Sunday night I described my personal brand as a technology leader with over a dozen years experience planning, developing, and operationalizing web technologies. I asked for help matching that background up with opportunities. A number of people have asked me about consulting and freelancing–e.g. “what’s your hourly rate?”
I can create a strategy for utilizing technology in communication that will save a company thousands of hours of misspent time. There are so many ways to spend the precious capital a company raises or earns and all too often, in retrospect, the history of efforts to utilize technology is full of false starts, dead ends, and failed expectations. I’ve learned a great deal from a dozen years of working on the implementation side of startup companies and would like to put some of that perspective to use to help others.
First, when thinking of communication, it is wrong to think as though you were developing software. The essence of communication is a two-way process, the authenticity of which is judged by how responsive the speaker is to the listener. In face-to-face interactions, we do not get to rehearse an entire speech and then deliver it. We start talking, we observe the reactions of the listener, we answer questions and interruptions as we engage in a conversation.
Social media tools–things like blogs, twitter, and facebook–need to be approached with a strategy, not a development plan. We need to understand why we are using a particular tool or technology and be prepared to evaluate and adjust our tactics constantly.
I can listen to the needs of an organization and draw up a strategy. As a technologist, I can take it a step further and describe and implement the details.
Consider a company that is looking for a way to work with existing customers to build loyalty. They wonder if there is something they could be doing with social media or technology, but launching something “half-cocked” is too risky–it might make them look inept and alienate existing customers. And they don’t know enough about the specifics of what they want to do to spec out a proposal.
I start by meeting with the company to better understand their customers and what they are currently doing. You can’t just leap in and start making Facebook pages or telling the CEO that she should be blogging. The point of communication is to engage in a conversation with customers and to strengthen the brand of the company by creating a new, authentic engagement with customers. So before we leap into implementation, we need to really understand the customers and come up with an approach, a strategy, that will guide our actions.
Part of the strategy has to be a way to evaluate and monitor success. As we understand the customers’ needs, we have to think realistically about whether they are likely to respond to our communication strategies and then define a “conversion” as something tangible we can measure.
A goal might simply be better brand awareness…but I would work to identify measurable results such as increased sales, increased referrals, greater utilization of resources, etc. A good strategy ties it all together–not in a perfect plan for guaranteed results–but in a verifiable prediction that we can express in language everyone understands.
Good tactic: We will create a facebook page and promote it through all our other digital channels–e.g. newsletter, twitter, website, word of mouth, corporate blog–and monitor how it grows for the next month. We’ll maintain that page by posting industry relevant articles to it and especially noting linkages to anything our customers are doing online. If we have a blog, we will keep the frequency of posting up and monitor how much traffic is referred back and forth. After a month we will examine the customers who have utilized this feature and compare them with other customers to see if there is any difference in behavior.
Bad tactic: We need a facebook page, a blog, and a twitter account. Make sure somebody posts a lot. Here is a book on social media you should read. Here is training on how to use facebook. Hire a young person to do this because the older people don’t get it.
I’m being intentionally extreme above, but I bet a lot of folks have a strategy closer to the second example than they want to admit. The first example is hard to truly quantify…we will not have perfect data or be able to monitor everything. But the important factor is to have a strategy, not just a plan.
What are my qualifications to provide this kind of strategic consulting? I do not have a degree in “social media” or even an MBA. But I believe I can propose an approach that will allow a company to enter this realm methodically and evaluate whether it is worth pursuing further. I’m not out to sell a big development project and I don’t believe I should be doing all the work. Each customer will be unique–not “one size fits all.”
So to answer the original question, “what is your hourly rate?” I would have to defer to the time-honored answer of “it depends.” I would meet for free for an hour or two, then gather information to draw up a proposal quoting the work on a project basis, identifying the activities to be done and a price for various stages. The initial stage is an assessment which would vary depending on the complexity of the company, customers, and existing activities. The assessment would include recommendations for an implementation phase.
Some significant parts of the plan would require involvement from the client. I would rather coach a beginner blogger than become an expert in someone else’s company. But it depends on what we feel we can do authentically. I would not “impersonate” the CEO, but it might make sense to act as a company identity for certain purposes.
Finally, the strategy should be comprehensive. As I described above, there are always going to be multple pieces that fit together…a facebook page is not of much use if there is nothing to post there, so the content must come from a blog or at least periodic articles that are more than just press releases. Email newsletters are likely a key component of engagement. Getting customers to participate will vary depending on the customers–again a reason to have a strategy and then evaluate. Customers may jump in to a blog and start commenting away. Or maybe the customer base has no desire to be active in that manner. An email newsletter and periodic blog posts that do not generate comments might be considered extremely successful if there is steady readership and the readers are steady customers. A good strategy will help a company manage and evaluate this whole communication strategy–including the possibility that the strategy is not paying off. But at least the client will know what has been tried and will have an answer to those who say “you need to be doing X, Y, or Z.”
If you would like to meet with me and talk about how I could help your business with a strategy for digital media communication, contact me by email at dave (at) davewrites (dot) com.