Performing expertise

As already introduced in a previous post, The book Freelancing Expertise - Contract professionals in the new economy - by Debra Osnowitz is an important reading even if it doesn't specifically covers cases of interpreters. A key chapter I have been reading several times and pondering about is chapter 3 : Performing Expertise.

The sub-chapters in order of appearance are :

1. Making Impressions, Conveying Competence
2. Exuding Confidence, Engendering Trust
3. Asserting Control

It is not easy at first reading to draw links with a situation whose dynamics are pretty different from the one described by the author through specific examples drawn out contracting for programming or editing projects. In these examples, time seems long, with meetings between potential contracting client and contractors to assess competence. Not all but many cases feature contractors working inside the client's location, although some do perform away, usually from their SOHO home office. These are playing a somewhat different game.

There is no mention on how these contractors were contacting by potential clients. Did the web played a role in this, in terms of serendipity of encounter thanks to Google?

If you expose your ware online and your web site is the essential net to catch fishes (it must feel the reverse for clients though) , the three points listed above are managed first in the design and content of your web site. The web site has a major role in making impressions, conveying competence, exuding confidence, and engendering trust. Asserting control, which is open to various interpretation of meanings, it better kept apart for the time being.

At the professional freelancers network I created some three years ago - Freelance France Japon - we will have a meeting in March in Tokyo about strategies of professional self display on the Internet. The purpose is to have between three and five members doing a 10 minutes presentation each on how they perform and what are theirs takes on the subject.

In my experience, a professional web site is an on-going building process that must be nurtured by theories, intuitions, and facts yielded out of ones own experience. New incisive perception of ones market dynamics will turn into actions at the web site content, which comes down after a few years to matters of fine tuning rather than big overhauls. 

Everything that sustains and allows the three points above to be exposed and perceived have to take into account that the encounter with a prospect who may turn a client is a usually a short affair where dialog is scarce. A prospect finds your web site because she was searching for something that happens to be more or less what you are offering. Finding your web site and leaving it is a matter of a click away. A sticky web site must therefore probably answer within a few lines located at the top of the top page what you offer - that must match what the prospect is looking after - and how to get in touch with you. And these first lines play a major role in making point 1 and 2 tangible.

From a marketing point of view, there is nothing new here, but the relationship between the two actors, the hunter and the bait, is different than that of a shop display. Because the visitor came on purpose, looking for something specific.

Although the purpose here is not to lay out everything in terms of strategies and how I came down to the current state of my professional web site, one item I have learned the hard way is that the web site is obviously part of your strategy of displaying your professional you, but it is totally linked to real life time and space, and does not belong to some virtual location distant, or independent to "real life". It is part of an ecosystem whose parts create a realm of professional strategy of self-display.

Just to illustrate this core fact with something that may sound trite but needs deep understanding instead, if you display a phone number as one of other means to be contacted, you must be aware that someone may effectively call you out of the blue and not be surprised that such thing could happen. It will, and their will be no warning signs. When the phone rings, all of a sudden, everything you put of that virtual show window of yours over the Internet is literally thrust forward into reality with a slapping bang (or ring). It calls for action, which is to deliver on the spot expressions that do match the three points cited above. And as the inquiry will most of the time focus on your availability and fees, you have to deliver answers on the spot, and not fumble on fuzzy, indecisiveness. There won't be a second call from that prospect.