I recently came across an article on one of my very favourite blogs, FreelanceSwitch by Patrick Neeman of UsabilityCounts.
It so perfectly summed up what I wish I could explain to every single client and potential client out there, that with permission, I’ve reproduced his article here:
Competitions are an awesome way to promote your brand, get people talking about your products or services and get them to do some marketing on your behalf. It’s viral marketing at its sweetest.
I got an email today with a 1Mb Word attachment advertising the sender’s product. The email instructions went as follows: “Send this email to 10 friends and cc us and you’ll be entered into a draw to win this great prize (the product).”
The product sounded really good, so I did just that.
The results of my sending were as follows:
- one email address I used was to myself to test, that went through fine
- four of the other email addresses got bounced as spam
- two of my friends emailed me to say they had it already
- I made a typo in one of the other email addresses so that bounced
- Two email addresses went through fine
- the sender’s email address that I had to cc it to bounced because their mailbox was full (of a billion x 1Mb Word doc attachments, I’d imagine)
So they didn’t even know I’d entered! And I’d used up at least 11Mb of my bandwidth!! (And here in South Africa, that’s an issue!)
Note to self: Send snotty email to competition holder as soon as they’ve cleared their email box to explain to them that this is clearly NOT the way to run an email campaign!
I got a call from a friend the other day – she works for her mom occasionally, and her mom wanted her to redo the company business cards for their boss, but she didn’t have the right programs to do it in. Her mom wanted her to use Powerpoint, because why should she pay a designer when she knew exactly what she wanted?
I laughed. I couldn’t help myself 
I read lots of blogs. I read my clients’ blogs; I read blogs about animal welfare (my pet charity). I read design blogs x lots (in a bid to keep at the forefront of my craft) and I read horse riding blogs (my hobby). I read my friends’ blogs on many different subjects because I like my friends; and I read strangers’ blogs because the topic sounds interesting. So I read a lot 
I’ve noticed that the most popular blogs all have the same few things in common tho…
Recently I had the most profoundly vile experience of my life with a certain client. Let’s call him the NCfH (Nightmare Client from Hell).
He was rude, he was ignorant (and proud of it! He emailed me telling me he did not want to be “over-educated”; I thought there was little chance of that ever happening!); he was inconsistent, he changed the brief continuously and regularly without telling me; he was argumentative (he once phoned me and threatened me with physical violence by proxy!) and he was just completely unreasonable.
My developer, Denny, tagged me to play The Status Game…
Twitter Explained by Tweeternet:
Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that allows you answer the question, “What are you doing?” by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called “tweets”, to your friends, or “followers.”