Creative Agency Secrets

I have been “lurking” on Skillfair for a year or so now. It’s a website that matches small businesses and freelance consultants to projects.

[Backstory: I first found Skillfair.com about a year ago because they advertised a job creating a micro-site for the River and Rowing Museum. And my sport is rowing, so I picked it up on an alert service for key words. I watched the site from a visitor registration for a while and found jobs that suited some of my clients listed there. My interest built and so I emailed Gill asking if she’d be available for an interview which I could publish. Here it is.]
So how did you start the website?
The Skillfair story began was I went freelance 7-8 years ago when children were young. My background is in IT and I got a contract from former employer, and then another from a mate…. I do specialist work and was on an internet directory and got a third contract from an enquiry off the directory. This led me to the thought that we needed one of those directories for everyone.
Sounds logical.

So how do you get consultants and work opportunities onto Skillfair?
It is hard work doing marketing and sales, when you are a freelancer or independent consultant. And it isn’t most people’s core specialism and so it gets put aside and you end up with the ‘feast or famine’ problem of work. So I created a marketplace for independent consultants in a range of disciplines. To give them a feed into the marketing system that keeps going in the background while they are working with clients.
Skillfair went live early 2002 which was an interesting time then. I had had no work for 6-8 months and got a job shortly after the site went live. The business ticked along for a couple of years. I discovered when you build a website if you don’t spend a lot of money on it you get what you pay for. We needed more behind the scenes in admin – and decided to systemise everything.
This was a key finding. You have to be systematic for all stuff, if you find yourself doing something manually more than 3 times…. like sending customer service emails and enquiry replies ask yourself how can I make it happen without me doing it?
Building a scalable business requires a system to do this for you. This is key to Skillfair’s success to date.
And so what’s happened since then?
We have experienced gradual and organic growth since then. We have not had massive financial investment. The UK economy is at the point where lots of people are going freelance and seeing this as a career option and a positive step. Some of the reasons are work:life balance and not wanting to commute.
And also companies and government want highly skilled people but don’t want to commit to employing them permanently because of financial and legal aspects of permanent employment. The coming together of these two movements is making a wave that didn’t exist before.
How do consultants and freelancers find Skillfair?
Consultants find us though search engines. We use Google ads and have found that placement is important. We do telemarketing as well. We call up people who we think are consultants and ask if they want to be registered for new work. We do the initial work to register them and then leave it up to them to decide to participate further by sending them weekly information.
We also buy lists for the telemarketing. And referrals from other consultants are another very key source of new registrants. Of course, that is how you passed Skillfair’s details onto your clients.
We have worked hard to make it easier to get people to refer their contacts through the website, as they trust what Skillfair is doing. We get about 100 – 200 referrals per week. And 30-40% of paying new joiners come from referrals.
So where do you find the work opportunities?
We use a public sector tender alert service for a lot of client work and we search 6-700 websites per week and OJEU to find the lower value tenders. We have a system for this (of course) to make it less time consuming. (Gill wrote some of the code herself and sourced some of it elsewhere). Skillfair also pays for some services to support this.
The private sector projects come from Google adverts in the main. Search engines are very accurate ‘help with marketing’ means that’s what clients are looking for and / or are a marketing consultant. We find that we get clients precisely when they are looking for advise and support and not at other times.
We now have a database of past clients and we send them newsletters and details of new consultants joining the system and we can send them a regular feed of consultant names for specific skills if they want that.
It is more of a challenge getting clients to say what they want… it is the interim management agencies who are interested in this and more able to say what they want. And we serve them too.

So what are your future plans for Skillfair?
We have worked hard to make a successful business and as I said before, we want it to be scalable. We’ve been working on offering Skillfair as a white label service for professional bodies and trade associations whose membership includes independent consultants. Our service will allow them to provide opportunities to these members without getting involved in admin or commission arrangements and will boost their revenue at relatively low risk. Our goal is to have at least one of these organisations operational by the end of 2008.
Thank you very much for your time, Gill.

And anyone wanting to know more should take a look at Skillfair.com (and please mention that you found it from a link at Creative Agency Secrets!

Some musings….on Networking and technology…..

I received a link to an academic “paper” written about networks by a group of keen MBA students. Intellectualising what is currently happening and really giving me zero insight into what I might do next with my networks…. but here’s the link if you want to read it yourself.

Lloyd has been thinking about tagging on photos and whether this can be both good and bad. And why it links neatly into social objects and how they get used online.

And while working with a client this week, I wrote a summary about social objects (and I was at the NMK conference where Jyri mentioned them and have been reading Hugh on the subject regularly since).

I was thinking a bit on the theory of WHY digital customer engagement is becoming so compelling and HOW data connects brands to potential consumers in both B2B and B2C.

Social Objects are a useful means of creating lasting customer engagement on websites and other digital media.

Background on Social objects from Jyri Engstrom (who I heard talk about it at NMK) The slides are at the bottom of the page and here’s a video.

This blends sociology theory with the real stuff happening on the web today. It explains why we find social media sites compelling and keep returning to them. This takes on from the CRM ideas of Don Peppers and Martha Rogers who, when discussing how to Interact with customers, recommend allowing the customer to dictate how and when they want to communicate with you and the medium for that communication. On social media sites this is the starting point for the ‘conversation’. [I prefer the word conversation to interact - which is rather sterile and sound pre-planned or managed]. And the key difference between social media and CRM is that the brand DOES NOT control the conversation - but it may participate, initiate and guide. Just like a trusted friend or adviser.

And so what are the ‘verbs’ that can apply to your website? How can it be a place for customers to return and visit frequently?

Hugh McLeod has worked hard to continue to promote Jyri’s ideas. He has developed his own ideas on what are social objects and the link is a list of great suggestions. And an application of a social object to blogging.

For this site, I hope that the social object is “Learning about business development”.
Commentary on what makes a social object in a marketing context (there’s a lot here… so read it last).

If there is enough interest, I’d be keen to have a pub drink and chat session to discuss Social Objects for biz dev folk…. let me know if you want to come along.

More anon.

Reminder, I am transferring this blog to Creative Agency Secrets.  Here’s an interview i just did with Gill Hunt of Skillfair

I get a daily news digest from the Guardian. Attached was an advert from Pearlfinders the agency new business lead tracking service.

I met the owners a while ago and although I have never used the service, it may be worth investigating if you find it hard to get leads or if you are trying to get into a new area of business.

Follow the link http://www.pearlfindersnews.com/landing/uk1.html Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange

Talking to Gill Hunt last week she said something that really resonated with me. “if I find myself doing something for the third time, I find a way to automate it.”

What a fabulous resolution for business this year. I am telling all my clients. Let me know WHAT you automate. Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange

Reading John Hagel way way back in 2003, he advocates a FAST strategy for B2B

Long term strategy is dead in the water (who knows what markets will be doing in 5 years?)

Here’s what he suggests around three key themes (Accelerate, Strengthen, Tie it all Together)

On the six to twelve month horizon, Accelerate and Strengthen are the key requirements. By Accelerate, I mean identifying a few key operating initiatives that have the potential to significantly accelerate the movement of the company towards the long-term Focus.

On the same time horizon, Strengthen also comes into play. Here, management needs to ask, what are the major organizational obstacles that are preventing us from moving even faster to achieve our operational objectives? Then the question becomes, what can be done over the next six to twelve months to “de-bottleneck” the organization and strengthen our organizational capabilities so that we can move even faster in the next six to twelve month cycle?

Tie it all together integrates these three streams of activities.

And I can really see applications for this approach in some work I’ve been doing this week.  This is tied in with  Anthony Mayfield’s comments

John Seely Brown’s ideas about FAST strategy and how loose coalitions of small teams can be the most effective way to organise.

And so yesterday I belatedly edited some copy for an advert, adapting from Australian English to UK (hillarious…… tag line was  “Australian made for the world”.  Really see that going down well in UK and US!).  And I sent it off….But started thinking about an exhibition / conference that the brand is visiting and whether I could do a competition to encourage stand visitors.  When I came across some old notes about good things to do at exhibitions and conference.  Make a door hanger tag that you can put on visitors doors overnight…. cool.  Integrate with visiting stand idea.  So I mentioned this to Di with whom we did a pre-Christmas campaign.  And she was kind enough to tell me I was bonkers, but suggested some collaboration on selling her stuff on the exhibition stand to bring more people in….. and offering a great prize for the competition.  And so I drafted a brief and sent it out to Alan and Leo.  And Rachel .

She suggested a couple of improvements, specifically voting… and then I remembered Liz had run a funny campaign on comments last year.   Maybe we could collaborate?  But the need to get it done quickly [conference date is 25 Jan] drove me back to Skillfair, whose MD, Gill Hunt, I interviewed back end of last year…  and I posted it up there for good measure too.

Small team.  Collaborating.  Moving quickly towards the mid-term objective.

Loved it.  Cheers everyone!

[Aside….I did a Skype con call introducing Leo and Rachel last week.  Interesting - they were both rather too polite to be free-thinking about their ideas.   Like shy and rather too agreeing with me as opposed to debating and sparking objections and suggestions.  Maybe too early to expect them to behave together as they do individually with me.]

I am very pleased to say that my webstats are getting better.
Got a lovely result for a google search "advice on making business grow"  and I’m at number 4.

And I have also been picked up by FutureLab on their list of B2B Marketing Blogs.…

A belated thanks to the InHouseVillage folk for adding me to their list of blogs to watch. [curiously filed under ‘toolkit’??]

Just got registration confirmation email…. and another trick missed.

If you feel that a colleague would also benefit from visiting Technology For Marketing & Advertising, please forward this email where they can register for FREE at:
http://www.t-f-m.co.uk/colleague

I left the link unconcealed so that you can see there is no embedded connection to ME.

The conference has no way of knowing who their most powerful & active referrers are.   Who are the “Mavens” who will help them with their marketing by contributing their personal contacts to hte common effort.

And other things…. no blog of the event, no questions about whether I write or contribute to a blog, no message forum space, no Jaiku / Twitter channel planned.  And that’s just the obvious stuff.

Gad, wish I wasn’t going now.

Correction: TFM&A doesn’t use best practice any CRM.

Just got emailed by TFM&A to get me to sign up to their 2008 event. I’ll probably go.

But first a gripe.

If they are the pre-eminent exhibition and conference for technology for marketing and advertising (as the name implies) why oh why can’t they use best practice for email communications?

My email WAS individually addressed to me “Dear Rebecca Caroe”. Good start.

It WAS sent just to my email address and although it made it past my Outlook spam filter, Mailwasher picked it up as ‘not to me” and I had to manually accept the communication.

But when I clicked on the link

It took me to a registration page where NONE of my information was pre-populated.

As I laboured my way down the registration opting in and out for various items, it dawned on me that this was just a ‘plain vanilla’ registration page for all the outbound email marketing. Why wasn’t there a unique response code embedded in my link? Why don’t they ‘know’ which email I replied to and from what source [they asked me both in the registration questionnaire and these questions were mandatory not optional].

And lastly, why isn’t Business Development, a skill area listed under specialisms?

I feel alone in the marketing world.

Many companies are continuing to send direct mail to large audiences who have not opted in to recieve it.

Read this if you want convincing about what the ‘average’ consumer in the UK does with it.

And if you want to see the future do some research into VRM. Vendor Relationship Management or the ability of the consumer to pre-select the brands they will allow to communicate with them.

Definition: VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties.

CRM systems until now have borne the full burden of relating with customers. VRM will provide customers with the means to bear some of that weight, and to help make markets work for both vendors and customers — in ways that don’t require the former to “lock in” the latter.

The goal of VRM is to improve the relationship between Demand and Supply by providing new and better ways for the former to relate to the latter. In a larger sense, VRM immodestly intends to improve markets and their mechanisms by equipping customers to be independent leaders and not just captive followers in their relationships with vendors and other parties on the supply side of the marketplace.

For VRM to work, vendors must have reason to value it, and customers must have reasons to invest the necessary time, effort and attention to making it work. Providing those reasons to both sides is the primary challenge for VRM.

Be scared, be very scared if you company is a heavy DM user and has not started to work towards an adapted / altered database marketing strategy - your world is dying a slow, lingering death and your brand’s marketing budget will go with it.

Learn more by subscribing to the Harvard ProjectVRM updates; James Burke does a good summary here and Read Adriana’s blog (link is to all her VRM articles). And if you want to move towards database marketing using a cost-effective, laptop based database package, have a look at Honeycomb.