Artwork, web projects, and updates to LiamDaly.com
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Are Clients Ready for Technology?
Some clients are better than others. Some client's mothers are better than other client's mothers.
This is my sixth year of blogging, and in all that time I've never had a client or potential client that I haven't advised to blog. Almost all said no.
I had a client five years back that wanted a Content Management System. Of course they didn't use those words, so neither did I, but that was what they wanted. Using CGI and Perl I set about building them a system which was a perfect fit in that it fostered a sense of community (their raison d'etre, ); facilitated participation by multiple and changing personnel, and addressed the communication problems they were having.
The communication problems were worse than I knew though, because one day I received a mailshot informing me of their brand new website designed by somebody else. So I remained unpaid for my work, and they got a static site that addressed none of the issues they wanted. Today they still have that static site which is never up to date, and the solution I was building is still a perfect fit, but now so is Drupal or Mambo or Joomla or PhpNuke, etc. But how do you tell them?
Recently I had a meeting with a client to discuss online marketing strategies. Having spent the previous two years on the word 'blog', I didn't mention pinging, trackbacks, folksonomies, podcasting, wikis, carnivals, blog tours, bitTorrents, RSS, digests, aggregators, social bookmarking, social search, CoComment, or Co.mments.
Why? Because I've been there before - clients aren't interested in how to do something, they're interested in the results. You can try and show them, but even then it's the results they want to be shown, not the functionality or the potential. In two cases where I failed to persuade a client what blogging could do for them I found ultimately the only way was to actually blog for them. But even then they don't know what exactly you're doing nor all the related peripheral functions. Even when empowering clients, embracing new technologies is not what they do.
I dropped a client recently while I, mis-reading the dynamism of the client, was in the midst of a two-year plan to implement a whole range of the new online technologies listed above. While benefitting in the meantime, the client by the second year would have been in a position where a huge number of people could have participated in collaborative publishing in an easily managed environment, with spectacular natural increases in marketing and efficiencies of organization and communication.
More than a perfect fit, in this case it was essential given the growth of the organization and increasing communication and efficiency problems it was having. It also would have been self-supporting, removing dependencies on me, and empowering ever-changing groups of people. The client however wasn't ready to hear. Instead they wanted to implement technologies it could understand, so it chose the very solutions I was working on for my older client all those years ago.
My newest client sent me a list of projects we would work on together over the next several months. With trepidation I pointed the client to BackPack by 37signals. Fifteen seconds later, Yes, said the client, let's use that.
Some clients are better than others.
This is my sixth year of blogging, and in all that time I've never had a client or potential client that I haven't advised to blog. Almost all said no.
I had a client five years back that wanted a Content Management System. Of course they didn't use those words, so neither did I, but that was what they wanted. Using CGI and Perl I set about building them a system which was a perfect fit in that it fostered a sense of community (their raison d'etre, ); facilitated participation by multiple and changing personnel, and addressed the communication problems they were having.
The communication problems were worse than I knew though, because one day I received a mailshot informing me of their brand new website designed by somebody else. So I remained unpaid for my work, and they got a static site that addressed none of the issues they wanted. Today they still have that static site which is never up to date, and the solution I was building is still a perfect fit, but now so is Drupal or Mambo or Joomla or PhpNuke, etc. But how do you tell them?
Recently I had a meeting with a client to discuss online marketing strategies. Having spent the previous two years on the word 'blog', I didn't mention pinging, trackbacks, folksonomies, podcasting, wikis, carnivals, blog tours, bitTorrents, RSS, digests, aggregators, social bookmarking, social search, CoComment, or Co.mments.
Why? Because I've been there before - clients aren't interested in how to do something, they're interested in the results. You can try and show them, but even then it's the results they want to be shown, not the functionality or the potential. In two cases where I failed to persuade a client what blogging could do for them I found ultimately the only way was to actually blog for them. But even then they don't know what exactly you're doing nor all the related peripheral functions. Even when empowering clients, embracing new technologies is not what they do.
I dropped a client recently while I, mis-reading the dynamism of the client, was in the midst of a two-year plan to implement a whole range of the new online technologies listed above. While benefitting in the meantime, the client by the second year would have been in a position where a huge number of people could have participated in collaborative publishing in an easily managed environment, with spectacular natural increases in marketing and efficiencies of organization and communication.
More than a perfect fit, in this case it was essential given the growth of the organization and increasing communication and efficiency problems it was having. It also would have been self-supporting, removing dependencies on me, and empowering ever-changing groups of people. The client however wasn't ready to hear. Instead they wanted to implement technologies it could understand, so it chose the very solutions I was working on for my older client all those years ago.
My newest client sent me a list of projects we would work on together over the next several months. With trepidation I pointed the client to BackPack by 37signals. Fifteen seconds later, Yes, said the client, let's use that.
Some clients are better than others.
And Here's The Stuff I Wrote Earlier:
