Marketing as Dating: let's hook up and exchange money for services rendered

lot of people I talk to are in dark places right now. They see excess office furniture and the people who used it carted out on dollies and they panic. Belt tightening can be inevitable. Even the parades of former co-workers dead-man-walking out the front door seems understandable to a degree.

Hands down the most common concern I hear from people contemplating the jump to freelance work or even just sideline freelance work is how to make contacts. Networking is creepy and makes stalkers of us all. Yesterday I heard an analogy that changed the way I think about networking for business contacts. It was a dating analogy, which blew my mind. Dating is all about prettying yourself up and making as many impressions if you can till someone gives you the time of day. It's so obvious.

Be a good listener

The dating scene seems a little quiet out there, doesn't it? Before the economopocalypse, everyone was shouting from every direction and a dollar spent on advertising was worth a dollar. It's no breaking news that many companies have shrunk or collapsed their marketing budgets lately, or as I now look at it, every other guy at the party voluntarily contracted larengitus. It's an unusal opportunity to shove that better looking guy off his feet and steal market share while your competition sits mute and forgotten. I'd say a dollar is just plain worth more when it doesn't have to work as hard.

You can't be afraid to be a hustler

I'm not proud of this next part, but it's only because the looks bad when using the dating analogy. If your client base shrinks by the numbers due to their own internal budgeting, you don't kick them to the curb; you cheat on them. Same analogy about marketing dollars, now is a great time to mad hustle for more clients. And not just regular clients. Consider married clients too. Some clients might get turned on by the aggressive swagger of an upstart leveraging against their AOR's more conservative, respectful stance.

Grow the relationship organically

All that furniture and deadwood wasn't bringing in clients; self-promotion and sales efforts do. A plant won't grow if the leaves all shrink. It needs to grow new leaves. The leaves in this horticultral analogy are one-off projects to help keep client money flowing. Now is the time to propose brave new areas of branding and promoting businesses, now that social media has removed some of the financial hurdles of traditional media. Presenting creative strategies and aligning partners on a project basis, like bringing a squirrel out of a bush with a peanut is what will grow those leaves.

Try, try again

When you're trying to woo someone and they turn you down flat, you don't crawl back in your car and leave, you step up and try someone else. I always tell the story clubbing with an old friend; it was late and everyone wanted to go but before he'd leave he ran out and hit on about fourteen women, struck out fourteen times, and we were off. He believed in the numbers game, and so should you.

On the surface of it, everything I've said follows the rules of common sense, but I believe people need to hear it some times. Getting noticed is the first step to getting laid. I mean, paid.

Entrepreneurial Idea: Get People off their Asses and right back on their Asses

There was a Thunderdome-style Econompocalyptic melee of the survivors to decide who got my chair when my last full time job went south. All those seats and computers just gathering dust. There's got to be a lightbulb joke about how many people are finding themselves displaced from their offices these days. What a waste.

Then I read Springwise's article on an online marketplace for desk space in the UK that practically begs to come to life here in North American urban business centres. Email me if you're on board.

Desk Space Genie uses a simple online real estate business model to allow a) people with empty office space, and b) people with asses to find each other. Companies with empty desk space, which is all the rage these days, post beautiful pictures of wood floors and tall ceilings, their availability, and ammenities like a rental site, then monetize the space as soon as a qualified applicant shows up with a banker's box full of stuff and the cash. The leasees gain the legitimacy of actual office space and a reason to shower and dress in the morning again.

Freelancing isn't always easy, and people often realize they miss the separation of work and home life, the daily banter of living individuals and the legitimacy of a bonafide office address. Companies realize they also miss the energy and banter of living people and see rentals and sublets as an additional revenue stream. The UK model offers broadband, utilities and security as part of a flat monthly fee. It's also a great way to situate yourself into a network (read: into networking situations) for client and customer alike.

Who wants to help me write that lightbulb joke?

The Death of Newsprint: Birth of an Idiocracy?

People love the dry rub of ink on blackened fingers. They love wrestling with the turgid crease of a tabloid format, flipping pages in tight spaces like subway trains and coffee tables. People love the flyers than rain out and the special edition sections and the search for the nomadic crossword section. And until you can walk into a midwestern coffee house to find a luncheon crowd of families and truckers hunched over their phones, scrolling the headlines on a two inch screen, I'm not ready to eulogize the printed word just yet.

I'm an optimist at heart. I'm also reminded that when the camera was invented, people decried the death of painting, cheerily claiming the artform to be obsolete and forgettable.

Newspapers are feeling the Economopocalypse like many industries. Some have actually shut down, and others threaten to follow suit. Some people mourn. Some people work to reinvent the business model. Some people cheer for the woodlands. Others see another nail in the coffin of accountable journalism.

Traditional journalism is definitely in trouble. A small but increasing number of news agencies have implemented some form of citizen journalism into their ranks, as a force for good. The democratization of the news. A grassroots level of consumer-level involvement. There's an obvious argument about fact-checking and accountability that's been debated since the day Wikipedia threw out their welcome mat and can wait for another day. I want to talk about stupification.

Princeton did a study that showed how the loss of a local newspaper has an "immediate and measurable impact on local political engagement". The fear is that in the same way TV makes us stupid, the internet is going to make us stupid and lazy; and when it comes to internet news coverage, users favour more sensationalistic national headlines and viral entertainment over local issues. The internet is the perfect venue for indepth coverage, but people are more likely to stay for the salient points and click to the next headline rather than reading "cover to cover".

Dark economic times don't make people stupider, but they're coniciding with a point in history where some percentage of the masses drank the kool-aid and bought into flashy adult edutainment rather than boring and proper civic discourse. Evidence of this exists in the number of editorial departments that left community news to focus on the more lucrative tabloid format, increasing stimulation and decreasing decimination (of actual news).

We'll have to wait and see what happens. All I know is: heads are rolling, and one of my local papers had two typos on the cover a few days ago. My hope is that people will enjoy dumbed down journalism or tabloid entertainment for what it is, but recognize that citizen journalism and the internet are tools for increased education and enlightenment and choose a nice balance in their lives. Namaste, readers.

Design Contests: a lot of losers and one Winner (who is also a loser)

If spec work is a cancer on the Advertising & Design industry, then "design contest" sites are full-blown AIDS.

Too harsh? Let's begin. In the beginning, there was pro bono work. Pro-bono work is work taken on for free, with no expectation of payment outside of any out-of-pocket expenses. The typical client is a non-profit, and people feel a boost of altruism livens their spirits.

Spec work, short for speculative work (short for "I'm speculative over whether I'm going to get paid for this or not) is work taken on with little more than a handshake (no contract, no deposit, no binding agreement). The danger is that the client will either reject, or in some cases steal your work, leaving you unpaid for countless hours of toil. Spec work makes the typical designer into a non-profit who's lack of blood sugar makes them feel a boost of swooning.

Lately I've been getting a few tweets (twitter messages, for the uninitiated) about "design contest" sites; "contest" being the operative word.

Here's the skinny: a client posts a brief looking for work with a typical budget of between $30 and $250. Hordes of would-be designers begin churning out work, all whittled down to the low-end of that $30 - 250 spectrum, then sit back and patiently await the client's verdict on their work. In these contests, there are a lot of losers, and one winner, who is also a loser, with $30 in his pocket.

I understand how economic downturn and whackjobs like the Arnell Group pissing through $1.2 million to rebrand Pepsi's look and feel certainly do claw at John Q. Businessowner's ability and desire to pay a premium for something as benign as a logo treatment. I get that. But spec work is at best, a potentially syphillitic blind date, and if this same business model were applied in any other industry, they would innevitably crumble flat into a Economopocalypictic landscape.

Case in point: I'm hungry. I put out the word on a "cuisine contest" site and 2,173 would-be chefs looking for work each make me a full-course dinner, and then 2,173 would-be chefs sit back and patiently await my verdict on their work.

I elect one (1) who will receive some compensation for their time and expenses, but remember, there were a few thousand entrants, so the real contenders had to lowball their rates to remain competitive. 2,172 would-be chefs now go to the next "I'm hungry" posting to design another dinner hoping one day they will get paid for their work.

I was going to use an image of scrimage at a UNICEF supply drop, which illustrates a similar kind of desperation, but the eyes of the hungry in the Sudan have more self-respect than this, so it just didn't fit. Spec work is cancer, we all agree. This trend towards "design contesting" may not be actual AIDS, but it is certainly a degenerative disease that eats the meat right off the bones, so play safe out there.