one man sells?

My ‘other’ site holds brief details on my little side job stuff, which is mainly focussed on web design. I’ve just finished a website (with another on the way) and it’s nice to get that little glow of achievement. I deliberately choose small projects, and it’s fun to take what I learn there into my day job as a technical writer.

Taking the lessons I’ve learned over the past couple of years whilst “running” one man designs, which is in essence a small business, into my dau job has been interesting. Treating a small team of technical writers as a distinct business makes sense on many levels. One I hadn’t really considered in great depth was marketing the services of the team, selling what we do to the rest of the company.

I guess I’d considered it an educational function and, once educated, everyone would (somehow) know to get the technical writers involved with their project, or introduce the latest functionality to them. Of course this is never the case. Now, don’t get me wrong, I knew this but just hadn’t really considered it in great detail before… what with being busy, you know, writing stuff. 😉

So how do you approach this kind of thing? Do you hold meetings, talk to the other team leads/managers directly? How do you “sell” what you do?