I imagine most freelancers are superstitious to some extent. After all, a call from out of the blue seems like divine intervention. It follows there must be a way to draw these enlightening bolts in our direction. By writing this, I fear I may be breaking the spell. But what the heck. Maybe it will work for you.

Actually, it gets worse. I invented a deity for freelancers some years ago. To tell the truth, I discovered her. Remember those periods when you were really busy and didn’t know how you were going to get it all done? You may be in one now. Remember when a client changed the schedule and there was a fatal clash of dates? This time you’re really screwed. And then at the last minute the phone would ring (in those days it would be a call and not an email) and one or other of the conflicting clients would change a date and your bacon would be saved.

This happened consistently enough to get the feeling that someone up there was looking out for me, so I gave her a name, Schedula – the patron saint of diaries. I would speak to Schedula, ask for favours, put my trust in her – me a rampant atheist, how strange is that? But it seemed to work. Job followed job in logical succession. Schedula always seemed to work her magic.

To be honest, I have neglected Schedula over the last few years and I haven’t used my marketing feint either. Perhaps that’s the problem. It’s nothing to do with the recession. I have unplugged my psyche from universal space time. My work antennae have stopped transmitting. I am no longer visible on the right wave lengths. But that’s going to change. Schedula, forgive me. I have forsaken you. I am open for business, rearing to go.

I discovered something else a bit spooky. I can bring other people luck. A friend would call to complain how quiet things were and bingo, a few days later their phone would be off the hook. It happened again quite recently. Try it if you like; call if you need work. I will only cost you the price of a phone call. I’m not some rip-off medium. Anyway, it would be nice to hear from you. But hurry, I could be getting busy quite soon.

Jim did some work on my house, good work. And not just decorating; roofing, rendering and a bit of plumbing. I ran around like a skivvy buying materials so he could keep up the good work. One day I made a joke about something he had done, left a valve shut, it was very trivial, but he took it the wrong way and walked off the job. I left grovelling apologies on his mobile and two days later he turned up as if nothing had happened. I even managed to make a joke about having to be careful not to rub him up the wrong way. But from then on, I handled him with kid gloves.

Jim is quick to bear grudges, quick to take offense, and he never forgets a real or imagined sleight. There was a perpetual ‘them’ or ‘they’ who conspired to do things the wrong way; who were out to frustrate him. Don’t get him started on parking wardens or Polish decorators. When he finished my job, I was glad to have him out of the house; glad not to have his brooding, sinister and small minded perspective to contend with. But whenever it rains, especially when it pours, I am grateful for the work he did on my slates and guttering; my roof is like the proverbial duck’s back.

I had not spoken to Jim for over a year, not since his father died. He’s not the type you want to engage in conversation; well you can’t in fact, all you can do is provide him with an opportunity to shed some more invective. But I was walking past his white van the other day and said hello. At first he ignored me, perhaps he hadn’t heard me. So I said it again, louder. He looked at me and said ‘Fuck Off’. ‘I was only trying to say hello,’ I said. ‘And I’m telling you to Fuck Off,’ he said. He meant it.

I realised at the time that something must have snapped inside him and didn’t take it personally; it was too bizarre. I later discovered he had had a nervous breakdown. Even though the attack was unprovoked and quite irrational, I am not sure it was entirely undeserved. I had thought and said enough things about Jim that merited at least a good Fuck Off. He almost certainly despises me; my type. In a way it was quite invigorating. We spend too much energy bottling up our feelings. Certainly he has, from what little I know of him.

Jim must be in a very dark place. He has no insight to shine a light on his demons. No wife to tell him to pull himself together. It’s all out there. I fear things might get worse, that Jim will flip into psychosis. One of his customers on the street is a retired professor of psychiatry. I wonder if he’ll tell him to fuck off. Maybe he should.

P.S. In case your decorator has just thrown a wobbly, Jim is not his real name.

When does life end? For Ken it ended abruptly. He lost his balance on a traffic island and fell under a cement truck. Horrified onlookers turned away from the grisly sight. Others covered their mouths, retching. The truck driver didn’t feel the impact but realised something was wrong when he saw people gesticulating in his wing mirror. Ken’s head did not escape the ten ton onslaught. His memories and daily routines, such as the trip to the corner shop, had been reduced to mush.

Passing drivers slowed to gawp at the body. A builder on a scaffold described the scene to someone he had been chatting to on his mobile phone. A man of military bearing returning from the same corner shop to which Ken was heading carefully unfolded the business section of his newspaper, the part he never read, and placed it over the new synthesis that was Ken’s head. News of stock market turmoil took on a more sinister hue as blood seeped through the headlines.

The truck driver arrived to inspect the scene. He was pale, shaking and looked round for support but none came. He had not seen Ken. No one saw him trip. The inner ear infection that had been troubling his balance remained undiagnosed. The ambulance siren heralded a change of mood. Those with jobs to go to, headed off. The drivers behind hooted to encourage the gawpers to move on. A police car arrived. The two young officers decided against lifting the red blotter. Traffic was diverted and the onlookers were corralled behind blue and white tapes. A shocked neighbour identified Ken who apparently lived alone but had a sister somewhere, New Zealand possibly.

However, Ken was not entirely gone from this world. True, he had forgotten the reason for his outing that morning, to buy some cigarettes. And although his thoughts were unstructured, there was a lot going on within the hyperactive mousse formed by the merger between the logical left and the intuitive right sides of his brain. The compulsions that once crowded his daily thoughts had evaporated into the traffic fumes and he was thinking clearly in five dimensions. Had it been possible to capture this outpouring, he would have won at least a Booker and a Palm D’Or. Decades-old sexual encounters he rehearsed in his masturbatory fantasies rallied to grant Ken one last volcanic orgasm. In short, Ken’s fall from grace had produced in a few seconds what years of mysticism and meditation had failed to achieve, complete creative and sexual liberation.

Plastic gloves were stretched over sweaty palms – scooping Ken off the road would be a messy business. His precious DNA, four billion years in the making, would soon be swimming alongside sanitary towels and the morning’s ablutions. From the perspective of the scaffold, he struck an odd pose. Who wears brown corduroys these days? His legs were twisted awkwardly though he felt no pain. In fact he was running, running along an empty beach, splashing in the shallow waves. He felt the sand splurge between his toes and the tropical sun beat down on his red, sunburned back. The crystal clear water shimmered with a myriad tiny lenses until he dived in headlong to shatter the illusion. At first he swam low, simulating flight, his tummy almost touching the barren sand. But then the sea bed fell away and Ken became king of a rocky metropolis festooned with gently undulating fronds. Sea cucumbers trawled the avenues for detritus while clusters of star fish searched for buried treasure. A large jellyfish gently pumped its way towards the light: a regular heart beat, not Ken’s. Then through the blue-green, sun-dappled water emerged the coral mountain where tiny polyps waved their greetings and brightly coloured fish played dare among the sea anemones. Ken felt at one with nature, an equal among his fellow creatures.

The strong undercurrent had carried him beyond the sandy bay and when he looked back he could barely see the shore. But Ken was where he belonged; away from denial, away from belittlement. Back on the beach, Ken’s mother Eileen was busy with her youngest, a curly-haired little girl of around three. Ken resented this demanding infant, even more so because he was expected to play father when the child’s own father was away. He spent the rest of his life trying to escape this trap – a trap of obligation toward a mother who could not understand his pain.

Eileen didn’t look up as Ken walked tearfully towards her across the hot sand.  ‘Couldn’t she understand? I nearly drowned out there.’ That would have taught her. A man with dark skin and strong, swarthy arms had plucked him gasping from the sea and rowed him back to shore without a word. If only he had taken him back to his mother, if only he could have saved her too. As he lay in the middle of the road, Ken saw the baskets of silly baby things he would have to carry back to the car park. At least she hadn’t forgotten his snorkel this time.

The police were measuring distances, taking photographs. The truck driver sat on a low garden wall, his head in his hands. He would see these forensic images at the inquest six weeks later which would decide upon an accidental death. He had been dreading it but thankfully there were no grieving relatives to corner him, no recriminating looks. His well-rehearsed apology was not required.

Some weeks later, Ken’s half-sister Cheryl received a solicitor’s letter informing her of the news and that she had been mentioned in his will. ‘Poor old Ken, only fifty eight. Shame he never got married. At least he can keep mum company now. Still, it was nice of him to remember me.’

When someone asks me to help plan their website, there will inevitably be a discussion about representation – who or what do I represent myself as? The answer is of course, ‘as yourself’.

The tendency in the past has been for freelancers and sole traders to create a site that looks more like a company than a person. Like the Wizard of Oz, people traded behind their corporate veils hoping no one would realise it was just them and a laptop. However, no one is fooled by these chimeras; it’s fairly obvious when a minnow is masquerading as a multinational.

Give your website a distinctive voice

These dummy companies tend to be rather bland because by definition, they lack personality. Their owners cannot communicate directly with visitors. A website that has a distinctive voice will not only be more memorable, it will also generate trust. But what if you are a limited company or have a trading name? I suggest the same principle applies – give your website a distinctive voice, be yourself. If you are a partnership, give key individuals a voice.

Coming out as ourselves

The web as a social medium has had a powerful influence on the web as a marketing channel. As parents, we looked on with some alarm as our children gamed and chatted uninhibitedly with kids all over the world.  Then we got a taste for networking and realised it’s okay to reveal our friendships on Facebook or to have a profile on Linked In. In short, we felt more confident to come out as ourselves.

There can only be one you

But that of course begs the question, how can you be yourself in one arena and a facsimile of yourself in another? If you read the average profile on Linked In and then go the associated website you sometimes wonder if it’s the same person. Even if you reveal different facets of yourself in different arenas, ultimately there can only be one you.

From Web to Blog?

For many people, their sole representation on the web is now in the form of a blog. Some are highly impressive and require enormous dedication to maintain. Does that mean sole traders should close down their billboard websites and start blogging? Not while the majority of people looking for services expect to find the answer on a website.  The only reason for going to a blog is that somebody else has recommended it. It takes too much time to dig around in the hope of finding anything useful. That’s why there will always be a place for the concise, structured marketing message – a website.

Static, proposition led, one way communication	Dynamic, content led, conversational

Strike the perfect balance

Thanks to Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress, a blog can now be incorporated into a website (this site being an example). Web plus blog make a powerful combination as it allows you to deliver your concise marketing message and allows you to extemporise around the theme with articles and observations.

Twitter feeds

One benefit of having a presence in the social space is to use it to feed traffic to our blogs and websites, creating a virtuous circle. An important lubricant for this traffic is Twitter. People tweet their blogs and those of others and the number of visitors can quickly multiply. Twitter provides a perfect way to keep suppliers and clients up to date and Twitter feeds on websites are now becoming conspicuous by the absence.

To be or not to be

Another issue is whether to put up a picture of yourself. I believe they offer a valuable way to build trust, but be honest; we all looked great when we were younger and slimmer. Above all, do not substitute a picture of your darling child or cat – it’s mawkish and trust averse.

Conclusion

The best way to create a credible and trustworthy online presence is to be yourself. Give your website a distinctive voice and be open for dialogue. Use all the social networking tools to attract visitors to your site. So let me ask you – what do you think makes a good website for a sole trader?

A meeting organised by the London Communicators & Engagement Group 27/01/01

The evolution of the internet is entering a new and much darker phase. Decision making will become centralised. Totalitarian and not so overtly totalitarian regimes (such as the French apparently) are engaged in a vicious regime of cyber attacks and counter hacks. Industrial and of course political espionage is rife. Not even our secular deity Google is immune. Established ivory towers of corporate power will be consumed by the billowing cloud; it’s a winner takes all game fought in cyberspace and brought to your door by crowd sourcing. The echoes of this battle are already reverberating across our screens; that slowing of Twitter feeds and Facebook updates you experienced yesterday was the fallout from 40,000 DOS attacks taking place across the world. The good news is, we are lucky to be alive right now, to witness the dying embers of individual freedom. Enjoy it while it lasts.

With the arrival of the new internet protocol (IPv6) we will enter an ‘Internet of Things’ where ‘Locality’ is all and every pebble and household implement will have its own IP address. Your door knob will be engaged in a dialogue with your refrigerator and, should you be foolish enough to step on the bathroom scales, a Denial of Supper attack will inevitably follow. We should be worried. You have been warned. It’s time to brush up on your Mandarin.

中国下一代互联网

Though some of us struggled to grasp the central premise of David Galipeau’s presentation, the influence of technology on management structures, we knew we were in the presence of someone who has their finger firmly on the fibre optic pulse, who advises governments and corporations on how to concisely time their communications to exploit the Earth’s rotation to avert financial meltdown. We were all so impressed none of us thought to ask, ‘So what should we do?’

Just as were about to reach for the Prozac who should appear like a knight in shining armour but John Smythe, doyenne of employee engagement. The idea that decision making is becoming centralised is complete piffle; everyone knows that the most successful companies have democratised the decision making processes. When challenged to cite his research that proved the opposite, Darth Veda could only mumble vague references to unpublished research commissioned by the very same forces of darkness that are plotting our digital enslavement. Smythe had tasted blood and challenged Galipeau to a public debate, which he somewhat grudgingly accepted. Watch this space.

http://www.galipeau.com/blog/

#rabbithole

There’s a guy in reception to see you, he’s got a big black box.

What does he want?

He says he’s a creative writer.

I thought all writers were supposed to be creative.

I dunno, maybe it sounds better than writer on its own.

Whatever, why does he want to see me?

He said he’s really optimistic about our company.

I am pleased to hear it but what has this got to do with me?

Maybe this is how he chooses his clients.

I see, he just hangs out in reception of companies he’s optimistic about?

He did seem to believe he had a good reason to be here.

Spooky! Anyway what’s his name?

He didn’t say.

Can’t someone else see him – I’m busy.

He insists on seeing you.

We run an open company here, we have no secrets.

Shall I ask him to leave?

I don’t need a creative writer, everyone around here can write, okay!

He wants to help us to communicate our philosophy.

That’s what marketing does isn’t it?

Do they? Anyway I’ll ask him to leave.

Tell him I’m busy but he can leave his box of tricks. I’ll take a look at it later.

He may not be prepared to do that.

Tell him he can pick it up tomorrow, any time.

Here it is. He hopes you find it useful, it’s yours to keep.

Really! It’s huge …‘The Creative Writer’s Pack’

Go on, open it up.

I can’t, it’s locked – is he still out there?

No he left immediately, he wasn’t at all put out.

How I am supposed to open this?

You’re not going to believe this. He said, ‘Tell him to say Abracadabra.’

You’re kidding me – that’s a joke …Abracadabra!

It’s not, look it’s opening, the lid is opening!

It could be a bomb! Quick….

No, it’s full of books, old children’s storybooks…

Yeah, and they’re all crumbling to bits. I’ve had enough – tell him to come back for his box right now, call him on his mobile.

I don’t think that’s a good idea.

Are you telling me you know what this is about?

Perhaps it’s about how the power of language can create the world we live in.

So we have got to start telling each other kids stories, ‘Once up on a time there was a petrochemical company that dreamed of world domination.‘ Get real.

It’s not that simple. The creative writer uses language to help create the company we want to be.

We have a mission statement, thank you.

It’s not a mission statement, more a dialogue with our vision of the future.

Hang on a minute, I remember that book, my mother used to read that to me. How could he possibly know? I am not kidding you, those are my actual books! Those are all my books!

Anyone in corporate communication can relate to this. Someone pins you against the wall at a party and asks what you do for a living. The strained expression on your face tells your interviewer they have stumbled on to sensitive ground. Perhaps you have just been made redundant or worse. What your slightly sozzled mind is actually trying to formulate is an answer that avoids the dreaded follow up, ‘So have I have seen anything you’ve done on telly?’ As you race through the limited glossary of terms that describes our profession, all you can do is eliminate.

The first term to eliminate is ‘corporate’. It smacks of smoke stack factories and armies of pen pushers. ‘Video’ has connotations of weddings or You Tube and is likely to lead to a tedious conversation about digital cameras. And if you dare mention the word ‘training’, the words John and Cleese bubble up from the memory of some long forgotten course on telephone etiquette and you are dead in the water.

‘I work in communications,’ you offer lamely. Your interviewer immediately asks whether you know of a fixed-price, all-in-one, totally for the rest of your life mobile phone and broadband package. You stop that train of thought with the qualification, ‘business communications’, or ‘business to business communications’ or, in total desperation ‘public relations’. Still none the wiser, your interviewer suddenly realises her glass needs refreshing and you are left standing there like the gay vicar at the garden party. ‘Next time,’ you say to yourself, ‘I really must get my script for this conversation sorted out. I need a reply that eliminates all confusion and makes me look cool.’

‘So what do you do for a living?’

‘Government and private sector communications, you know, high end stuff; behaviour change, product launches, environmental awareness programmes.’

Note clever avoidance of words industrial or business and the conflation of totally different types of communication.

‘What sort of communications are they?’

‘These days it’s all about mixed media. We use a combination of live action, dramatisations, CGI and of course it’s all integrated at the back end using Web 2.0, social media, online collaboration tools, you know the sort of thing.’

Your interviewer looks at you wide eyed, she hasn’t the faintest idea what you are talking about but it sounds very cool. You quickly intervene before the next question.

‘For instance I am just working on a regular communication for a pharma company. They need to get the rank and file up to speed on their new blockbuster molecule. The whole thing is shot in a dedicated studio (virtual of course) with VT links to our roving reporters across the world. They won’t get much change out of half a mil.’

‘Sounds really cool, how exciting.’

‘The communications industry is big business these days; turns over around £3billion, bigger than advertising. But we like to stay in the background, (taps nose conspiratorially) our clients are the stars.’

The communications industry is more impressive than corporate communication and never say, ‘but no one has ever heard of us’.

‘So what’s your  job?’

‘Nothing really, I just come up with the ideas and stop the client from making too much of a hash of it. Our job is all about managing expectations.’

Quit while you’re up, never let the conversation stray into specifics, move on ever so quickly.

‘So what do you do, anything interesting?’

Jonathan Priest does something very interesting. He’s a creative writer working on high end, back end, end-to-end communication solutions.