By Richard Romano on September 1st, 2008
Day 1 here.
I confess: I live in fear of the honor bar in my hotel room. The Hyatt Regency in Chicago has one of those pressure-sensitive honor bars where if the platen detects that the weight of a snack or drink item has been removed, it registers as a purchase. I was told upon check-in that sometimes it gets overly sensitive and will charge me for items I didn’t actually touch. Then I thought back to the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and considered carefully swapping a bag of stones of an equivalent weight to a small tin of chips. But then I remembered that in the movie the sequence ended with Indiana Jones running from a giant stone sphere, and I didn’t know if the same thing would happen here. Possibly; and I’m sure the Hyatt would find a way to charge me for the giant stone sphere.
Anyway, day two of HOW Magazine’s Creative Freelancer Conference began with a slight misunderstanding on my part. See, we were told that there was going to be a “morning walk” that started at 6:00. I thought it would be a walking tour kind of thing, but as it turned out, it was actually a kind of power walk exercise thing. OK, fine: I can adapt. I can walk briskly and drink my immense coffee simultaneously with a minimum of burns. Still, it turned out to be a fun networking opportunity; I lagged behind the more hardcore power walkers and as folks got tired, they slowed down and came within my event horizon, so it proved to be an interesting flow of contacts. We walked through Millennium Park and only a group of designers would be jazzed about having their picture taken in front of what looks like a giant, reflective kidney bean.
Back at the conference, each morning began with a set of roundtable discussions; I sat in on one moderated by “Communicatrix” Colleen Wainwright about e-newsletters—bad news for printers: the idea of a printed newsletter was not even mentioned. (I considered bringing it up, but got sidetracked on other topics.)
Morning sessions included a discussion of how to work with clients, presented by Joan Gladstone of Gladstone International which, like many of the session topics, could easily be ported to other markets and industries. Some tips are fairly obvious: make deadlines, don’t overpromise, don’t underdeliver, etc., but other tips were less intuitive, such as properly timing review processes. That is, how often should the creative freelancer (or whoever is the service provider in a relationship) meet with the client to evaluate the relationship and make sure the client is happy? (What? You mean you’re surprised that this should happen at all? I confess in all my years of print buying—that is, of being the regular client of a printer—I have never been approached about evaluating our relationship. Maybe the printing industry needs to start adopting this approach.) And Ms. Gladstone also provided a sample “Client Satisfaction Survey”—also a useful idea.
The most valuable session of the day—and perhaps of the week, as I think back (sorry, I had wanted to live blog, but it alas wasn’t practical)—was called “Building a Well-Oiled Marketing Machine.” (Of course, all I could think about was the high cost of oil, but decided to play along with it.) It was conducted by Ilise Benun of Marketing Mentor (and instigator of the Morning Walkies) and Colleen Wainwright, and provided a variety of tips for creative freelancers to market themselves—and using a variety of media. (Yes, print was one of them.) I will post more about this session at the “Making Marketing Work” blog at Expert Business Source.
A crisis with another project emerged at lunch, so I had to miss the after-lunch session “How to Talk to Your Clients About Fees” (although I came in toward the end and got the gist of it). The upshot was, basically, don’t be embarrassed about it. Fine.
Cartoonist Lloyd Dangle closed out the day with an entertaining and informative session on contracts and copyrights (sure, it doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that would be entertaining, but you’d be surprised; including a cartoon of a giant imaginary salami helps).
I met Lloyd in person at dinner in the restaurant pub a few hours later, as he and several others swept in and I got caught in their wake and ended up at their table. Lloyd was there with another illustrator and they both had their sketch books and Lloyd sketched me as we all talked (I’m not bad; I’m just drawn that way). I got to get inside the mind of an illustrator. Now I need serious therapy.
After dinner, I went back down to the conference room to have a peak at the much-ballyhooed “business review,” where by professionals would evaluate the marketing materials of some of the freelancers in attendance. I felt rather voyeuristic, but I overheard some interesting comments, which I will also discuss at a later time at “Making Marketing Work.” I left somewhat early because I wanted to watch Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. And thus ended Day 2….
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