This is a frustration that has been voiced be many freelancers and business people:
My biggest frustration is with high level executives who want their project done yesterday but can’t seem to put their Blackberry down for five minutes when you finally get some face to face time with them. I know many of these folks like to think they can be more effective by multitasking but in my opinion the majority of them are shortchanging both the person they are emailing and the person who is trying to have a meaningful discussion with them. There is definitely an art to effectively getting someone to pay attention these days with so many portable distractions. To tactfully tell someone you need their full attention is not always easy.
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The issue with Internet privacy has been popping up all over the place in recent weeks. Google and Facebook are currently the two largest targets, but the issue at hand now isn’t one that hasn’t already been dealt with before. Eleven years ago, in 1999, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy told reporters that consumer privacy issues were a “red herring,” after their competitor Intel disabled identification on their Pentium III chips. He said, “You have zero privacy anyway…Get over it.” (Sprenger, 1999).
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One classmate wrote this about presentations:
Your presentation doesn’t necessarily have to be at the end of the design process. You are presenting yourself the entire time. The more persistent, communicative and trustworthy you are, the better chance you’ll have at winning that client for the long run.
This is great insight. I also agree that the more honest and communicative you are with a client the whole way through, the better your working relationship will be in the long run – and it may even lead to new design work. Some clients I’ve worked with have been strictly through email. When I’ve won some design contests online, the clients I received lived in different countries than I do. Given our time differences, and the ease of communicating a lot of information at once, email was our preferred method of communication.