Vox Fortis Communications

A few weeks ago, I received one of the most generous gifts I’d ever gotten from a client. Technically, he isn’t even MY client. I do some work for a virtual marketing agency, and he’s their client. He had a humdinger of a online PR problem, and a small team of us cleaned it up for him. Business as usual, we were happy, birds were singing, dogs and cats played together nicely, etc. He wrote us a very nice email saying he’d love to take us out to dinner, upon which he had to be unfortunately reminded that we’re a virtual team. (We were immensely bummed.)

Then a box showed up on my front step, and I stared at it blankly for a few moments. It was fairly heavy and I recognized the name on the return address, but couldn’t figure out for the life of me what was being sent. I opened it up, and discovered a VERY nice bottle of red wine, and a gift card for 100 smackers to Ruth’s Chris steak house. I was totally floored.

There are a few lessons we can take from this, kids:

Saying “thanks” means a lot.

He didn’t have to send our team squat. He hired us to help him out and we did, but there are goodies of note on both sides of this equation. First, on the agency side, we delivered a lot faster than what we’d set up his expectation to be. (Frankly, I think we surprised ourselves, too!) We set the bar at a reasonable level and then blew the sucker out of the water.

On the client side, it reminds us that even if we work for ourselves and pay others in that endeavor, we need to say thank you sometimes. We are always a client to someone. Maybe it’s just when you’re picking up kitty litter at the grocery store, but when the checkout lady smiles and remembers your cat’s name, that’s pretty damned great customer service.

He is building loyalty.

I’m not saying that any client is more important that another. Service should be given regardless, because they’re all clients that want your expertise. But guess what? If he calls in a panic at 2am and wants to know where to locate the most expensive Happy Meal ever, guess who will be willing to drag herself out of bed and start combing the Internet? The girl who is groggy because she had some of the wine this client sent, that’s who.

Have you said thank you lately?

When I thought about it, this was quite a production for him. There were about 4 of us that work on his account regularly. He’s never met but one of us in person. How on earth does one even figure out what to get a group of people like that? Somehow he did. He took the time to figure out that there is a Ruth’s Chris steakhouse in my area. He took the time to pick out a great bottle of wine. He got them assembled into one package, got my address and had it mailed out in a pretty quick manner.

We took time in our day to work on his account because that’s our job. He took time out of his day to say thank you for doing it well.

With the holidays coming up, ’tis the season for saying thank you, even if it’s something you paid for to begin with. Besides, you never know when it might come in handy to have hired someone who could tell you what it costs to watch the wildebeest migration from a hot air balloon.

And if you need them to find out at 2am, it helps if you’ve recently told that someone “thank you” for the work they’ve done before.

One of the benefits of being entrepreneur is that you can decide how much or how little you want to work. You are the lucky dog who has a modicum of control over how much you’re making. (Assuming you’re landing jobs, of course.) But there is a huge limitation that us workaholics actually get visibly irate about: there are only so many hours in a day.

I can work 18 hours straight, because what I do rarely feels like work. I love it, I enjoy it, and all that huggy yummy stuff. Since I don’t want to make you feel motion sick, we won’t dwell on the yummies. Instead, let’s focus on those people who have managed to ride their entrepreneurial rollercoaster, and finally get over that huge, slow, crawl to finally hit the peak and take off rushing at a million miles an hour. This has been all around me recently, mostly notably with my friend Naomi who has now exploded onto the freelance scene thanks to her entry that pitched a tent on the front page of Digg.

As much as I love my work, there are only so many hours in the day, like I said. If you’re doing well, you can fill those, but how do you get to that next level? How do you manage to grow your deserted island into a little village full of natives? (Not like the ones in King Kong. If those are your natives, you need to consider exile.)

People that have managed to step off their island and grow it into a village have one of two ways they’ve managed to do this, aside from the fruity drinks with the little umbrella. (Those never hurt, but you’re more likely to get tourists than villagers that way.)

Way of the Solo Warrior #1: They are good at multiple things.

I fall into this category at the moment. My mind makes connections to stuff, especially business capability. I started in sales, and got interested in consumer behavior, so I landed in marketing. I always loved writing, so I took a job writing for consumer experience, which just so happened to be in the e-commerce division of a major retailer. That environment immersed me in how things work in the web world, and being an organized and pretty focused person, my skill set grew in things like managing projects and campaigns. I started digesting online marketing information and it made sense to me, so I grew into an online marketing role.

Here’s my point. Maybe having skills in underwater basket weaving and survival skills in the desert aren’t going to be a solid offering. But, if you can find related areas to what you do that you’re naturally good at, you’re increasing your skillset. The clients I work may only have little ol’ me, but I can write, market, do analytics, and manage projects and campaign strategy. Having that combo has proved to be pretty great, which is something I never would have thought. I read so many things about how you have to focus, capitalize on the whole Long Tail thing, and mostly wound up feeling like a scattered person who wasn’t sure what to offer.

I started offering up all things I was good at, and it’s worked well. I haven’t hit that all-important pinnacle on my roller-coaster ride yet. I’m still climbing up, but I think if keep plugging at it I’ll be plunging forth and looping upside down in no time. And, I do offer the fruity umbrella drinks, but the natives that seem keen to hang on my island for awhile stay anyway, so that’s kinda nice of them.

Way of the Solo Warrior #2: They have people that can do what they don’t.

Let’s say you’re really only good at one thing, and you know that. That’s absolutely awesome. I love to have people around that know one thing, but they know it so well that in my mind there’s no other resource on Earth who can possibly have half their knowledge in their puny little brains. Plenty of people make a great living doing this one thing they’re good at. The people with the grass village on the deserted island tend to have a network.

They mingle with other people that have a skill set that would complement theirs. There may be zero interest in learning what the other one knows, but when people know what they don’t know, they’re a force to be reckoned with. Seeking out those who know what you don’t is a valuable way to spend a little time each day. You never know when you’ll have a client that loves you so much they don’t want to use anyone else…even if they’re asking for things you don’t know how to do. Guess what? If you know someone who does, then you DO know how to do it by proxy. You have a person you can refer (if they’re not a jerk) or you can sub-contract out to (if their work doesn’t suck, no matter how much they know). You = rockstar to your client.

There are many other things that play into when and how your wee little business takes off, but these are the two I run into repeatedly. Feel free to share the others.

Speaking of building an island, feel free to join mine. We have frequent bonfires and roasted marshmallows.

I have a black lab pup who has an extraordinarily quirky habit: she makes piles of things. You let her outside, and she will literally spend hours nosing around in the woods, dragging sticks (and sometimes parts of fallen trees) into a designated area of the yard. (I have yet to figure out how she picks her coordinates). She will do this repeatedly, and you can’t distract her from it. She gets tunnel vision, and takes this personal task very seriously.

I was sitting on my front porch in the morning chill drinking that almighty first cup of coffee, watching her engage in her ritual. On this particular morning, she was working on two piles across the yard from one another as my gears were turning on a marketing plan for a client.

It suddenly hit me that her mystifying and endearing habit actually has some merit in the marketing world.

You make choices when you market.

Much like the aforementioned stick piles, you survey the landscape and pick certain things out of it to focus on:

1. What do you want your campaign to do? Sell stuff? Get people to hang around and comment? Entice people to pay your bills? (Good luck on that one.)
2. Who should you be asking to perform this action?
3. Where do you find those people?
4. How do you bridge those above three together?

Pile of Sticks #1: Your objective

You can’t do anything else until you figure out what you want the consumer to do. Trudge into your Forest of Big Ideas, and force yourself to pluck out a few twigs or maybe one or two big sticks. Avoid picking out a ginormous shrub, no matter how pretty it looks…too much going on, and besides, they can attract bees. These piles shouldn’t be too big. Resist that urge to grab the branch labeled “branding,” the one across from it named, “buy stuff” and the other one named “all information possible in the world so that hopefully something will stick.” (That’s a big sucker and it’s probably rotting with maggots all over it. I think that makes it clear how I feel about that method, no?)

You waste energy trying to drag the whole forest when you just need a few logs. Pick what’s most compelling and don’t get tempted by the stuff around it that will serve no purpose other than creating noise.

Pile of Sticks #2: Who might want to do the action?

I know that all of us would like to think what we offer appeals to everyone. As a business, it’s hard to get away from saying, “But who wouldn’t WANT to do this?” The answer to that is: plenty of people.

There are obvious examples, like trying to sell palm trees to someone in Maine. If you’re reading this, hopefully you’re not that guy, and if you are, I refuse to help you. My apologies.

If you’re selling something like propane to residential customers (which, frankly, is on my mind because AmeriGas is an evil empire and I just want my fireplace to work…but I digress) then you’re not going to pass out flyers at an apartment complex. So, that automatically has you pick out the sticks in the Demographic Forest for homeowners. Seems pretty obvious, but there are some other twigs you should throw on that pile. How about homebuilders? Strike up a deal for the neighborhood they’re building where you’ll provide a discounted service if they recommend you. Talk to realtors that might be selling newly constructed homes, or those that are selling existing ones to put in a good word for you.  (I’ll touch on that in a future entry about how NOT to get another referral, ever again….for now, read SmallFuel’s advice on Ditching the Hard Sell.)

Once you start seeking out your big sticks, you’ll see a lot of twigs on it. Make your pile.

Pile of Sticks #3: Finding these people

Thanks to the Internet, this can either be really easy, or really hard, depending on how you look at it. There’s tons of information, forums, online communities and more to find these people. That’s also the rain pain-in-the-butt part. There are SO many. If you are purely trying to network locally, city sites and getting out there to give the handshake is going to be effective for you. Hire someone to draw up press releases for you and get them into the local paper.

If location is no object for your business, then you have a lot of digging you can do. Network with people online constantly. Have a website, and be sure it doesn’t make people weep. (I have a whole list of examples.) Refresh your content, participate in communities, and seek possibilities to get connected through others via sites like LinkedIn.com.

Pile of Sticks #4: Create your message and disseminate accordingly.

See these piles you have, now? You have your objective, your market, your methods. Planning’s over, it’s time for the true test. Hopefuly before all this you have set up your brand and have all of that locked down. Now all you have to do is communicate it. How do you do that?

Put those piles together, grab a match, and light the fire.

And I don’t mean by using their handy calendar applications. 

There’s something to be said for visionaries. The world is full of people with the Next Big Idea, and all the grand schemes on how it’s going to materialize. Unfortunately, things get in the way of that…some people are great at ideas, but poor on execution. Some don’t know where to start. Sometimes they KNOW it’s a great idea, but they don’t have enough background in the market to give it traction.

That said, look at a phenomenon like Google. It was a search engine, people. With plenty of early dot com ones out there to compete with, dreamed up by two young guys, blah blah blah, the rest is history.

Is it really, though? The history was their initial idea, not the cutting edge of innovation in Internet-land that Google has become. How did these two idea guys get it done?

They planned it. They thought it out. They did their homework. They picked what they knew would work and started with that, and the rest became gravy.

Sometimes it’s a simple lesson, but one worth heeding: test the water before you jump in. Well, maybe not always, but if you see the shark fins, then it’s probably good advice. It can be tempting to want to run the gamut of Internet wonder with clients sometimes because you see the potential, but it’s important to remember that sometimes YOU need to keep your feet on the ground to be the best advocate for your client. If Sergey and Lawrence, the founders of Google, had put together a plan that included all the services that Google now offers (”oh! oh! we could have document sharing!”….”dude, no wait….CHATTING”) do you think the core of Google would be as well-honed as it is?

Probably not. Don’t spread your clients too thin on a ton of services. Take the time to listen, and start with the basics. If you’re a consultant, that same advice goes for you too, young man/lady. If you spread too thin, you will wind up giving nothing to your customers.

It’s about vision. Keep it laser-focused, but be nimble about the methods you use to attain it.

If you doubt the power of vision, check out the paper written by the Google founders while they were still at Stanford. Look at where their company is today.

Now tell me it’s not worth the time to plan a little.

I’ve been freelancing for years, but only have a few weeks under my belt doing it full-time. I started plugging away when I was a writer churning out stuff in a cube, at first for some extra income. After a few months I realized something crucial:

 I liked it.

I really liked writing newsletter content for dental practices one moment (so not kidding) and then helping devise e-mail strategies 5 minutes later. As an extreme multi-tasker who gets bored easily, having multiple clients was a natural fit for me. In the past year, things really started falling into place for me at a time where life was turning into a pressure cooker. New house, new job, finishing my MBA, and new freelance clients every other week. I could feel the squeeze, more and more every week. I knew something would have to give and I’d have to make a decision. That decision wound up happening suddenly a mere few weeks ago, and now that I’ve had time to reflect on pre-freelancing life and in-the-thick-of-it-pulling-up-by-my-bootstraps, I’ve come to some reflective conclusions.

Let me enlighten you as to what it’s like for me to make a decision about big things like this….it’s a humdinger of an experience. I’m an analytical person by nature, so first there’s the mental listing of every possible scenario. Then each of those has what ifs, which branch off into others and…you get the idea. Tailspin central. I’d look at freelancers that were doing it, and wonder, “How’d they KNOW?”

Here’s the thing, which is really freaky for any of you that think like me: You don’t know. It’s probability, not a proven science. There are certain factors that you weigh, and depending on whether the “yes” or “no” is heavier, you can use that. Which factors is probably the next question, and there are too many to list, even for me. But here are some biggies:

1. Do you have a client base built up?

If you’re mostly finding one-shot projects on bidding sites for peanuts, the heavier answer here for you is “no.” In that case, don’t quit your day job to sweat week-to-week. You’ll always sweat some as a freelancer, but steady clients are your deodarant.

2. Are you constantly underselling to land a gig?

If you weigh heavier on “yes,” then you need to stop it. Unless you’re totally without experience (and you shouldn’t even be considering making the jump if you’re in that camp anyway) don’t be cheap to land a gig. IttyBiz has a great explanation of why that I won’t even try and duplicate. If you’re finding clients that are paying a rate you’re not wincing over, you’re on more solid footing here.

3. Does it feel like your freelancing is getting in the way of your day job?

If the scales tip towards “yes,” then you might want to decide if freelancing full-time is what you want. If it feels like a nuisance and you have a problem being self-motivated, those are huge hurdles to overcome. This brings up the opposite, however…

4. Does it feel like your day job is getting in the way of your freelancing?

If so, maybe this is where your loyalty really lies. If you’re more interested and it doesn’t feel like work when you’re working on your clients’ projects…that should say something. ‘Nuff said.

5. Can you make enough to get by at first?

Even with a steady client base, you will struggle the first few months because you don’t get paid regularly. Plan for this. It’s feast or famine, and there’s not really any two ways around that. If you have the aforementioned steady clients each month, that certainly helps. If you’re not sure that you’d have enough for a can of beans and Saltines at the bare minimum, you have to crunch numbers. I know, it’s not fun, but you’ll thank yourself if you’re realistic. Try this calculator from Freelance Switch…it’s very eye-opening.

I was at the tipping point for my threshold of stress and work. Something had to give, and I had a lot of support in the decision which made it an easier one, but no less scary. You have to be intrepid, you have to be out there, and you have to be willing to take rejection and share your opinions and recommendations over and over again.

It was the best choice for me, and you’ll know if it’s something you really want. There’s no perfect moment, no matter how much you’d like to plan it…there’s just the probability of success. Stack the odds in your favor.

There seems to be an eternal struggle between creatives and marketers, and these differences manifest themselves daily. I could likely devote this entire blog to nothing but those slight differences in the ways both groups want to do things, and still be writing when I’m 95 years old.

Let’s dissect one of those otherwise miniscule things that I’ve seen create huge discord: button naming. It seems like such a small thing, doesn’t it? A button is a button, a link’s a link, whatever…you click and something happens. It should seem so easy.

Having been on both sides of this fence, and understanding the motivations for both, I have to weigh in on the side of the marketers this time. Let’s explore each camp’s viewpoint, shall we?

The creative stance: Let’s face it, web pages can get really boring. Same text on everything, same call to action…there’s a tendency to want to be clever because you CAN be and you figure it will stand out. I’ve been there, totally. Naming links something that was probably pretty witty (well, in my mind, anyway) and perfectly matched the theme, intent and feel of the page. Original. Different. Which you can sometimes confuse with engaging for a consumer/web site visitor.

The marketer/analytic stance: Web pages exist for a purpose. In the case of something like e-commerce, your intent is to convert to sale…any distraction from that purchasing path is a very bad thing. That said, button naming needs to be incredibly clear and straightforward. It needs to say what people are pre-programmed to believe it will: “buy now.” It doesn’t show off the company’s smarts and wit, but that’s not what the consumer is coming there for, either.

I haven’t dealt with this issue directly for awhile, but it was refreshed for me this week as I was doing some research. I was checking into how vendors are using things like community and consumer-generated content to further the reach of the brand, and was browsing around KitchenAid.com. I knew they had forums somewhere, but after scanning the home page, I couldn’t find them. I Google’d it and it popped up right away, so I knew I had to be missing something.

 I finally found it…on the home page, a link to the lower right that reads “Join others at KitchenAid Conversations.” I had completely glossed right over it. Even though I appreciate the language used as a writer, as a consumer this was very frustrating. I am already programmed to look for something that says “forum” and when it wasn’t evident I missed the fancy wording. Plus, how am I supposed to know what KitchenAid Conversations is? It could be a blog for all I know.

My point is, as both a writer and marketer, it’s important to know which hat to wear. Make sure you’re doing the same for your clients. Sometimes you want to scrath the creative itch so badly that you forget your company has a business need that needs attention as well. Always stay clear about the intent of the piece you’re working on, and be open to the knowledge your client has about what their audience will be looking for, and the keywords that will keep them engaged.

 I was thinking about co-partnerships among companies today, and which ones work well and which ones are just kind of….lame.

Case in point. A few months ago when HBO launched John From Cincinatti, Billabong, the surf gear company, partnered with HBO to “create excitement” for the show.

There are a few things that come to mind, especially when I read stuff like this before my morning coffee.

I cringe when I hear “create excitement.” It’s a falsehood. Maybe “create interest” is more accurate, but I feel like “excitement” is something better applied to things that people give a hoot about. Excitement conjures up mental images of carnivals, scary clowns, and pony rides, not Hawaiian-print button-up shirts. It’s compounded by the fact that the surfer demographic isn’t one I can see showing overt excitement about a clothing line. Apparently there will be co-branding at flagship Billabong stores, and some point of purchase materials for their “Catch the Wave and Win” sweepstakes. (Shudder. It’s too early to get into cheesy sweepstakes names.)

Here’s the thing. Brand association can certainly be sexy, but I always feel like it has to be appropriately done. Take Sex and the City. Carrie Bradshaw become synonymous with Manolo Blahniks, but it worked. It was never the sole design line referenced, and it fit into the context and characters of the show. You certainly didn’t go into a store that sold them and saw a “Runaway Runway Sweepstakes!” sign by the register. (Ok, obviously not too early for cheesy sweeps.)

I question the motive behind the partnership, mostly because I think HBO would probably stand more to gain than Billabong. I have not watched John From Cincinatti, though it’s sitting there on my DVR collecting dust, but from what I’ve heard, it needs all the excitement it can get. I found this suprisinng based on the promos I saw which cited the NYTimes and the NYPost using all the rave phrases you’d expect, but Jossip.com may have uncovered why the show doesn’t remotely match those reviews…because those reviews don’t even remotely exist, possibly.

Is HBO ever going to produce another drop-dead hit (pun completely intended) like The Sopranos? Maybe not one big enough to be considered a cultural icon, but they certainly turned out great shows with others like Rome, Six Feet Under, etc. Maybe they need fresh blood, or maybe they’re hitting some kind of mid-life crisis. Either way, I think it’s clear that crappy shows can’t be saved simply by taking a Bong hit.