Micro Marketing For Big Organizations

When you use the Internet well, you may never see clients face-to-face. In fact, it can be more efficient not to, although the personal contact helps with initial negotiations.

I’ve been interviewing customers on the phone and writing case studies for a data storage system vendor. When I finish recording an interview with my digital recorder, I upload it to the project site on www.basecamphq.com for the transcriptionist to work on. When she’s done, she notifies me of the uploaded transcription. I download it, write a draft, and upload that to the project site for my client.

The editor calls and we discuss revisions on the phone. Sometimes there aren’t any, but if there are, I make the ones we work out. Then I upload the second draft for the client to read, and the client uploads his edit request. I make those edits, upload the final draft, and the client takes it for publication.

The whole process goes a lot more quickly than even email submission would.

I don’t recommend rush jobs based on this, but I’ve been turning around 1,000 word case studies in a week or less from interview to final draft. Most of that time depends on the work load of the transcriptionist, the editor, and the client.

Some people have reported problems using basecamphq.com with large group projects where they do everything online - and I mean everything: to-do lists, task reminders,  searching large hierarchical project files. For a smaller project and team, it seems to work fine.

I never trust any online data repository completely, so I always have local copies of my own work. And so do my other teammates. With the very linear project flow from one of us to the other, it works fine.

When you’re a consultant, patience is a virtue - a necessity, really. Clients are so busy these days it takes around three months (or more) to get from initial discussion by phone to proposal to project approval to final work and payment.

Small and large clients are so overloaded they need to outsource. As a consultant and contractor, your problem is getting them to move on the work they need. We’re dealing with 20-year-old approval structures, from a time when executives kept their fingers everywhere and signed off on all of it. Now executive management has no time, and many department-level managers have no signature authority.

The end result is a bit like the gap between editorial acceptance and actual publishing in any magazine. The longest I’ve gone is eight months between the first discussion about writing a technical article and acceptance of the final draft.

When I designed and managed semiconductor products for the traditional analog, battery power and networking markets, I was constantly pressured to get products out yesterday. Schedules were unrealistically tight, but competition was heavy. If your product missed the market window, you lost market share.

Kind of makes you wonder what lowly place marketing tactics and collateral have in corporate and small-business America.