a bare minimum though, all sites / businesses MUST have a Webmaster.