“Someday we should shoot a little video for YouTube of freelancers scurrying around, frantically creating all the documents and preparing all the listed arrangements, then donning our space suits, screwing on our bubble helmets, and walking down the long corridor into the space center, getting strapped in ready for launch . . . . and waiting, waiting, waiting . . . . until our skin sags, our flesh falls away, and we die there. . .waiting.”

OK, it’s not that bad, but in this business you’ve got to play the numbers game. If you aren’t marketing yourself while doing billable work, one day soon there won’t always be billable work.

Working for yourself is rewarding, but only if you have The Right Stuff.

Certainly, my three children may have altered my career from a traditional corporate trajectory, but I think the necessity of flexibility resulted in an even better, more innovative career.

And because I had three children in five year — and I loved what I do — I created a company called High Tech Connect. Over the past 14 years, my business has benefited hundreds of clients and consultants, connecting people who otherwise would not have found each other, generating millions of dollars in business.

Will three (or more) kids kill a career? Only if you think it will. And if you think you can, you can create an even better, more rewarding and prosperous career.

One communications consultant I know likens the discipline as that like working as a veterinarian. The vet deals with animals ranging from the parakeet to the potbellied pit and the myriad of dog and cat breeds in between. Here’s the best part: None of the vet’s patients can tell the vet where it hurts, how bad it hurts or, in general, what’s wrong. And that’s why some people maintain it’s harder to become a veterinarian than a medical doctor.

Do you see any similarity with clients? Let’s not go there.

Smashing Magazine, one of our regular reads on the web, recently ran an article entitled, Turning All Clients Into Dream Clients (or Common Client Difficulties) and you should take a look. In a nutshell, here’s their advice:

• Doesn’t Know What They Want
• Feels Left Out of Process
• Changes Mind Midway
• Doesn’t Understand Web Design
• Doesn’t Provide Enough Information
• Expectations Are Too High
• Struggles to Pay on Time

Complain, complain, complain.

Look: Here’s my point: You are working, for the most part, in the communications business and, by definition, are supposed to be better a communicator than your clients. That’s why they hire you in the first place. All the complaints listed above are just the table stakes required for you to even think about playing the game at the big table with the high rollers. If what Smashing magazine has outline above is the stuff that makes you crazy, then you need to get with a career counselor before you waste any more of your precious time … or that of the clients. Really.

What do you think?

Business at High Tech Connect is up, up, up and, apparently, we aren’t the only one. Online freelance marketplace Elance just released its Q4 2010 highlights and is reporting both year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter growth — during a quarter that is normally slow.

For the fourth calendar quarter of 2010, Elance reports employers spent $27M through its service for freelance work. Compared to the previous year, that’s a 44% increase.

As if that isn’t impressive enough, here’s the kicker: Growth from Q3 to the normally slower Q4 was 11%. Let’s be sure we see that: During Q4, normally the slowest quarter of the year, the spend on freelancers through Elance grew 11% compared to Q3.  Thanksgiving? Christmas? Bah, Humbug! Perhaps Dickens’ Christmas Carol gets turned upside down this year and the best gift we could get is the chance to work.

At High Tech Connect our consultant placement business is booming — so much so I had to cancel my planned Week Off this week. (It’s far more fun to make magic for my clients than tackle neglected closets and household repairs.)

At the risk of sounding pedantic and grumpy, I’m constantly amazed how marketing communications professionals can do a such a poor job of marketing themselves. Then, the whole self-marketing communications problem is exacerbated as more and more people work remotely. Distance can breed low awareness or, worse, lack of appreciation.

Gina Trapani has thought long and hard about these issues and her insights have come to the attention of Fast Company who has given her a platform. One of her most pithy, accurate insights appears above:  How Telecommuters Stay Close.

Trapani does an excellent job of running down the different ways to use technology to stay close but doesn’t overlook the human touch such as making sure you visit everyone, and that means everyone, when you do make your way to the client’s office.

What are your tips for staying close from afar? How do you stay top of mind even if you’re in another time zone?

We are all more comfortable hanging around with people who are like us. It is a lot easier to pop into a discussion with other copywriters, or other web designers, or other management coaches, than it is to get engaged in discussions with a group focused on manufacturing, or financial services, or small business strategies.

But there are many, many benefits to making the effort to “move in” with your target market, to become at home in their world:

* Get advance intelligence. If there are changes coming to your clients’ industry, if there are going to be shifts in the way they do business, you’ll learn about it much more quickly from them than you will from either your peers or from the media. [more]

Getting advance intelligence about your clients’ business is priceless.  It might tip you off that there are new opportunities, or it might give you the ‘heads up” that it’s time for you to reinvest in your new business efforts.

That’s what many of our corporate clients do daily in the high-tech marketing industry. Full-time employment isn’t even close to a 40-hour job any more. Seems they are not alone.

Jason Fried, a CNN reporter and author of a new book called Rework, says, “The modern office has become an interruption factory. You can’t get work done at work anymore.”

I’m thrilled on Fridays when usually only one other team member is there in our small office — because I get SO much done. And when I need to crank out an important article or focus on a strategic project, I’m always more efficient and creative between 10 pm and 2 am. Too many college cram sessions, I guess. On the other end of the spectrum, Michelle Stewart gets up at 5 am to plow through her email and tackle client issues before they even log in for the day.

The point is, not everyone works efficiently in a traditional office and this is why clients have reached out to High Tech Connect for home-based expert help over the past 14 years. We were freaking visionaries, way ahead of our time!

So how about some solutions? Jason says there are a lot of things you can do to discourage interruption at work and give people longer stretches of uninterrupted time to get things done. Here are a few:

1. Instead of casual Fridays, how about no-talk Thursdays? Try it. You won’t believe how effective it is. On Thursdays — and you can just try this once a month if you want — no one in the office can talk to each other. You’ll be blown away by how much work you’ll get done that day. I’m just asking for one day a month to start. Try it, trust me.

2. Use passive instead of active communication tools. When someone calls your name, knocks on your door, or stops you in the hallway, you can’t avoid them. Even if you try, you’re already distracted. So, instead of relying on so much face-to-face communication and collaboration — what I like to call “active” communication — try more passive methods of communication. Use e-mail. Use instant messaging. Use collaboration software. Here’s why: If people don’t want to pay attention, they can turn that tool off. They can hide it. They can put it away. You can’t put away a knock on your door or someone calling your name. But you can quit your e-mail app for a few hours. Then, when you’re ready, you can open it up — on your own schedule — and get back to people.

3. Cancel your next meeting. Or just don’t attend it. I’m not suggesting you boycott all meetings — just the next one. Life will go on. And all that stuff you thought you had to talk about with eight other people around a table will get worked out some other way. You’ll gain an hour of time you can spend on more important things. And so will those eight other people. Work can happen without that next meeting. Once you recognize that meetings aren’t as necessary as you thought, they’ll become a last resort instead of a first resort.

Here’s the entire CNN article and video from Jason.

What do you do to minimize interruptions at your job?

The project begins. The client has a clear expectation about what the deliverable should look like.  The texture, color, shape and size.  You’re the marketing communications person, not the client, and this puts you at a disadvantage. By definition, you’re the better communicator of the two, or you should be.

Then there’s the second scenario:  The client has, at best, a vague notion of what she wants but will let you know when she sees it and now you’re working in Nordstrom, hoping you have something on the floor she’s going to love. And that you don’t burn up so many hours letting her try things on that the project becomes hopelessly unprofitable.

Freelance Switch has a post you might want to read, A Method for Meeting Client Expectations.  I sincerely hope you don’t learn too many new things in this post because you probably need to be at a more advanced, competitive level.  On the other hand, you really need to have these lessons incorporated deeply into your consulting practice. For example…

On some instances, I’ve shown clients clips of my work to show them the different options in tone they can use; otherwise, they may think all copy is the same. For example, do they want short, punchy headlines? Do they want the content with bullets? Do they want things written in first- or third-person tone? I go right to the nitty gritty, because the more information you have, the better you can produce what the client has hired you to do. Just because they cannot articulate themselves doesn’t mean it’s a free for all–you have to know how to get your clients to express what they want. (And most of you know, that’s more than asking, “What do you want?”)

Here’s a link to the entire post. What tips can you share?

Recently, Shankman made a post I think deserves your attention. Ever since the first issue of Fast Company back in 1995, and before that, in everything Tom Peters ever tried to teach us, we’ve been aware that we — you, me, him, her — are the brand.  In my case, my company and my personality are almost synonymous. What I’ve learned is that many marketing consultants don’t manage their own personal brand with the same energy and diligence as they’ve applied to their clients. And that’s the problem.

During the past 20 years the “company man” has become a fossil.  Today, every one needs to be a star — a super star — every day.  And no one else is going to manage your brand for you.

Here’s an excerpt from Shankman’s post:

It is no one else’s fault if your personal brand isn’t how you want it to be. It’s not Facebook’s fault. It’s not Twitter’s fault. It’s not LinkedIn’s fault. It’s not the fault of someone who wrote on your wall, or tagged you in a photo. [more]

Shankman’s post is scarcely more than what I excerpt, but I encourage you to follow him because whatever he has to say is important.

His post springs from Pizza Hut hiring an intern to manage its social media strategy and this sparks … well … a rant from Goldsborough that hiring an intern to manage social media is tantamount to hiring an intern to manage customer service. Take a quick look:

Would you ever put an entry-level employee in charge of your brand perception, advertising or customer service? That’s what you’re doing when you hire a twintern or someone who’s new to the professional world to manage one or more of your key online consumer touchpoints. Try putting that last sentence in a PowerPoint deck as your strategy and present it to your boss. Then let me know what the reaction was if you still have a job. [entire post]

At High Tech Connect, we’ve seen a dramatic surge in demand for consultants with social media skills and experience and we’ve drawn the conclusion that anyone in marketing MUST be fluent in social media.  But we’re also seeing an economic squeeze that’s driving the work to the millenials who may know how to talk social media but don’t have the more important skills of how to help a company create demand.

We’re watching this topic very closely.  What do you think?