A fascinating lesson in business ethics

I've been watching an interesting lesson unfold this week. It is a story about how doing the wrong thing, for the right reasons, can come back to bite you in the rear.

I am a member of a large NYS organization. They maintain the database of all the members, other businesses in the state. Well, earlier this week, an under trained secretary in one of the offices sent out an email to everyone in the database with a PDF attachment. She didn't know to put the email addresses in the "BCC" field, and within moments, every one of us state wide had the motherlode of marketing - fresh email addresses for the owners of every single one of these businesses, along with the PDF attachment.

My jaw dropped. "Oh...noooo" I thought "this is a bonanza for anyone who ever wanted to spam this group!" I was sure many, many people would abuse it and we'd never know for sure how our emails got on their "marketing" list.

Moments later, it became obvious that the email was caught in a loop - probably triggered by one of the addresses in that list. The email kept coming and coming, dozens, then hundreds of occurances of it - each with a .5 MB attachment.

Within an hour of that happening, one of the women on the list did what I feared. She took the opportunity to grab that entire list and send a "we've got special services just for you!" email out to the ENTIRE list. And guess what - she, too, put the whole list in the "To" field (ugh... just in case you missed it the first 200 times).

I know her personally, and know that 1) she never does miss a good opportunity to promote herself and her business 2) she knows better than to do what she did, and 3) she'd be the first to defend that the end justifies the means.

Only, guess what? HER email got caught in the loop, times TEN! Now, this blatant, opportunistic little spam introducing her business went out to everyone once, then ten times, then hundreds of times. By the end of the day, I was hearing from people on that list, other colleagues, how enraged they were to be getting these emails from her, seeing her name in their in box over and over.

So, from one quick thinking opportunistic move, she went from market recognition to market loathing in a day. Personally, I've set up filters to put everything from her straight to the trash because my inbox keeps filling up. Of course, the inept clowns behind the mail servers can't seem to fix it so it's still going. I woke up to hundreds more this morning, too.

Now, you may have noticed I said "the wrong thing for the right reasons" at the beginning. Look, I'm a marketer. I'm in the business of marketing my and my client's businesses. It's a necessity! But I know that spam (aka Unsolicited Commercial Email) is a bad, bad move, even with a golden opportunity like this. And I know this woman enough to know that she probably thought "oh, so I piss off 3/4 of them... so what? It's the 1/4 who hear about me and contact me that matter!" Yup, that's probably what she thought. And, so it is a little bit (okay, a lot) amusing to watch what actually happens to people who think that way ;0)

Unreal!

Adding a signature to your web site

Do you want to give your web site a personal touch? Maybe you should consider putting "signing" a letter written to your prospects or audience.

Here are steps to take, to do it yourself:

1. Sign a piece of white paper (no texture or color) in black ink. *
2. Scan it - at 300 or 600 dots per inch (DPI) so it is much larger
than you need it. Save it to TIF if you can
3. Open it in a graphics application. Select the white background
and make sure every pixel is white behind and around the
signature - you might have picked up "stuff" in other colors -
the masking or "selection" tools will help you see if its clean.
4. If you don't do this you'll get "artifacts" of other pixel colors
around the edge of your signature
5. Size it down for your web site - usually 250-300 pixels wide is
good
6. If you need a white sig on a black bg, invert the whole image now
so you've got black bg and white ink
7. Export to GIF using white as the transparent. 16 colors should be
sufficient if you've done your clean up - this allows the edges
of the signature to be smooth and not jaggedy
8. Save this transparent gif and reference it on your site!

Of course, you could also ask your web or graphic designer to do this for you, past step one!

* For security reasons, you don't want to sign your entire name, obviously! Just your first name, or a closing message like "Yours in business, Robert" or even a business nickname or symbol.

Getting paid!

In business now for ten years, without even so much as a business course in high school or college, I've learned all my tricks the hard way. But, I haven't been "stiffed" by a client in years and I recently had an opportunity to think back on how and why that is... here is my advice for making sure it doesn't happen to you.

Use a contract. Always. Doesn't matter how cozy you feel with the new customer. A lot of soloists worry that they will seem "too hard" if they have one and I say PHOOEY... it's simply good business. Even if it says "this is what you pay, this is what you get, this is when you get it, this is when I get paid, this is what we do when we dissolve our relationship, this is what you own when we're done," get it in writing. It doesn't have to be in legalese... but everyone should read it, sign it, and expect to abide by it.

Schedule payments. Make sure it is agreed up front when you are to get paid. Define your deliverables, and stagger them according to payment. I might take payment in thirds - but the payment comes BEFORE the work I'm doing, and I will stop all work until that payment comes. Sometimes, rarely, something decides mid project to stop work and in those cases, I've had at least 50% down. It might be half of what I expected, but at least I didn't do the second half while they figured out what they wanted to do. And they didn't feel like they paid for more than they got.

Get a merchant account to process credit cards. Make it easy for people to pay you - usually people want to pay but they have their own cash flow issues. But, they're honest and would put it on a credit card if they could. I have an OUTSTANDING service I use which lets me take credit cards by phone and process online.

Pre-Approve Credit. However you do it - taking credit cards allows you to get paid up front, and to authorize (but not charge) a card in advance. So - you don't work until you have an authorized card and an understanding that you can take a check but if they stiff you, they can expect to be charged.

Incentivize people to pay you FIRST. For example, I offer a ten percent discount on any design project over $1,000 which pays
in full with the contract. You might consider something similar. Package services so that it makes sense for people to pay up front. People LOVE a discount - and it could be the best thing you ever do for your cash flow.

All of this requires a tremendous amount of trust. How do you create that? Well, everything you do in business builds your reputation, certainly. Having top notch testimonials on your marketing material helps reassure people. I take it a step further and invite prospects to contact anyone on my web site portfolio directly if they wish. That way, they can be sure it's not staged and authentic.

On occasion, I do work for proven, long term clients without money up front and I've never been disappointed. I have found, that having such solid rules of engagement as I've described is a top notch way to weed out the people who are a bad bet in the first place.

Since implementing all of these strategies, I've never needed a collection agent beyond the first few years I floundered around learning all these things :) So, keep that cash flowing... the future success of your business depends on it.

Launch: Rosanne Raneri

I'm so happy to show you all this special web site that just launched this week.

You probably don't know this, but I sing! In two choral groups, but mostly for my own entertainment. But, going all the way back to high school choir, I had a best friend who went on to become perhaps the best known and loved Folk singer-songwriters in the region around Albany, NY. Rosanne Raneri and I have stayed in touch every since, and I have had the honor of promoting her incredible talent around the world with a web site.

Rosanne's hallmark is that she writes beautiful, lush and sensual lyrics and sings them like a force of nature. My job was to create a vision for her new site which captured the rich layers, textures, emotions and complexities she sings of; evoking but not over powering. I also wanted to develop an easy way for her to communicate with her legions of fans (and there are legions - I know, I imported her mailing list!), a place for fans and media to get photos and news in her own delicious words. This project offered me the chance to use the most gorgeous photography I could find, and if you study the site, you'll see that there are patterns and messages in nearly every choice I made. What unbelievable fun this was!

I could babble on and on about Rosannne but go, visit her online, and have a look and a listen. You won't be disappointed.