It’s not always practical to copy the big fish when it comes to consulting. You’re one person, and they’re a massive organization, with backshop support, after all. Still, just because you’re not Ernst & Young or KPMG, doesn’t mean you can’t employ some of their tactics to net you some business.
What does a potential client want from a consultant? Well, an affordable rate, for one. But an even more basic consideration is “Can this person do the job?” If you happen to be a web developer, it’s easy to answer the question. Just point the client in the direction of previous work. If you’re offering more high level, strategic consulting services, it’s not so simple, since you probably didn’t deliver a publicly viewable product.
That’s where the case study becomes useful. Even if you’re bound by a non-disclosure agreement, you can usually produce a document outlining the basics of your past engagements (still, be sure to always check with your client first). You’ve no doubt seen them before, since every big firm offers them via their website. Lucky for us, since we have a lot of source texts to work from. Let’s look at what makes a good case study.
Read the rest of this entry »
Stealing on the internet is easy. It takes very little effort for someone to copy your work and slap their name on it. Almost every month I hear of a photographer, blogger, or designer I know whose work gets used without their permission. With all this copyright infringement going around, I’d be surprised if a majority of WWD readers claim that this has never happened to them.
When it does happen, what should you do?
Read the rest of this entry »
I recently had an email exchange with a photographer. He was unhappy that I used an image from his web site on one of my blogs without a proper credit or link back to his site. I took a look at the blog page in question - from 2005 - and noted that indeed, I did not credit him or link back to his site. So I removed the image immediately and replaced it with a Wikipedia Creative Commons image.
The photographer was not satisfied. He asked that I pay him retroactively for using his image. I argued with him that the blog was not a commercial one, it didn’t get very much traffic at all, and even though I did not link back to his image, it was embedded using the actual image HTML code from his site so all anyone had to do was view the image to see the source. He persisted. After further research, I learned that I was in the wrong.
To find out more about photo rights on the Web, I turned to a lawyer, Deena B. Burgess, Esq., Managing Partner with the Law Offices of Deena Burgess, and gave her a few scenarios to comment on. Here is what she had to say.
Read the rest of this entry »
It’s okay if you don’t recognize the name Nancy Duarte. You know her work. She is a Principal at Duarte, the agency that designed and produced Al Gore’s stunning Keynote presentation for the movie An Inconvenient Truth. When a business presentation is done really well it can be magical and change your perceptions, as anyone who has gathered for a Steve Jobs keynote knows all too well.
Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Ms. Duarte as she is getting ready for the August release of her new book, slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations. While her firm is best known to the public for their work on An Inconvenient Truth, they boast a client list of many Fortune 500 companies.
Not everyone is going to have the chance to deliver their presentation in front of millions with a 50 foot screen behind them. As web workers, we’ve all suffered through those webinars where you have half an eye on the boring, dry PowerPoint in the WebEx window and half an eye on your email. A few of us have had to present such webinars. They’re tough. You have no feedback from body language or eye contact. After all, you can’t hear people nodding and smiling, you can only imagine their nose hitting the keyboard as they doze off. These presentations can be almost as painful for the presenter as the attendee.
Never fear. Nancy offers us some tips for engaging an audience while presenting remotely…
Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve written before about the importance of personal branding for the web worker. But there’s one piece of that brand that’s been growing in importance, yet is often ignored: your avatar.
In blog comments, on Twitter, on Facebook, on Skype, in instant messenger clients (the list goes on) the first impression that many people will get of your identity is through the tiny image that you choose for yourself. People who have already established their own logos and branding can just go with those; many others opt for the cell phone or MacBook photo. But there are plenty of other choices for getting a distinctive or customized avatar. Here’s a roundup of some of your options. Read the rest of this entry »
A recent story on news.com identifies the need for awareness by employees of what is acceptable in a public facing personal blog. On the Patent Troll Tracker blog (now hidden from public view), the author just recently identified himself as a Cisco employee. As a result, two lawyers in Texas filed a suit alleging author Rick Frenkel of smearing their good name and causing harm to a patent case against Cisco.
This case raises some complex issues regarding corporate and personal blogging and we’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject.
What comprises an effective blogging policy? How do you go about developing such a policy? Do employers have authority in dictating what an employee blogs about, given the company’s name is never mentioned? Do you know if your company has a blogging policy? If so, is it too restrictive?
Shortly after posting a recent article about Google Documents, I was emailed by a director in the Google Documents team requesting more information on how I use the service. Additionally, a post about Google Gears spurned a blog comment/email discussion with a member of the Google Gears team about how Google Gears could be leveraged with other sites around the web.
This post isn’t about praising Google, rather merely using them as an example of good customer service. Google is a large corporation with thousands of employees focused thousands of products/initiatives. Yet, they take the time to reach out their customer base to enhance their products and gain feedback from users.
Read the rest of this entry »
Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny recently blogged about a proto-trend he’s seeing in the workplace: meetings that advertise and enforce a “no laptop” rule. The idea behind this is that if people don’t really find a meeting important enough to pay attention to, they shouldn’t be there, and that we’ve reached the point where such common courtesy needs to be demanded rather than assumed.
It’s an attractive idea to anyone who has ever attended a meeting at which most of the people were paying more attention to their screen and keyboard than to the presenter. But in our view, this seemingly innocuous rule just makes the laptop a scapegoat for the underlying problems, which have little to do with laptops (or other devices) themselves.
Read the rest of this entry »
