Happy Labor Day weekend! When we were kids my dad told us that Labor Day was for work and we’d end up helping in the yard…tilling the garden, mowing the lawn, washing the car, or (sometimes) big projects like laying new concrete. Not our idea of fun.

I hope you’re getting off work early today to enjoy your long weekend without working. We close the office at 1:00, which means Pete The Tapeworm and I will be leaving as soon as we accomplish three more things (not including this post) and attend to only three things for three days: Ride, eat, and sleep.

Following are the top five stories for week ending September 3, 2010. Continue Reading »

Last week PRWeek published a guide for required reading and Sheelagh Doyle recommends Spin Sucks, among my own favorites.

“Required reading – a definitive guide to PR blogs” begins with, “Everybody has an opinion. Social media provides an unrivaled avenue to share it with the world. PRWeek examines some of the individual blogs and Twitter feeds that all communications pros need to bookmark.”

Check out the list below…I found some new gems in here and hope you do, too!

Communications Conversations
Arik Hanson
arikhanson.com
Seasoned PR pro Arik Hanson’s site offers thought-provoking commentary and insight on PR with a particular focus on digital communications. Hanson, principal of ACH Communications in Minneapolis, also shares usable strategies and tactics to develop long-term social media relationships. This blog features equal levels of industry rants and raves. Hanson’s approach to sharing the link love makes this a good gauge of who – and what – to know. Continue Reading »

I was interested to read a June 1 article in PRWeek that was a debate between Steve Cody, the founder of Peppercom (and someone I got to cycle with in Palm Springs a couple of weeks ago) and Sean Cassidy, president of DKC (someone I’ve never met) about fixed retainer versus hourly rates.

When I started Arment Dietrich four years ago, a business coach told me that we would make money only if we billed our time. I’ve always thought about that, even as everyone complained not only about entering time, but tracking it against client projects.

That being said, we find that clients have a budget, they want to be billed the same amount each month, and they don’t want to pay by the hour. So we have a bit of a hybrid between the retainer and the hourly rates.  We help clients set budgets, based on what they want to accomplish, and allocate a certain number of hours per month against that dollar amount. Then we track our monthly hours and decide, if we’re going to go over, if it’s because we needed to train internally or because the client asked us to do something outside of scope. If it’s outside of scope, our account leads have to have a conversation with the client to either switch gears and not do the new project (or, in very rare cases, even get additional dollars).

This allows us to do what Cody says: Get paid for the strategy and high-level thinking that goes into getting the results.  As Cassidy suggests (and PRWeek agrees with), we should do anything and everything it takes to get results, even if it means we spend $40,000 in time, even if the budget is only $20,000.

I’m a fan of PRWeek. I think their editorial staff is smart and savvy. It surprises me they agree to what sounds like something only a big agency can do…overservice because they have the resources to do so. If we did that, we’d be out of business by now.

We’ve talked on this blog, in recent weeks, about creating value-based fees. But, we haven’t yet found anyone who wants to pay us a hybrid of a flat fee for strategic thinking and ramping up, and then bonuses for affecting business growth. Could be the economy. Could be no flexibility in budgets. Could be we’re just ahead of our time.

What is working for others?