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Leadership Interview: Marianela Queme, Marketing and Communications DC

October-Marianela

Marianela Quemé has been Assistant Department Coordinator for Marketing and Communications since early 2020. When the position of Department Coordinator became vacant, she decided to go for it and got elected. Marianela is a systems engineer who enjoys learning new technologies.

Her current day job is technical team lead at a marketing company in the Netherlands. As an Open Source enthusiast, she loves to be involved in Joomla: “It is great to be a part of something with people who have the same views as you do.”

You started out as Assistant Team Lead for Marketing. When and why did you decide to run for Department Coordinator? 

I was asked by some of the current leaders to participate in the elections and I decided to run for DC because the Marketing Department needed someone who would take action into promoting Joomla. I work in marketing, so having hands-on experience is always a great way to learn more about the industry.

How did Joomla change your life?

Joomla gave me the opportunity to start my own business as a web agency. After that, being part of the community changed my life. I have met people who have become my lifetime friends. It is great to be a part of something with people who have the same views as you do.

What do you see as the most important role for marketing within Joomla? 

The Marketing Department still needs leaders. We have many people with great ideas who do a lot of great work. But we need leaders who can coordinate between the different teams. We need leaders who can actually make things happen and execute the ideas the team members are suggesting to promote Joomla.

What are your goals?

My main goal is to promote Joomla 4 and to gain a larger audience and user base. We want Joomla to take up a larger share of the market. However, promoting Joomla is not just a marketing effort, every volunteer and every team can promote Joomla, by participating and being active in the community. During the past months, Joomla teams have been doing great work to promote the Project through events, learning tools, writing in the magazine and of course writing code. Being in the Joomla community doesn’t necessarily mean you have to know how to code, Joomla needs many sets of skills.

And what do you consider your biggest challenge?

At the moment the biggest challenge is lack of volunteers, we have many people who sign up to do something but in the end they don't have the time to contribute to the project or they simply don’t know how. It's usually the same set of people doing the work, and that can have a huge toll on the volunteers. We are especially looking for copywriters, marketing specialists and designers who can work on the marketing strategy to promote Joomla to the world.

You have two teams in need of a Team Leader: the marketing team and the community translation team. In your opinion, what would make somebody the ideal candidate for these roles?

The ideal person would be a proactive leader who is willing to contribute their time to the project. Ideally, if they know about marketing it is a plus. But the main skills would be project management, so the ideas can become a reality. We currently have amazing people working in the marketing department, now we need people from the team to step up for the leadership positions. Having great leaders makes the work so much easier and fun.

What are you working on right now?

We are working on social media campaigns to promote Joomla. Also, we are working on slightly redefining the current marketing strategy to meet the current needs for promoting a more mature new product. And we are trying to measure the efforts we are inputting into the marketing campaigns to find out if they are worthwhile. In many cases, small rewards may be worthwhile, but in the case of Joomla, we need to focus on campaigns that will yield bigger rewards because the work we do is done by volunteers with limited time.

How can we help in achieving your goals?

The best way to help is to get involved, and once involved the best way to help is to attend the team meetings. This is where volunteers can find out what has been planned and what needs to happen to execute these plans. As mentioned, many volunteers sign up and they don't exactly know how to contribute, but if they attended the monthly meetings it would make the process much easier. Volunteers who would like to join the marketing team can reach me personally, my door is always open, and any input is more than welcome.

Thank you Marianela for participating in this interview!

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