Blabbermouth Missives

Looking back on 2011 while looking ahead to 2012

2011-12-30T17:09:00.001-05:00

As I look back on 2011, it comes to mind what a challenging year it was in its own way. Just when I thought my first full year of the agency in 2010 was difficult, 2011 proved me wrong. In many ways it was harder.

The challenges of 2010 were getting the agency established, promoting it, finding clients, and getting and keeping the work. While the agency was already well established by 2011, the other items on that list still remained a factor coupled with a continued down economy and less work overall than 2010. There were some months in 2011 that were downright scary for the old pocketbook, but somehow I managed to scrape by.

I guess in some ways I consider the freelance life a trade off of sorts. I trade a steady salary and job with benefits for being my own boss, deciding which clients I do and don't want to work with, and setting my own flexible schedule. And in a lot of ways, that trade off is overrated! The least fun part of being self employed is the making ends meet part. Some days I really miss having a salary I could rely on. You tend to take it for granted when you have one, but let me tell you that when you don't have it any more, you value it a lot!

I'm grateful for the existing clients that enjoy working with me enough to give me new pieces of business to work on with them. I'm also appreciative of colleagues who send business leads my way. It's nice to know that they think of me and my agency when the topic of marketing comes up in conversation. I'm happy for new clients that decide to take a chance on the high-strung redhead with all of the energy and ideas. And I'm especially appreciative that my little gamble two years ago paid off and that I've been able to make a go of this agency thing for another year.

So, for 2012 my wish is a return to 2010 levels of activity with good clients who pay on time who have interesting projects from which I can learn and grow. Here's to year three of Blabbermouth Communications and whatever may lay ahead!

Happy New Year everyone!

Biting the hand that feeds?

2011-12-21T15:17:00.002-05:00

I've noticed a bit of a trend lately amongst my PR colleagues in which they very publicly bash the very same media outlets they try to get coverage from for their clients. I'm confused by this and decided to write a blog post on it which I suppose could be controversial depending on how you feel about it.

With more and more media outlets and their staff members joining Facebook and Twitter with very public profiles, we PR professionals now have the ability to connect with the media in ways we couldn't before. Many of us follow these journalists in the hopes of getting to know them and hopefully making a connection that will be beneficial when it comes time to pitch said reporter on a story idea for a client.

Sure, in a perfect world a journalist or editor would be objective and not allow what he or she thinks of you, the PR person, to come into play when deciding whether or not to cover your client's press conference or write about your client's new product or service.

But we all have egos and feelings, so I have trouble believing it's that easy to separate the personal from the professional. I can't help but think the journalist who saw your tweet or Facebook post dissing their latest article might conveniently ignore your follow-up phone call, or act like they didn't receive your recent press release sent on behalf of your client.

So does it make sense for a professional PR person to keep their opinions to themselves where media outlets are concerned, or should they stick to their First Amendment right and say whatever they wish whenever they wish to do so? Certainly we are all entitled to our opinions, but I have to wonder about the wisdom in biting the hand that feeds, so to speak.

The way I was taught PR in college and in practice in the workforce was that we PR people want to be the journalist's colleague, their resource for all things related to our clients and their respective areas of expertise. That means being friendly, approachable and accommodating, especially of last minute requests. That said, I can't imagine openly, and in some cases repeatedly, bashing a particular reporter, editor or media outlet. It just goes against the grain to me.

The goal of the PR person is, after all, to get their clients media coverage. That is what we get paid to do. So why would you jeopardize that if you could avoid doing so?

I'd like to hear other professional PR people's thoughts on this matter. Let me know where you stand.

The art of the turndown

2011-12-09T12:15:00.001-05:00

I was commiserating with a colleague the other day on how no one in business seems to know how to turn me down politely any more and I don't know why. Every new business lead starts out the same: I am approached by a potential client about their need for PR, marketing or social media marketing needs; we meet so I can assess those needs; I present a proposal either in person or via email and allow them time to review and consider it.

However when I attempt to follow up with them by phone and/or email, I get no reply at all. It's as if they either are avoiding me or have forgotten completely about our meeting and my proposal. It was frustrating at first but I've since gotten used to this treatment and have come to expect it. I don't know why it's so difficult for people to respond with a simple "No thank you," or "I've changed my mind" or even "I've selected another agency/freelancer." At least that response would immediately let me know where I stand and I would then know not to bother that potential client again.

So why not respond to me at all? Are you afraid if you take my follow-up call or reply to my email that I will get angry and fight with you? Or perhaps you think I will try to convince you that you need my services and that I am the agency to hire. Or maybe you're afraid of the old hard sell like we're so often faced with from sales people. I promise you that I will do none of those things but instead will handle your turn down reply with grace.

The very nature of pursuing new business leads involves the invest of time to meet with them and put a proposal together. Depending on the potential client this could take as little as 2-3 hours of my time or as much as 7-8 hours. So I am prepared to make that investment in order to meet them, get to know them and your business and determine how we can work together.

But since service-oriented my business is centered on my time and talents, the time I spend with them in the hopes of getting them as a client is time spent not doing work for my existing paying clients. Time really is money in my line of work. So I think it's reasonable to expect a polite turn down response to my inquiries in a timely manner. That's all I ask. I know many of my colleagues feel the same way, so I can't be totally wrong on this.

Why do you think so many business professionals have a difficult time with turning down a fellow colleague's proposal when they attempt to follow up with them?

Dealing with "soft" project time frames

2011-11-22T14:36:00.001-05:00

I started working with a local nonprofit client earlier this year who hired me for marketing and PR consulting services. The scope of work for our contract included several items that were within my control to complete, but all of them were predicated on the client's approval to start.

Due to powers beyond my control, several of the items have been delayed by the client more than once. So now the contract is due to expire but the items in it still need to be completed and no discussion for additional compensation has been made so far.

It's never happened to me that projects in a contract couldn't be completed within the designated time frame due to outside factors. I've always been able to work on and complete projects at the same time as being compensated for the work performed.

To make matters a bit more confusing is that fact that I ended up investing many more hours with this client than what I am actually being compensated for due to the amount of hand-holding needed. I did not know this is how they would be as a client going into the contract or I would have approached my pricing structure differently.

So I feel as though the compensation I have received to-date is actually on-par with the work being performed and the time invested in meetings, phone calls and email exchanges, even if it doesn't cover all of the items contained in the contract.

At this point in time I can see no way around it - I'm going to have to finish the remaining items on the client's schedule in early 2012 and not be compensated for my time working on them since the client thinks they've already paid me for the work. I will also need to figure out how and when to cut off the work being performed so it doesn't morph into additional projects outside the scope of work outlined in the contract.

To avoid this happening again, I'm wondering how best to approach future projects where I suspect that the overall time frame might be "soft" so that I am doing the work I am being compensated for at the same time I am being compensated. I'm just not fond of getting paid now for work to be done later. I think it creates a gray area with the client when they are not actively paying you while you are doing work for them. Maybe that's a simpleton's approach but I believe in being paid now for work being done now. Any advice?

Asking to be compensated

2011-11-03T14:30:00.001-04:00

Over the last two years I've been asked to do many presentation and speaking engagements for local groups of all sizes on the topics of either social media marketing or public relations. I get approached every now and then to either be the sole presenter at a seminar or luncheon, or to serve as a panelist on a panel discussion.

I was flattered by these invitations and accepted all of them readily in the early days of the agency. Most were for nonprofit organizations so I did not expect to get paid and only did once. The presumption was that by doing the presentation I would get my name out in the Lehigh Valley business community; I would be able to promote my agency and the services it offers; and I would secure work from attending businesses.

While the first two certainly happened, none of the presentations I did ever turned into paying client work. Perhaps that is a failing on my part for not selling myself better or not closing the deal, or perhaps it was just never going to happen to begin with. To be honest, I had realistic expectations going into these presentations and never expected them to result in clients or paid work no matter how well the potential opportunity was sold to me by the person inviting me to speak.

While I had already assembled my PowerPoint slide shows on public relations 101 and social media 101, each presentation was slightly different than the last resulting in spending time tweaking my presentations before delivering them. In addition to the prep time was the driving time to and from the location of the event, the time out of the office, the mileage, the time giving the presentation - all time for which I couldn't bill a client or get compensated. At one point I was doing presentations every week and it was getting to be too much.

(I might also add that most of them didn't even present me with a thank you gift. I'm also not able to write off as a tax deductible donation my time to do these unpaid presentations for local nonprofits.)

After conferring with a fellow local PR pro about how she handles such requests, she suggested setting a monthly limit as to how many free presentations I would be willing to give. Any requests beyond that should be turned down or asked for some amount of compensation. That made sense to me and I decided to adopt it.

The requests for presentations have dropped off quite a bit lately so I never had to put that approach into practice. However about two months ago I was approached by a local printed publication (not a nonprofit agency) to serve on a panel for a social media seminar they were planning to give. They wanted me to present as well as to serve on the panel for a Q&A session. I told them I was interested if they could compensate me for my time at the event. Since they were charging $25 event admission for attendees I felt this was a reasonable request. They said they'd think about it and let me know.

Needless to say they never called me back and have gone with a panel of four other presenters. I can only assume that all of them are doing it for free and for the exposure they hope the event will give them. Or perhaps I am wrong.

Do you think it's wrong to ask to be compensated in some way for these presentations? Should I just be grateful for the opportunities to promote my business and do the presentations without pay as I've been doing? Or is it fair to want to be paid for my time and expertise, especially if the host is charging attendees to be there? What do you think?

New Lehigh Valley Visions video... and then some!

2011-10-19T09:00:00.000-04:00

As you probably know by now, I do a web-based video series for my client Discover Lehigh Valley called "Lehigh Valley Visions." We film about four videos a year to promote local attractions and communities for tourism. The goal of our five-minute-long videos is to provide a sneak peak of a venue, just enough to pique the interest of the viewer and hopefully encourage them to come check it out in person.

Our latest video is an overview of the Historic District of Downtown Bethlehem. We started with the city's Moravian history and ended with its revitalization into a busting downtown with shops, restaurants and businesses.

A second video was produced by my client earlier this month. It is a compilation of outtakes from the entire video series. I've been hosting these videos since I was the Director of PR at Discover Lehigh Valley and have produced about 12 or so videos to-date. Not being trained in broadcast as an on-screen personality or reporter, I often flub my lines and have been known to swear a time or two when I get them wrong. So this special "Lehigh Valley Visions Outtakes" video will make you laugh, especially if you know me personally! Enjoy!

Thoughts on my agency's second anniversary

2011-10-03T15:18:00.001-04:00

This first week of October is the second anniversary of my agency and I am entering it with perhaps less enthusiasm than I did a year ago. That's because the second year has proven to be more challenging in many ways than the first year.

The first year was largely spent figuring things out, testing the waters, and trying to stay afloat. The second year has been about settling into a routine, trying to retain existing clients, and also trying to find new ones. That has proven in many way to be the hardest part - maintaining business.

While I work in marketing and PR, I've never considered myself much of a salesman and find it difficult to court and approach new clients. I'm not the kind of business person who thrusts my business card into everyone's hands like some networking whores do. I have, however, been fortunate enough to get additional pieces of business and/or renewed contracts from existing clients which is very rewarding.

Year one was busier than year two has been so far. I'm not sure the reason for that but I have several theories. Was I the new agency on the block, hence clients wanted to give me a try? Are there fewer projects to work on this year than last? Do clients have smaller or tighter budgets this year than they did last? Are clients handling more work internally and not outsourcing it to a freelancer like me? Or did they try me during year one, not like me or my results, and hence not return? That's the theory I like least of course but I have to be honest with myself that it's a real possibility.

As my early blog posts on starting the agency indicated, I've had concerns about being self employed and having my own business since day one. It's not something I ever envisioned for myself and I struggle with the stress of it daily. The fluctuation of clients and thereby income is not enjoyable. That feeling of insecurity in wondering how next month's bills will get paid if I don't find more work is not fun either. I had hoped that once some time had passed and I was established these kind of worries would pass and I would feel more confident in myself and my agency.

What I've now realized is what a roller coaster self-employment really is and how it is not meant for just anyone to do. Still not sure that I am the right person to be doing it, but I guess I must be doing something right! A large part of having your own business seems to be "winging it." You won't always know what to do or how to handle a situation until you have no choice but to do so, until the situation is thrust upon you. And then you can only hope that you make the right decision.

I didn't mean to write such a "down" blog post for my second anniversary. I guess I should be patting myself on the back that the agency even lasted this long! Anyone want to take bets on whether it makes it another year or not?

What do you do when your client contact leaves?

2011-09-13T09:00:00.000-04:00

It's happened to me more than once since starting the agency almost two years ago. I sign on with a client for a project and immediately begin working with one person in particular on their staff who becomes my main contact there. Hoping to get more project work from them in time, I endeavor to develop a strong relationship of trust between us.

Then out of the blue one day, he or she informs me that they are leaving the company and going elsewhere to work. And while I certainly would like to go along for the ride with the promise of new work, I don't want to lose an existing client either. But now I have no direct contact at the client to work through. This person was my main contact. I will be temporarily passed off to someone else on staff until the project is completed, but after that there's no guarantee I will be kept around for future projects.

In the handful of times this has happened to me so far, the results have varied. With a few clients I was able to stay on board and successfully continue my relationship with them, making a new contact and developing that relationship. But with others, once my contact was gone, so was I. As soon as the project was over, they moved on to another agency or freelancer, perhaps due to their own personal connections to such marketing professionals. No matter how much I try to endear myself to them in a short amount of time, it almost never takes.

So my question is how do you stay connected to a client once your main contact there leaves, especially if he or she is the one who brought you on board to begin with?

It's easy to say that I should make additional contacts at each client and develop them at the same time. Sometimes I'm able to do that and sometimes I'm not. Working in marketing, my range of exposure to the staff is usually limited to the marketing director and his or her staff. And I'm not the kind to go poking my head in the president or CEO's door to introduce myself. I'll meet them when the time is right and I am properly introduced. But even after that has happened, I am most likely not going to work directly with someone at that level on a regular basis giving me the opportunity to get to know them.

Sure I can request a meeting with the higher-ups and my main contact's replacement when the time comes, but they don't know me like he or she did and don't have trust in me, even if I can prove to them that I have performed well for their company in the past.

So what's the trick to keeping the work during a time of client transition? Any advice? Past experiences you'd like to share?

Is work/life balance related to dedication?

2011-08-03T14:18:00.000-04:00

In the year and a half I've had my own agency, I am sometimes forced to question my level of dedication to it after I meet another self-employed colleague who tells me how much time he or she is investing in their own business. I've heard stories of woe of long days spent at the computer, in client meetings, traveling to and from said meetings, and nights slaving away instead of relaxing.

Now, you might argue that this level of dedication is necessary when first starting out in order to get yourself and your business established. Then again you could also argue that the same level of dedication will be needed to continue to maintain the business, and your clients, year in and year out.

One of the things I love best about being self-employed is setting my own work schedule each day and choosing what projects I want to work on and which clients I want to work with. I come into the office Monday through Friday like everyone else and put in a full day, and I give my clients and my work as much of myself as I can during those hours. And while work-related duties sometimes encroach on my evening and weekend activities, I don't endeavor to bring them home with me unless absolutely necessary.

This is what I consider to be a healthy and reasonable work/life balance. I put in my time during the work week during normal work hours and attempt to leave my evenings and weekends open for downtime, fun stuff, and/or time with family and friends. I guess I live by the "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" theory from "The Shining."

So when I hear of colleagues burning the candle at both ends, I wonder if I am less committed than my counterparts and wonder if I would be more successful by putting in longer days and more miles, albeit less happy. And if that is the sacrifice that needs to be made in order to be successful as a self-employed person, am I really cut out for this line of work, or am I better off working for someone else?

What do you think?

Making new acquaintences "friends"

2011-07-11T14:14:00.000-04:00

When I was younger, my older sister used to preach about keeping your work colleagues and your friends separate. She was not in favor of making friends at work due to the workplace politics and gossip that eventually transpire. I think she's changed her opinion on that today, some 20+ years later. However this still brings up an issue for me when it comes to new work-related acquaintances and Facebook.

I've noticed that if I attend a work-related function or event and meet someone new, they will often immediately look my up on Facebook profile and send me a friend invite. We've only just met and I don't know then well enough yet to consider them a "friend." I would be happy if they'd become a fan of my Blabbermouth Communications fan page, but I'm not sure I want them to be my friend on Facebook just yet. I'm always afraid that not accepting their invite will be noticeable since they will remember sending it, and I have no wish to offend them. People really take these things personally today!

It's not that I don't want to be Facebook friends with business colleagues since I am already friends with many colleagues on there. But they are people I work with periodically or have met several times and know something about. I am hesitant to automatically open up my friendship circle and posts on personal subject matters to brand new acquaintances that I really don't know.

So that raises the question of how to handle such requests. Is it okay to not accept a Facebook friend request from someone you're only just met until you get to know them better? Or should you open your connections to anyone who is willing to connect with you since they might be future clients or colleagues? How intimate should you keep your friendship circle on Facebook.

(Perhaps the new Google+ will solve this problem for me in time thanks to its Circles feature.)

The art of following up

2011-07-06T11:21:00.000-04:00

I'm pretty sure I've asked this question before in a blog post awhile back, but I thought it merited asking again.

In business, how many times do you follow up with a prospective or current client before you decide to leave it alone? I'm not speaking of someone you met once at an event and are pitching your services to blindly.

I'm talking about a client that you already worked with on a project with the hopes of doing more work with them if the initial project went well. So you already have an established working relationship. Or the potential client who you met with in person and then presented with a formal proposal. But despite followup calls and voice mail messages, you don't get a response of any kind.

I run into this problem often with existing client or potential clients of all kinds. After meeting with them and presenting a proposal, they stop communicating completely. I usually follow-up with them three times and after that I assume it's dead.

It's frustrating not to get a response at all, even if it is bad news. But I guess non-response as a form of turn down has become standard operating procedure today in business.

So how many times do you followup with a client or potential client before considering the lead dead?

Working in trade for services

2011-05-23T11:52:00.000-04:00

Earlier this year I was asked by a client to do some PR work for them in trade. The client wanted me to promote an educational seminar they were hosting for business professionals in exchange for a free seat at the event.

This seemed like a good offer to me and so I accepted. But it got me to thinking about working on a trade basis in the future and how often I might be willing to do that. At the end of the day I need to pay the bills, so cold hard cash does the trick. But when what is being offered as trade is something that might be beneficial to me or my business, should I consider it?

Especially with the number of small business owners I work with who might want to use my services but can't afford to do so, would it be wise to accept some or all payment in trade? And if I do, how do I handle that from a tax standpoint?

If you are a freelancer like me, do you ever work in trade with clients? If so, how often do you do it? And if you do the trade deal once, does that mean the client will expect it every time? What's your advice?

Taking a sick day

2011-04-18T10:00:00.001-04:00

Last week I came down with a cold that moved from my head into my chest and turned into bronchitis according to the doctor. So I allowed myself to lay low on Friday and basically gave myself a sick day doing a minimal amount of client work. Of course that means when the drugs started kicking in and I felt almost human again, I was way behind on work. So I ended up working through the weekend to get back on track.

This experience brought to mind a much worse time in 1999 when I came down with bi-lateral pneumonia. It had started as a cold that turned into the flu and evolved into an infection in both lungs. The illness was so bad it landed me in the hospital for 10 days. And the recovery was long and slow resulting in me being out of work for a month.

Luckily I had an awesome boss (the owner) at the PR agency I worked at in Lebanon, NJ and she continued to pay me during this time. I've often wondered how I would have been treated elsewhere in the corporate world had I not been working for a small, family-owned boutique agency.

But this latest experience got me to thinking about my own agency and what would happen if I fell ill like that again. Since I work for myself and have no staff, who would take care of my clients? Would I need to ask a colleague to step in? If I couldn't find anyone to fill in for me, I can't assume clients would pay me, so then I'd be out of an income too. Would I end up losing clients as a result?

I guess the obvious answer is to save money that I could live off of should this ever happen. But when you're self employed and just starting out, saving money isn't the easiest thing to do. So now I'm worried that one serious illness could knock out my little agency in one fail swoop.

Should I have some type of contingency plan for an emergency like this? If so, how do I put it together? What should it cover? Should I write it into my client contracts?

Paying the piper... or the tax man

2011-04-05T09:00:00.005-04:00

Last year was my agency's first full year in business. I knew it would be an unpredictable one as did my accountant. So when he and I met at the beginning of 2010 to project my income for the year, we were conservative. We kept expectations low figuring that the agency would need time to build and grow.

Based on that projected amount we set my quarterly state and federal tax payments. Flash forward to yesterday and my 2010 tax return is complete. A phone call with my accountant determined that we had both underestimated my projected earnings and I'd done better than I thought I would. That was the good news.

The bad news was that this miscalculation now means that I owe DOUBLE the amount of tax that I'd already paid in. So instead of getting a return or breaking even, I was now going to need to come up with a few thousand dollars that I didn't have by 4/15.

This situation has thrown me for a loop since I felt that I'd been paying a reasonable amount in taxes all of last year. Not to mention that I haven't yet fully replenished my savings from my recent unemployment, so I don't have the money for the extra taxes on hand.

This has left me feeling very defeated as a self-employed individual. Here I thought I was doing good for my first year when really I was way off. I'm starting to understand why so many small businesses never make it past the first few years. It's just so hard to get started and keep your head above water.

I'm also coming to understand why so many older professionals I've talked to tell me that they too were once self employed or once owned their own business but left it behind to go back and work for "the man." It's easier to work for someone else and let them take care of all of this.

So how can I prevent this from happening again? Obviously my accountant and I will increase the amount of my quarterly payments, but I still won't feel confident in those numbers since the entire thing is basically a guessing game. Any advice? Has this happened to anyone else and maybe they have a lesson they learned from it they'd like to share with me? It would be appreciated.

The blog is back!

2011-03-29T14:09:00.000-04:00

I started this blog in fall of 2009 when I started my business, Blabbermouth Communications, as a way to promote both it and me. I figured that if I was going to offer social media marketing services as part of my agency, I had to practice what I preached, so to speak.

In the beginning I blogged about starting the business, finding clients, what rates to charge, and other business-related topics. And I had every intention of continuing the blog into the foreseeable future, albeit with less frequent posts as the agency took off and I became busier.

When I wrote my last post during Christmas 2010, I had no intention in there being such a gap between that post and this one today. I guess I figured that no one would miss my posts or would even notice that I'd stopped blogging. But to my surprise, more than one colleague has commented to me about the blog no longer being active and updated. Apparently they not only noticed its absence but they also missed my posts to it.

So today I am picking up where I left off late last year with new posts which I hope to write on a weekly basis about how the agency has grown and developed in the past 18 months. Please stay tuned as I welcome your comments, advice and input. Thanks for sticking with me!

Giving clients gifts at the holidays

2010-12-16T09:00:00.021-05:00

Last Christmas, Blabbermouth Communications was still getting up and running, and so the thought of giving my clients gifts wasn't a possibility. Flash forward one year to present day and things are a bit different. The business is established, albeit a little slow right now, but I still don't feel that I have the money to spend on gifts.

I plan to hand-writing greeting cards and sending them out this week to all of the clients I worked with this year and ones I hope to work with in 2011. I think that's the least an agency can do this time of year to let their clients know they are thinking about them and to also stay in front of them.

But I have to wonder if clients are expecting gifts from their agencies. So many agencies give holiday presents to their clients that it's kind of become a tradition. Some give actual wrapped gifts while others may take them out for a fancy dinner.

During the decade I spent in the agency business, I only worked for small agencies of 5-10 employees, but my bosses always made sure to give our clients presents at the holidays. Most of the gifts were tailored to the client and the point of contact's personal interests in order to be as relevant as possible. But my bosses were also spending upwards of $1,000 on these gifts, which I certainly can't afford to do.

So what do you think? Do clients expect some type of gift from their agencies at the holidays? And if, as an agency, you don't give your client a gift, do you expect that the client will think less of you, or will understand that times are tight?

For my fellow freelancers: Do you give your clients gifts? If so, what is your spending limit? Or does the amount you spend on a particular client's gift correlate to how large of a client they are and how much they business they bring you?

The dreaded follow-up phone call

2010-12-15T09:00:00.013-05:00

When I was coming up in PR back in the early-to-mid 1990s, it was commonplace for a PR person to send out a press release (snail mail) to a targeted media list and then place at least one round of follow-up phone calls to said media oulets. The goal of these calls was to confirm that the release was received and to see if the journalist or editor needed more information, photos to go with the story, or help in securing an interview with the client for a resulting article. Basically you were trying to keep tabs on whether or not the media outlet was going to do anything with your press release.

But this practice was annoying to most journalists and the calls often interrupted their busy days and deadlines. Some less tactful PR people would keep journalists on the phone despite their lack of interest in the press release, forcing the otherwise nice journalist to hang up on the PR person. It had gotten so bad that some journalists I knew in NYC wouldn't even answer their office phones and only screened voice mail messages.

Keep in mind that this was before the advent of social media, and e-mail was still in its infancy. We also used faxes to communicate and mailed out printed photos for our clients since the digital revolution was yet to come. So it was a much different world from today and phone calls were still the best and most immediate way to communicate.

I stopped doing en masse follow-up phone calls several years ago since I hated doing them and they were rather ineffective. So today when a client expects me to make follow-up phone calls as a matter of practice because that's what they think the last PR person they worked with did, I have to ask myself if they really did make all of those calls. It just seems impractical to me and like a huge waste of time. So to appease the client I may make a few calls to the usual suspects, but I certainly don't reach out to everyone on the original press release distribution list.

So fellow PR practitioners: do you think that doing follow-up phone calls after press release mailings/distributions are outdated? Do you still do them today, or have you too given up on them? What's your approach?

I'd be interested in getting feedback from some current or former editors and journalists about how they feel about receiving those calls, and if they still get them to this day or if the practice has died out.

Do I deserve a raise?

2010-12-14T14:53:00.000-05:00

I've blogged before about what rates to charge my clients for the various PR and marketing services I perform for them. I've decided to go with a package pricing approach as opposed to billing by the hour like so many agencies do.

This is mainly because I've found that the small clients that are my agency's bread and butter have sticker shock when they hear an hourly rate quoted. Not to mention that I would never get the piece of business if I actually charged them by the hour once you factor in time wasters like last minute changes and games of phone tag.

But now I am wondering if and when it's appropriate to request an increase in fee from a client. For instance, one of my clients is on a 12-month retainer contract for which I perform a wide range of services. I do more work for them on a regular basis than I am technically being compensated for. I do this since I want the client to be happy and I want them to have a good online and media presence. However I would like to receive more pay for these efforts.

My 12-month retainer contract with this client is scheduled to renew in early 2011 and it's my intention to request a modest increase in the rate that I think they can afford. So my question is, should I request the increase and see if they go for it? And if I do and they don't go for it, do I just agree to hold my existing rate so as not to loose them as a client, but then do less work for them to make up the difference?

If you're a fellow freelancer, tell me how you handle increasing your rates with clients over a long period of time? I'd appreciate your input.

Reflecting on what I'm thankful for this year in business

2010-11-23T09:00:00.028-05:00

This year has been another roller coast ride for me as my little agency that could, Blabbermouth Communications, continues to grow, develop and change.

What started last fall as a bit of a gamble - could I make self-employment and my own agency work? - took off in the first quarter of 2010, proving to me that I could really make a go of this. I've enjoyed working with a nice range of clients on a healthy variety of projects. A slight end of the year slow down has come just when a break was needed. Now I only hope that the first quarter of 2011 rebounds as nicely as this year's did.

So here's my list of what I am thankful for this year:

I'm thankful that my agency has survived its first year in business.
I'm thankful for colleagues with great advice and insight, as well as for the valuable partnerships and collaborations we've formed.
I'm thankful for having arrived at the point in my life and professional career where I actually know enough about PR, marketing and advertising to run my own agency and have clients trust the advice I give them.
I'm thankful to clients who pay in full and on time.
I'm thankful for new clients who don't know me but who have taken a chance by hiring me.
I'm especially thankful to clients who retain my services for one project, but bring me back to work on additional projects with them.
I'm thankful for clients and colleagues who refer work to me and who speak highly of me and my agency to fellow colleagues who might want to work with me in the future.
I'm thankful to have a professional and affordable downtown office space out of which to run my business.
I'm thankful for the mistakes I've made this year and that none of them were serious enough to cost me to lose a client or earnings.
And finally I'm thankful for all of you who take the time to read my blog posts, status updates on Facebook and Tweets on Twitter. Thank you for staying engaged and connected. It's very much appreciated.

Divorcing a colleague

2010-11-18T09:00:00.011-05:00

Earlier this year I wrote a blog post entitled "Divorcing your client" in which I questioned how and when to walk away from a difficult client on which you are losing money. It appeared to be a tricky and somewhat unpopular topic as some people seemed to think a freelancer should never give up a paying client no matter how difficult they are. Others applauded the topic of the post and recognized that it's difficult for most of us to walk away from any clients since we all need the work.

This post poses the same question but in respect to divorcing a colleague. Since my professional skill set doesn't include graphic design or web design, I need to bring in colleagues who do that type of work on my clients' projects in order to effectively service the account. But once a given freelancer is aligned with one of my clients/accounts, it makes it hard to replace them with someone else if I am ever unhappy with them or their work.

I've already had it happen where a chosen freelancer charges a reasonable amount for their services initially, but then once they are on board, they jack up prices unexpectedly which creates a problem. I've had others whose design work and quality isn't up to par, or who suddenly get busy with their own clients and don't have the time to service mine but still won't walk away.

What would be the best way politically to remove such a colleague from an account? Is there any way to do so without damaging our business relations and/or friendship? And what if the colleague goes around me and tries to continue working with the client without my permission? Is there anything I can do about that?

End of the year slow down?

2010-11-16T10:27:00.000-05:00

After a very busy summer juggling several clients and many different projects, the fall is now winding down and I am experiencing my first slow down in business. That's not to say that I have nothing to do - I still have several clients I am doing work for, but I would like more.

A few of my fellow freelance colleagues warned me that the end of year holiday season is a slow down period for them and that I should expect it for a couple of reasons. First, there's the craziness of the holidays with people on vacation and projects put on hold. Second, there's the end of the year belt tightening for all of those clients whose fiscal years match the calendar. So some projects they meant to do in 2010 may get carried over into 2011 if they can't be paid out of this year's budget.

So does that mean I can expect work to pick up again in the new year? Do I just have to tough it out the next month and a half before things returning to being busy?

Are you a freelancer who has dealt with a similar slow down? If so, I'd love for you to share your experience with me and tell me how it played out for you. Thanks!

Does liking a client lead to better performance?

2010-10-18T09:00:00.002-04:00

It occurred to me the other day that I seem to have developed a bit of niche for non-profit clients. That got me thinking about the kind of work I like to do and the kinds of clients I enjoy working with most. (It's not necessarily the ones that pay the most, either.)

My thoughts then lead to performance and I began to wonder if we freelance marketers perform better for clients that we enjoy working with more than clients that we can't relate to. And when I say "clients we enjoy working with," I'm not just referring to how the client treats you as their agency. That's an important part of it certainly, but that's not the entire thing in my mind. I'm also referring to enjoying working with them because of the product or service they make or sell. If it's a product you personally enjoy and connect with, does that mean you'll be a better marketer of it than an agency who doesn't really like the product?

Case in point - one of my clients is the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail. I happen to be a wine drinker and enjoy our local wines. I think that this makes me an ideal candidate for the trail's PR and marketing efforts compared with someone who either doesn't drink alcohol at all, or perhaps does drink, but does not enjoy wine.

On the flip side, I've worked with The Crayola Factory in Easton for several months promoting their attraction via social media marketing. While I've certainly been to the attraction and am familiar with it, as a non-parent, I'm not exactly their target audience. So does that mean an agency rep who is a parent can relate to The Crayola Factory and its experience better than I can, and hence would do a better job of promoting it? After all, we can only ever learn so much about our clients and their products/services without actually working for them full-time.

So what do you think? Do you feel that marketers can do the best job of promoting and representing a company or product if it's one they don't use or consume themselves? And what if you really don't like your client? Does that affect your performance? Be honest, and let me know what you think.

How do I partner successfully?

2010-10-15T14:17:00.000-04:00

When I first started the agency a year ago (boy that feels good to say!), several colleagues suggested that we work together jointly on their client projects. They more or less promised to bring me in on projects that needed a marketing element that they themselves did not offer, such as public relations or social media marketing. The idea was that together we could present a broader range of services to each client than we could do individually.

Initially this sounded fine to me and I hoped to do work with them. However, nothing ever came along. Either the colleagues forgot about what they offered me, or the right client projects never came along. So I figured that I wouldn't be able to count on others to bring me work and would need to rely on myself 100% for it.

However, a colleague recently has started trying to bring me on board with a client of his and I'm not sure how I feel about it. While I certainly want and need the work, I've become used to the idea of finding and maintaining my own clients. I'm not sure how I'll feel about working with someone else on a project knowing that the client belongs to them. I'm used to being the only client contact for all of my accounts. In other words, I like that the buck stops with me and am not sure how I feel about having to filter everything through my colleague.

I know that these kinds of partnering relationships are quite normal for freelancers, and I do them on my end when I need to bring in a colleague on one of my own client's projects to do something like graphic design which I don't do. So far it's worked out pretty well, but that's because I am ultimately in control of the project.

So, how can I successfully partner with other freelance marketing professionals on their clients' projects? Do I have to give up my need to be in control of the project? Is is best to act as the secret partner and allow the colleague to present everything as being his or her own work so as to keep a distance? And how do I not go around my colleague with the client if I feel that the colleague is dropping the ball on something? What's the best way to operate?

Blabbermouth Communications turns one!

2010-10-14T15:52:00.000-04:00

This month marks the one-year anniversary for my little agency, Blabbermouth Communications. Starting out I wasn't entirely sure the business would make it a year, and I half expected it to fall apart at any time, leaving me unemployed again and looking for work.

The last 12 months have been a combination of experiment and roller coaster ride as I figured out exactly how to start a business since I had no such prior experience. Still, despite my fears after an initial slow start, the agency took off at the beginning of 2010 with a constant flow of clients. I've inadvertently developed a bit of a niche with non-profit clients. I guess they've become a forte of mine.

After working from home for the first 6 months, I opted for a small office space that I share with a graphic design colleague in downtown Easton. I've determined that this was a wise decision for me as it's important to get out of the house every day and have a place to go where business and only business is done. I've experimented with everything including how much to charge clients, finding and retaining clients, and balancing my work/home life so that I'm not working all of the time.

I'm excited, and kinda nervous, for what the next year holds. I now have more confidence in myself and my business to succeed, so I don't doubt that there will indeed be another 12 months of Blabbermouth. Here's to 2011!

Asking your client for a raise

2010-10-07T13:57:00.000-04:00

I have a few clients that I work with on an ongoing, monthly retainer basis. They contract with me for 6 - 12 months worth of work at a set rate for a set range of services.

One of these contracts will be coming due for renewal in early 2011 and I've been thinking about asking for a slight increase in my monthly retainer. I know a lot of agencies expect increases when contract renewals roll around and often jack up the price quite a bit, resulting in sticker shock for the client.

I am hoping that this client feels that I have performed well in the last three-quarters of the year and that they will not only want to renew with me but will agree that the small increase is merited. This client happens to be a non-profit organization which makes me hesitant to ask for an increase in rate although I really feel like it's appropriate.

So my current dilemma is thus:

Do I ask for a rate increase and keep it modest so as to avoid sticker shock?
Will the increase request possibly jeopardize their decision to renew with me?
If their budget can't afford the requested increase, will they tell me as much so we can negotiate, or will they just turn me down flat?
And finally, if they refuse to pay the increased amount but agree to renew with me at my previous monthly retainer level, do I take it in order to keep them as a client or walk away knowing that my services and time are worth more?

Dilemmas, dilemmas...

Cha-cha-changes!

2010-09-30T09:00:00.001-04:00

My little agency is facing its first test of survivability just one year in. As I prepare to celebrate my first anniversary in early October, I find myself in a place of transition. How big or a transition it will be remains to be seen.

One client has recently informed me that after several months of working together, they have decided to take their social media marketing efforts in-house. While this certainly is not a surprise, I had hoped against hope that they might continue with me through the end of the year before making that change.

Another client has informed me that they are leaving their job and I am now not sure if the client will keep me on-board. Unfortunately the person who is leaving was my primary contact at this client and the one who brought me in to begin with. So their departure leaves me without a strong contact at the client and in a point of weakness.

Both of those recent developments, combined with the fact that several other short-term client projects have recently cone to a conclusion, have me a little nervous about finding new clients or new work from existing clients to replace the departing ones.

Several of my freelance colleagues warned me from the very beginning to be prepared for dry spells; that they are inevitable. And while these changes certainly do not equate to a "dry spell" since I still have plenty of other clients and work to keep me busy, they still represent a slight shift for the agency.

It looks like the fall is going to be my next real test of the agency's long-term survival. Stay tuned to see where the next three months take me! As always I have a feeling it's going to be an adventure!

Sal-Lee Farm in Bangor benefits from marketing assistance thanks to CACLV grant

2010-09-27T09:00:00.016-04:00

It appears I have been remiss in not only updating my blog so far this month, but in also promoting my current client projects. So I'm vowing to do better with both.

One of my clients is the Community Action Committee of the Lehigh Valley or CACLV for short. I was brought in to work with them on a grant program created from the stimulus program to help small businesses market themselves. Most of them had never done marketing of this kind before, or they had done very little and most of it wasn't effective.

The first grant recipient was Sal-Lee Farm in Bangor. This family-owned business produces natural meats and dairy items as well as fresh vegetables. It needed help marketing its on-site farm stand as well as its presence at local farmers' markets this summer.

Working with my graphic design colleague Dina Hall of Dina Hall Graphic Design, we created a print newspaper ad for various weeklies serving the communities in which the farmers' markets were located. We also created a full-color rack card that could be handed out to folks who visited their stand at the markets, and a banner to display in their market tent. A new web site is currently being developed for the farm and should be live soon.

Sal-Lee Farm print ad for weekly newspapers

Sal-Lee Farm banner for farmers' market booth

Rack card - front side

Rack card - reverse side

"Divorcing" your client

2010-08-31T09:00:00.002-04:00

I think most freelancers have clients that they like or at least can tolerate. I'm certainly not someone who thinks that you should do anything just to get a check, but I think most of us regularly go above and beyond in serving our clients and that our clients recognize and appreciate that.

However, there are occasionally clients that test us by pushing our wits and patience to the limit. And while you might think at first that it's not that bad, that you can handle it, it's been my professional experience with clients like this that it will only get worse over time if left unchecked.

None of us want to go toe-to-toe with a difficult client and risk loosing them, so I think we all too often take it on the chin in the interest of keeping the business, completing the project and getting paid. Still, there are times when it's probably best for both parties if you walk away and in effect "divorce" your client.

I'm wondering if anyone has ever done that, and if so, what is the most diplomatic way to do it. How do you stand up for yourself, your business and your time so that you don't get taken advantage of or completely loose your shirt on a project? I would imagine that there is a fine line between leaving a client and pissing them off completely so that they badmouth you around town. I certainly want to avoid the latter and would appreciate any advice you have on how to handle the former.

Give me your feedback. Thanks!

The long and the short of it

2010-08-13T14:54:00.000-04:00

When you leave a voice mail message for someone, is it long and detailed or short and to the point?

The reason I ask is because I recently had a conversation with a colleague who overheard me leaving such a message for a client and then commented after I hung up how much he hates getting long VM messages like the one I had just left. He said that his messages are straight to the point - he leaves his name, number and asks the person to call him back. That's it; end of story.

To me, a message that brief and non-descript is pointless. How am I supposed to know why he called or what he needs form me? Without that information how can I determine how truly urgent it is for me to call him back?

This got me thinking about the proper length for a business voice mail message. I was trained in my early agency days to leave a very descriptive voice mail as to why I was calling so as to arm the recipient of said message with all they needed to know in order to call me back with the answers I was looking for. Still, my messages sometimes get so long that automated systems cut me off abruptly and disconnect the call. Guess I need to find the happy medium between brief and too detailed.

So which is it for you? Do you prefer a VM message with just the essentials, or do you like a little background info so you know why you were called and what the caller expects of you in return? And do you practice what you preach by leaving the same kind of VM message for the folks you are calling?

To belong or not to belong...

2010-08-04T09:00:00.001-04:00

I've been debating the importance of membership in industry-related organizations. For the last several years I was a member of the Public Relations Society of America through my former employer. It just so happened that before I was laid off from my job last July, I had just renewed my membership. And the membership goes with the person, not the organization, so I got to keep it!

So I'm now due to renew and have decided not to do so since it will cost me upwards of $350+ and I don't feel that I'm getting anything out of it. I'm not active in the group. There isn't a Lehigh Valley Chapter so I'm forced to belong to the Philly Chapter (which I resent). I had hoped that I might use the membership to get discounted rates on educational seminars that they put on, but most of them are just too expensive for a solo practitioner like me and I can't seem to afford to take the time away from the office to attend. Besides, I can still attend such seminars as a non-member if I really want to do so and just pay a higher fee.

My only other membership is in the Greater Lehigh Valley Ad Club which I get value out of. I attend their events and volunteer on their ADDY Awards committee. It's true that you get out of something as much as you put into it because I've made some great local contacts from being a member of this group. So I plan to continue the Ad Club membership while dropping the one in PRSA.

So how do you decide which professional organizations to belong to? Do the annual dues dictate that for you in any way, or does your employer pay for it? And if you do decide to join, how involved do you get with the local chapter? What benefits of membership do you use most? Please share with me.

Personal vs. work-related social media lines

2010-07-26T09:00:00.000-04:00

A story was relayed to me recently by a colleague regarding her use of her personal Facebook account when it comes to business which caused me to be concerned about the fine line between personal and professional relationships on social media.

Allow me to share a synopsis of the story. Apparently this colleague had posted something to her personal profile that her boss found objectionable. (Her boss is/was one of her "friends" on FB.) He told her to take it down because other work-related colleagues that she was connected to would see it and it would reflect badly on the business. She immediately took down the FB post and proceeded to remove all of her "friends" that were work colleagues in some way, shape or form.

I thought this crossed a line and I'm not sure how I feel about it. Surely my friend is allowed to post whatever she deems fit to a personal profile that has nothing to do with her job or her work. And she is certainly allowed to connect with work colleagues through social media. Having her boss tell her that something she posted there seems like an overstepping of the work/personal life boundaries to me.

I can tell you that while the post's content might have been objectionable to the boss, it wasn't horribly vulgar or even obnoxious, just suggestive. You might even call it "playful." And this colleague does not use social media as some of us do to find clients, make sales or contacts for business, or anything of that nature. She just does it for fun.

Now I know that many of you will say: that you shouldn't put anything out there on social media that you don't want to come back and bit you in the you-know-what. But she had no problem with the post until someone else brought it to her attention that there was a concern about its message/tone.

So what do you think? Does an employer have the right to critique your personal FB posts or Tweets when they are not directly work related? And if so, should you honor the boss's request to remove them and/or change them in the future? Or should the line on such things be drawn at the office door, giving each individual the right to post what they want, when they want and connect with whomever they want?

Tell me what you think.

Billing clients for related expenses

2010-07-19T10:01:00.000-04:00

Back in my agency days we kept track of every expense we accumulated on a client's behalf - phone calls, faxes, mileage, meals, etc. Some of them were absorbed as agency expenses and written off. But others were charged back to the client per our agreement with them.

The contract for services indicated that the client would be charged for certain work-related costs. Most clients were okay with this but others refused to pay for them saying that they were simply a cost of doing business which the agency should either cover or find a way to write off.

I haven't taken to writing down every client expense in order to bill it back to them as that is not only a time consuming practice, but i don't think most of my smaller clients would appreciate being billed for them. However, I have had a client tell me to bill them for my mileage on their behalf which I have shied away from doing since it just doesn't feel right. I certainly want to cover my costs, but I also don't want to nickle-and-dime my clients and have that leave a bad taste in their mouths.

So I wanted to ask you, my fellow freelancers, what your policy is. Do you charge the client back for all reasonable related expenses on their behalf? Or do you try to anticipate at the outset what those costs will be and build them into the price you quote the client for the project/job? If you bill them back for these costs directly, have you found that most clients are okay with paying for them, or do they debate it with you?

Please share your thoughts, practices and opinions with me. Thanks.

Celebrating an anniversary of sorts

2010-07-15T09:00:00.037-04:00

Today marks the one-year anniversary of my layoff from my former employer. I'd been there for four years, having just had my anniversary there at the end of June. I knew our non-profit's funding had been cutback and that the staff would be facing all kinds of cuts, but I mistakenly thought I was too valuable to ever be let go. So it came as a real shock to me when I was told to pack up my office and leave the same day.

Several freelance colleagues of mine suggested trying to work in their world as a freelance marketing and PR consultant. I'd never thought about doing that and once again didn't know how to get started. So after contemplating it for a few weeks, all of a sudden I woke up one day and it all changed. I had a client, ironically my former employer, and I wanted to present myself as a formal business, not just an out-of-work former employee.

So in the matter of a week I came up with my business name, Blabbermouth Communications, hired a graphic design friend to create my logo, set up my web site, and arranged to have a professional headshot taken, again by a colleague.

Over the last year I have learned not only how to start and run my own business, but I have learned a ton about myself: what I can learn when I need to; how inventive I can be; how supportive my friends and family members can be; and most importantly, what I am capable of overall. Had I not been forced into this situation thanks to the layoff, it may have been several more years until I learned these truths about myself, if ever at all. So, all in all, I'd say it's been a good year!

Join me on a tour of The Velodrome on Lehigh Valley Visions

2010-07-12T09:00:00.003-04:00

I am pleased to share with you my latest video for my Blabbermouth Communications client Discover Lehigh Valley (formerly the Lehigh Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau). It's a tour of the Valley Preferred Cycling Center in Trexlertown, best known locally as The Velodrome.

This video is a bit shorter yet faster paced that the other Lehigh Valley Visions videos we've done over the last three years. You can see all of them on the YouTube channel for Discover Lehigh Valley as well as on their own web site which promotes the region for tourism, meetings and conventions, group tours, and sporting events.

Each video in the ongoing series provides a short tour of a local attraction that visitors and residents alike might want to visit themselves. The idea is to show just enough of the attraction to whet the appetite and encourage an in-person visit. I hope you enjoy it.

Restarting a blog after taking a break

2010-07-08T09:00:00.000-04:00

So once again I've done it; I haven't updated my agency blog in more than half-a-month. This has happened a handful of times before but each time I've bounced back and come up with topics to blog about. (Thanks to everyone who took the time to write a comment by the way!)

So now I am wondering how to get back on track with the blog posts. When I first started the business in fall 2009, I had more time on my hands and was writing new posts every day. That got to be too much and I dropped back to a more reasonable 2-3 posts per week.

But clients, and my work for them, come first and so my blog ends up sitting untended to. But as someone who does social media marketing for a living, I kinda have to practice what I preach by keeping a business blog of my own, don't I? It's kind of like the sayings "Don't trust a bald barber" or "Don't eat food from a skinny chef." Mine would be "Don't pay for social media marketing services from an agency that can't find the time to maintain their own blog!"

So now I need your advice on how to restart my blog. What does it take? Any epiphany? Some kind of special inspiration? A different focus or theme for posts?

What do you think?

Do you do spec?

2010-06-18T09:00:00.000-04:00

About a month ago I met with a potential client who threw me for a bit of a loop. He told me that he would only pay for my work if I achieved the goals outlined in my proposal. He suggested that if I achieved some but not all of the goals, he would pay me on a sliding scale basis for what I had accomplished.

I was a bit appalled and even more confused by this appraoch. I've always been paid for my time, talent and expertise without an expectation of outcome. Although we all have goals, sometimes achieving those goals depends on others or factors over which we have no direct control. This is especially true for public relations and marketing. No one in my field can "guarantee" that you will get X amount of business because you executed their marketing plan or a set of recommended tactics. Hence the return on investment for marketing is very subjective.

When I discussed the potential client's approach with my faithful freelance colleagues, they informed me that he was attempting to get me to work "on spec," a practice which many established freelancers shy away from unless absolutely necessary. I'm told it's not unusual for someone just starting out to do spec work, (working without getting paid until the project is completed or goals are met) and some of them told me they will still do it if they think it will lead them to a bigger piece of business with that client.

This potential client did dangle the carrot of paying me well for my efforts and promises of future projects together if this initial one went well. But something in my gut was telling me it wasn't right for me. I ended up turning him down and walking away from the work. I think I did the right thing and feel good about my decision.

But it started me thinking about the practice of asking freelancers to do spec work. If you are a freelancer, regardless of field or industry, have you ever worked on spec before? Do you still do it today, and if so, why? Would you do it again? Tell me what you think.

Could working weekends damage my rep?

2010-06-14T09:00:00.003-04:00

It's another Sunday night and I'm preparing for my work week by getting an early start (or is it a late start?) by catching up on e-mails to clients at 10 p.m. at night. My goal is not for them to respond to me yet this evening, although some will, but rather for my e-mail to be waiting for them in their inbox tomorrow morning when they arrive at work.

Since not everyone pays attention to the date and time stamp on an e-mail, it never occurred to me that my clients could get the wrong idea from me sending them an e-mail at this hour. As a colleague recently pointed out to me, an e-mail sent at this time might give the impression that I am behind on my work and forced to work late hours in order to get caught up.

Or it may tell them that I see nothing wrong with working at all hours of the day and therefore lead them to expect such performance without complaint in the future when and if they need to reach me late one night or on a weekend.

When my colleague works late, he writes his e-mails but saves them and waits to send them until the morning at a more reasonable hour, such as 8 a.m. This got me to wondering if he had a point and whether or not I should be doing the same thing.

What do you think? Will clients who notice the time/date stamp on my e-mails get the wrong idea when receiving my e-mails at odd hours, or will they just think I am dedicated to my business and willing "to go the extra mile" to service their account? Give me your input.

How skilled are you at "Cutting Through the Clutter"?

2010-06-09T12:41:00.000-04:00

Please join me and my colleagues of the Greater Lehigh Valley Ad Club next Thursday evening, June 16 for an informative and educational lecture by our own Bill Childs entitled "Cutting Through the Clutter."

Here's a description of the seminar per the Ad Club's web site:

Have you ever wondered why it seems advertising doesn’t work as well as it should? Do you know the difference between adverpanicking and advertising? Do you want to learn how to create effective advertising that cuts through the clutter and gets results?

William Childs, Creative Director at The Morning Call brings his mix of knowledge and humor to a presentation that you don't want to miss. William will take an informative look at why most advertising and marketing today struggles to find its audience. Whether you’re a graphic designer looking for inspiration or a senior level account executive looking to expand your knowledge base, this program can benefit you.

4:30 PM: Doors Open
4:45 PM: "Cutting Through the Clutter" Presentation
6:00 PM: Mixer with food and beverages*
7:30 PM: Event ends

Ad Club Members are FREE! Non-Members pay a nominal $20 admission fee which includes the presentation and mixer. Register here. Hope to see you there!

What is appropriate summer workplace attire?

2010-06-03T07:34:00.000-04:00

Now that summer's unofficially here, we're all start wearing cooler clothing to work to be more comfortable. But over the past few years I've noticed greater and greater liberties being taken with attire in the professional workplace.

To my mind flip-flops have got to be the first offense. I don't care if you Bedazzle them with sequins and beads, they are still flip-flops and not appropriate for a professional work environment. That begs the question about whether sandals in general are appropriate for work. Perhaps I am old fashioned but I wonder if showing one's naked foot is really necessary at work. And I'm a sandal wearer!

And when it comes to the wearing of capri pants, they're really just a compromise between shorts and regular full-length pants, aren't' they? So does taking a few inches off the inseam really make a difference in cooling you down at work, or are they just another fashion option we get to wear in the summer months?

Keep in mind that I was raised in the 80's, the era of women trying to look like men by wearing power suits to their corporate jobs as they climbed the ladder. So I believe in a more formal dress code at work, but certainly not every day. I think suits should be worn for important meetings and occasions, but that a more relaxed slacks or skirt and blouse or shirt combo can be worn the rest of the time. I know I'm in the minority here but I still can't help but wonder how the younger generation is perceived at work when they bring their casual fashion trends into the workplace.

And as for cleavage, in my opinion there's never an appropriate time to show off your ta-tas at work, ladies. I can't even imagine why you'd want to objectify yourself to the men around you and create anger and even resentment with your female co-workers. I tell every young woman entering the workplace that's willing to listen that there is just no need to show your breasts in the office. Do it all you want in your personal life outside of work, but please cover up when you're at work.

So what do you think? Do some of us take summer fashion at work too far? Or am I just being overly sensitive, not adjusting with the changing times? What annoying fashion trends have you seen abused in the workplace?

Today's speaking engagement - e-Women Network

2010-05-11T07:50:00.000-04:00

I'm delighted to be the featured speaker at today's Accelerated Networking event of the Lehigh Valley chapter of the e-Women Network group at Lehigh Country Club. This is another one of those opportunities that kind of came out of nowhere.

I received a call from Managing Director Marisol Sosnowski about a month ago. She'd heard of me and my presentation on Social Media 101 - The Basics that I did back in January for the Greater Lehigh Valley Ad Club and was interested in having me give the same presentation to her members.

I figured that this would be a great opportunity to meet other professional women in the region who are business people, and entrpreneurs, like me. And if I could help any of them understand why they should be doing social media marketing for their comapnies and businesses through my presentation, that would be a win-win for both of us.

So today over lunchtime I will be reviewing the basics on using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, blogs and YouTube with them in the hopes that I can get them to be more active in social media.

Wish me luck!

Word is getting out!

2010-05-10T10:13:00.000-04:00

In the last 2-3 months I've started receiving inquiries that come from out of the blue. In other words, they're not people I already know nor are they technically being referred to me by anyone. They are just hearing about me and or Blabbermouth Communications and wanting to know more.

Most of them start by Googling my web site, while others take the next step and arrive at my Facebook fan page or Twitter account. It sounds like all of the buzz I have been trying to put out there for the last 7 months is starting to work and is building awareness which is all any marketer can hope for. As I always tell my clients, effective marketing and PR takes TIME. It doesn't happen overnight. And now I guess I'm practicing what I preach. I'm starting to reap the rewards of everything from a clever and memorable business name, to my involvement in the community.

While I'm not going out of my way to market myself, I've heard feedback from people who saw my presentation as a speaker earlier this year at the Greater Lehigh Valley Ad Club's half day marketing seminar. I've met others through Twitter and Facebook, and others just from being out and about in the Lehigh Valley community at large. The word-of-mouth marketing is paying off!

I'm always amazed at how work gets done and how people in business meet and connect with each other. My little business continues to grow and it's making me even more confident with each passing week that I can make my business my new profession and vocation. That it has the potential to go long term. It's very exciting!

Feeling obligated

2010-05-06T15:53:00.000-04:00

My friends and colleagues have been supportive in the start-up of my little business venture and want to help me be successful. So often they refer me to people they know that "need services like yours." Someone they know needs a brochure, or a press release or some other marketing-related item and I'm the one for the job.

But sometimes these proejcts are so small that they honestly aren't worth my time. Especially when it comes to clients that don't know how to work with an agency and result in me spending time that I don't get compensated for to train and babysit them. When you are a freelancer there really is a breaking point as to what is going to be profitable and is thereby worth doing, and what you should run away from screaming before it can suck you in.

So if I suspect that a client lead being given to me won't be profitable or successful, I usually don't bother following up on it. During the first decade of my career in agencies, I've developed a pretty good sense of what's going to fly and what won't. Still, I don't want to disappoint my friend who gave me the client lead since their heart was in the right place. And I don't want it getting back to them that I didn't take their advice and thereby offend them. So I often feel obligated to look into small jobs with little potential just to avoid upsetting a friend.

Now I know there are freelancers out there that will tell you that no piece of work is too small. Or they'll say that the small stuff is worth doing because it might open up the door to a bigger piece of business down he road. I see their points, but I don't necessarily agree.

So I want to know if you think it's worth spending time to follow up on these leads or not. Should I follow my gut and only follow-up on the ones that appear to be legit business leads, or am I obligated to followup on all of the leads that come my way so as not to risk alienating a colleague?

Helping the United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley with social media marketing

2010-05-04T11:41:00.000-04:00

I'm proud to announce that my newest social media marketing client for Blabbermouth Communications is the Valley's own United Way chapter.

Like so many other non-profit organizations whose budgets have been cut due to the economy the last few years, they've had to do more with less. And as such, they're embracing social media to help them get their message out to the Lehigh Valley community.

They already had a fan page on Facebook but wanted to do more with it. So as of yesterday I am helping them with that as well as starting a new LinkedIn group and a new Twitter account.

So if you are a supporter of United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley or would like to become one, please consider becoming a fan, follower or member today. Thanks!

Tell me your name again?

2010-04-28T10:00:00.008-04:00

I hate to admit this but I have a bad memory for names. Always have. And that's not exactly a great trait for a person in marketing and PR! It can take me 2-3 meetings before I remember someone's name and/or recognize them on site. Unless they've made a really big impact on me in some way to make them memorable, it will take awhile for their name to sink in. Especially if I think they look like someone I know with a different name. Then I will NEVER get their real name into my head.

I deal with this every day and constantly find little ways to figure out their names after having been introduced besides, of course, waiting for someone else to address them by name directly. It's almost like I'm too focused on my own introduction and shaking hands than I am on hearing and remembering their names. I don't get it.

I met with a colleague today for lunch who told me that she has the same problem - bad with remembering names - but that her husband is great at it which is helpful for his restaurant business. We agreed that if one of us learns a simple, and memorable, trick for learning and retaining names, we'll share it with each other.

Do you have trouble with names and/or faces? Know any tricks for remembering names that you can share with me? Some kind of word association trick or something along those lines? HELP!

Getting rid of my dinosaur laptop

2010-04-26T11:26:00.000-04:00

I bought my first laptop about 5 years ago. At the time I paid extra to upgrade it with all of the latest features including a faster processor, more memory and good quality video software. But like everything else in this fast-paced world, my once state-of-the-art computer is now outdated and slow.

I recently had more RAM added to it which helped make it run faster, but that was only a band aid for the larger problem. My Dell laptop has become too slow for me to multitask efficiently and its weight slows me down when transporting it from office to home to meetings. The keyboard has recently started acting up and the space bar is sticking and not typing out the spaces I tell it to. And as if that weren't enough, the power supply cord for the computer is on the fritz too! It's almost like the computer knows I'm looking for a new one and is giving upon me!

I recently met with a colleague who is a tech guru and he gave me his advice on the features I should get on my next computer. Despite the passion that many of my colleagues feel for their Macs, I will probably stay in the PC world and am thinking about getting another Dell. That's mainly because I'm a creature of habit and tend to go back to what I know. My Dell laptop certainly hasn't been perfect but it's much better than the Gateway desktop computer I had prior to it. But I'm not sure that getting another Dell is really the right way to go.

I'm hoping to get a no-finance-charge offer for one year from Dell so I can pay the computer off in installments. I don't want to spend more than $1,000 and I want it to rock and roll when it comes to processor speed and RAM. I also want it to be lightweight and easy to transport. I'm not worried about having a really big, panoramic screen or about video software or things like that in general.

So what do you recommend? Should I get another Dell or is there another PC brand of computer I should consider? What computer manufacturer is hot right now? Any advice?

Is business for marketing freelancers starting to rebound?

2010-04-22T08:02:00.000-04:00

At last week's Lehigh Valley Tweetup one year anniversary event, of which Blabbermouth Communications was a sponsor, I ran into a fellow freelance PR colleague. We started talking about how busy we both were with clients and projects and he said something that resonated with me.

"It's as if January arrived and someone turned on the spigot and forgot to shut it off." This isn't a water analogy but rather a business analogy and he is right about it, at least from my standpoint.

More and more of the freelancers I talk to across the Lehigh Valley are telling me how busy they are all of a sudden. It doesn't seem to matter what part of the marketing field you are in - general consulting, advertising, graphic design, PR, etc. Business has picked up for many people and it's inspiring. It gives me hope that the economy is starting to turn around and that new one-woman-shops like mine actually stand a chance of succeeding this year.

Another colleague suggested to me that the reason for the sudden boom was due to companies renewing marketing projects that they had put on hold last year (last fiscal year, to be specific) for financial reasons which they have now decided to move forward with. It's also occurred to me that they might be choosing to work with freelancers instead of formal agencies due to cost and level of service.

Are you a freelancer or do you know one? Have you (or they) seen an uptick in activity for your business since the start of the new year? If so, what do you attribute it to? The economy rebounding? The Stimulus Package? A normal cycle of highs and lows?

Tell me what you think. I'm interested to hear everyone's opinions on this.

Gimme a break! Time for a little time off!

2010-04-21T07:21:00.000-04:00

When I started Blabbermouth last fall, I had many questions and concerns about being self employed. One of those concerns dealt with taking time off. I debated this in a blog post back at the holiday season when I wanted to take a few days off to enjoy the season. I wasn't sure how clients would feel about me taking time away from work since I didn't have a backup person to do the work for me as is the case at a larger agency.

Well, I've decided to bite the bullet and give it a try. At the end of April I am going to take a family vacation for four days to Virginia. I'll technically only be missing two "work days," a.k.a. weekdays. I've decided to take my laptop along so that I can get online and check e-mails as well as check my clients' social media accounts that I maintain for them. I plan to send them an e-mail early next week letting them know about my time away.

I also plan to nicely let them know that while I will be checking e-mail and the web, I will not be responding to anything that isn't urgent until I return to the office the following week. I think this is fair and reasonable since they too take time off and are unreachable for short periods. And since none of my clients are in a life-saving field such as medicine, I kind of doubt that any true crisis would come up that couldn't wait for me to return or that they couldn't handle themselves.

To my other freelance/self-employed colleagues, how have you handled your vacations with your clients in the past? Do you check in with them once or twice while away? Do you shut down the business completely and figure you'll get back to everything when you return? Or do you hire someone else to maintain your clients while you are gone? Any advice you have on how to do this effectively would be appreciated.

The Blabbermouth Communications web site is reinvented with a new look!

2010-04-19T15:06:00.000-04:00

I'm pleased to announce the redesign of my Blabbermouth Communications web site. Since I am not a graphic designer and was on a tight budget when I started the business last fall, I chose to use a web design templating software through Go Daddy, who I also registered my domain with. The initial site was suffucient at only 5 pages but the design was rather boring.

I had previously asked my graphic design colleague Garth Gower of 2gDesigns in Easton to design a customer Twitter page for my @blabbermouthcom account. He developed something colorful and fun, yet professional that I loved. So it only made sense to go back to him and ask him to expand on it for the new web site.

We kept most of the content the same as before but got rid of the contact form as I had started getting non-legitimate submissions. Getting rid of that form allowed me to reallocate that page to become my Portfolio page and thereby shorten the Services page which had become quite long.

I love having a personalized look and don't miss that generic template one bit! Hope you like it too!

My first office - It may not look like very much just yet, but it's a start!

2010-04-06T10:00:00.009-04:00

Yesterday was my first official day working out of my new office in downtown Easton at the corner of 4th and Northampton Streets. It's located in a 100-year-old historic bank building with the original wood floors and trim in the room. It's one room, approximately 400 square feet, which I will be sharing with a graphic design colleague of mine.

While that doesn't sound like a lot of space for the two of us, it certainly feels big right now since it's mostly empty. Over the weekend I moved a filing cabinet, printer stand and small computer desk with folding chair into the office so that I'd have what I needed in order to work there today and be productive. It's not much just yet, but to me it promises big things to come! (My new L-shaped desk gets delivered on Wednesday.)

I took a few photos of the empty space as well as a few of my temporary work set up so that I have a point of reference one year from now when it comes time to renew the lease. Then I can look back and see how much we've grown and filled the empty void that is now our office with clients, conversation, laughter, success, ... oh, and furniture too!

Recap of last night's Women in Business panel discussion at Lafayette College

2010-03-30T07:55:00.000-04:00

Last night's Women in Business panel discussion at Lafayette College was great! About 50 young women (and 2 young men) showed up to hear me and two other panelists discuss or experiences in our professional lives. We covered the gamut from balancing work life with family life, to dressing and acting feminine at jobs in male-dominated industries.

The ladies attending were encouraged to ask us their questions after each of our responses to the topic question. They didn't hesitate obtaining our opinions on things like whether or not they have enough leverage to negotiate a higher salary or more benefits at their first professional job out of college.Or whether they should they get married and start their family earlier and establish their career later, or get their career established first and do the family thing later.

I also enjoyed hearing the comments of my fellow panelists. We were able to offer slightly different generational opinions because our ages ranged from 30s to 50s. It was very interesting to hear what the more senior panelist among us had experienced in the workforce as far as sexism and discrimination. I'm certainly glad that by the time I came along much of that had already changed.

This experience gave me a great opportunity to interact with tomorrow's female business leaders and hopefully encourage them while helping them to manage their expectations for the working world.

Thanks to my friend and Lafayette senior Alan Raisman for inviting me to be a part of it!

Tonight's speaking engagement on Women in the Workforce

2010-03-29T10:00:00.001-04:00

I've been asked to sit on a panel tonight at Lafayette College in Easton regarding Women in the Workplace. It's part of the wrap-up to their National Women's History Month series. I'm told that the other two panelists are a civil engineer who is a professor at the college and another professional woman, neither of which I know.

The questions I've been told to expect include:
1. What motivated and encouraged you to start your own business and hurdle adversity?
2. Was there any point in time where you felt torn between family life and your career? How did you balance the two aspects of your life?
3. What are the different challenges that you faced while "climbing up the ladder" in your field?
4. Were there any advantages to being a woman in your field?
5. Would you describe your field as a male dominated one? If so, how do you carry yourself in a way that expresses your femininity while reinforcing the fact that you are equal to the men in the professional world?

I've been specifically asked to speak on my experiences after being laid off from my job back in July of last year and the challenges I faced in starting Blabbermouth Communications. While I don't know that either of those situations has anything to do with me being female, I can certainly explain what I went through and how I attempted (and in many ways am still attempting) to persevere.

Not sure if the room will be packed or if I will be able to hear my voice echo when I speak, but either way, I'm up for it. It'll be a good public speaking experience for me, which is something I don't get to do a lot of. I'm hoping it will be relaxed and informal so that the dialogue can flow freely.

I also hope there are questions at the end, even if only two or three of them. I always find it awkward when at the end of a presentation they open it up to the audience for questions and no one has any. I always feel like either no one was paying attention or they found the topic uninteresting.

Wish me luck, and stop by if you want to see me in action!

Take a tour of The Crayola FACTORY on my new Lehigh Valley Visions video

2010-03-26T11:08:00.000-04:00

I'm pleased to announce that my newest Lehigh Valley Visions video is live on YouTube. It's a tour of The Crayola Factory in downtown Easton, Pa. Check it out.

This quarterly video series is done for my client Lehigh Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau. They are the non-profit tourism bureau for the region. Wonder where they will take me next...

An update on last week's dilemmas

2010-03-23T11:30:00.000-04:00

Last week I wrote two blog posts regarding business dilemmas I was having. I've made some progress with each of them so I thought it was time for a quick update.

The first one had to do with attending a rather costly two-day professional development conference in NYC. It is all about digital media and the latest trends, so I thought that attending the conference would be an investment in myself and my business. The goal was to not only stay up-to-date on what's happening in the world of social media marketing but also to come away with a new understanding that might help me serve my clients better and possibly even offer new services through Blabbermouth.

The other business dilemma had to do with the decision to rent an office space and stop working out of my home. I feel that having a real office would make my business seem more legitimate to clients and that I could cut costs by sharing the rented office space with a fellow freelance colleague. While I've enjoyed working from home these past six months, there are days when I think I could have benefited from the structure and formality of going to an office to work every day. Not to mention that when our two resident teenagers return home from school, the house gets a little noisy and I'm someone who likes a quiet work environment.

So here's the update: I'm thinking of bagging the two-day NYC conference due primarily to the cost in favor of saving that money and investing it in renting a new office space. My freelance graphic design colleague Cliff and I visited an historic office building in downtown Easton yesterday and saw several office spaces for rent. It's in a great location and we both like the idea of being downtown. We'd be fools if we didn't think that there would be start-up costs such as getting office furniture, signing up with an Internet provider and things like that. I think I'll see more return on my investment by having my own office for the next year than what I would get out of a two-day conference.

So now it's time to apply to rent the office space we've selected. Wish me (us) luck!

Decisons, decisions - Part 2

2010-03-19T09:26:00.000-04:00

The next decision I am pondering has to do with whether or not to get an office. Currently I work out of my home, which I have come to enjoy. I have a wall of my own in the living room but I don't have walls and a door to close out the rest of the world when it gets a little noisy at home.

When the kids are with us, their music, video games and TV watching interferes with my work as I prefer a quiet work environment with as few distractions as possible. However I like being home and knowing that I can throw a load of laundry in the washer while I work and get more done that way. I also like having the flexibility of hopping on the computer to get work done at any time of the day that I happen to be home, including weekends.

Yet I like the idea of having an office of my own as I think it will help both me and potential clients feel that Blabbermouth Communications is a legitimate business with a future. I think the structure of going to an office every day to do my work would also help me since I am a creature of habit and have done the office thing all my life. That said, going to an office every day would help to give my days more structure.

I also like the idea of working in downtown Easton since I already support the city with my energy and time through volunteer work and try to patronize its downtown businesses as much as possible.

An Easton-based friend of mine recently told me about office space she rents downtown that is quite affordable and it got me thinking. Granted, money paid toward monthly rent, utilities, insurance and parking would detract from my profit, but some of it would also be able to be written off from an income standpoint for my taxes.

So, assuming I could find a small office space that meets my requirements and budget, do you think this is something I should attempt at this time? Or should I give Blabbermouth more time to get established, perhaps after its one year anniversary in October 2010, before venturing into the office situation?

Any advice from those who have owned or currently own their own business on making this jump from working from home to renting an office space from someone else?

Decisions, decisions - Part 1

2010-03-18T10:00:00.012-04:00

The first decision I am pondering for my new business is whether or not to attend a two-day educational conference on digital media, social media and the Web in NYC.

As a member of the Public Relations Society of America I receive numerous e-mails from them inviting me to all types of seminars that interest me, most of which I can't afford to attend due in part to the distant locations and related travel costs.

But the one I received an e-mail about earlier this week for their Digital Impact Conference in NYC on May 6 & 7 interested me right away, not only because it is near to home but also because of the topic. This conference will deal entirely with the world of social media and the Internet and should provide me with ample advice on using them effectively for marketing and public relations purposes.

Since social media is a marketing service that I want to do more of for my Blabbermouth Communications clients, I see this as an opportunity to expand my knowledge base and thereby have what I learn at the conference benefit myself and my clients.

I've done the math to calculate what two nights in a hotel would cost, plus dinners (lunches and breakfasts are included in the conference package costs), tolls and parking (since I would prefer to drive myself into NYC than take the bus, though that part is negotiable), and miscellaneous costs. I'm arriving at around $1,500-1,800 for the two days, which certainly isn't chump change.

So right now I am trying to justify the cost versus the potential value of attending this conference. Part of me thinks it's too much money for me to spend right now while my business is still in its infancy. But the other part of me thinks it's an investment in myself and my business in order to keep abreast of trends in this ever-changing field.

What do you think? Should I attend the conference despite the cost or should I wait and attend next year's conference?

Questioning the value of awards

2010-03-09T13:53:00.000-05:00

Like most people I watched the Academy Awards on Sunday night. As I watched the winners give their speeches I thought about what a win at this level would do for their careers. I know that I tend to give more credence to an actor once I hear that they have received a major award such as an Oscar. I'm sure the movie offers roll in the very next day and that they can command a nice salary increase as a result.

That started me thinking about awards for marketing and PR agencies and their creative concepts and designs for clients. As a member of the Public Relations Society of America, I receive e-mails all the time encouraging me to submit an entry for the Silver Anvil Awards or some such thing. And as a member of the Greater Lehigh Valley Ad Club, I recently attended their Annual ADDY Awards and watched winners walk off with prizes in a wide range of categories, including two for Best in Show.

While most agencies pride themselves on winning such kudos, I have to wonder if they really have an impact on clients, mainly potential new clients the agency is trying to woo. Are clients impressed by the awards enough to have it factor into their decision making when deciding which agency to hire? Does it matter more for big New York City or Philly agencies and not so much for smaller Lehigh Valley-based agencies?

Or are the awards more about validation for the agency as tangible proof they are producing award-winning work, and less about impressing clients? Perhaps it's just about bragging rights or friendly competition between opposing agencies. And how long can an agency tout its most recent awards for? What is the cutoff?

Having previously worked for two Lehigh Valley agencies who didn't submit entries for such awards, I don't have a point of reference on this and am very curious to hear what others think. Tell me your opinions. How much do industry awards really matter when it comes to getting new clients?

Taking advantage of media contacts via Facebook

2010-03-04T10:00:00.000-05:00

I am connected to a few media colleagues through my Facebook account. While these were meant to be personal connections with people I have gotten to know, I am wondering what the new rules are when it comes to using a social media outlet like Facebook to contact these individuals with a formal PR pitch or press release on behalf of a client.

It occurred to me the other day as I was preparing to distribute a press release for a local client that I could actually use Facebook's direct message feature to send the release to them that way. After all, PR people have been searching for years for ways to cut through the clutter when it comes to getting their press release in front of a journalist.

In the old days we snail mailed printed copies of releases and hoped that when the envelope arrived on the media person's desk that they took the time to open it and at least read the headline. Today we send them out via e-mail and hope that the message makes it through the spam filers and into their inbox where it will hopefully be read without being deleted. So to my mind, having the ability to send a press release directly to a Facebook contact via the social media site is even more direct than e-mailing it to them and has a better chance of the recipient receiving it AND looking at it.

Still, I have to wonder about the appropriateness of doing so. Part of me feels like this might violate some unwritten rule of correct Facebook behavior for PR people. I've tried to put myself in the journalist's shoes and thought about how I might feel to get a press release or pitch from a colleague of mine via our connection on Facebook. I have to say that I don't think I would like it, but I guess it all depends on how you view social media and your use of it. I use it for both personal and work purposes which kind of blurs the lines.

So what do my fellow PR people think? Should I stick with e-mailing releases and pitches to my media contacts even if I am connected to them on Facebook? Or do desperation times call for desperate measures and I need to do whatever I have to do to get my press release in front of them? Would a journalist unfriend a PR person on Facebook for doing this?

I'd be interested in hearing from PR people and folks in the media too.

Experimenting with promotion via Facebook ads

2010-03-03T10:00:00.000-05:00

I recently began experimenting with advertising on Facebook and think I am finally starting to get the hang of it. It all started about a month ago when I realized I had a Facebook ads credit from when I registered the domain for my web site with GoDaddy.com. I had $50 in free ads just begging to be used before an early-March expiration date. So I started with a short campaign to promote Blabbermouth.

The ads are easy to create - you upload a logo or image, a short headline and slightly longer copy for the body of the ad. The system gives you character counts so that everyone's ads stay the same size and format. You can choose from various types of criteria to help narrow down who sees your ad, such as state and city you wish to target, men and women, college educated, and fan pages they either are or aren't connected to. You then determine how much you want to bid either per-click on the link in your ad or per 1,000 impressions (views on Facebook users' profile pages).

Since the Blabbermouth ad campaign didn't exhaust my advertising credit, I ran a few ad campaigns for the non-profit Easton Main Street Initiative, with whom I volunteer, to promote their What's Up in Downtown Easton blog and their free bi-weekly e-newsletter. For all campaigns I've chosen to set my bid for impressions versus paying per click which is the most common, albeit more expensive, approach. Overall I've been pleased with the amount of impressions my ads are getting for the relatively little cost of running them.

While I've had several people tell me that they don't pay attention to the ads that appear on the right-hand side of the screen while in their Facebook account, I have to say that I have found myself glancing at them on more than one occasion. While I don't click on all of them, I have clicked on a few for more information, to become a fan of a page that interests me, or to register my opinion in a poll.

Have you used Facebook ads for a client or to promote your business? What were your results? Would you do it again? Any advice for me?

Do the rules of spelling and grammar apply in social media?

2010-02-26T10:00:00.002-05:00

While I don't consider myself to be a grammarian by any stretch of the imagination, I do try to play by the rules. When I write a press release, I do my best to stick to the AP Stylebook's rules as it is a PR person's gold standard. And in my regular day-to-day correspondence, I try to make sure I capitalize proper nouns, use correct punctuation, and properly conjugate my verbs.

However when it comes to social media, I've seen that much of what we were taught way back in grade school goes by the wayside. It appears that most people typing a Tweet or Facebook status update do not take the additional time needed to reread what they have written and therefore their posts are chock full of typos of all varieties.

And while this casual approach to social media is one of its hallmarks, when it comes to those of us who use these tools for our businesses and/or clients, I think higher standards need to be enforced. Still, part of me understands the need to speak the lingo of the social media outlet. After all, if you're gonna walk the walk, you gotta talk the talk, right? Otherwise you just come across as another boring marketer who doesn't "get" the medium.

For instance on Twitter, where character limits prevail, it's common to use slang, abbreviations or numbers instead of words (2 for "to"; 4 for "for") in order to save space. And while I'll admit to having done that a few times in a pinch, I loathe doing it. I'd prefer to use the correct word and spell it out.

So I often feel like I walk a fine line between doing it the correct way versus doing it the widely accepted way of the given social media outlet. If I want my status updates and tweets to connect with fans and followers, should I write in the tone and format that they use (casual), or should I endeavor to uphold correct grammar and punctuation at all costs (formal)? Or is there a way to marry the two?

What do you think?

Snow days and the small business owner

2010-02-25T09:22:00.000-05:00

Today's pending snow storm is the third one this month to shut down businesses across the Lehigh Valley. And while Blabbermouth is a home-based business without a storefront or formal office space, it got me thinking about small business owners who rely on a regular schedule of hours and customers to achieve their financial goals each day.

I can't help but feel badly for those with overhead and employees that need to meet certain quotas in order to cover their expenses each day. And while some of them may open for business for at least part of today, they are no doubt going to lose the afternoon and evening, and possibly some if not all of tomorrow too. That, combined with the Saturday snowfall and the Wednesday blizzard earlier this month must add up to at least 4-5 days of complete or partial office/business closures.

I'm lucky in the sense that what I do for a living doesn't rely on me going into an office or opening a store in order to be productive and meet my goals for the day. Days like this are actually more productive for me as my client meetings usually get canceled allowing me to stay in my home office and get more work done.

For those of you with offices and/or businesses, how are you surviving the month of February financially? If you are in retail, will you do something special in March, such as a promotion or sale, in an attempt to recoup lost profit? Or if what you lost is productivity, will you just work longer days and weekends (as if you weren't doing that already as a small business owner!)? Or do you have a reserve that you tap into when you run into bad months like this in order to meet your expenses? Tell me. I'm curious to know.

Forming a bond between PR practitioner and newspaper editor

2010-02-23T10:00:00.009-05:00

I recently received a shout-out from a media colleague in a blog post he wrote regarding one of the wineries on the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail. As you may remember, the Wine Trail is my newest client and as word of that slowly gets out, it's giving me the opportunity to reconnect with some travel media that I used to work with during my four years at the Lehigh Valley's tourism bureau.

During my time there I promoted the wine trail as a tourist attraction but also promoted the region as a whole as a tourist destination. Each year when the Eagles came to Lehigh University for their summer training camp, I would work with a sports editor at the Philadelphia Daily News named Paul Vigna to develop an article on what else folks from the Philly area could do besides training camp during their trip to the Lehigh Valley. I would write something which Paul would edit and then run in the special Eagles Training Camp section of the paper in late-July.

As it turned out, Paul was also a wine aficionado and had been writing a blog called The Wine Classroom which focused on wineries in south-central Pennsylvania and northern Maryland. So in addition to our once a year conversations about Eagles Training Camp in the Lehigh Valley, we'd also discuss the Wine Trail and its nine family-owned wineries.

When Paul decided to take a job with The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, I assumed our relationship would end there which disappointed me. We'd gotten to know each other beyond the level of editor and PR hack, which is something that PR people value and never want to loose.

So when Paul heard through the proverbial grapevine that I had started my own PR and marketing consulting business and had secured the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail as a client, he was ecstatic that we would be working together once again. His enthusiasm showed in his blog post which made me smile from ear to ear. It also made me feel good that I had made a connection with a member of the media and developed a relationship that had transcended our respective career changes.

As a PR person, it's always nice when you get to connect with a media person who is friendly, easy to work with, and supportive. So I'm just as excited to be working with Paul again as he is to be working with me!

Is social media the new, cool way for brands to connect?

2010-02-18T10:00:00.005-05:00

During the Super Bowl two weeks ago and during this week's Olympics I've noticed an increase in the number of TV advertisers who are using the favicons for Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in the closing screen of their commercial.

Usually the favicon images are prefaced with the phrase "Connect with us" or something along those lines. Sometimes the favicons just appear in the bottom left or right hand corner of the screen which suggests that those viewers who use social media know what they mean.

I think one of the ads I saw was for Sears but I'm not 100% sure. One brand's commercial actually ended with the address of its Facebook fan page and not its own URL.

It's interesting to me that the major brands are getting on board with social media to the point of mentioning their involvement in it in their advertising. Is this already becoming the new norm? Since social media allows a brand or company to connect directly with their fans/followers (i.e their desired target audience) it makes sense to me that they should play it up.

Pepsi recently received a ton of publicity about their choice not to do a costly Super Bowl ad this year as they had in years past and instead invest it in their new Pepsi Refresh social media campaign. Many have speculated on whether or not this was a wise move. I guess only time will tell.

Have you see any of these TV commercials I'm referring to? Do you remember which brands they were for? Or are you seeing more social media references in print ads? That's one I am not seeing yet but maybe I'm just not looking at enough national magazines and newspapers.

Should I get a video camera for the business? Which one?

2010-02-17T10:00:00.007-05:00

Today I need some techie advice on an electronics gadget purchase I am considering making for the business. I already own a digital camera but don't have a video camera. With the rise in popularity and affordability of these new point and shoot video cameras, I thought I could afford to get one for about $200.

My goal is to have a lightweight, portable and easy-to-use video camera to keep with me when I attend client events where I might want to shoot footage of the event for use on their social media sites or web site. So the videos don't have to be of the highest quality or sound, but they should be decent enough. I expect to use the camera personally too.

I was originally looking into the latest model of Flip camera which shoots in HD. But I'm wondering if it's worth the extra money to get an HD one when regular definition works just fine for online video. One of my Twitter colleagues recommended not going with a Flip because they don't offer the ability to install memory cards to increase the amount of memory and thereby video footage it can hold. I was also told that they don't offer an external mic jack which is something I might want or need in the future for better sound quality.

I've been redirected to the Kodak zi8 which is comparable to if not better than the Flip in many ways. It too offers an HD model along with the ability to insert memory cards for more storage, and has an external mic jack. Cost is comparable too, with the Kodak model being slightly more expensive, not to mention the additional cost of a memory card.

And I would have bought a Kodak zi8 by now if I could have found one locally that was discounted and in stock. It seems that even Amazon.com is sold out of them and they offer the best price around. I could buy one directly from Kodak but then I'm stuck paying full price.

Does anyone own one of these cameras and can offer me their advice? What do you like or don't you like about it that I should know about and consider in advance? Is HD quality worth the additional cost in your opinion? Which video camera is the best fit for what I need and how I plan to use it?

Definition of "small business" = game of semantics

2010-02-16T10:00:00.002-05:00

The creation of Blabbermouth Communications last fall was an exciting time for me. I was anxious to tell everyone I knew that I had started my own business. Not only had I named my new creation, but I'd developed a web site, started a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page for it, as well as this blog. I even paid a professional designer to develop a custom logo for me and opened a business checking account with my credit union.

So I guess I was a little surprised to find out that in the eyes of some professional business people, what I had created didn't really constitute a "business." Why, you ask? Because a real business has an office or storefront space and employs a staff. Apparently all I had created was a brand for my self-employment.

I then came to find out that as far as the Federal Government and the Small Business Administration were concerned, the critics were correct. I really do need to employ people to be a "business." For instance, the grant money being thrown around by the government to help small businesses in an effort to stimulate the economy require the employment of staff and/or the generation of new jobs. And while Blabbermouth might be employing me as its owner, it technically isn't generating any jobs. It will, however, pay its share of taxes.

Regardless, I still see this as a business even if it isn't in everyone's eyes. So my question for you is: when someone decides to become self employed and develops a name and image to package the business they plan to do, do you consider it to be a "real" business? What do you think?

The Lehigh Valley Wine Trail is Blabbermouth's newest client!

2010-02-11T11:18:00.006-05:00

I am pleased to announce my newest client for Blabbermouth Communications, the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail. I will be assisting the Wine Trail with is marketing and public relations efforts, including getting it more involved with social media marketing.

The Wine Trail already has a Facebook fan page, and today I have started a Twitter account for them and a LinkedIn Group. Please join/follow us if you are involved in these social media outlets. I expect to start a blog for them before the week is out and will share a link to it as soon as it's up and running.

During the last four years that I worked as Director of PR for the Lehigh Valley's tourism bureau, I enjoyed promoting the Wine Trail as a tourist attraction. So having the opportunity to work with them again is something I am very much looking forward to.

Learning to balance

2010-02-08T09:05:00.008-05:00

Things are finally starting to take off for my little one-woman business. I've secured some project-based clients and have recently secured my first monthly retainer-based client. I'm starting to get busy and am delighted by it.

So for the first time since starting Blabbermouth Communications in October of last year, I'm running into a problem of balancing my time. As I see it, I have three places in which I need to focus my energy and time:

Servicing and maintaining my existing clients
Finding new clients
Promoting my business

I'm trying to decide how much time to award to each of those three each week. I think it's obvious that servicing the clients needs to come first. After all, they are the ones paying me, and without them, I don't have a business.

But when it comes to the other two - finding new clients and promoting my business - I'm in a bit of a conundrum as I see the two as being linked in many ways. I certainly can take the time to meet with potential new clients and follow up on leads given to me, but I still need to actively promote my business since I don't know where my next new client lead is going to come from.

Right now, promoting my business means maintaining my Twitter account and this blog with regular postings, as well as my Facebook fan page. It also means attending networking events in the Lehigh Valley which can become time consuming if I go to enough of them. So perhaps my question really is about those second two bullets.

Out of 100%, if I spend 50% of my time maintaining existing clients, how should I divide up the remaining 50% between finding new clients and promoting the business? Or should I be allotting more than 50% to maintaining existing clients. What do you think? And what advice can you offer?

To follow up, or not to follow up? That is the question.

2010-02-03T08:27:00.007-05:00

In my early PR agency days, it was common practice to send out a press release (by snail mail back then!) to a long list of media that we thought might be interested in it. Our hopes were that they would either want to write an article about it, possibly attend it or visit it, or at lease write a short blurb and run it along with a photo.

And since these writers, editors and reporters received so many press releases every day from PR folks like me, it was common practice to call them to follow up and make sure they received the release. The real goal of the follow-up phone call was to develop a relationship with them over time but I am not so sure the journalist on the other end of the phone felt that way.

Often those follow-up phone calls were seen as annoying and they were usually dodged. Most journalists would never answer a live call and would instead only screen voice mail messages. As a PR person, it was never our goal to annoy them but rather to connect with them on behalf of our clients in the hopes of ensuring editorial coverage.

In today's modern age of e-mail press release distribution and making connections through social media, I think that the follow-up phone call has gone by the wayside. No longer is it common practice to call every media member on a press release distribution list to see if they received your release and were planning to use the information contained in it in some way. Still, some clients expect the follow-up phone call to take place. But since this is an outdated practice, I am disinclined to do it.

If you are someone who practices PR or media relations, do you still do follow-up phone calls on all of the press releases you distribute for clients? If so, do you call everyone on the distribution list or just a select few with whom you have relationships? Or do you trust that the journalist received your release and that they will use their best judgment as whether or not to use it?

What do you think today's best PR practices are when it comes to follow-up phone calls? Share your thoughts with me.

How to handle Twitter spam followers

2010-02-01T10:35:00.007-05:00

One of the first things I did last fall when I decided to start my own marketing and PR consulting business was to set up accounts for Blabbermouth Communications with all of the key social media sites. Since social media marketing was a service the business was going to be offering, I had to practice what I preach, right?

I very quickly set up a Facebook fan page, created a LinkedIn company profile and established a Twitter account. I use a free desktop software program called TweetDeck to manage the five Twitter accounts I am currently maintaining for work and personal. I am able to monitor new followers without having to log into the Twitter web site to see who is now following me. But it's getting harder to tell which followers are legitimate and which ones aren't.

Since there are a ton of spam Twitterers out there, I've started to automatically block any new followers that don't have an avatar image or a written profile description. But the spammers are smart and have started using avatar images and short descriptions that sound semi-legit. So I'm having trouble knowing who to block.

Obviously if a follower is using profanity or sexually explicit pictures in their profile, I automatically block them. But as for the others that are questionable, if they really are spam, is there any real harm in letting them continue to follow me?

I've read articles about the importance of scrubbing your followers list for spam and removing anyone that is even remotely questionable. And while I wouldn't want a client to check out my list of followers and find something objectionable among them, I still have to wonder what the detriment is of letting the questionable ones continue to follow me. So long as they don't send me spammy Tweets, why should I block them? Is it hurting my credibility somehow, somewhere?

Can someone tell me what my best practices should be when it comes to my business's Twitter followers list? I'd like your advice.

Referring colleagues and friends

2010-01-28T10:00:00.002-05:00

Earlier this week I wrote about accepting referrals from colleagues who bring potential clients your way. I was wondering whether I was obligated to at least reach out to and/or meet with these referrals so as not to upset the colleague who referred me to them. Several folks felt that it's always worth looking into these referrals even if only for a preliminary meeting or conversation as you never know where it might lead or who they might know.

Well, today's post is still about referrals but in a slightly different way. This time I want to know your thoughts about how to handle referrals when it comes to colleagues.

As a freelancer, I work with all kinds of fellow freelancers - web design, graphic design, copy writers, etc. Several have already approached me about working collaboratively on client projects that I get, should I get them. And while I'd like to recommend as many of them as I can within reason, there are some that I like better as friends than I do as professionals. And there are others I've only just met and haven't worked with yet so I have no idea as to their talents or professionalism.

I feel conflicted about recommending colleagues that I don't know very well or don't think too highly of since I think a referral reflects back on me.

So how do you handle referring the people you know to your clients? Are you very selective even if that means not recommending some of your closest friends? Or do you try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and figure that there's an appropriate freelancer for every job/client?

Feeling obligated about referrals

2010-01-25T09:49:00.007-05:00

I've spent the last four months trying to grow Blabbermouth Communications by making contacts and finding clients on my own. But the largest lead-generator so far has come from referrals given to me by colleagues.

It flatters me that so many people I've worked with in the Lehigh Valley over the last decade-plus think highly enough of me and my marketing talents to recommend me to their own friends and colleagues. I think many of them want to support me and my start-up, which I greatly appreciate.

But when a referral comes my way that sounds like either a bogus operation or a waste of time, am I still obligated to look into it and/or meet with them? You might think that as a small business owner whose new venture is not yet self-sufficient, let alone profitable, that it is always worth my time to meet with a potential lead. Because, after all, you never know where it could go, right? But since I am a one-woman-show, I am also trying to use my time wisely when it comes to balancing doing work for existing clients, finding new clients, and promoting the business itself.

After a decade doing agency work and meeting with clients of all shapes, sizes and industries, I feel that I have developed a pretty good sense of which ones will bear fruit and which ones won't after just one phone call. However I don't wish to offend any of my colleagues who were kind enough to send a referral my way by not taking the time to meet with them.

What do you think? Am I obligated to meet with each referral that I am given? Or is there a graceful way to say thank you for the client lead but that I'm not interested?

It's all a matter of style

2010-01-18T11:42:00.007-05:00

Today's blog post features questions about copy style, specifically when it comes to web-related words.

I was taught in my journalism classes in college to rely on the AP Stylebook for all things copy-related. And while I do try to follow it to the T in my press releases and other types of copy writing, I can't help but think they got some of it wrong.

For instance, AP Styleguide rules state that the word "web" (as in the world wide web) technically should be capitalized. That just seems strange to me and looks funny - Today I spent two hours surfing the Web...

Also, the word "internet" gets capitalized too. Again, I think it looks weird - How many hours do you spend each day on the Internet?

I guess when these technologies came into prominence in the 90's they needed to be treated as proper names and hence capitalized. But does anyone agree with me that they no longer need to be capitalized? Do any of my fellow copywriters who use these words capitalize them?

And when it comes to web addresses, it used to be the correct style to type it in all lowercase letters even though most if not all web browsers are not case sensitive when it comes to how the addresses are input. But about two years ago, I noticed a trend where major companies were using a combination of upper and lower case letters in their URLs. I was told it was because by capitalizing the first letter of each word in the URL (called initial caps in copywriting speak), it made it faster and easier for the eye to read and comprehend.

Since most companies use their company or brand name as their URL, depending on the length of that name understanding the URL name can be very easy (cnn.com) or very complicated if it's a longer name with many words in it. Adding abbreviations to the name only makes it more difficult to read, hence a reason to employ the upper caps approach.

However a team of graphic designer friends of mine recently told me not to mess with a URL; to leave it all lower case and not do the initial uppers. As if this were a matter of design and not readability.

What do you think? Do you find web addresses with initial uppers easier to read (www.BlabbermouthCommunications.com) or do you think we should stick with all lower case letters as has been done up until now?

What is Twitter etiquette when it comes to business?

2010-01-15T13:33:00.011-05:00

When I first got involved in Twitter two years ago, I was told that there were certain "rules" that basically equated to being good manners. Some of them included:

never type in all upper case as it considered to be shouting, just like in an e-mail.
you should follow all of the people that follow you whether you are interested in them or their tweets or not.
try to always include a link to a web site, photo or other online resource in your tweets.
use a smiley face icon or LOL to let someone know you are joking around with them in case your tweet could be seen as mean or offensive.

While Twitter has certainly evolved over the last several years, now that I am using it for my business (@blabbermouthcom) and for business clients too, I am wondering if these rules still apply.

The one "rule" that has always boggled me the most is the follow-back rule. I don't believe in following back everyone who follows you, especially with the large amount of Twitter spam out there. It's getting difficult to determine which followers are legitimate or not as the spammers get more savvy.

First of all, is there any one out there that actually does follow back everyone who follows them? Let's assume that no one does that any more. So then how do you decide who to follow back? I don't have time to analyze each and every follower's Twitter account before considering following them back.

I've started automatically blocking those followers without a real (or pornographic) avatar image, as well as those without a bio/synopsis for their account. I figure if they can't take the time to post either or both of those items, then they don't really know what Twitter is about and how to tweet correctly.

So how do you decide who to follow on Twitter and who to block or just not follow back? And what rules of etiquette do you follow?

Does volunteer work hold sway with potential clients?

2010-01-13T10:00:00.009-05:00

In order to get some clients for my new business, I originally started doing some pro-bono social media marketing for two non-profit organizations I support: the Greater Lehigh Valley Ad Club and the Easton Main Street Initiative.

A few years ago I served on the Ad Club's board as its PR chair but left the group about two years ago. I rejoined when I started Blabbermouth Communications in October of last year because I knew of the great contacts I could make in the region's marketing, advertising and PR community. I wanted to get involved with the Board again but there were no positions available that I was interested in. So I settled for taking over their social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn when the person who had been doing them moved away.

As for Easton Main Street, I've been a volunteer on its marketing committee for the past three years and have chaired it for the last two. So it seemed like a natural fit for me to also take over their social media marketing initiatives which were being done by several different volunteers. I explained that by bringing their Facebook and Twitter accounts together, and by adding a LinkedIn group, I could better control their marketing messages and more proactively handle the updating of the accounts. I also started a blog for them entitled "What's Up in Downtown Easton" to which I post almost every day.

While I am happy to help out these two important organizations, and do so for my own personal reasons, I am wondering how much weight this kind of volunteer work carries with a potential client. When a client sees that I am helping out in my community, does it win me support, or doesn't it matter?

My decision to do the pro-bono social media marketing was two-fold: I wanted to help these organizations with their marketing, and I wanted to be able to show potential clients examples of my work. But do clients see pro-bono work such as this the same way as the work I do for paid clients/accounts? Is there a difference between paid and volunteer work in their minds the way I am thinking there is in my own mind?

What do you think?

Is it ok to use Facebook to follow up with a business contact?

2010-01-11T08:08:00.000-05:00

I have a business etiquette question today and I'm too intimidated by Miss Manners to send her a letter, so I thought I'd ask all of you.

I met with a potential client before the holidays about a project they were consider starting in the new year. Despite my contact being out of the office during the week between Christmas and New Year's, I reached out via e-mail several times to stay in touch. I sent a Christmas card and an e-mail wishing a happy new year, all the time continuing to express my interest in working together.

Now that it IS the new year, I attempted to follow up again via e-mail but am getting no response. I know a phone call is next and always dread making those calls. I know there is always a chance that they have changed their mind about working with me, chose another agency, or have put the project on hold; all things I really don't want to hear.

Then it occurred to me over the weekend that I am connected with this contact on Facebook since we know many of the same people in the region. I debated if it was appropriate to contact this person about business matters using Facebook since I see that as being a kind of invasion of personal space. If it were LinkedIn, I wouldn't hesitate since that social media site is business-oriented. I'm just afraid of breaking some unwritten rule of manners and ruining the relationship.

I'm conflicted on this because Facebook certainly has a business/commercial side to it and I would think that some of us expect to be contacted in that manner. However, I connected with this person for personal reasons and now feel it might be inappropriate to contact them about business matters using it.

So, what do you think? Is it ever ok to reach out to a business contact via Facebook? Or should Facebook be used for personal contact only and not business? Remember we're talking specifically about the client/agency relationship here.

What's your advice?

Did YouTube fall off the radar in social media?

2010-01-07T09:15:00.008-05:00

I recently completed a social media marketing competitive research analysis for a client in the Easton area. This tourist attraction wanted to know how others like it across the country are using social media to promote themselves.

I was given a list of five similar attractions across the country to research, and started by going to their respective web sites to see how prominently their social media involvement was displayed on the homepage, if at all.

While all of the attractions had Facebook fan pages, not all of them promoted it on their web sites' home pages as has become the new norm for business-oriented web sites. Most used the blue Facebook favicon and linked it directly to their fan page. Others just used plain hyperlinked text to mention that they were on Facebook.

Using the favicon has become the preferred method since Facebook has built up significant brand recognition over the last few years, meaning that everyone recognizes the square blue "F" symbol as being theirs. Same as the light blue Twitter "t" and the red and blue Flickr dots.

What surprised me most in my research was that each attraction had a YouTube channel of its own, but only one of them promoted it on their web site. Since video is so important in "telling the story" of a tourist attraction, it boggles my mind why they would list their involvement in Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other sites, but completely forget to include their YouTube channel.

I've turned this over in my brain but still can't figure out why and how otherwise social media savvy tourist attractions could leave out YouTube when mentioning their social media involvement.

Anyone have any ideas why they might do this? Is it just an oversight, or is it deliberate in some strange way? Or do they just not consider YouTube to be social media? What do you think?

A new year's resolution - stop procrastinating!

2010-01-05T11:21:00.007-05:00

Since this is my first blog post of the new year, perhaps it should be about making a resolution not to procrastinate.

For more than a month I have known about two project deadlines that would be coming due this week. The first one is a social media marketing research report for a downtown Easton attraction that wants to know what its competitors are doing with social media so they can gauge their own activities against it. The second one is a marketing plan for a small Southside Bethlehem start-up business that has a web-based product/service. One project is due tomorrow and the other is due on Friday.

And while I have had ample time to work on these two projects, for some reason I chose to put other things first and am now rushing to get them done this week. And I know better than to do that! I guess we all procrastinate now and then when it comes to work or our businesses. For some people, procrastination is a way of life.

I used to do it with term papers/reports/presentations in college. I'd wait until the last minute to do the research and write the thing, but would still manage to turn it in on time and get a pretty decent grade. So I guess that only reinforces the behavior, doesn't it? I just never thought I'd still be procrastinating as a grown adult, especially when it comes to my own business. And please know that I don't procrastinate on ALL work-related things, just projects and the like.

Do you procrastinate when it comes to work? If so, how do you deal with it? If not, how do you manage yourself and your time so that it doesn't happen?

Happy New Year Everyone!

2009-12-31T10:22:00.004-05:00

Just wanted to wish all of my friend, followers, clients and colleagues a Happy 2010.

The past year has been a year of change for me which I hope will result in personal growth and development. Becoming unemployed for the first time in my career has been a challenge that I continue to deal with as I start my own business.

I'm excited about the promise that the new year holds for both me and my business. I have something to look forward to and it's given me the drive I was lacking before in my career.

So here's hoping that 2010 is a better year for all of us personally, financially and in business than 2009 was. May it live up to all of the hope and dreams that all of us are investing in it for success and happiness.

Happy New Year!

The future of Facebook for marketing and marketers

2009-12-30T10:00:00.008-05:00

I read an interesting wire service article the other day on what 2009 has meant for Facebook. It explained that the social media web site really exploded this year, making it a valid Internet player along with the likes of Google and Yahoo. It's growth with users for both personal and business purposes has made it a "heavyweight."

The part of the article that interested me most had to do with the speculation that Facebook may be setting itself up for an Initial Public Offering in 2010. Considering how popular all things related to social media are these days, I wonder how much Facebook might get for each share. I'm no stock market whiz, but I would imagine that the cost could be through the roof, at least initially.

From a marketing standpoint, it made me contemplate the future of Facebook, and Twitter for that matter, as the tools that we social media marketers are using (and, quite frankly relying on) for our work. We've adopted this new form of media and are now maximizing it for marketing and advertising purposes.

Our use of social media has caused some experts to speculate that their life spans are now limited because advertising has exploited them. It appears that the folks who were Facebook and Twitter's first users, did so in part because they loved their underground/off-the-radar aspect. The rest of us didn't know about them at the time and that made them more "organic" or even "genuine" in some ways.

Now that they've gone commercial, these same pilgrims will no doubt abandon them in time (if they haven't already done so) and find new ways to communicate with each other. Apparently it's a cycle of sorts.

So does that mean Facebook and Twitter already have a "Best if Used By" date stamped on them? And if they do fall out of favor in time, will social media marketing be over for us marketers? Or will we just adapt and gravitate toward whatever new trend has been invented since? And should we expect that the social media explosion happening now is going to be followed by a fallout similar to the dot-com bust of a decade ago?

What do you think is the future of social media as a marketing tool? Would you buy shares of Facebook in an IPO? How much would you be willing to pay per share?

Join me for my first speaking engagement

2009-12-28T10:00:00.002-05:00

I've been invited by my friends and colleagues at the Greater Lehigh Valley Ad Club to be a speaker at their next event.

Aimed at small business owners who need help with their marketing, the half-day workshop on Friday, January 29 will help business people who can't afford to hire an agency or even a marketing staff member of their own with evaluating their current marketing message. Topics will include web site and search engine marketing, creativity in advertising, public relations, video messaging, and social media marketing.

I'll be part of a panel discussion along with four other Ad Club members, and will also teach the break-out session on social media marketing. This is a great opportunity for me to promote myself and Blabbermouth Communications, and I'm really looking forward to it.

The half-day seminar is being held in conjunction with the Greater Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce's Small Business Council at Northampton Community College's southside Bethlehem campus, the Fowler Family Southside Center. Members of the Ad Club and Chamber attend for $49 per person while non-members pay $79. The cost includes breakfast and lunch.

If you are a small business owner who could use help with your marketing, or if you're just interested in attending to hear what my colleagues and I have to say about today's marketing tactics, I hope you will join us.

To register, please visit the Ad Club's web site here: https://www.glvadclub.org/afp/aevent/.

Merry Christmas to all!

2009-12-23T09:01:00.009-05:00

Since the preparations for our respective Christmas celebrations will soon consume us, I wanted to take the opportunity now to wish each of my friends, colleagues and clients a very Merry Christmas.

Your support of me and Blabbermouth Communications since it's start back in October of this year has meant a lot to me. I am thankful for everyone who takes the time to read my blog posts, especially those who take the time to post a comment. The advice, feedback and thoughts you have shared with me are not only helpful but very much appreciated.

Thank you also for following me on Twitter and becoming a fan of my page on Facebook as I continue to get the word out about my new business and the services I am offering. It's been great getting to know some of you through social media, and to stay in touch with those of you I already know very well.

I hope each of you gets the special Christmas present you wished for this year and that your celebrations with family and friends is a safe, happy and healthy one.

Cheers!

My Christmas Wish

2009-12-22T10:00:00.010-05:00

Ok, so the title of this post sounds corny, but bear with me.

It's been one heck of a year for me. The year started out fine but changed half way through when I was laid off from my job of 4 years in July. After a few months of job searching and interviewing, I decided to start my own business in October, Blabbermouth Communications, which so far has been well received and supported by friends, colleagues and clients.

I've learned quite a bit about myself in these last few months, the most surprising of which is that I feel as if I now have a dream.

I graduated from Mansfield University in 1995 with a B.S. in Mass Communications and went to work for the next decade in the PR and ad agency world. During that time I was often asked by colleagues where I saw myself in the next 10 years. Did I want to own and run my own agency some day, or perhaps move to a big city and work at a big agency with Fortune 1000 companies for clients?

I guess these seemed like logical questions to the people asking them since I'd started out so strong in the agency world. But I always told them no, I didn't have any interest in moving to a major metro area or in running my own agency. I guess I hadn't really thought that far out. The sad truth was that I had no real dreams or aspirations when it came to my professional life. I was just happy being gainfully employed doing something I liked.

Well... nothing like a layoff after nearly 15 years of working professionally to kick you in the pants.

Now, after starting my own business, I finally have a dream of my own. And that dream is to make my business succeed.

To establish Blabbermouth as an effective and affordable marketing and PR consulting agency for small-to-mid-sized businesses in the Lehigh Valley.
To get a stable of project-based and retainer-based clients in a variety of industries, that I can work with to help build awareness for their services, products and brand.
To make it self-sustaining so that it is a steady source of income for me every month.
To become well-respected for the work I do so that existing clients refer me to their colleagues, thereby leading to new business opportunities.

So that's my Christmas wish for 2009. Is it a little self-serving? Perhaps. It's not a wish for world peace or to end hunger, but it is a wish nonetheless. My wish... and my dream.

What's your Christmas wish this holiday season?

Establishing my home base and client radius

2009-12-21T10:01:00.005-05:00

From the moment I decided to start Blabbermouth Communications, I knew the Lehigh Valley would be my home base. Since I've spend nearly 15 years developing relationships and contacts here, it made the most sense to me that my clients would come from within the region's two counties.

I also figured that by staying close to home, it would help me control expenses such as gas, tolls and mileage which you often don't get directly reimbursed for in business. Many clients won't pay for your mileage if you try to bill it to them. They feel it's just a cost of doing business and therefore you have to absorb it. So Lehigh Valley-based businesses and companies just made the most sense for becoming clients.

And while Blabbermouth is still in what I call it's "taking off stage," I've started rethinking this strategy in an effort to more quickly grow my client base in the short term. So I'm giving some thought to venturing outside the region and am wondering where and how far to go.

I've had folks tell me that the counties of Berks and Bucks are largely under-served when it comes to affordable PR and marketing consulting. I would imagine that's also true for some parts of the Poconos and even into western and central New Jersey.

Perhaps I would need to charge clients outside of my home base region a little more for my services in an attempt to help cover travel costs. But I'm still trying to figure out how far I am willing to go to get a new client. Is Harrisburg too far? How about Wilkes-Barre/Scranton?

I'm not interested in clients in the major metro areas of Philly or NYC, so that leaves them out. And most if not all of my travel needs to be by car, so it's important to me that the client be located within a reasonable driving distance (round trip) of home.

What do you think is a reasonable radius from the Lehigh Valley to go to find clients while still controlling travel costs?

Is enclosing a business card inside a holiday card ever ok?

2009-12-18T13:49:00.006-05:00

Today's post is a carryover from at Tweet I sent out yesterday which asked one simple question: Is it okay to enclose a business card in a holiday card being sent to a business contact or client?

The reason I asked this question is that it took me awhile to get my Blabbermouth Communications logo designed and printed into business cards. So in the beginning I was handing out my own self-made cards that looked awful. Now that I have real business cards to hand out, I am gladly doing so at every opportunity.

Still, I haven't had a chance to see some of my colleagues or potential clients since getting my stack of new business cards and thought I could simply enclose one in the holiday card I sent to each of them. I wouldn't normally do this but I thought I would make this one exception due to the timing.

I remembered something from the early part of professional career in which I was told in no uncertain circumstance that it was NEVER appropriate to insert a business card into a holiday card being sent to a client. So that's been burned into my memory which is what made me hesitant to do so in the first place. But I was also told this a decade ago and thought that times might have changed.

So I posted my Tweet yesterday and received a bounty of replies that were all over the map. Some said they saw nothing wrong with it, while others told me it was bad form to do so - holiday cards for clients are about saying thank you for your business.

So what do you think? To insert, or not to insert? Let me know.

Deciding when to take time off

2009-12-17T10:00:00.002-05:00

With the holidays already upon us and Christmas fast approaching, I've started to think about which days I want to work between Christmas and New Year's.

Being self employed, I guess I have the luxury of picking my own days off. But since I am also in the early stages of starting my new marketing and PR consulting business, it also seems like taking time off is a luxury I can't afford right now. It feels like every day I don't do something for my business is a day I fall behind or loose out on potential income or opportunities.

I'm thinking that for the holidays, I should base my days off on when I expect my current and potential clients to be working. I'm assuming that most people aren't around the office on Christmas Eve day and certainly not on Christmas Day. And since Christmas is a Friday this year, that means the weekend after it is probably lost too.

But should I be using that down time to get caught up on work, or allowing myself a few days of enjoyment? Maybe I should do a little work each day so that no one day is completely lost for productivity, even if it only means checking my e-mail, Twitter and Facebook accounts.

So what do you think? When it comes to being self-employed and taking time off, be it for a holiday or vacation, how do you decide when to take off and how much time to take?

Making my business web site be all it can be

2009-12-16T10:00:00.004-05:00

I've been thinking about my business web site lately. When I started it two months ago along with the new marketing and PR consulting business, I only had time and money to do the basics with it. Not that either of those factors have really changed, but I've started to wonder if what is up there is sufficient.

Since it's not an e-commerce site, it's kind of basic with no fancy bells or whistles. I use a templating software program to design it since I don't know how to write HTML code nor have the money to hire someone to design it for me. I also like the flexibility of being able to update and change content myself using the templates.

I only paid for a five page web site to get started figuring I could always upgrade to a 10 page one later if I felt I needed to do so. Right now the five pages are:

Home page - obligatory. I think this page is presently under-used yet I don't want to fill it with a million widgets-worth of content and end up making the page too busy.
About me - a little overview of my career history, my new head shot, the industries I have experience working in and the non-profits I volunteer with as well as my professional affiliations.
Services - the largest of all the pages since it not only lists the key services I offer to clients, I've also used this page to show examples of my voice over and on-camera work, which makes for a long page to scroll through.
Testimonials - So far it contains four of them and I am wondering how many more to add.
Contact Me - a form that allows anyone interested to reach out to me without actually giving away my e-mail address to spammers and bots.

While I've received a handful of inquiries from the Contact Me page, not all were legitimate client leads (some were sales oriented) and I am wondering if this page might be used to serve a more important function such as re-purposing it as a Greatest Hits page in which to showcase my audio and video clips as well as a few links and maybe PDFs of some PR examples. I could then simply post my contact info on the homepage where there is plenty of room for it.

For now, it's all food for thought. I need to spend an afternoon, or maybe a day, analyzing it a bit more before I make any of the changes I am currently considering. Which is why I decided to make this a blog post and get your feedback first.

Please give my site a once-over and tell me what you think needs to be revised, removed or added. Just remember that I am a small business owner with limited funds and resources for my web site. I see it as my online marketing piece or sell sheet for me and Blabbermouth Communications. It's my resource where potential clients who don't yet know me and haven't met me can go to get all the info they need before reaching out to me. That's it!

Is it ever okay to name drop?

2009-12-15T10:00:00.000-05:00

I don't consider myself to be a name dropper. I mean, I enjoy being connected in the Lehigh Valley, but I don't see myself as one of those people who throws around the names of everyone they've ever met in the hopes it might impress someone. Those kind of people annoy me and I tend to distance myself from them as much as I can.

But when it comes to my new business, is name dropping a good idea? I'm asking specifically in regards to the name dropping of my clients. Since the business is only two-months old, I feel that naming the companies I am doing work for might help me validate the business in the minds of others. I'm hoping it will make them more inclined to hire me themselves if they think I can run with the big dogs.

For instance, when it comes to my Blabbermouth Communications web site, should I list the clients I am currently doing work for and the type of work I am doing for them? Or does that open me up to unwanted competition by other local marketing and PR pros who are looking for clients and work of their own? Might they use the list of clients on my web site to attempt to steal business away from me? Am I just being paranoid?

What do you think?

What is the right number of blog posts per week?

2009-12-14T10:00:00.005-05:00

This blog is about two months old this week and I've been wondering how I am doing with it and how I can make it better without turning it into a full-time career unto itself.

I started it for several reasons.

First, I did it as a way to share my thoughts on and experiences with starting my own business. I knew there were others out there who either are doing or have done this and that they might find my posts to be of interest. I also wanted to solicit opinions and advice on various aspects of the business since I've never done something like this before and have quite a bit to learn.

Second, I did it to promote the very business I was starting. I wanted to get the Blabbermouth Communications name out there as much as possible via the web and link mentions of it in my posts back to my web site. Sure I want to generate exposure for my web site, but mainly I wanted the mentions and use of keywords in my daily blog posts to help my ranking in organic search engine results. If you aren't on the first page of results in a search, you might as well not be there at all. Most consumers never make it past the first page of search results even if Google or Yahoo pull up dozens of pages of such results. And being in the top five or ten results on the first page is like gold.

But I've always wondered about the frequency of my blog posts. I've been trying to write a blog post daily, primarily Monday through Friday since I am writing about a business and that is when I think the people who follow the blog are most inclined to read my posts. I strayed a few times from that and only posted three times for the week. Nothing bad happened when I wrote fewer posts but I felt that I wasn't getting out there as much on the web as I should have been.

So as I move forward with the blog I am debating if I need to continue this pace of posting every day. Are five posts a week too many or just about right? I know bloggers who only post once or twice a week and I can't help but feel that that is too infrequent. What do you think?

Also, I write some of my posts in advance of when they are actually published live to the blog and use a scheduling tool withing Blogger to post them at a designated date and time. I've been going with 10 a.m. figuring that most of the blog's followers are probably business people reading it at work, and by that time of morning they are settled in at their desk for the day. So what time of day is best to publish my posts? Should I be posting them earlier or later? Why?

Am I courting financial ruin?

2009-12-11T10:00:00.000-05:00

Today's blog post crosses the line from my usual new business-oriented posts to something a bit more personal.

I had lunch earlier this week with a colleague who owns his own business. We were talking about the early days of his now-successful multi-media company and how tight money was for him 10 years ago when it started. He mentioned what it was like trying to make a living from project to project and having to take it on the chin a couple of times financially.

He mentioned how hard it was as a self-employed person to get banks to pay attention to him or his business. Even though he had an established credit history in good standing and owned a home with his wife, banks didn't want to touch his new business with a 10 ft. pole to give him a loan. So that make it extremely difficult to buy a company car or the hi-tech equipment that was needed to operate the business. Ultimately he took out a home equity line of credit for such expenses and luckily it all worked out in the end.

That got me thinking about my own new business and how potential creditors would see me. While I don't plan to ask for a business loan any time soon, it does make me wonder what will happen when the time comes to apply for one. My car is 10 years old and on its last leg. It's going to go any day and I certainly don't have on-hand the $10k plus needed to buy a new or new used one. That means I will need a loan or lease and I am wondering who will give me one when I tell them I have uncertain and unsteady earnings as a self-employed person.

So for those of you that read this blog and were once self-employed as I am now, how did you get loans from banks? Is the home equity loan the only way to go? I own my home for less than two years, so what if there's not enough equity in it for a loan? Is borrowing money from family members a better way to go? What advice can you give me?

Where to meet?

2009-12-10T10:00:00.000-05:00

Since my new business is run out of my home, I'm not planning to entertain any clients or even fellow colleagues here for meetings. That means we always have to meet at their office, which isn't a problem but the scenery never changes. And I don't literally mean the scenery but rather the environment, be it friendly and welcoming, or rushed and harried.

Sometimes I prefer to meet with a client somewhere else such as a restaurant. We often do lunch or breakfast appointments but sometimes opt for the after-work drinks routine.

If the meeting is just a visit, then I've found that pretty much any place that will allow us to hold a conversation can work. But sometimes you need to bring along your laptop and use the Internet to review a project. And while there are many local places that now offer free wi-fi access, I'm wondering which of them is the most conducive for a productive meeting.

I've had several Lehigh Valley business people tell me that Panera is their favorite place for business meetings. The food is good, there is free wi-fi, and they don't kick you out for staying too long or not buying food like some places do.

But I've also been warned that Panera can become a madhouse at mealtime with loud conversations that make it hard to hear the person you are with, busy/dirty tables with no place to sit, and long lines for food.

So when you want to get out of the office environment with a client or colleague, where do you take them in the Valley to meet? I'm open to suggestions, including ones that aren't restaurant related.

To pursue or not to pursue, THAT is the question

2009-12-09T10:00:00.001-05:00

So I've come to that inevitable time in every new business owner's career when they have to make the decision to pursue or not to pursue. A potential client, that is.

The client in question was introduced to me about two months ago by a mutual contact. He and I chatted initially over the phone and seemed to get along great. I was very interested in his business and products, and really wanted to help him with the marketing and public relations needs he had.

He asked me for a proposal containing my costs which I provided to him in due course. Since I don't like to hound a client, I gave it a week before I followed up with him. But my voice mail and email messages went unreturned and I started to get suspicious.

Had he changed his mind about working with me? Was he courting other agencies/freelancers and decided to go with one of them and now doesn't have the guts to tell me so? Were the costs that I quoted him for my services too high for his liking? Or is he just waiting until the new year to start working together?

I followed up a second time before following up a third time just before Thanksgiving to wish him well for the holiday season. I'm starting to think this client lead is a dead one and I should let it go. But what if he's one of those clients that needs you to chase him to show him you're really interested?

So today's question is: for how long do you pursue a potential client lead? More than a month? Several months? And how do you continue to pursue them over time without becoming annoying? And what is the best way to reach them without being too intrusive: e-mail or phone?

Deciding what to sponsor and why

2009-12-08T10:33:00.009-05:00

I recently decided to become a sponsor of the monthly Lehigh Valley Tweetup gathering for December. Since I am active on Twitter both personally and for my business, this seemed like a no-brainer. And the $50 sponsorship fee to have your business name and Twitter handle listed on the back of the event t-shirt and sweatshirt was definitely within my limited marketing budget.

It started me thinking about sponsoring future events to promote my new business, what I could afford and when to do them. While I certainly don't anticipate having several hundred dollars to sponsor a Chamber event or anything of that caliber, that's not to say that I might not benefit from sponsoring other smaller events, perhaps as a co-sponsor.

So how do you decide which events to sponsor? I know that cost and relevancy play key roles in making that decision, but is that all it's about? Should I consider events that offer perks such as my company name and/or logo printed on a giveaway item? Or perhaps events that will allow me as a sponsor to address attendees and say a few words about Blabbermouth Communications?

What's your advice?

To send holiday cards or not

2009-12-07T08:54:00.006-05:00

Since money is tight right now, I've been debating whether or not to send out holiday cards to my list of current and potential clients. It's not that the cost of the cards and postage is all that much, but it is yet one more expense I really don't know if I can afford right now.

I'm on the fence because I know when I used to receive holiday cards from colleagues and clients, it always felt nice to be remembered. However I wasn't very fond of the cards that came with pre-printed signatures as if they didn't want to take the time to personally sign each card. It kind of felt impersonal and I wondered why they'd bothered at all.

In my agency days, we did a holiday card mailing to all of our clients and media contacts. The cards were pre-printed with the name of the agency in the signature area, but they were also personally signed by everyone on staff who knew that particular contact. So I guess I've come to expect the same from the cards I receive.

I suppose sending out holidays cards would be a nice gesture at this time of year and a good way to stay in front of potential clients. And while I really don't have the time or the money to get ones pre-printed with Blabbermouth Communications on them, I certainly could hand write it on if that's appropriate.

So, what do you think? Should I send out holiday cards or save the money? And if so, should the cards be just from me, or from me and my new business?

Giving of myself but to what extent?

2009-12-04T08:11:00.019-05:00

Like most of you, I am solicited from time to time by local non-profit organizations that would like me to join one of their committees or serve on their board. And since I don't do anything half-way, I tend to get very involved with the non-profits that I have chosen to align myself with in the past. Unfortunately, this can be a big distraction from the work I need to do for paying clients.

So far I've limited my volunteerism to two organizations, each of which I volunteer with for different reasons.

I am currently the marketing chairperson for the non-profit Easton Main Street Initiative and have acted in this role for about 3 or 4 years. I've also recently started doing their social media marketing including managing their Facebook fan page, Linked In group and Twitter account, as well as starting a blog for them with daily posts. I volunteer with them because I believe in the revitalization and continued economic development of downtown Easton.

I've also recently taken over the social media marketing efforts for the Greater Lehigh Valley Ad Club, a non-profit of which I am a member. This includes managing their Facebook fan page, LinkedIn group and Twitter account. I volunteer with them because it gives me great networking opportunities and potential for new business and/or clients.

When I am asked to volunteer, I often have trouble saying no. Most of the non-profits that have approached me in the past are groups that I either have a personal interest in or that I think could benefit from my marketing and PR expertise. And while I'd like to help all of them, it's just not possible. I mean, I believe in volunteering and giving back to the community but I have to set limits. My paying clients have to come first.

How do you decide which non-profit organizations to volunteer with? Do you pick ones that interest your personally? Or do you align yourself with ones that might lead to new clients or business? And how do you balance the amount of pro-bono work you do with the work for your paying clients? Any advice?

How much of a good thing is TOO MUCH?

2009-12-03T10:28:00.010-05:00

When I decided to start my own marketing and public relations consulting business two months ago, I'll admit that I didn't have a clear picture of where it might go. Mainly I was just looking to get back on my feet ASAP after a mid-July layoff and no luck in finding a new job since then.

But now that things are starting to take off and I've secured three clients, I've started to wonder how much of a good thing is too much. In other words, how do I determine how much of a workload, and thereby how many clients, I can handle on my own?

Since I am expecting to work with clients in two capacities - monthly retainer work and periodic project work - I was thinking that it would be good to have a healthy mix of both. Having between three and five monthly retainer clients complemented by a variety of project-based clients that I only work with from time-to-time would certainly fit the bill. Then again the workload kind of depends on what these projects entail and how involved they are.

My worst nightmare and my greatest dream for Blabbermouth Communications are one in the same: that I end up getting so much business and/or new client leads that I can't handle it all at once. The thought of turning interested clients with viable projects away is unattractive to me.

I don't anticipate hiring a staff, although I would certainly consider collaborating with other marketing and PR freelancers like myself on a project. So at least for right now, all I can do is plan a workload that revolves around me.

So how do I determine how much I can handle without sacrificing quality and the personalized attention to clients I am striving for? Is this something I will just know from within, or is there some kind of formula for balancing your clients that I should know about? And how much should I let my need to earn a certain amount of money each month dictate this decision?

STILL Managing (my own) expectations!

2009-12-02T08:07:00.010-05:00

I was recently asked by Jeff Tintle, President of Thrive LLC, to write an article for his www.LehighValleyEntrepreneur.tv web site. He'd seen one of my blog posts on Blabbermouth Missives and asked me to expand on it a bit so that he could use it as a featured article on his web site.

The post was originally featured on my blog on Thursday, Nov. 19 and was entitled "Managing (my own) expectations." Jeff told me: "I liked the authenticity of it and your uncertainty resonates with long-time and new biz owners, although few may admit it."

At the end of the post I asked for advice from fellow small business owners on how they managed their own expectation as to the success and growth of their business. His advice to me was: "I'd set reasonable goals (goals are your expectations) and a strategy for achievement. Also set up a volunteer advisory board to help apply critical thinking and referrals."

To my delight, that blog post received some other great comments and advice.

Read the new, expanded article for Lehigh Valley Entrepreneur here.

Have I mentioned how much I hate financial matters?

2009-12-01T10:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I wrote a post about whether or not I needed to align myself with a lawyer. Since funds are tight right now, I haven't been too interested in meeting with a lawyer to discuss Blabbermouth Communications, yet I know I should have one ready to go should a legal matter present itself.

And so it might sound a bit hypocritical when I tell you that I HAVE aligned myself with a accountant. I met with him back in October when the business was first getting started. He came to me as a referral from a small business colleague of mine who I've known for years and trust. I've since come to find out that she's recommended him to two other self-employed business colleagues of mine and they are using him to. So that makes me feel confident that I made the right choice.

I absolutely hate dealing with financial matters, not to mention that I stink at math, so finding an accountant seemed like a no-brainer to me. And while I haven't met with him since October, I know that I will need to do so in the beginning of the new year to start arranging my paperwork for my 2009 tax return. I'm SO glad not to have to do it myself this year and instead turn it over to someone who knows the ins and outs of the tax code.

That said, when I next meet with him, what items should I bring along and also be prepared to discuss? One piece of advice I've already received is to start using the same accounting software that he uses (QuickBooks perhaps?) so that I can download my financial info from my computer onto a jump drive and give it directly to him to upload into his system.

What other advice can you give me regarding working with an accountant? Kind of like some "best practices" suggestions. What should I know or ask him when we meet again, prior to tax season?

Do I need a lawyer?

2009-11-30T12:37:00.009-05:00

Along with my questions from last week regarding needing clients to sign a formal contract when we work together and getting a deposit up front, comes another related question: Do I need a lawyer?

Initially I thought it would be a good idea to have a relationship with one just in case, but now it seems like just one more expense I can't afford. I don't intend to use a lawyer unless my business is sued and I certainly hope that doesn't happen. And I would certainly engage the services of a lawyer should I ever want to change Blabbermouth Communications from a sole-proprietorship to an LCC.

A colleague on Twitter recommended a local attorney to me who apparently specializes in small businesses. And while I haven't made contact with that person yet, I am wondering if I should do so now, or wait until something specific comes up with which I need their help.

Anyone have advice or suggestions on when to retain a lawyer? Should I establish a relationship with one now for down the road, or wait (and save the money) until the time comes that I actually need one?

Finding things to be thankful for this year

2009-11-26T10:00:00.000-05:00

After a year like this one has been, I'm having trouble finding the silver lining.

I wanted to do a blog post for Thanksgiving Day to say what I was thankful for and was having some difficulty in coming up with anything to list. Still, I was able to find a few important things that merited being mentioned here:

I am thankful for the never-ending support of my friends and colleagues who are cheering me on from the sidelines as I launch my new consulting business. The referrals and recommendations they are sending my way continue to humble me as I wonder what I have done to deserve their continued love. I am grateful for their support. It means more to me than they will ever know.
I am grateful to President Obama for enacting the legislation that included the mini-COBRA coverage for people like me who worked for a small employer and wouldn't have otherwise qualified for regular COBRA health care coverage. This legislation allows me to get full coverage through my former employer's plan while only paying 35% of the premium while the government picks up the balance. I wouldn't be able to afford health coverage right now without it.
I am grateful to talented friends and colleagues like Dina Hall and Garth Gower who have been good enough to extend their design services to me at a fraction of the price that they would charge to other clients because they understand and appreciate my situation as a small business owner who is just getting started. I plan to reciprocate as soon as I am able.
I'm actually grateful to my former employer for becoming my first paying client by hiring me to do a new web video for them last month. I hope to continue working with them in 2010.
I am thankful for all of the people who have contacted me with potential projects for us to work on together and for the potential clients who have taken the time to meet with me about Blabbermouth Communications and its services. (I'm even MORE thankful to the ones that asked me to prepare a proposal...)
And I'm grateful to all of you who take the time on a regular basis to read my blog posts and/or follow my tweets on Twitter. I'm even more delighted by those of you who take the time to post a comment to something I've written here or reply to one of my tweets. Your advice and input is very much appreciated. Keep it coming!

So that's my summary for Thanksgiving 2009. Here's to hoping the same list a year from now is much longer!

So what are you thankful for this year, from a professional/career/business standpoint?

Getting your due with a deposit up front

2009-11-25T10:00:00.004-05:00

As a follow-up to yesterday's blog post on whether or not to have clients sign a formal contract for work, this time I wanted to ask about deposits or prepayments.

Most agency quotes or proposals that I am familiar with indicate in the small print at the very bottom that a certain percentage of the total project cost will be billed immediately upon approval of the contract. The balance will be billed once the project is completed. This seems to be standard operating procedure and I don't think most clients have a problem with this.

Still, there are those that feel freelancers are individuals and not agencies, and therefore should not be getting paid any money in advance for work yet to be performed. And while I haven't yet run into this situation with a potential client, I am kind of expecting it to happen.

When it does, do I give in to the client in the hopes of getting the work and tell them that I will waive the deposit on the project? Or do I follow my gut instinct and walk away, being glad to cut my losses now before this client could become a big headache?

Also, how much is a reasonable amount to ask for up front? 25%? 50%? On some smaller projects where the client is just starting a business, I am demanding half up front as I want to make sure I get paid at least a little something in case they stiff me later due to limited income.

But with larger clients that are established businesses, should I be charging them a smaller deposit because they are more likely to be able to pay me on time in the end? After all, the point of that deposit is to help financially sustain me in the present while I work on the project, the balance for which won't be invoiced until it's over.

What approach seems reasonable to you when it comes to asking for a deposit?

To contract or not to contract? That, is the question

2009-11-24T10:32:00.010-05:00

In my agency days it was standard procedure to present clients with quotes for the projects we hoped to do for them. Upon approval of the project and its costs, we asked them to sign the quote thereby making it a binding, legal contract on both sides.

Since I am not looking to hire a lawyer to help me draft a legally binding document to use as a quote template, so far I've been creating my own proposals with payment terms at the end. The proposals do not have a signature line as I am not planning on having my clients sign the document. Rather, I was going to invoke the honor system and do business on a handshake. I figure that if I can't show my clients that I trust them, then why would they trust me?

Still, I feel a great amount of uncertainty in operating my business this way. It seems horribly naive not to make them sign the proposal or quote in order to make them commit to the project. And I know that I need to protect myself from dishonest clients who will let me work with little or no payment in advance and then stiff me in the end.

I've asked a few other freelancers I know how they handle the signing of contracts, and several of them told me that they don't require a signature either. While some will admit to having been burned once or twice by this, they claim that most clients are honest and will pay the full amount agreed upon for the project.

So what do you think? Should I be asking clients to sign a formal contract with me for the work they are hiring me to perform? And if so, should the template for the contract be drafted by a lawyer in order to ensure that it is legally enforceable?

Or should I try my method of using the honor system for now and see how it goes? In other words, don't go with a formal contract until I've been burned and learned my lesson. Once bitten, twice shy as they say. Give me your input.