Comments on: Not Sure Whether to Laugh or Cry

By: rickey gold

rickey gold — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 05:19:34 +0000

Boy does this ever sound familiar! But it becomes much less important when your clients who “get it” are pleased with your work….as yours seems to be. Great advice!

By: Todd Defren

Todd Defren — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 21:42:53 +0000

Geva, first, I love it when I find that clients read this blog – thank you.

And thanks even MORE for your amazing post. I’ve printed it and will sleep with it under my pillow tonight!

By: Geva Perry

Geva Perry — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 21:35:01 +0000

I wouldn’t worry about it too much, Todd. The person who made the “casual” comment is obviously a moron. And life is too short to work with morons.

Should be one of the easier decisions in your career.

In any case, our experience with Shift has been quite different.

By: Geoff Livingston

Geoff Livingston — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 21:15:18 +0000

Good for you, Todd. I love firing pain-in-the-butt clients because they hurt my whole business. It hasn’t happened in a while (last one was a dead beat on payment), but it does need to happen periodically. Besides, I think this clears the deck for a better client.

By: Mike Driehorst

Mike Driehorst — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 19:32:13 +0000

When clients start to direct the how we do our work — particularly when it’s successful — that is definitely a deal breaker.

Working with bloggers and etc. is similar to talking with a parent of one of your child’s new friend. It’s definitely not the same as talking with a newspaper reporter or your doctor.

Casual, honest, even cautious is best. Though you are working in the relationship, the blogger often doesn’t see as a professional relationship. It needs to be much more informal and open.

Clients need to be educated — or dropped — as do coworkers at times.

Keep teachin’ Todd.
– Mike

By: Jesse Ciccone

Jesse Ciccone — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 18:32:47 +0000

My thoughts exactly, Susan.

Todd, you are not alone in your crank. I just spoke yesterday with a former colleague of mine. He’s been in the agency biz for a couple decades, running practices and offices of some big-time brands. He’s in the process of checking out to go run a software company and remarked to me that the anxiety is not really less, but in a way more bearable because it’s not based on continuous negative reinforcement.

That comment and your post yesterday made me realize that then it most often (if you’re any good) takes a somewhat veiled form (“What have you done for me lately? “That’s good, but why wasn’t it better?”)

By: Susan Getgood

Susan Getgood — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 15:41:31 +0000

Umm. Why would it matter whether your pitches, pr or br, were casual or formal? If they worked, which apparently they were.

I spent the bulk of my corporate career on the client side, managing agencies such as yours, and the only time I cared about the word for word content of pitches were when they WERE NOT getting results.

You have every right to be cranky.