Dear Internets:

I am completely willing to admit I do not know everything. I believe in taking advice on the things I am clueless about, usually from you and your pal Doctor Google. Foolhardy, possibly; but it’s always worked for me.

This year marks a transition for me from being part-time employee and part-time freelancer to being full-time self employed. It also marks the year in which we will, at some point, be applying for a mortgage. (Yes, I am 35 years old. No, I don’t own my own house. I’ve also lived in three countries in 10 years and been broke in all of them; give me a break.)

So while getting my financial ducks in a row is a high priority, the broader world of full-time freelance is also a bit of a mystery I hope to unravel with your help.

Things mama never told me about service providers:

• Where can I find an accountant or financial adviser in Cork to do my stuff and give me advice about setting aside enough money for taxes and paying PRSI and all that jazz?
• As my previous employer will no longer be paying my mobile bill, which I’ve never even seen, I need to know which provider and plan to go with. Hint: I like to talk. I do not believe SMS is a medium in which real adults can carry on real conversations. That said I really only use my mobile when traveling in Ireland (about once a month) but can rack up several hours in calls then.

Speaking of money, down to the nitty gritty:

I have no idea what market rates are in Ireland. I design sites, I code sites; I provide consulting and strategy for online marketing and positioning; I package and brand products; I write understandable web copy that reads like it comes from humans; I do site assessments, usability analysis, and user testing.

For all of these things, I have been charging a figure that is less than €50 an hour, except for usability testing - I charge test group costs plus the same hourly for that. The people who are paying me are telling me to charge more, and I know they’re right but I have don’t know what the right numbers are.

• What should I be charging for all of these various things?
• How can I keep costs accessible for people who have fun and interesting projects but low budgets? I often like those projects; they tend to refresh my creativity and I don’t want to price myself out of ever being offered them.
• If you’re booking clients months in advance, do you take a deposit now to block out the time for them at a future date? Usually I do 50% up front and 50% on delivery or go-live, depending, but getting 50% now for something I am not going to get to for three months seems a little dodgy.
• What do you do if you’re killing yourself to stay on top of a series of tight production schedules and a client doesn’t have their bits ready for their project’s agreed upon start date? My contracts state that if they can’t deliver their clearly articulated To Do list, delivery dates will be pushed accordingly, but what if you literally do not have room for slippage?

So, dear Internets, do you have any words of wisdom and experience for me? This is my year of Getting Things Done, and I’d like to do them right.

Yours, always,
Sabrina

Here at chez moi we’re off to CreativeCamp a day early as we have plans for Friday night that will put us in Kilkenny on Saturday around noon. Given that little scheduling hitch, I have to say that Keith and Ken and the whole Kilkenny mafia have been 32 flavours of lovely dealing with me, because I have been a perpetual pain in the arse about this:

Is there public transport? Are there projectors and screens? How long do I have? Can you save slots for me? Which slots? What’s for lunch? When is lunch? Do I need a dongle? Can I have a pony?

And not a single one of them gave up and just shot me.

But that is not the end of Irish excellence today. I had two more stellar experiences today that really demand blog love.

First of all, the people at Blacknight got a name registered, DNS sorted and free sponsored hosting in place less then three hours after we faxed in a rush request for a .ie domain name. It’s for a super top secret, soon to be revealed web project Elly Parker and I are kicking off at Creative Camp. We’ve been working on it for a while, we just didn’t realise that this weekend was, uh, this weekend. Anyway: Blacknight. Awesome service.

Second of all, a couple of people have emailed me to say they can’t make CreativeCamp but are interested in my presentation on How to Blog Like a Boy. Since I refuse to read off my (very minimalist) slides, my presentation notes are the bulk of my gig and the slides are just summary backdrops. This means I can’t just make a PowerPoint download; it would leave all the context behind.

Marcus Mac Innes at Pix.ie to the rescue. I uploaded all of my slides as JPG images into an album and he entered all of my notes by hand in the first comment of each slide, one by one. Pix.ie users can’t use HTML like paragraph and break tags yet, and some of these slides have four or five paragraphs of notes and citations, so he saved my stressed out bacon. (Slides go live after Camp.)

Flicker, who wanted me to upload three test images and then wait more than a week until they’re reviewed so I can prove I’m not no longer a pornographer, can kiss my booty. Or just, you know, hire more staff.

Anyway, CreativeCamp, Blacknight, and Pix.ie all get 10 out of 10 for being outstanding, home grown examples of utterly fabulous people.

Give them your money and your love.

PS:

I have a yenta streak a mile wide. I am, in fact, an unabashed match maker. I love pairing things up, although this may be more symptomatic of OCD than a predictor of success in my backup career running a dating agency for geeks and nerds.

In any case, this week I’ve delivered a match made in heaven. I paired stock image site LuckyOliver up with color palettes site COLOURlovers with a cool, cool contest:

Pick an image off LuckyOliver, create a palette from it at COLOURlovers, and be in with a chance to win cool prizes.

Which, by the way, start with a $300 iPod Touch and end with an iTunes gift card. Bonus: all prizes can be redeemed for cash instead of McProducts so that those of us who think Macs have been rendered useless as doorstops now that they don’t weigh anything can play too.

I am a self-confessed contest whore, but I’m picky with it. All those book cataloging sites with contests where they’re offering up yet another Amazon gift certificate as a prize seem like wasted opportunities to me. Amazon will give you no love and send you no traffic. Why not pair with an online book seller who is keen to share traffic and will promote your contest with equal love and will ship £€$100 worth of books anywhere in the world to the winner?

(Despite the fact that I love craft marketplace Etsy, I was really, really annoyed when I filled out a tedious, poorly formulated marketing survey there only to find out that I couldn’t win the survey contest because I wasn’t in the US. That’s just rude.)

Speaking of crafts, promoting a new book on crafting? Buddy up with a popular yarn house for prizes, and ask people to knit or create (and photograph) book covers as contest entries. Even if you end up paying for the prize pack yarns yourself, you’ll get way more back from your partner’s traffic than you spent in cash. What’s more, that traffic is your target audience, and if you have good content, they’ll come back and stick around.

Plus, “I made this for this contest and photographed it and you can see it here”? Total blog fodder. Everyone who enters will blog about it. Viralpalooza!

So, please: go out and make friends in your niche. Share the love to spread the word. And no more Amazon gift certificates!

The internet takes a lot of crap for being all about pornography. My general response to this is that the market gets what the market wants, and it should come as no surprise that naked people like other naked people. I have zero problem with online pornography as an industry, and the proliferation of everything from college call girls to phone sex workers doesn’t bother me in the least. You work it, honey.

What does bother me is whoring by people who are not, in fact, paid sex workers.

You may be surprised to learn that the most recent example of this is near Bantry, not generally known for being a red light district. A local hostelry is running an online contest which you enter by linking to them in your blog with a particular Google keyword phrase. They are, in short, gaming Google. They don’t want your opinion or your love; they want your inbound links to improve their search engine rankings.

I don’t have a problem with the suckers people who “entered” the contest by writing about Glengarriff Lodge. I have a problem with Glengarriff running a competition that is transparent, blatant link whoring:

You write a blog post which links to our homepage using the term Luxury Self Catering. In the same blog post you link to one friend who you think might be interested in the competition.

The thing is, it looks like a neat place and is touting itself as eco-friendly and sustainable. They could get legitimate links and an authentic viral buzz off of that. I can think of at least ten places with high Google rankings that would cover this joint if told about it, deliver better Google results for a very competitive keyword phrase, and not piss off half the blogsphere in the process. Or - hey! - they could actually optimise their site for search engines, with, say, page titles and stuff.

So, I’m with CrankyPants on this one.

The only good thing I can say about the Glengarriff campaign is that while they are prescribing the single phrase you need to link with, they are not telling you what to say. So, I can tell you that I think this Luxury Self Catering campaign at Glengarriff Lodge sucks, and according to the contest rules, that’s okay. Since I’m interested in what Eoghan McCabe thinks about this campaign, I guess I’m officially entered. Fair enough.

The same good thing cannot be said about ebuzzing, who spammed emailed me this morning to let me know they’ve setup shop on the corner of Hollywood and Vine:

ebuzzing allows bloggers to earn good money by writing about things they actually like, and even to define their own price for doing so. They browse ad campaigns posted by advertisers, create content for their blog discussing things that they genuinely wish to highlight and are paid for each article.

This kind of pay-per-post scheme is not new, and as long as the company running the service has a policy in place that requires the paid posts to be flagged as such, which ebuzzing does, I generally don’t have an issue with it. In this particular case, however, there’s one little catch: they have to approve your blog entry before you post it.

We will not censor content nor pass judgement on the quality of an article you’re publishing on your blog. But we have a duty to guarantee our advertisers the consistency and integrity of their campaigns and to see to it that the briefs they issue on ebuzzing are interpreted correctly. So it is incumbent on us to evaluate whether a post is within the framework laid down for the campaign, includes the necessary elements (eg links to advertisers’ site) and conforms to ebuzzing’s general editorial policy.

Call me cynical, but I’m reading that as “we can’t censor what you write on your own blog, but we’re probably only going to pre-approve and pay you for things that our client has asked for, namely positive blog entries.”

I’m not sure which of these two practices is more odious. The only thing I do know is that I have a lot more respect for the people whoring themselves to the almighty dollar than I do for the one’s whoring themselves to the almighty Google.

It’s not often that revolutions happen in retail - one of the most entrenched, least progressive sectors out there. I mean, sure, there’s the whole web thing, but aside from that, the creation of IKEA and the invention of the January Sale, I’m hard pressed to think of anything that really makes consumers wiggle with glee.

But there is a revolution going on at Sleep Squad, a Chicago mattress retailer. Their company story and the way they’re retailing is described in a great article at Furniture Style, but in a nutshell:

You select the mattress attributes you want online, they throw a bunch of matching products into their truck showroom, and they drive to you. You lay down and test out the selections in the mobile showroom, and if you’re particularly happy with one of your choices, you buy it right there. They deliver it directly from the truck to your home minutes later.

This is, in a word, brilliant.

One aspect of Sleep Squad I find really interesting is that founder Michael Cote doesn’t come from a long line of home furnishing retailers, or anything even close. He used to head up nationwide B2B sales for T-Mobile. When he decided to get out and go retail, he surveyed households for the most common items over a particular price mark, and then cross-checked his data with an existing survey on the buying experiences that made consumers the most miserable. That’s how he chose mattresses; because, in his words, “This industry is ripe for change.”

Speaking of the need for change, I do have two criticisms of Sleep Squad, neither of which has anything to do with their product or their retail model.

First of all, their logo is pants. Well, that’s not actually true; it’s a cute rendering of a bed. But they are not selling beds, or even mattresses. They are selling a buying experience, and that buying experience is all about the truck. The truck is their market differentiator, and the truck should be their logo.

They don’t need to create an iconic image for their business; they have one already, and it is their business.

Secondly, they need an image gallery, pronto. I don’t understand, really, how this works. I have no idea how you shove up to 26 mattresses into a truck that doubles as a showroom, but I’m pretty interested. I want to know what the show room I’m supposed to lie down in looks like, before I trundle out there in my bunny slippers. And, you know, since I’m potentially going to be testing products in my nightgown, some nice, reassuring in situ photos of the sales staff I’ll be meeting in the truck would be a plus, too.

There are couple of other things they could do to help position themselves to their best advantage with consumers, but really, despite the oversights, I’m cheering for this business. This is a great way to look at a very traditional sector and do something new and consumer driven, and I love this sort of thinking.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had a definite upsurge in people contacting me to ask if I’m available for some consulting hours. By and large, these are companies who want help with traffic, conversions, online marketing campaigns, issues of stickiness, or general communications strategies that do not suck.

While this is great, I always worry about wading in with new clients who want to know if I can help them.

Because the answer is usually, yes, I can work with you. But you’re probably not going to like it.

When I was more active in Second Life and doing consulting for real life and virtual-only brands, my clients always used to joke that they wanted t-shirts that said “I Survived Sabrina Dent’s Business Boot Camp” to commemorate the ordeal.

My real life clients probably think the same thing but are too scared to ask.

Here is the thing. If I’m working with you, you can pretty much assume I think something about your site, your product or your service is great. But I also assume you’re not paying me a (very reasonable) hourly fee to tell you how awesome everything is and outline all the bits that that are working really well.

I’m assuming you’re asking me in to tell you what the problems are, with your site or with your products or with your online marketing, and sometimes, even if you didn’t realise it, all of these things at once.

This is an unpleasant experience.

I’m also very focused on the bottom line. If something doesn’t work, I don’t want to know the story of how you designed that ad or developed that website feature or why you adopted a particular strategy or where your development bottlenecks are. In fact, if you persist in telling me, I may hang up on you. Because those things do not matter to the end user, and the best thing I can do to help you is vigorously maintain my perspective as an outsider to bring you unfiltered feedback.

The clients I click best with, the clients who get the most value for their money are the ones who are prepared for tough love, who are hungry for real information, who don’t have their egos tied to their products, and who sit on the other end of the phone and say “Bring it, bitch.”

These are the clients who get t-shirts.

The back of that t-shirts says “And my business is better for it.”

Since the whole Moli.com thing, I’ve been thinking about what they could have done better. Specifically, I’ve been wondering about what someone in PR might think of the whole thing, and how the real PR experts punching way above Moli’s weight class might have managed a similar issue.

Recently I found at least one version of the answer in B.L. Ochtman’s blog. While I was busy chastising Moli.com, social media strategy consultant BL was busy being emailed to death by Adacio and - wait for it - PR Week, which bills itself as “the online resource for up to the minute Public Relations and PR Jobs”:

The irony of the fact that my trip to email hell for the past two days was caused by a PR company is not lost.

But that’s pretty much the only funny thing about the “mistake” Adicio.com made when they sent out 3200+ emails to an OPEN list of PR Week newsletter subscribers and then re-sent that message and the passwords of everyone on the list to each person as many as 1000 times over the next 24 hours.

PR Week set up a portal page relating to “the incident.” Editor-in-Chief Julia Hood issued an apology on the PR Week US website, as did contractor Adicio. They even appear to have covered their own story. All of that, on paper, is at first glance excellent and transparent management of a PR crisis. However, according to their own version of events:

PRWeek first posted an apology letter from Adicio on Tuesday evening. Editor- in-chief Julia Hood followed up with a personal e-mail and apology to all affected parties on Wednesday night.

Wednesday? Wednesday night? This amazes me. These are PR people, talking to other PR people, and yet they seem unable to manage their own bloody PR in the aftermath of a major cock up. I mean, what exactly was Julia doing for 48 hours? Was there some other, more pressing issue she needed to be dealing with in her capacity as the editor of an online-only resource for “up the minute” PR? Was she drinking mojitos at DEMO with Judy?

The PR Week story on their own crisis is, ironically, tagged crisis communications. When browsing through some of those articles, I was astounded to find lots of holding forth about how the old rules don’t apply any more, but virtually nothing about how to actually respond to crisis in a 24/7 digital world. No wonder poor Julia didn’t seem to know how to move any faster.

The only thing they seem to have done right is responded to B.L. Ochman’s posted blog demand for a $161 refund for the Microsoft Office 2008 she had to buy after the “incident” rendered Word and Entourage unusable, and one of the iPods they talked about in every one of the thousands of emails they sent her over and over again.

PR Week’s response? Julia Hood called B.L. to tell her PR Week was FedExing a cheque and one of the iPods that was the prize in the errant emails. That, at least, is doing something.

Judy Balint at Moli.com please take note: I’d quite like an iPod Touch.

Please join me in a BINGO adventure as we score MOLI.com on their PR ability, commitment to transparency, crisis management rating, and customer service skills.

Believe me, even I am getting a bit bored with how shit they are at all of this, and I regret that this post will only be of interest to venture capitalists, DEMO attendees, TechCrunch readers, Valleywag whores, users of Wikipedia, members of social networks, people in PR, people in marketing, people in communications, and those who want to see how MOLI.com finally responded to being caught astroturfing. A small audience, in other words.

Due to the fact that MOLI has racked up quite a few chits on their Bingo card, it’s a bit long. So in honor of Valleywag, who covered this story last night, “more after the jump.”

Read more »

I don’t make a secret of the fact I work from home. A client calling in is, for example, quite likely to hear me rattling around and making a cup of tea, or notice the television in the background when I’m walking through the living room on the cordless. However, given that homeworkers are generally perceived as being less professional, I generally try keep as invisible as possible facts like:

• My husband has hauled me out of the shower to take critical calls, leaving me standing naked in my living room, dripping water all over the carpet while getting verbal agreement to sign for a project;
• I occasionally take calls in bed, or go lie on the bed in the dark of the bedroom when really trying to focus on what someone is saying;
• My normal business attire is pajamas.

The dog, however, has no such respect for business clients. She also has no concept of telephone calls, so when I’m pacing up and down the hallway talking to someone, she tends to think I’m talking to her. Delighted, she races up and down behind me, wagging her tail and bouncing off the occasional wall.

On this particular evening, however, the dog stopped her racing around to join me on the bed, where she proceeded to roll around on her back while I talked and listened and talked some more, every now and then giving her a little pat to send her off into another spasm of ecstasy.

And at some point, the following conversation took place:

Client: So what do you think?
Me: Really interesting. The only issue is that it’s going to be… oh my God, Eimear, did you just pee on me?
Client: (pause) What?
Me: Sorry, my dog just… peed on me.
Client: (pause) Well, that’s the height of professionalism.

To be fair, it wasn’t that much pee.

Apparently the fact that Steve Jobs is an ego centric jackass is somehow news. It’s been highlighted lately by his rejection of a fan’s request for a photo while Jobs was out on the MacWorld floor:

Thinking a girl — in this case, a fangirl, me — will never get anything if she doesn’t ask for it, I lightly touched his arm and said “hi”. He looked at me, and I blushingly asked if it would be okay for me to ask if I could take a picture with him… He told me curtly, flatly that I was rude. And turned his back to me.

Every nerd boy on the internet is running around shrieking ZOMG, Steve Jobs is rude! (like that’s news) and totally missing the real story. The real story here is not the Steve Jobs is rude, it’s that Steve Jobs is gay.

Because the woman he turned down? Is Violet Blue. Not only is she the web’s leading “open source sex” blogger, vlogger, and podcaster; best selling author of titles like The Ultimate Guide to Cunnilingus and The Smart Girl’s Guide to Sex; sex columnist for the SF Chronicle and a UC Berkeley lecturer…

…but seriously, have you seen this woman? If she asked for a piece of chewing gum from my mouth, I would give it to her. And weep with gratitude.

Steve Jobs doesn’t know what he’s missing. Because Violet, she likes the geek boys. A lot.