Marketing Blogs
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by Fi Bendallon Mar 30 |
The independent digital specialist's frustration honour roll
How to quickly to get on the wrong side of people who can help you!
There are many brave, bold, wonderful people, who have left the corporate world, to be independent, offering their highly tuned skills, experience and networks to organisations. They are intensively experienced in their individual space and deserve to be recognised for their contribution. Sadly they are often exploited by organisations that gladly take their IP and represent it otherwise. Unfortunately the value of the advice on offer is negated by more established traditional forms, resulting in mistakes being made as our communications ecosystem has changed, which is an ever-growing trend with the emergence of social media.
This article is in support of the many individuals who offer highly valuable services to organisations as individuals and who deserve to be recognised for the exploitation factor they have to endure.
This is 'the frustration honour roll' for all of those wonderful people who are at the heart of the digital industry!
The frustration honour roll
1. Ask these independent specialists to come in and drill them to give their thoughts free of charge (in return for coffee!).
2. Get lots of proposals and thought leadership thoughts, don’t pay and represent these ideas as your own input to company strategy – cut and paste …"Yawn!".
3. Pay them the minimum and screw as much work value out of them over and above 'cos you think you can!
4. Tell these people, that the organisation isn’t quite ready for these ideas after they have given you the route to real commercial value through new spaces, like how to do social media properly, then try and do it yourself with no experience other than your Facebook page.
5. Make them work with some (NOT ALL BEFORE YOU BEAT ME UP!) badly educated agencies that earn buckets loads of more money for executing these ideas badly because they haven’t had the benefit of hindsight from the specialist who gave you the idea in the first place.
6. Don’t pay on time, what little you do pay
7. Never give credit where it is due. Publically announce at speaker events that these initiatives are your own
From Twitter responses, specific to digital complaints from these worthy people:
8. Prefix every site with 'The'. ie - 'We want to be on the Twitter and have people rate us on The Digg.' @jaredwoods
9. People that leave comments who are only interested in link building. @inspiredworlds
10. Use the word 'fad' in reference to 'the internet'. @joelyrighteous
11. By writing fake comments on people's blogs! - el stupido behaviour. @neerav
12. They hate it when you get your zeroes and ones mixed up. One sure way to piss them off. @sboiling
13. Overt plagiarism – note this from @neerav
14. Leaving Twitter comment aside for a moment, last but not least: just not recognising the value of individual contribution to a company because it doesn’t come neatly packaged as traditional marketing services but offers better focused value, is a poor excuse for not doing your job properly in today’s evolving marketing climate.
I have had many experiences, over 22 years in business to form an opinion from agency-owner, agency-side, client side and independent. I currently operate through a collaboration with many individual digital specialists and bloggers internationally that has made me realise the fantastic talent available in uncovering the experiential value of the individual.
I listen and learn, many hours a day. I read and re-educate myself as the digital space evolves, to extend my day to many hours during the working week. I know there are many like me, where value is knowledge. But what value is put on that knowledge?
Crumbs from a king’s table and late payment are not worthy of the experience that these many highly knowledgeable individuals have. This is not a whinge, personal or otherwise, knowledge is paramount in this evolutionary period we are all working in. Sharing that knowledge has a real tangible value.
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Certainly I have had my ideas, designs and products 'borrowed', 'rejigged', 'developed' any many other euphemisms for 'stolen'. I have sat in meetings where the wealthy, worthy and wise listen, dismiss you, shake your hand and kick you out. Then launch your idea because you cannot copyright an idea and even if you could their lawyers will beat you up in court.
It is not just big bad business either. 'Entrepreneurs' are actually worse. There is the young go getter business person who has an idea (probably someone elses). They then decide to 'take this to market' and they ask you to do all the work and usually most of the thinking for them. But tragically cashflow is always tight when the bill goes in. You can either write it all off or finish it off in the hope that there will eventually be some cash in it. I guarantee there never will be, even if the concept makes it to market. I have made three people that I know of wealthy, one of them extremely so and I cannot get any of them to take a call from me now.
My advice is to never sign a NDA without being financially retained to a significant degree in advance. If that isn't forthcoming, get on the web and let everyone else know that there is another carpetbagger doing the rounds.