August, 2009

Built by and for pros

This is a release that I’ve been looking forward to announcing for quite some time. Please Feed The Animals, a  site where out-of-work advertising agency professionals can open a free account and post their resumes, work experiences, and  eventually, portfolios to connect with agencies that are hiring, has been released in Beta. The brain child of Erik Proulx, the site was designed and built by an all volunteer force of agency professionals. I provided project management and information architecture services as well as space on exUrban’s BaseCamp for the duration of the project. Through Erik’s connections, and mine, some of whom overlapped (unsurprising in a town as small as Boston) we pulled together Michael Durwin, Joe Morris, Liz DiPietro-Frazier, Amanda Talbott, Conor Feely, John Szalay, and Richard Haynie — rocking designers, all. Based in and around Boston, New York and Phoenix, AZ these folks designed and laid out the many pages that Skookum — who generously donated their staff’s time and is based in Concord, NC — needed to work their magic.

The designers went above and beyond and knocked the designs out of the park. From just a single, model template this geographically distributed team created 26 page designs (lots of forms and information presentation pages) that matched each other perfectly in terms of PFTA’s brand. This consistency is a true testament to their skill and their professionalism. As happens with a volunteer team of hustling ad-types the size and composition of the team ebbed and flowed as folks picked up paying gigs, but the design work was evenly distributed across team members and the bulk of the templates were completed in a few weeks — give or take some staffing ebbs.

The development and deployment of PFTA was a terrifically collaborative experience with plenty of spirited give and take, and a high level of trust that the pros on the team would make good decisions and do what was right for the job. The team did not disappoint. PFTA proved, yet again, the viability of social media as a connector (that’s how Erik and I met) and a tool that can be used to marshal resources and enable them to work together. Spread across the country, using email, cell phones, Twitter and a $25 per month, cloud-based-extranet/project management tool (two actually, Skookum has one as well) a talented bunch of folks brought to life a really cool idea. If I were a giant, publicly-traded-holding-company-owned-agency I’d look at PFTA as both a wonderful staffing resource but also a potential threat to my organization. The world’s biggest, most experienced agency is on the streets, and it has everything it needs to succeed and deliver value to customers. In a final, wonderful bit of meta-context, Please Feed The Animals was built by the people for whom it was intended: the talented, passionate, driven ad-pros who lost their jobs in the ad-biz blood-letting of 2008-9 (hopefully, it evolves into “just” a job site for talented ad folks, no more hemorrhages for a while, please). I am proud to have been a part of the genesis of PFTA, and completely thrilled at how well it turned out. May it be wildly successful.

Billable, or fixed rate?

I read an interesting article (requires online subscription) in Monday’s Wall Street Journal (24 August, 2009) about the pending demise of billable hours at law firms. It appears that lots of large corporate clients, who also use outside counsel to augment their corporate legal teams, are driving some hard bargains and asking law firms to drop the highly profitable billable hours compensation model. Any time I see lawyers making less it makes me smile a bit, though, before I started getting too giddy, I kept reading. The article gives the impression that both sides are on board with it and that it’s pretty good for everybody involved. The article made it seem that there are some very open discussions between clients and vendors (let’s face it, if you work in client service then you’re a vendor) about what you get for certain agreements, and there is still the ability to revert to hourly for really large, complex cases. That’s when it hit me and made me jealous, for just a second, of the lawyers.*

The article, in its most refreshing passage, quoted a lawyer who said of these agreements that

a client can’t expect to have the absolute best team of [trial] lawyers from a firm and have the lawyers give up all the other work they could be doing on a regular fee basis to work 18 hours a day for months of time on a flat fee engagement.

Right there is the difference between agencies and law firms. I guarantee that even when an agency says we’ll work for that, and we’ll get it done for next to nothing, they never follow it up with “but we’ll put our b-team on it, they’ll work no more than 40 hours/week, we will not deliver our best work as we could for more money and we will ruthlessly manage your scope so that not a single comma will be moved, nor a logo enlarged even 1% after the allotted two revisions.” Sure, it’s written in scopes and terms etc., but it never happens like that in practice. Agencies, “invest in the relationship” and reduce their margins in an effort to hang onto business. Sometimes, this is warranted, but eventually it makes for bad relations between agency and client, as well as the team being put through the grinder by the client on one side and management on the other.

Agencies should follow the example of the folks in the law firms. Be blunt. Be up front. Be strong. Agencies have long worked on fixed cost projects, and have always striven to lock in long term retainers, but they rarely stand up for themselves within the frameworks of these agreements. Given the plight of so many shops today (though the market does seem to be stabilizing, somewhat), they will be more loathe than usual to stand up for themselves and say “this is what it takes to do this, We can work under this agreement, but you need to give us latitude and you need to understand very clearly that the scope means what it says.” I hope that large corporate clients and their large law firm-vendors acting like rational organizations and altering their relationships in the context of the current economic climate, can be a positive example to agencies and that the latter can learn a thing or two to help them down the line. Maybe, agencies need to hire lawyers to help with these conversations. Or, if an agency would rather not pay the hourly fee they, could talk to their outside counsel about moving to a fixed rate agreement and get some pointers for when they have the same discussions with their clients.

*Major Tangential Aside: Could you imagine an agency that got paid for every hour it actually worked for a client? Imagine if agencies were more like lawyers (used to be)? We’d all still be sitting in private offices with credenzas filled with booze a la Don Draper and the boys of Sterling Cooper (those were the days!).

That's a Phone, Watson?

Attribute it to preoccupation with other things — summer, life, jobs, the general hustle of starting your own business. I ignored Twitter, this blog, my Posterous account and some new developments in social media through late July and into early August. I was awash in a sea of informational ennui brought on by a general lack of interest in the perceived-dross that was washing over the transom of my social media platforms. I broke out of it though by really focusing on the group I’d set up in Seesmic entitled “friends.” Some of these people are real friends, people I’ve know for years. Some are friends I’ve only ever interacted with on Twitter. Regardless, I call them friends because for whatever reason I caught a spark from my interactions with them that really opened up to me the possibility and promise of social media, when I first jumped in. These people say things that matter to me. They’re not selling me something. They’re not telling me how to act. They are sharing information, insight, links, pictures and asking for feedback. They are initiating conversation and interaction and sharing.

One Tweet in particular helped me snap out of it because it brought me to a wonderful, thought provoking post, Search as Research by Richard Reeve (@CCSeed) at his blog, Catskill Cottage Seed. Writing about the vast oceans of personal information that folks share, and how it can and will be used down the road — by not only marketers (of course) but also by sociologists, anthropologists, historians and psychologists — Richard ends by asking “who will effectively learn to read” this sea of information? The post sparked a tremendous discussion, and sharing of ideas that helped to snap me out of my social media torpor. I stopped watching the data stream by in my various interfaces and instead engaged, and remembered that it is engagement that draws me to this space and this business.

In the world of social media (really in any world) it’s all about engagement: with people, their ideas, their points of view, opinions, photos, work, trials and triumphs. Marketers have been striving for decades to engage customers to sell clients’ stuff. The name of the game hasn’t really changed; but, the tools have, and the communication channels have proliferated and how and where and when we consume information and connect certainly have (Imagine A.G. Bell looking at a Blackberry or an iPhone: “you mean that’s a phone, without a wire and you hardly talk on it because you’re too busy using it to type messages and read articles and take and send pictures…?). But, for now, tonight, I’m not concerned with how marketers use social media — that’s covered, ad nauseam day in, and day out, c.f. Twitter. Richard’s thought provoking post (and he’s always thought provoking) rekindled the joy that comes from engaging with people in conversation about things — and I mean things, stuff, the weather, whatever. For all of the technology, and systems and interfaces this is really a tremendously humanistic time. Never before have we had such ability to interact with other human beings. On the most basic level people are talking. As Richard mentioned in a comment:

So again, it comes down to
people interacting in the digital marketplace regardless of the
platform, but here with sense being that of the Athenian agora

Some are selling and promoting and others are offering me free access to hot singles in my area . . . but most of us are just talking. Engaging. I’m not sure why I forgot that — chalk it up to Sirius, maybe — but once I remembered what was important, the engagement with real people, social media and it potential came back to me. What one does with that engagement, is up to the individual and their own personal needs, wants and desires. For me, I’m going to talk.

The Dog Star, Sirius

“The dog days of summer” get their name because once upon a time Sirius, the Dog Star, used to rise at the same time as the sun during the hottest days of summer between early July and early September. Sirius no longer rises at the same time as the sun at this time of year (a result of precession, and, if my understanding of the latter is true, then it will be true again in about 25,000 years, give or take a millennium) but the term has stuck to describe this time of year. The ancient Romans and Greeks attributed the heat of these months to the anger of Sirius and they believed that this was a particularly evil time of year. While I would not go so far as to say that this time of year is evil — well, maybe I might — it certainly is a challenging time of year.

Whereas the ancients dealt with drought and potential crop devastation (still a reality for the modern agrarian) we in the small business world deal with another kind of drought — the vacation induced kind. Vacation, no doubt is brought on by another malady that the ancients associated with this time of year: sloth. During the spring and early summer we couldn’t respond fast enough to RFPs but since early July things have been quiet. The pipe was thin. Unfortunately, or fortunately, we are not alone. Colleagues at other shops are saying the same thing — “kinda quiet,” “a bit brutal out there” etc.. Contacts in other industries and professions are also letting us know that things are slow. The new business pipeline is key for many reasons. The obvious reason is it’s nice to be in the hunt for money. Another reason is that when you are pursuing it’s much easier to be confident about the future and keep the energy that you need to get a business off the ground.

All of this said, however, no sooner did July end than prospects started to look up. We live & die by our pipeline and it seems to be filling in again, pretty nicely. All one can ask for is the opportunity to connect. Now that the dog days are on the wane (though today’s weather would suggest otherwise) their attendant sloth seems to be diminishing as well — vacation season is winding down. It’s getting easier to connect and pursue and get in the hunt. Next year, hustling harder through late spring and early summer will help to allay some of this dog day slow down. If it doesn’t, I could always do what the ancients did: sacrifice a brown dog to Sirius, though that could turn into a PR nightmare.

Avoid the content trap

One of the things that I’ve found as a producer of marketing and sites for the web is that the most underestimated and misunderstood part of a job is often content creation. On many projects content is one of the hardest aspects of a job to scope. Certainly, one can scope number of revisions, estimated page counts, etc. — but there are all sorts of gray areas within content creation, especially on websites. Sometimes there is existing content that “only needs to be edited,” “or content that’s already been created but needs to be given “a consistent voice and tone” Unless these, and myriad other content-related are nailed down and discussed in depth prior to the start of the job they can be become morasses that sink a job. This is actually a larger topic than this post will cover, and I’ll come back to it at a later date. What I want to share now, though, is how important it is to not short-change your site development process by forgoing a copy writer or content creator and taking it all in-house. There are three reasons for this that I see and am happy to hear more from others, so please comment away.

1. Assuming responsibility for writing site content puts extra burdens on either you, the business owner (the person in a small business setting with the most knowledge of the company), or on your staff. Content creation can be laborious depending on the depth and breadth of the site being built. Your time and your staff’s time is better spent on core competencies and responsibilities like running the business, client management and new business development. Placing content writing responsibilities on staff or yourself means that full attention is given to neither the needed content, nor core responsibilities.

2. Professional copy and content writers are much more experienced with this type of work. This is what they do for a living, and by including them on your site development team you are tasking them with something that is their job and for which they are paid (see point 1 above). This professionalism and experience permits a writer to say things more succinctly and efficiently than you and your staff often-times can. A writer does not completely relieve you of responsibilities, you and your staff, will still have to collaborate and work with them, but mainly in an advisory and review capacity. Efficiency will be gained all around.

3. Creating your website, or revamping your website is an emotional process as much as it is a creative and technical process. Diving into a site build or site redesign will really force you to look at your company’s offerings and define your company in a very public way. This emotional aspect often makes site builds much more challenging than anticipated at the start of an engagement. Bringing in a copy writer or content specialist adds an objective third party to the process who can help to navigate some of the issues that arise when developing one’s site content. This objectivity is useful for the very reason that site owners and staff have biases (often positive, sometimes not) that can impact the copy and content creation process and lead to too much, diluted content.

Bringing an extra resource onto a job does cost money, and in the current situations all business owners are looking for ways to save money — we understand that as well as anybody. Often, budgeting for a copy or content professional will save you and your staff time, and money down the road. It will also help your site, which is a large investment to be the best that it can be and therefore help to better represent your company to current and future team members, the public and, even more importantly, to current and potential clients.