OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Choosing an Organization Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Identify an organization and situation you want to study over the remainder of the course.
2. Describe the organization and situation.

Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

1) Describe your organization.

I work with a smaller digital marketing company that works with both private clients as
well as operates a handful of digital publications. Our company is responsible for
researching and ranking keywords on search engines to drive traffic that converts into
sales, views, etc. Simply put, whenever you type something into Google or Bing, it’s our
job to make sure the website ranks near the top. Our websites rely on revenue from
advertisements, whereas clients pay us based on either the sales generated and/or traffic
received. Every client is different in the way we bill. Our company isn’t large, maybe 10
to 15 employees at a given time and was founded in 2006. At the moment, all of us work
remotely from home using tools to communicate such as Slack and Zoom.

2) Describe your role in the organization (it can be internal or external).

Within the organization, I’m a project manager. I’m responsible for an array of activities,
mainly meeting with clients/advertisers as well as ensuring my team has the appropriate
tasks, according to the client’s needs for the day/week. On a given day, we often hold a
morning virtual meeting, making sure my small team, usually about five people, know
what their roles are for the day. Most have the same roles, but in some cases, things need
to be shaken up if a deadline needs to be met and/or something urgent comes up. After
this meeting, I will be available throughout the day to assist the team with any
questions/problems they may have. I also work on tasks that relate to search engine
marketing, from outreach to modifying websites, such as adding content, programming,
etc.

3) Describe the situation. (see the Canvas instructions for details, especially about how
your situation will be analyzed from five different perspectives over the next five
modules)

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 A few years ago, we ran into the trouble of almost losing one of our largest clients, a
major finance company. If we were to lose this client, then we would more than likely
have to lay some people off. It wouldn’t be pretty. What had happened was that we
recently acquired this finance company from another marketing company, so we had to
analyze the company to see what we could do for them as well as how we could continue
to rank their website for major keywords. This was standard practice. After 30 or so
days, we received a webmaster tools message from Google saying that the website was
being penalized because it was violating the terms of service. Generally, in layman’s
terms, this means you’re doing shady things that artificially inflates your search engine
ranking. Google doesn’t like this and will apply a penalty. When a website is penalized,
your ranks drop overnight, which, usually, if your company is relying on them, could
mean a lot of money lost each day. While you can overcome these penalities, it can be
very time consuming and it takes a long time to hear back from Google.

Once the company heard about this fiasco, they were livid. They wanted to drop us
immediately and move on, but we had no choice to hold an emergency meeting. We told
them to give us a few days to figure things out, and they obliged, thankfully. What we
had found out was that the previous company they hired participated in some shady
activities. We had to show the company this evidence, but it wasn’t good enough at
moment; they wanted their ranks back. Since search engines don’t find out about this
type of shady activity immediately, it can take weeks, sometimes months to send out a
notice, which was the case here. This situation caused a lot of stress for our team as we
had to work around the clock to remedy the situation. Since we were working with a
larger company like Google, it took quite some time to straighten things out once we
figured how to remedy the situation. There was a lot of research involved, as we never
were in this situation before, but thankfully, things worked out in the end and everyone
was safe with their jobs. Throughout the entire dilemma, there were a lot of mixed
messages as to what to do as well as lot of stress for everyone involved. It was one of the
biggest challenges I have ever faced in my professional career.

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 Reference or References