Small Wars Journal
Friday, June 18th, 2010Is looking for a few good men. Or women.
SWJ commencing phase 2 or our nefarious plan
….These are roles rather than job descriptions; each has a bit of an up-front project flavor to it with an enduring execution tail. We expect you to bring some insight and vision to the position, and expand it in a win-win way. We’re trying to frame these in terms where a palatable chunk of 10 or so hours per week is ample for success, though we realize that’s a wild guess and it is recon pull – we’ll evolve together to further lump, divide, or build out the cast of characters.
The big roles we’re framing now are:
- Advertising Manager (Banner King/Queen) – run our advertising operations: rethink our ad inventory as we go through site redesign; enhance our advertiser kit and the whole flow; outreach to, discussions with, and inking deals with advertisers; monitor campaign execution. You have audacity, tact and hutzpah, with the business, people, and operations sense to put it all together.
- Merchandise Manager (Schwag Tsar) – think up some nice small wars stuff that our folks would like to have, and find a way to get it to them. Not at a loss, but we’re more interested in building a brand and a community than we are at selling cheap stuff to make an extra buck. Deal with vendors, figure out some realistic inventory, and get ‘er done. Should have a keen eye for the difference between stuff and junk, and think end to end as far as the logistics goes. Amateurs talk t-shirts & coins, professionals talk fulfullment.
- Social Networking Manager (Grand Twit) – so we’ve got a token Twitter and Facebook presence, but we aren’t doing much with it. There are some untapped capabilities there and in our user profiles in vBulletin. We haven’t done much in the way of facilitating local get togethers. There’s tons we could do but aren’t because we just don’t have the time. You have the vision and execution ability to do more smart stuff to help more people get SWJ their way, and get together in ways that are meaningful to them.
We’ve also got some more focused gaps where folks with some specific talents can help us:
- Developer – if you’re competent on a LAMP box, we’ve got a few office workflow things we’d like to have our system do more nicely. These are distinct from our in-process migration to Drupal and we hope they are discrete, interesting projects that can be feathers in your cap and arrows in our quiver. If you’d like to drop a shoulder on some of it, send us a note for a short list of specific things we’re interested in.
- Graphic Design (Style Guru) – so with all this redesign and rework we’re doing, we need someone with a better eye than us fashion disasters. We’ll soon be doing the CSS work with our site development team, and then there are a couple of collateral things that should synch up for that clean, consistent, simple, functional, good looks. More Filson than Guggenheim, but we want some restrained flair and perhaps you’re just the person to dope slap us with it. We’ve got to make our 2009 Rolling Stone hotness even hotter. Maybe this design gigs stops at the look & feel, maybe you drive through that to be more of a brand manager than a designer with excursions into content and the whole IO thing – e.g. who knows what kind of junk that merchandise person is going to try to schlep that is just inconsistent with our “look”? Your call. But it starts with a sense of style.
I know there are many readers here who are techies who like the subject matter of COIN, national security and strategy, so I thought I would try to help amplify the message in my own small way.
Those who are “deadly serious” are encouraged to contact SWJ publisher Bill Nagle.
