Bernskiold Learning » Clients

Interacting with Clients

Erik Bernskiold — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:00:51 +0000

There is no question about the fact that businesses who interact with their clients really do generate more buzz than other companies which is why it has proven to be crucial to most businesses. So, how can you interact with your clients to build buzz around your company?

Using Social Networking Websites

We are beginning to get into the second round of social networking and in this second round, many of the websites previously only used by technology-interested people are beginning to go mainstream. A good example here being Twitter, a website that is growing even faster now that it is getting a stronghold with the general computer-user.

By establishing your company on the most used social networking websites, keeping them up-to-date, post regularly and interact with your visitors, you will begin to create the buzz you are after. It isn’t just about posted updates on things within the company, but also respond to other’s posts and basically build a relationship with your potential clients.

You don’t need to consider Twitter, Facebook or any other website you establish yourself on as a place where you turn a majority of your followers into clients, but as a place where you can help get your brand out there and in turn get more clients alongside a wider spread of your brand. The most important thing here is that your brand gets out on the internet and that people learn to recognize it.

Assign a Person to the Job

Something you definitely want to do if you dwell into the social networking aspects, is hiring a person to do the work in these areas (as one part of his or her job). Make sure that the posts coming off a Twitter account for example are personal. That they are from a person to another person instead of from a big company to a “small” consumer. If people learn to trust the person, they will trust the company and in turn you will strengthen your brand!

Thinking Twice About Forums

Although this post is essentially about how to interact with clients, I really feel that including a point on what perhaps not to do is of essence. While a forum can be a great place, it is probably not the way to go for most businesses unless you happen to already have a large visiting base and deal with areas that people gladly discuss. You can also run the risk of your company not be seen as seriously as you want.

Good Design Does Wonders

Erik Bernskiold — Mon, 11 May 2009 11:00:36 +0000

It’s He Said, She Said week this week which means that tomorrow there’ll be an article here on the site by Elizabeth Gast (and I’m posting my thoughts on the same topic on her site), because of that, there will not be a design themed Tuesday post! Instead, I’m going to combine the business side with the design side today on the subject of good design and what it can do for you. Nowadays, we are very aware of design however most of the time just not conscious of that. Say for example that we go to a company’s website and are interested in their services/products. Let’s also say that they are a smaller company that have their products available through order on their site only. When you come to the website, it looks rather old and not really like most of the sites you visit. That is exactly what I am talking about.

Design-awareness lives subconsciously

I really do believe that our design-awareness always is turned on and is somehow active. In the example above, we would draw the conclusion straight away, almost subconsciously that the site might not be legitimate and thus, we probably wouldn’t order out of fear that it is a fraud. The question now stands, how many times have you done like that? We naturally make decisions based on how things appeal to us, be it food, music or design. By not acknowledging this, you run a big risk!

Keep the Design Good and on Par With the Rest!

The solution is pretty simple. Keep your design at a high-quality, a quality that matches what everyone is seeing out and about every day! You grow accustomed to what you see every single day and anything that is of lesser quality will be thought of as less professional. So basically, if you cannot design on that level yourself, hire someone who can! This can be a secure way of gaining customers.

If you are the designer, you definitely want to make sure that you think about everything that could eventually be used. Think of possibly odd form additions to the site, useage of RTE editor HTML tags that a client might use without knowing that you say, haven’t styled that tag. If you can make sure your client’s website looks brilliant as well being worry-less for your client, you are in for a good ride!

Organizing Clients Files – My Way of Doing It

Erik Bernskiold — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 05:30:30 +0000

It’s a tough topic this and perhaps one of the most time consuming I can think of. We all keep (or at least try to keep) a good workflow order when it comes to files and management of those. When you are dealing with clients, this is perhaps even of more importance than ever.

I’m a folder junkie!

Myself, I’m totally a folder junkie. I create a ton of folders, perhaps my folders only contain one file, but that is still order for me that is easily manageable, at least in my head. A good example of this is the video application tips I run every Friday. I save those on an external hard-drive, in a Videos folder that in turn has a “Friday App Tip” folder, which has a folder for each year, which then has a folder for each date as well as the name of the application. Then, inside of that folder, I place my video file. It does work for me however.

Client Projects Folder

I try to keep my hard-drive as organized as I can, therefore I have got a folder called “Client Projects” sitting in my main user directory where all client stuff gets placed. Inside of this directory, I’ve got one main directory for every client (with the clients name as the folder name. I color code these folders depending on the status of something in the projects, for example, Red means that it is an urgent project, while grey means that it is completed.

Inside of the main client folder, there are another set of folders with the name of each project and it is inside of those folders that I store the specific project files, still in a lot of other folders like, “source” for the raw application files, “resources” for any materials I’m downloading and using for the design and/or client instructions and so on.

Try a structure and stick to it!

The most important thing when developing a structure for yourself is to try one out and then stick though with it. If it becomes a part of your daily routine, then you are going to work with it without thinking twice about it!

Be careful what you write about your clients online!

Erik Bernskiold — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 05:30:50 +0000

Fun stories about clients that have been stupid are mostly enjoyable and can give you a good laugh any day. Just don’t let a client experience get over your head before you can think – sharing it with millions of people as well as your client, right away.

As any professional where you deal with clients, you’re bound to get extraordinary stories regarding a plethora of projects and subjects. However interesting these may be, and how angry you might be, sharing this on your blog or social networking account might not be the best idea.

Anyone can access anything!

Just about everything on the internet is accessible by anyone. This includes your clients too. Even more important, it includes your future clients as well. If you sound-off on your blog, Twitter or even your personal Facebook account, there is always a risk that your client may see it. So what happens when he/she does? Well, if it is nasty enough, you’ll probably hear from them but that is hardly enough. There is a good possibility that he or she is going to tell that to people they know, who might tell that to someone that they know and then we are on! The word of mouth works not just with positive things but also with the negative, affecting both your current client relationship as well as the flow of new clients.

Yes, I did say Facebook as well!

By now some of you might be arguing the fact that if you post it to your personal Facebook account, where you only allow your friends access, how can it hurt? As I see it, you don’t really know if you are going to open it up someday to more than just your closest friends. As soon as you post for more than people that is within your inner circle so to speak, you can never be sure on who is going to read it in the end.

It’s always better to be safe than sorry. Think twice about what you publish that refers to clients. You don’t want to ruin any relationships using this relatively easy method. You want to keep them!

Learning to deal with even the toughest clients!

Erik Bernskiold — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:30:11 +0000

While you can say no to the most tough clients you’ll eventually have to deal with clients that make you just loose your temper more than once, even if you are a calm person. So what can you do to prevent yourself from lashing off at the client?

There have been a number of clients that have provoked me and made me loose my temper quite a lot. Now, I’m a person with a short temper and clients are usually dealt with after long school days and a lot of the times, just in a time that I would rather not deal with them in, but have no choice but to do it. The worst thing that could be done in this situation is to show to your client that you are loosing your temper. Keeping your professionalism is the key in all situations here.

What you can do here largely depends on what kind of person you are, however I prefer to have a large soft cushion or pillow nearby. That way I can take my anger out on my pillow. I can hit it, slam it to the floor until I’ve gotten rid of my energy that’s building up, causing me to loose my temper (often related to the patience). That way, you also do get a little break from dealing with the client. If you know you are going to deal with a particularly tough client you can always postpone it until you are ready.

This technique works best perhaps if you are having an online conversation, email or instant messaging. If you are on the phone, you will more or less have to learn to keep calm and to release the frustration later on.

If you are sending email replies, you have an additional advantage though. You can always refrain from sending the response right away and take a break, do something different and get your mind off the annoying client. When you go back to it again, you will be able to save the day before sending a rude email away.

Friday News Report and Tidbits

Erik Bernskiold — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:13:18 +0000

Today I do have quite a lot of things to share with you, so let’s get right onto it!

WordPress 2.6.3 has been released. The main news is just some bug fixes to what’s classified as a "not so important" issue. You can download the new version on the WordPress website.
A very interesting article was posted on CSS-Tricks yesterday regarding if you should host your clients websites yourself. I very much agree with Chris’s thoughts on the subject, which you can read on his site here.
Today is the absolute last day to submit your entries to the iPhone Book Contest that I wrote about a while ago on the blog. For more info, check out Terry White’s blog today.
A fun fact, yesterday marked the 7th birthday for the iPod! It’s pretty remarkable that it’s been around to long now! Congrats to Apple for creating it, it’s really grown to be a truly great gadget and one of my personal favourites.

Going directly from idea to coded design to show client.

Erik Bernskiold — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 08:00:08 +0000

I’ve been reading more and more people who are really advocates for showing clients coded designs and never Photoshop/Fireworks files. Their biggest reason for this is the fonts. You can really never get accurate font preview in a Photoshop file as compared to the final web result. This is an argument that I fully buy. It’s pointless to try to show how a design will look with fonts in a web browser, but in a jpeg file instead.

The real main con, as I see it, with this method is that it is going to take a little more time. It does mainly depend on how fast of a coder you are. It’s so much simpler just to send of a jpeg file to a client with the design in, have them change their mind as usual and then code it. To me that seem like the most logical order (perhaps since I’m used to it by now), partly probably because I’m working faster in Photoshop than I code.

There is perhaps a mid-range option here. What you’ll do is that you do the design in Photoshop as usual, save out a jpeg file (with no fonts) and then just quickly place a floating, absolute div over the jpeg file, previewing how the fonts would look on your design.

I want to bring up just another bit as well; my personal experience with this. I must say I’ve yet to get a client that complains when they get their final version that it differed like the one I showed “before”. If most people know it is sample, or don’t care about the change, I don’t dare to speculate in just now but it gets me thinking if I really need to put that much energy into finding a solution to a thing that isn’t super broke.

In the end, my opinion about this on the whole, is that if you are a quick coder. By all means, do show clients a coded version if the coding for you is one of the heavy parts, then don’t. Showing the designs in a jpeg file seems to work and I’m not sure how much difference it would mean to clients if you showed the coded one.

Now, if Adobe would just get an option in the type tool to render the text as a web browser does, I’d be much happier…

Friday Goodies

Erik Bernskiold — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:17:05 +0000

There is no hard explanation to why I never posted anything yesterday, I was just so tired after a long day filled with unexpected things. However some Friday Goodies is always needed before the weekend.

Scott Kelby posted on his blog, Photoshop Insider, today about his latest book, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 for Digital Photographers and said that it was a complete rewrite of his old (about 95% new stuff). According to himself he’s streamlined his workflow, learnt a bunch of new things as well as learnt the most asked questions and how people use it. I can say that it is going to be a killer book!
Mark your calendars, August 23rd. Something cool is coming. Just mark them and be with me there. No info as of now.
A few votes in the poll are telling me that they don’t know what Photoshop World is so I thought I’d end that right now be telling. Photoshop World is a semi-annual convention for all Photoshop users. It’s held in the US once on the east coast on the spring and then on the west coat in Las Vegas every fall. This time it is coming up in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center on September 4th through 6th. It’s an amazing conference and to read more, check out the Photoshop World website.
Finally, if you need a mantra for all those times when clients are being a pain curtsey of my fellow NAPP member Michael. "I get paid either way, I get paid either way."

And with that nice mantra have a nice Friday eve and weekend. I’ll probably get some stuff up over the weekend as well.