In this episode of the podcast, Lorrie and I come clean about some of the mistakes we’ve made during the course of our freelancing careers, as well as some of the boo-boos we’ve seen other people make. You don’t want to miss us cringeing our way through this one!
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Transcript
Philippa: Hello, and welcome to Episode 14 of A Little Bird Told Me, the podcast where two freelance writers talk about the highs, the lows, and the no-nos of successful self employment. You can find us on the web at ALittleBirdToldMe.Podomatic.com and from there you can find out all the multitude of ways to subscribe to make sure you never miss a future episode.
You can also find links to our Facebook page and to my and my co-host’s various social media profiles and websites. I’m Philippa Willitts.
Lorrie: And I’m Lorrie Hartshorn, and my cold is gone.
Philippa: Yay!
Lorrie: Everything is good again. So today we’re in a cheery mood and we’ve decided to change things up a little bit. The whole A Little Bird Told Me podcast is all about how to succeed as a freelancer writer, so all the things you can do and not to do make sure that your self employment goes as smoothly as possible. What we thought we’d like to do this episode though is talk about some of the ultimate boo-boos that Pip and I have made along the way.
Philippa: It might be astounding to hear that we’ve made them but it’s true.
Lorrie: It’s true, there’s been boo-boos. As we’ve mentioned a couple of times before, mistakes are horrible, they’re unpleasant, but they’re a brilliant, brilliant learning experience. Pip and I have been freelancing for eons so if there’s anything we’ve got plenty of besides skills, experience, and professionalism of course, it’s horror stories. Lots of them. So it will be safe to say we’ll be talking about the mistakes that we’ve made, mistakes that we’ve seen other people make because really, there’s nothing better than a car crash moment and you look at someone and say, “Oh, thank God that wasn’t me.” Hopefully, it will give you some insight into what can happen and how you can avoid it, or if you can’t avoid it how to kind of recover from it if it does happen.
Philippa: Absolutely. In this podcast we both give advice which is based on our experience and our knowledge. But the fact is some of that experience and knowledge really does come from us not getting it right. We get it wrong, we’ve both made mistakes some small some big and we thought it might be useful to share some of those embarrassing moments with you.
Lorrie: I’ll get the first and most unpleasant one for me out of the way. It’s about making a good first impression. I had a meeting with a potential client, and I’m pleased to say that they are now my client rather than just being too horrified to employ me, but I didn’t leave enough time before I went to this presentation. I turned up extremely sweaty and red in the face and I then had to go and present a marketing strategy in front of a room full of directors which was just awful. The room was dark, they put a spotlight on me and then I was there shiny, and red, and embarrassed, and getting hotter and hotter the whole time and just hating the world and wishing for the hall of shame to swallow me.
But it didn’t and I had to stand there for a good 40 minutes dripping and growing sweat patches all over my clothes.
Philippa: Oh, poor thing.
Lorrie: It was the worst thing ever. Eventually one of them looked at me and went, “Do you want to sit down?” And I went, “Yes, I do. I do want to sit down. At this point I want to sit down under the table.” Oh, it was so awful. But I was going to say what it learned me, because [inaudible 3:52], what it’s taught me is that you need to leave enough time for meetings. You need to double check Google Maps before you set off. Even if you think you know where they are find out which floor they’re on, find out if there’s a lift, cover all eventualities because it was excruciating and I was literally in the spotlight on one of my worst professional moments for a good 40 minutes.
Philippa: I had an almost moment like that because of similar lack of preparation really. I was doing an interview with a woman who was reasonably high profile in the area she works in and it was a very important interview. I was meeting her at the hotel she was staying at and I had spent pretty much the whole week preparing for this interview. I had read and watched every other interview she’s ever given, I found out everything I needed to do. What I didn’t double check that the hotel which I thought she was the hotel she was in.
Lorrie: Oh, no.
Philippa: She had given me the name of the hotel and I Googled it and found the street it was on and left it there. I got to town and I went to the hotel only to find it had a different name than the one I was looking for. So I just assumed because of the street name and because I knew there was a hotel there, I assumed it was there. I had to go into that hotel to ask them where their competitor was, I bet that went down well, and it was about another five minute walk. Thankfully, I got there just in time but it would have been much preferable from my point of view to have gotten there five minutes early and have been able to get myself together for a few minutes before the interview started. But yes, always double check. Even if you think you know where you’re going always, always double check.
Lorrie: I’m so glad you didn’t actually mash it up at the last minute. I didn’t mash it up but it was sheer compassion on the part of the client that meant that I didn’t mash it up because I gave everything to be there on time. I was there on time, I had prepared the whole week, and it was a decent presentation and we’ve had a great working relationship since then. But every time I try and go in now and see them face-to-face I remember it. I remember being there and looking like some sort of beached jelly fish.
Philippa: I think from both those examples, we both have that feeling of horror of what if because, we were both in a situation where we pulled it off but we equally might not have done.
Lorrie: Definitely.
Philippa: That feeling is really horrifying.
Lorrie: And it won’t go away. That’s why it’s been such a good learning experience is I can still feel the same way. When we have meetings in the same room, I’m there.
Philippa: To remind you.
Lorrie: I’m there thinking of, “Oh past me, please get this presentation right.” It’s just the most awful feeling.
Philippa: Another area where I got it wrong a couple of times is definitely marketing.
Lorrie: Yes.
Philippa: When I started out I really didn’t know much about how to market myself. Like many people, I built myself a website and thought, “There we are.”
Lorrie: Yeah, that’s quite common I think.
Philippa: Yeah, it really is. That’ll do it. Then of course you start and go –
Lorrie: Where are the clients?
Philippa: Yeah, why am I expecting people to suddenly hire me on this basis and realizing how ridiculous it was. So, I started doing that kind of panic research and trying a bit of everything which is never really a good idea. You want to focus in on something until you find out whether it works or not. But, because I was panicking a bit, I was doing bits of this and bits of that.
Some of them were very successful and I still use them now and others failed entirely. In some respects that’s fine because the thing with marketing is a lot of it will fail.
Lorrie: Of course.
Philippa: Just by its nature. It’s very unusual indeed to send out some pictures and get 100% positive response. So, you have to do some that won’t work in order to find the bits that do work.
Lorrie: Yeah, people are often surprised to find that say a 1% or 2% conversion rate is absolutely amazing in a lot of fields actually.
Philippa: Definitely.
Lorrie: If you pay for some advertising, or if you send out an email marketing campaign, to get a 2% conversion would be stunning.
Philippa: I think when it becomes a bigger fail, even bearing that in mind, it’s like you say conversion rates tend to be certainly under 10%, is where it actually cost you a lot of money or taken you a lot of time. That’s when it feels more of a fail than just a low conversion rate. I know Lorrie and I have both mentioned in the podcasts before, that we both tried something independently of each other, we just had the same idea and it bombed similarly for both of us, which was to choose a business website and proof read a page or two of it and then contact the owner of the site to say, “I was just having a look at your website and I thought you’d want to know that on this page you’ve got a couple of typos. If you want, I can proofread the rest of your site for you.”
Both of us had either no responses or negative responses. The problem with that is we had taken quite a lot of time to do the proofreading in order to make the initial contact. That is where in my opinion, it becomes a fail rather than just a lack of conversion because, we did hours of work for no return.
Lorrie: Definitely. I felt really hard done by when I did that because I think we took a slightly different approach. I popped a page on my website which is still there but won’t be by the time I’m finished recording this podcast, that’s what reminded me, that said I would happily do a free proof read and content analysis of a couple of pages on peoples’ websites, they just had to get in touch with me.
So although I got some contact details from it I found that I would do the proofreading and then never hear anything back or get a thanks very much have a nice life from people. So they were happy to take the work and that really did teach me something, that people are very, very happy to take work from free from you and I suppose I was a bit naïve when I started out because I didn’t think people would have the nerve to do it really.
Philippa: Yep, people like a freebie.
Lorrie: A freebie yes, but getting in touch with somebody and saying, “Can I please have this free content analysis,” and you get back in touch with them and give them – you know, I sent good 1,000 word documents over to get no response. I chased a couple of times and said, “Oh hi, I just wanted to know if everything’s okay?” I got, “Yeah, thanks it was fine.” I said, “Alright then, thanks for letting me know.”
That’s taught me that certainly freebies, keep them to the minimum unless you need to offer a freebie. They are a very short boost, the freebies, so if you’re absolutely desperate for more work and you really need to raise your profile very, very quickly then offer a limited time freebie that you know you can deliver.
Philippa: Yeah, and that won’t take hours and hours.
Lorrie: Yes. Yeah, don’t feel stingy by offering something small. I suppose that takes us onto something else that can be a little bit of a mistake when you’re freelancing and that’s offering too much work for too little money.
Philippa: And, it is so common especially, when people are just starting out. But, even people who are established aren’t immune from sometimes miscalculating how long a piece of work will take, or just making a mistake with calculations and offering too much for too little.
Lorrie: Definitely. You can find yourself actually paying to do work at some point. If you take your overheads into account, and you take how much other work you’re turning down into account, it can actually cost you a lot of money and I’ve done that. I’ve sort of charged far too little and then combined it with another newbie fail by failing to sign an agreement before entering into the work. I can hear you, you’d be like, “Oh yeah.”
Philippa: Yeah, when I first started out I took on a big piece of work for very little money and it was because I was in that, “Oh my God I might never get any work ever come in.” So, when someone offered me some work and suggested a price I mistakenly thought that that would be better than not taking it. But the fact was, for the whole 5,000 words I resented every sentence because, I knew how badly I was being paid because by then it became clear how much I was getting hourly and all that and it was just horrific.
I did the work because I agreed to do the work and I did it for the price I had agreed on but, it really taught me, it was a kind of sweat shop shock really that I had to value myself for more than that. While it might seem in the short term better to take badly paid work than no work, the fact is if you refuse that either they will pay you more because they really want you or they won’t. But, it gives you time then to spend marketing yourself and getting paid work. If you’re stuck in a contract with badly paid work your time is full and so you’ve not got the opportunity to find better work.
Lorrie: That is it. I think there’s a fear with newbies, and I can certainly admit to it myself, I didn’t want to start making demands. That was my fear, I didn’t want to say to people, “I’m not starting the work until I get a down payment.” Now, for larger projects, not for ongoing projects, but for larger one off projects I take a down payment.
Philippa: I do similarly with new clients as well quite often.
Lorrie: Yeah. It’s a very sensible move to make.
Philippa: It is.
Lorrie: You imagine the worse things. You imagine thinking, “Oh, my client is going to think I’m so rude.” But, it’s just business. It’s just business. I take a down payment because I’ve had people not pay me up to 800 Pounds before and because of no contract in place, this was when I was really starting out, I’ve done an incredibly amount of work for literally no money because there’s nothing in place to make sure that they pay me.
Philippa: I’ve found that if you’re just very matter-of-fact about your demands – demands sound like a very demanding word, but if you’re just very matter-of-fact –
Lorrie: Yeah, they’re requirements, aren’t they?
Philippa: Yes, that’s a better word, “I will submit the work once I’ve received payment,” or whatever your own terms are, “Copyright switches to you once I receive payment,” or whatever it is. If you just state what they are people rarely pick me up on it, people rarely challenge them in my experience.
Lorrie: No, on the contrary I think it’s actually quite a professional thing to do.
Philippa: Yeah.
Lorrie: If you present someone in writing with a list of requirements from your end, they know that you’re serious about what you’re doing and they know that you know what you’re doing.
Philippa: Similarly, a client sometimes has a list of requirements. Maybe they’ve been burnt before by freelancers or something, but I quite like it. I know where I am and I can agree or not and they’re usually very, very reasonable. It’s things like, “Deliver the work on time.”
Lorrie: Actually give me the work if I pay you.
Philippa: That’s it. So I’m not offended and I don’t feel like someone doesn’t trust me or whatever if they have requirements and similarly if you present them in a similar way, other people don’t tend to get like that either.
Lorrie: No, absolutely. People have accounting departments, and human resource departments, and they need paperwork often, that’s all it really is. They need to know what they’re going to get and how much they’re going to pay for it.
Philippa: Exactly, exactly. And, who will own the work once it is completed and that kind of thing. There are lots of little small embarrassing mistakes I’ve made over my life.
Lorrie: I was hoping that we were going to get off the embarrassing ones and just talk about the more sensible ones.
Philippa: Oh no, there are plenty more of those.
Lorrie: Oh no, here we go.
Philippa: Little small ones that don’t have a big impact on your business but still just make you cringe. One of those for me is I manage all my email through one Gmail account. I’ve got about 12 email addresses and that’s not an exaggeration, it’s ridiculous. So, I get everything forwarded to one Gmail account and from that account I can also send from the other email addresses and that kind of thing.
Lorrie: Sure.
Philippa: If I receive an email to say my Philippa@SocialMediaWriter.co.uk account, then when I reply to that through my Gmail it automatically applies from that account so I don’t need to think about it. The result is if sometimes I send an email, even to reply, but in fact is a first email I forget to change in the drop down box to the correct account and so I’ve sent a few, a few –
Lorrie: I notice your voice breaking on that.
Philippa: A few emails in my time, from my personal account. It’s not awful. Thankfully, my personal account isn’t named something horrendous like SexyBabe84 or anything like that, but it’s still somewhat embarrassing in a professional capacity. Also, I do work quite hard to keep my professional and my personal quite separate.
Lorrie: Sure.
Philippa: So it’s one of those mistakes that is easily done and I spot it about five seconds after I’ve clicked send.
Lorrie: That’s always the way.
Philippa: I hate doing it but it has happened to me a few times.
Lorrie: Luckily, I have not actually done it but again, it’s the near miss thing where I’ve sent something – I was with Yahoo for years. It’s not as bad as BlueYonder or Hotmail, but it’s still a bit old fashioned. But, I was resisting the fact that Google is so sort of omnipresent now. But eventually I left Yahoo and I went to Gmail. The way that emails are stacked when you open a mail trail, when you want to forward something to somebody and not reply it keeps it in the same thread.
Philippa: Yes.
Lorrie: So there have been a number of times where I’ve had horrible clients, or clients doing something really, really frustrating and I’ve just wanted to really vent my frustration and I’ve emailed you Pip obviously, and just said, “In confidence, am I completely wrong in thinking this person’s being a bit weird or am I reading this the wrong way?” Then for about five minutes afterwards I’ve thought, “Please tell me I didn’t send that back to the person.”
I’ve done that in my personal life never, touch wood, in my professional life. But when I was about 18 I sent an email, it was one of these university ones, and we’d just gotten to university and everyone was working out who liked whom, and who was friends forever and who was just never going to speak again. I sent an email to somebody sagging her off and I sent it to the wrong person. Rather than send it to the person I wanted to send it to, I sent it to the actual person saying, “Oh, she’s annoying me so much. I don’t think I’m going to speak to her much anymore. I think this is it.” You know, real 18 year old drama and it went straight to her. From that, thank God it wasn’t professional.
Philippa: There is something that saves me on a daily basis from this kind of thing and it’s a little add on you can use with Google where you can undo sending.
Lorrie: Cool.
Philippa: Yes, I know.
Lorrie: You’ve got me excited.
Philippa: All it does, and you can set the timing yourself, I think I’ve got it set for five seconds, and for five seconds after clicking send you’ve got the option to undue sending. All it does basically is delay sending it for five seconds. But the fact is that nine times out of 10 you spot that you haven’t included the attachment you said you would, or that you’ve spelt somebody’s name wrong, or that you’ve sent it to the wrong person, often you spot those things the moment you click send. So with this little add on in Gmail where it would normally say, “Message has been sent,” it just says, “Message has been sent, click to undo,” and for five seconds has a link to undo. If you get there quick enough, you get it back and then you can fix it.
It is that thing of you do spot it the moment you click send so that for me is a lifesaver, or I’d do a lot more of –
Lorrie: I’m certainly going to go in and install that.
Philippa: Do it definitely. You know, that classic, “Please find attached,” and then there’s no attachment.
Lorrie: Definitely. Gmail actually tells you now doesn’t it, it picks up if you’ve mentioned attach.
Philippa: Yes.
Lorrie: That’s another reason that even though I’m not too keen on the thread organization in Gmail, I do prefer it very, very much. I will be going in and installing this because just as I’m thinking about it I have been known to send vest regards to people and vest wishes.
Philippa: Similarly, I also have been guilty of sending tweets from the wrong account.
Lorrie: Yeah, I’ve done that.
Philippa: I have my personal Twitter account and I have my professional Twitter account, and I also run the Twitter accounts for two non-profit organizations.
Lorrie: You’re basically most of Twitter.
Philippa: I am most of Twitter. 99% of it is me.
Lorrie: Good marketing strategy though.
Philippa: Although Tweet Deck is a lifesaver in the terms of I don’t have to have four different browsers open, I can manage all the accounts from the one place, and it’s quite easy to highlight the account you want to send a particular tweet from, but the fact is that when you’re a bit on autopilot there are occasions where I’ve sent the wrong tweet from the wrong account. Sometimes that’s fine. They’re not that much [inaudible 24:12] but they’re not contradicting each other so it’s not usually the end of the world if I send something through my personal account that was meant for one of the non-profit accounts because I tend to agree with what they’re campaigning about.
More embarrassing is if I send something personal through my professional account. There are ways you can sign certain petitions by sending a Tweet and I’ve done that with embarrassing consequences at times from the wrong account. It’s rarely the end of the world, but it’s certainly embarrassing and it makes you feel a bit incompetent when it happens.
Lorrie: Definitely. I do use Tweet Deck now as well, you’ve finally converted me. It was just too difficult having even just two browsers open at the same time. The thing with Tweet Deck, lovely though it is, is it defaults to one account so obviously, one of your accounts has to be the main account. For some reason, I think it’s just a glitch, or I might follow one person from both accounts and in that case when you reply to somebody’s tweet sometimes both or all of your Twitter accounts are highlighted so this person receives the same tweet from about four different accounts that they’ve never heard from.
Then obviously, they want to go and see who’s been talking to them and they head over to my personal account and it’s full of feminist rhetoric and angry responses to the daily mail and things like that. It’s a bit of fun but it can be a bit of a shock to people when they’ve just been reading about my copywriting.
Philippa: Exactly. If I send something to my personal account about the latest content marketing strategies, it’s irrelevant but nobody really cares.
Lorrie: That’s it.
Philippa: If I send something to my professional account about, I don’t know, being annoyed –
Lorrie: [Inaudible 26:06] do you.
Philippa: [Inaudible 26:09] trying to get across the seriousness without implicating themselves.
Lorrie: Don’t worry, I’ve already implicated myself.
Philippa: If I send something to my professional account about being annoyed with a client or being stressed about not having enough work or too much work, or whatever it is.
Lorrie: Oh, those would be the worst
.
Philippa: That’s more problematic. Thankfully, touch wood, which I am.
Lorrie: I’m touching all the wood within reach at this point.
Philippa: I’m leaning on a desk so much of me is in contact with wood. That hasn’t happened, but it’s easy to do and I can see why it does happen.
Lorrie: I suppose it’s on a similar vein and I am going to implicate myself, I don’t really mind at this point you’ve all heard that I sweated my way through an initial client meeting so how much worse can it get. When I started a Facebook page for my business I was reading up on how to get sort of more followers in an organic way rather than do that whole follow me, follow me, follow me and then buying followers [inaudible 27:13].
So I was reading these articles and it said, “Why not invite people you know?” I thought, “Fair enough,” because most of my client base is sort of from a friends of friend, colleagues of colleagues, people I’ve worked with kind of origin. I went to my Yahoo account, as I mentioned earlier, and I selected the people from my address book that I wanted to inform about my professional Facebook page and I clicked send. I deselected all the randomers that I had spoken to over a good five years with that email account and I went on my merry little way.
All of a sudden I started receiving emails and likes from people I hadn’t heard from in years. As it transpires, Facebook had a little promotional tool of theirs that had sent the email to everybody I had ever emailed or who had ever emailed me in five years. Estranged family members, ex-boyfriends, people that I no longer speak to for a multitude of reasons, people I used to work with, people I never used to work with, everybody. The builders, the window cleaners, the gardeners, everybody, thousands of contacts received this SPAM email about my Facebook.
Silly me, well actually I don’t think silly me, I’m going to stand by it. I went on my personal Twitter account which is in no way connected to my professional Facebook account, there’s no link between the two and I basically had an, “Oh shit moment.” I was like, “Oh my goodness. Oh, no a horrible horrible moment.” I mentioned, and I didn’t name anybody but I said, “Oh this awful person just tried to like my Facebook page.” And then I got a Tweet from the awful person. They must have Googled me and found their way to my personal email account because there they were saying, “I hope I’m not the awful person you’re referring to,” and they were. I went, “Oh no,” and they wouldn’t go away they tried phone me, texting me, and emailing me for days afterwards.
Philippa: I nearly invited an ex that I don’t speak to, to connect with me on LinkedIn the other day. I finally agreed to let it sign in with my Gmail account so it could find people I’d had contact with to request connections and it did. There were loads of people most of whom I didn’t know who they were. They were presumably somebody who’d sent me an email once. It seemed to scrape everybody.
So I was going through this immense list. There was this kind of check all option and so I did that and then went through unchecking the odd person either I really didn’t know who they were or they had nothing to do with anything I might do professionally. Of course, once you’ve scrolled down 30 or 40 people you start paying less and less attention to what you’re clicking and unclicking and yes, I very nearly invited an ex that I had a bit of an acrimonious break up with to make contact which, if nothing else, would have provoked a really awkward conversation with that person.
Lorrie: Oh, how awful.
Philippa: Thankfully, it’s another horror of the almost.
Lorrie: I wish it was just an almost.
Philippa: I did spot it, but the horror of what may have happened if I hadn’t still sits with me.
Lorrie: No, I have the horror of what happens if it does happen and it is horrifying. I felt like my stomach was going to drop out of my feet. It was the worst thing, honestly ever. I just sat there and went, “Oh no,” because it wasn’t anything I had done. I had unchecked everything and it was Facebook. Oh, I loathe Facebook sometimes because I don’t know whether it was a glitch, I don’t know if it is something they do that is a little bit naughty to try and get more people on there, but it caused me huge, huge problems.
Luckily, I hadn’t said anything awful on my professional account but what it also did was invite people to be my friend at the same time. So what that does is give people access to all your personal information on Facebook. Again, luckily my Facebook is fairly neutral.
Philippa: One of the whole points of having a professional Facebook page is that you can keep the professional and personal separate. So there might be people who you would really like to like your Facebook page but connecting with them on your personal account is a whole other thing that you probably don’t want.
Lorrie: Exactly. My privacy settings on my personal account are sky high.
Philippa: You’ve got it so locked down and understandably. More and more people are doing that.
Lorrie: Like you say, for good reason, but yeah, it was excruciating, it really, really was.
Philippa: Other social media no-nos that I see quite a lot is a professional account, even a LinkedIn account which is pretty much entirely professional, or professional pages with awful profile photos of you falling out of a night club. Not you, falling.
Lorrie: I was going to say, “When did this happen?”
Philippa: Of people falling out of a night club or being a bit sexy.
Lorrie: Or, the duck face.
Philippa: Yeah, exactly duck face. That’s fine on your personal account, it’s fine on your Facebook personal profile but on your LinkedIn account, no it’s not good is it.
Lorrie: Sexy web cam pics. I’ve seen somebody who I know is a really, really, really good professional person. Very, very skilled, very intelligent and I had a look and their profile picture is a murky webcam picture that’s taken in sort of half light and yeah, this person is doing duck face. For anybody who doesn’t know what duck face is, poor Pip, she clearly has bad experiences with ducks or duck faces.
Philippa: Duck faces, ducks are fine.
Lorrie: I like ducks actually, but yeah, duck faces which frankly do a disservice to ducks, are when people stick their pouts really, really far out and try to be blasé about pouting. It’s a very, very weird thing so I might actually link to it in the show notes.
Philippa: Do, although I’m sure people, as soon as they hear it, will know exactly what we mean because it’s so prevalent on Facebook in particular.
Lorrie: Definitely.
Philippa: It’s just that every girl seems to have the arm outstretched phone above the head.
Lorrie: Yes, always the arm and in the bathroom.
Philippa: Yes, the bathroom.
Lorrie: Always in the bathroom or in front of the bathroom mirror.
Philippa: The thing about having murky profile photos or just inappropriate ones, 10 years ago that was kind of okay because lot of people didn’t have digital cameras and would have to scan a photo and scanners weren’t very good and all that. But these days, you get more photos from people’s phones on one night out than you might have had in your entire digital photo lifetime. Until a few years ago there were digital photos everywhere. There were opportunities for digital photos everywhere and there were few excuses these days for having an inappropriate profile picture, I think.
Lorrie: Absolutely. Carrying on from the theme of really embarrassing profile photos, I’d like to think I’ve never really suffered from. My personal Twitter account as a weird one sometimes, but it’s nothing excruciating, is embarrassing profile information.
Philippa: Oh, yes.
Lorrie: So whether it’s your Twitter profile or your LinkedIn profile headline, or commonly actually, people’s websites. For some reason people feel the need to tell people on their professional websites everything about them, and their hobbies, and their interests, and what they get up to and particularly in the copywriting sector, or communications, or editing. There tends to be this over share tendency with stuff that they write.
Philippa: I think it’s difficult because we’re always told, and it’s correct, we’re always told that we need to inject personality into what we do.
Lorrie: Definitely.
Philippa: That people hire a person as much as they hire a copywriter and that by portraying you as a well rounded individual you’ll do better. That’s good advice however –
Lorrie: There’s a big however.
Philippa: There’s a line and some people don’t even seen the line.
Lorrie: To some people the line is a dot. Like you said, it’s good to inject a bit of personality. I write fiction and there’s a number of times I’ve had to sort of provide people with an autobiography of myself. You have a look through other people’s autobiographies to get an idea of what’s a good idea and what isn’t. Often it’s nice to inject a little bit of humour into them. Mine’s got a little bit about trying and failing to write the great British novel and I read somebody else’s that said they had been on the Zombie Walk recently, but it was one line and it was an oblique reference.
Whereas, I’ve been on people’s website and the most recent example I can think of is that somebody had dedicated a paragraph to the fact that they write Harry Potter fan fiction on their copywriting website.
Philippa: Oh, no.
Lorrie: For those people who aren’t particularly savvy about fan fiction a lot of it is quite saucy.
Philippa: It is. It’s quite often an erotic – people carry on a story from the end of the Harry Potter books, or the Twilight books, or whatever and turn it into a more adult thing. I mean, that’s where the infamous 50 Shades of Grey, that started off as fan fiction so that gives you an idea of what fan fiction can be like.
Lorrie: This is it. Or, if you disagree with the original author’s choice for couplings for example, if one character ends up marrying a different character and you think they should have gotten with the other person, then your imagination can go wild in your fan fiction.
Philippa: Which is fine.
Lorrie: That’s fine. It’s fine for [inaudible 38:49]. I was a bit worried about mentioning this in this Podcast in case people were like, “Hmm, I wonder if she does fan fiction?” And I assure you I do not.
Philippa: And even if you did –
Lorrie: It would be fine.
Philippa: It would be fine but it also wouldn’t be on your copywriting site.
Lorrie: It certainly wouldn’t be on my copywriting website.
Philippa: If instead you were a writer of erotic fiction and had a website dedicated to that, then it could possibly have a place. But, on a copywriting site, or a web design site, or anything like that there are lines and you’ve got to think. You do want to inject personality but you’ve got to think, “Is this what my clients are trying to find out about me? Is this something I would want them to know?”
Lorrie: Unless there’s a great big untapped niche for Harry Potter fan fiction purchasers than I would suggest not including it on your website unless you know there are companies out there who will buy your Harry Potter fan fiction for a handsome sum. In which case, by all means offer it as a service otherwise, perhaps stick to your blog.
Philippa: I fear that the 50 Shades of Grey phenomena may encourage more, and more, and more fan fiction than necessary.
Lorrie: It already has. Honestly, literary work has become interesting in the last few months I’ve got to say. I believe a number of people that I’m actually friends with have been asked to edit stuff that’s a little bit more adult.
Philippa: Yeah, I’ve edited some erotic fiction. It was an interesting process, I quite enjoyed it. But that was very good, it was good quality it wasn’t fan fiction.
Lorrie: Good quality writing is good in whatever form even if it’s a bit eye opening.
Philippa: Back to mistakes we’ve made, probably my worst one by far I’m mortified when I think about it.
Lorrie: I was looking forward to this.
Philippa: I was at a networking event, a face-to-face networking event locally. I was taught you kind of do the rounds of the room and you talk to various people and I got talking to a guy who is a lawyer and he works with small businesses on writing contracts for their work. He works with sole traders and freelancers as well.
I was chatting with him saying, “This is pretty interesting. I’m aware it’s something I need to formalize more in my own work.” So I was chatting with him and earlier that day I had actually watched a video about why freelancers need good contracts in place and so that came to mind. I made what had to be my most misjudged comment in my entire life.
Lorrie: I have no idea what it is but I’m tickled waiting.
Philippa: This video that I had watched, it had gone a bit viral understandably, and I’ll link to in the show notes and it was called F*ck You, Pay Me.
Lorrie: Oh dear.
Philippa: But not F*ck You, Pay Me it was the full word you, pay me. Now, the F word doesn’t offend me, I’m quite a sweary person at times.
Lorrie: It’s true, she is. The editing is unbelievable.
Philippa: So for some reason while talking to this lawyer at a networking meeting I said, “It’s funny we’re talking about this because I watched a video only today. It was very good and it was called Fuck You, Pay Me.”
Lorrie: Oh, no.
Philippa: I said it and then the look on his face was pure horror. There was no amusement.
Lorrie: You think you’d get a little bit, “Oh dear.”
Philippa: You think he might be slightly amused, perhaps taken aback because it was [inaudible 43:09] I shouldn’t have said it.
Lorrie: For sure. Pure horror.
Philippa: Pure horror. He looked at me like I had just punched his child in the face and couldn’t get away fast enough.
Lorrie: Could we just say at this point no children have been punched by Pip ever.
Philippa: No, not a single one.
Lorrie: It’s not something people expect from her at all.
Philippa: Yes, it was awful and it was my fault. When you’re speaking to someone you don’t know in a business context you don’t use the F word and yet, for some reason, my internal sensor didn’t switch on in time and I said it and it was horrific. So learn from me, if you’re talking to a person you don’t know at a business account and they’re a lawyer and they’re a middle aged man in a suit, I’m making judgments there, but it all plays in doesn’t it – don’t use the F word. Just don’t, even if it’s a title of a video. It’s a very good video, I’ll link to it, but yes, please learn from my mistake. I’m mortified just thinking about it still and this was months ago.
Lorrie: How awful. I remember saying once, in an interview actually and I got the job, but I mentioned that I couldn’t be asked for something. That went down equally well as you could imagine they just went, “Hmm,” and carried on.
Philippa: The initial thing was me going, “Oh, I shouldn’t have said that.” But then it was his reaction that really made it 100 times worse.
Lorrie: Like, “No you really shouldn’t have.”
Philippa: Yeah, I could not have misjudged it more badly. It was as bad a misjudgement as is possible to make. But thankfully, I wasn’t looking for work from him I was more interested in possibly using his services actually to get one off full proof contract drawn up rather than winging it. I’ve got a reasonable one but I’m sure a lawyer could tear it apart.
Lorrie: Especially that one.
Philippa: I was possibly interested in using his services. Thankfully, I wasn’t trying to get him to use mine. But, oh, don’t.
Lorrie: I had an excruciating moment recently but luckily, after what we’ve said in the last episode or two about luck and how it’s just not a big part of freelancing, luckily this person is a friend and I was doing some work for him for free for a favour. We access one another’s fiction writing, we read one another’s fiction writing and offer reviews. It’s a really nice sort of friendly working relationship.
We were talking about writing scary stories. It’s a little bit before Halloween and I was in the midst of something spooky. So we’re chatting away and he said rather than coming up with a spooky story as a whole what he was doing was making a document full of spookiest scariest possible things he could think of and then he was going to write short stories around those.
Well I thought, “What a great idea. Brilliant.” Because I tend to start a short story and just see where it goes. For longer pieces I do pen them out but for short stories I just sort of wing it and then do some editing afterwards. So I said to him, “Go on, send me your scary ideas because I really want to be scared.” He said, “No, no, no they’re too scary.”
I thought he was joking at first because we were chatting on Twitter on my personal account and I kept going, “Please, please, please.” Eventually other people on my Tweet feed who didn’t know him were like, “Come on, please. Send us the scary stuff.” I was sitting in bed and I had already terrified myself by writing a scary story that succeeded in scaring me. It took me ages honestly, because every time I got to a scary bit I was like, “Oh, I can’t it’s just too scary.” So at least my readers know I do suffer for my art.
Eventually, after so much warbling he was like, “Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” So, I open the email anyway and I was reading through and I don’t really want to give too much away about his idea but I thought it was hilarious. I was like, “Oh, you tricked me. After all this time you’ve sent me something really, really funny.” I was weeping with laughter, it was so funny. It was late at night and he was about to go to bed and he said, “I’ll send you a little bit of the document now.”
So I got in touch with him on Twitter and it was quite sweary I was like, “Oh you,” in less than nice terms, “You, I thought you were going to send me some really scary stuff. This is Fing hilarious.” And it turns out it was actually the scariest thing he could ever think of.
Philippa: Oh, no.
Lorrie: It was actually generally the scary stuff that he had been so nervous to send me.
Philippa: Because it was so scary.
Lorrie: So scary and also he was embarrassed that he was scared by it. I still wasn’t taking him seriously, I was still absolutely convinced he was having a laugh with me. So I was like, “No, you’re so funny.” It carried on and he was like, “Seriously, this is harsh dude.” I’ve never felt as such a failure as a literary editor in my life.
One of the services I provide is developmental critiques and people send me a synopsis and a 10,000 word extract of their writing and I tell them what I think of it and how they can improve it. Sort of assessing the marketability of the writing and I absolutely shredded it just because I thought it was so funny. I swear honestly, I was convinced he was trying to make me laugh. I felt so bad. I’ve apologized to him so many times but he was like, “Yeah, I won’t send anything to you when I’m feeling a bit delicate next time.”
I can’t tell you how bad I felt. I think you’re getting a sense of it. I felt so bad.
Philippa: Yeah, I feel for you. In work there’s a mistake I’ve made a few times, not when freelancing but in other work that I can see could certainly happen in freelancing and that is pretending that I’m further on in a project than I actually am. If you’re manger says, “How are you getting on with that thing?” And you go, “Oh God, I’ve forgotten to do it.” So you go, “Yeah, I’m getting on fine I’m about half way through. I’ll get it to you in a bit. But it becomes problematic that you then realize that you need more information from them and you have to go, “Actually…”
Lorrie: Yeah, somebody didn’t send the vital document over and you’ve said you’re half way through.
Philippa: I’m half way through but could you resend me the title? Would that be alright? Thank you.
Lorrie: Just so I can double check.
Philippa: Exactly. Can you resend your whole instructions I just want to cross reference them?
Lorrie: Who was the client again?
Philippa: I’ve done that in a job I have not done it as a freelancer but I know plenty of freelancers who have because you don’t want to imply that you’re running late and your clients don’t want to think that you’re rushing their work. So it could be tempting if someone says, “How are you getting on?” To say, “Great, nearly there.”
Lorrie: A bit of a auto response really.
Philippa: That’s it and then you’re stuck if you do need more information on something you’ve said you’re already done.
Lorrie: You’d have to word yourself extremely carefully to get out of that one.
Philippa: Yeah, definitely.
Lorrie: Something that feels similar and I’m not sure why or if it is, but on the subject of sort of getting enough information for a project often with clients, as we’ve mentioned in one of the earlier episodes, you’re not necessarily dealing with one person in the company you’re dealing with several and some are better than others at sending information over. Some are notoriously bad for it even in house.
Occasionally, I don’t think this is something that I’ve done but I know it’s something that I’ve come extremely close to doing, chasing people for more information and feeling a bit of an attitude with them because really, how are you supposed to write something without the necessary info and then finding that they’ve already emailed you. There’s nothing like a smug person, “Do you just want to check your emails because I already sent you that.”
Philippa: Often, that could happen with someone that is notoriously bad at sending information. You might make an assumption without double checking. If it’s normally someone who is normally very reliable and you can’t find the info you double check.
Lorrie: Of course.
Philippa: But if it’s someone who is notoriously bad you are more likely to jump to the conclusion, “Oh, here we go again they haven’t sent it.”
Lorrie: This is it, always, always check your inbox. As I said, I almost did it the other day, a client company who is terrible at sending information. They’re rubbish at it. You’ll send them something and they’ll send you back question marks, or they’ll say, “Oh you need to ask such and such,” and I had no access to that person. There’s all these reasons that I can’t get the information that I need for the work they want.
I was on the verge, I had even typed out the email, “I’ll do this as soon as I finally have some information from X person.” And I looked down and again, I’m sure Gmail sent it for me, it was a Gmail issue, it was sitting under the email I was typing. It was just tucked in there and I think our emails had crossed and it just popped in the bottom. It was there so I deleted the email thankful that I had taken a bit of time over it and that that person who is notoriously bad at sending over information wouldn’t have any ammo to use against me.
Philippa: There’s a mistake that I’ve made several time and it’s not strictly a freelance writing mistake. As well as the freelance writing that I do I’ve got a few small websites that earn a bit of affiliate income which is just a nice bit of passive income really so little bonus extras. More times than I care to remember, and it tends to be late at night, I get generally over excited with the best idea I’ve ever had and this is amazing.
Lorrie: The one that is going to make you a millionaire.
Philippa: It’s just going to be perfect and how has no one else thought of it. So at 1AM I buy about six URLs for the amazing, amazing websites I’m going to sell. I wake up the next morning and just go, “Oh God, what am I going to do with those?” I bought www.TiredAndFedUp.co.uk.
Lorrie: Deals for freelance copywriter. It’s just what you want to be telling people, “You know what? I’m tired and I’m bored.”
Philippa: I don’t even know what I thought it would be but it was a brilliant idea at the time. Late at night it was fantastic, I had plans galore. That recently came up for renewal and I said, “No, please don’t renew it.” Thankfully because it was a .co.uk it only cost me about a few pounds for two years. But, I’ve done that so many times.
I get my URLs through a website called 1and1, I looked through my 1and1 account and I’ve got my useful ones that I use and then I’ve just got so many that I look at –
Lorrie: It’s a shame.
Philippa: I got, “Oh why did I ever think that was a good idea?”
Lorrie: I think I’ve got www.TheLoveBooth.co.uk up for renewal soon.
Philippa: That’s brilliant.
Lorrie: And I think it’s not going to get renewed. It was a good idea. I’m not going to tell you what the idea was in case somebody steals it and then I resent them forever. But if anybody out there would like to purchase www.TheLoveBooth.co.uk by all means it’s up for renewal soon so stay tuned.
Philippa: As well as mistakes we’ve made we also see plenty of mistakes going on around us.
Lorrie: Yes, it’s far more interesting territory for me because it means that my embarrassment is over and I can start pointing at other people and going, “Oh, thank God I didn’t do that.”
Philippa: So true. One I see quite often is famous or not so famous people who go onto Twitter with the intention of doing a vanity search and basically search for their own name to see what people are saying about them. This can be a good idea if you’re running a business, it’s really good to see what people are saying about you. But, it’s not unheard of for people to get it wrong and instead of typing their name into the Twitter search box they actually put it into the status update box and send a tweet with their name, just of their name.
There’s a politician in the UK with the rather unfortunate name of Ed Balls and he did this once. He sent a tweet that just said, “Ed Balls.” I saw it so I retweeted it and I added, “Philippa Willitts,” at the start and lots of other people did too. The thing is, the poor guy, this was about two years ago he did it and I still about once a week see it retweeted it’s just Ed Balls saying, “Ed Balls.” If you’re going to do a vanity search that’s fine but put it in the right box for goodness sake.
Lorrie: I bet Ed Balls doesn’t do anymore vanity searches because that will probably be the most common tweet that comes up for him. It’s not quite on the vanity search front but the British Red Cross, the person that manages their Twitter account and to all of my knowledge still manages their Twitter account did something that Pip and I mentioned earlier which is getting their personal and professional accounts mixed up.
Now, the British Red Cross has hundreds of thousands of followers so it’s not like Pip and I with a few thousands each. It was fairly late at night and we will add an article about this into the show notes, but the British Red Cross announced to its hundreds of thousands of followers that it was ready to go out, drink lots of beer, and get completely slizzered.
Philippa: Slizzered.
Lorrie: They were ready for a hot party time and they were going to get slizzered. They mentioned the brand of beer and the brand joyfully retweeted it. They were like, “Oh, good God this is the best endorsement ever. A British first aid charity has just recommended going out and getting paralytic on our beer.” Luckily they handled it really well.
It was a bit of a PR triumph actually. I think they made some comment about keeping people away from their Twitter feed when they were getting slithered. It all went well but it was so funny at the time. You just felt so sorry for that person because there’s no way you could get a tweet like that back before it had been retweeted by hundreds and hundreds of people.
Philippa: In a similar vein something I see quite a lot is people trying to copy and paste URLs into a Tweet or an email and they don’t pay attention to what they’re actually pasting and they’ve copied the wrong thing. I’ve seen people emailing, “Please check out my website,” and then a recipe, a whole recipe, or something just unrelated.
This one case where a guy was on his company Twitter account and sent out a URL to a porn site that he’d obviously copied and then perhaps copied something else and it didn’t click properly or something. But, he lost his job.
Lorrie: I’m not surprised. I’m really not surprised at that because a lot of people are offended by porn so it’s kind of a case of, “Sorry, you’ve got to go,” in that case. I’ve done it before but luckily the URL I posted was nothing sensitive although I really, really didn’t want to post it.
I had contacted somebody, and it was somebody I know fairly well, but at the time I was keeping my fiction writing a secret because I was feeling a little bit nervous about getting out of copywriting and into fiction. It’s a lot more intimate, writing something from yourself than writing a press release for someone else so I was keeping it under my hat while I was getting into the swing of things.
I was in the middle of telling this person, “No, sorry you can’t see my blog. I’m not telling you where my fiction writing is. But, here’s another website,” and I sent my blog URL. It was the most awful thing. I don’t know whether he saw it but he didn’t mention it. It’s totally possible, sometimes he’s a little remise on noticing things but we’ve never spoken about it. It was just so excruciating because it’s one of those moments I really could have fixed with that Gmail undo thing because as soon as I sent the email I just had an, “Oh, no,” moment.
Philippa: It’s awful, it’s awful.
Lorrie: It really was.
Philippa: Another thing is that people kind of forget that if they say one thing to you and are on Twitter saying the opposite you know. If they say, “I’m going to pay that invoice right now.” This is an exaggerated example but then they go onto Twitter and go, “Ha-ha-ha, I’m not going to pay that invoice for a week.” You can see it.
Lorrie: You’ve got some really dastardly clients haven’t you.
Philippa: That hasn’t actually happened, but it was all I could think of. It’s that kind of, “Oh, sorry I’m really busy this afternoon,” for instance and then they’re on Twitter talking about Carnation Street. People, don’t forget that if you’ve got a visible profile or a visible Facebook page, just be sensible don’t be stupid. If you ring someone up and they’re trying to pretend that they’re not in the pub and they blatantly are, don’t lie. You’re quite entitled as a freelancer to an afternoon of and say, “I’m not working this afternoon I’ll call you back on Monday.”
Lorrie: No, no I’m just in the office.
Philippa: Exactly. Do you know there’s a pub in Sheffield that’s called The Office.
Lorrie: Oh, lovely.
Philippa: I think it’s ingenious because you ring home and go, “I’m going to be home late I’ve got to stay late in the office.” Isn’t that clever?
Lorrie: That is good actually. I though actually you were going to say something really, really ingenious, not that what you said wasn’t ingenious. But, I thought you were going to say something along the lines of actually you can wave a little flag and everybody will stop making a noise so you can actually pretend that you are home. That would be great, wouldn’t it?
Philippa: That would.
Lorrie: If you had a pub that was very freelance friendly and you could just stick your hand up and be like, “I’ve got a call.” That would be a life saver.
Philippa: I think we’ve covered quite a few mistakes that we’ve both personally made or both personally almost made and you learn just as much from almost making a mistake as you do from actually making it.
Lorrie: Yeah.
Philippa: The point is everybody will make mistakes, everybody will. You can be as good as you want but it’s going to happen. The point is getting out of them alive, trying to do as little damage as you can when you make them and mostly learning, learning from it. Don’t assume which hotel on a particular long street it is. Don’t say the F word to the man you don’t know.
Lorrie: Don’t turn up late to meetings, or almost late because you don’t have time to go and check your makeup in the mirror, check that you’re not sweating all over people. There’s nothing worse than a wet handshake.
Philippa: That’s it. That’s just some of many mistakes that Lorrie and I have made in the course of our careers and there will be more to come no doubt. I’m sure we could repeat this episode every few weeks and there would be more.
Lorrie: I really, really hope not.
Philippa: Let’s hope not.
Lorrie: It’s a question, a lot of time especially, as you go on and you learn from the mistakes that you do make, it’s prevention rather than cure if you possibly, possibly can. A lot of the mistakes really are just a result of not being prepared or having a lapse in judgment.
Philippa: Yes.
Lorrie: It’s a momentary lapse and you’ve just got to get yourself into the write habit, you really, really do. Once you’ve done it you’re at least minimizing the chances of absolute agony and it is agonizing when you make a horrible, horrible mistake. But what I would say is that if you make a mistake don’t try and bullshit your way out of it, really don’t.
Philippa: If you need to apologize, apologize. You’re not going to lose face, you know, you made a mistake. So say, “I’m really sorry I shouldn’t have done that.”
Lorrie: If it’s needed. If not, have a laugh at yourself.
Philippa: Yes, absolutely.
Lorrie: Don’t take it too seriously if you don’t need to. Apologize for any inconvenience or hurt that might have been caused, duck and cover for a while if you need too, lay low while the storm blows over if you’ve got to. But at the end of the day, we all do it.
Philippa: Yep, it’s true. Now, what we want to do now is introduce a new segment that is going to be part of every episode of A Little Bird Told Me from now on. It’s the Little Bird Recommendations. I feel we should have a jingle.
Lorrie: Da-da-dada.
Philippa: What we’re going to do each episode is both of us are going to choose something that we want to recommend to listeners. Now this might be a blog post, a podcast, a grammar tip, a piece of software, a website, a plugin, anything really that we thought was worth sharing. So Lorrie, what’s your Little Bird Recommendation this week?
Lorrie: So my first tip, it’s an important one but it’s really, really simple, but it’s something that I’ve noticed recently, sorting out your emails. Two things, first as we’ve already mentioned, I think in one of the early podcast, an email signature is a great way to get a little professionalism into your communications and as we’ve already said it’s a great way of getting in a link to your website and your social media feeds.
Secondly, the autoresponder. This is something I’ve really been thinking about recently. In the last few weeks I’ve emailed a number of different freelancers about a number of different things but always with a view to actually hiring them. On every occasion I’ve had nothing but silence. Nothing but silence.
I understand that people, particularly freelancers, and particularly those doing sort of manual work which is what I really wanted which is window cleaners, gardeners, builders, that sort of thing, they can be out and about. So I waited for a day or two, waited over a weekend and then when you hear nothing you go elsewhere.
But what’s also happened is the minute I go elsewhere I’ve had an email back from the original choice going, “Oh, I’m really sorry was away.” If I had known they were away and if I had known when they were going to come back via an autoresponder I would have waited for them because they were my first choice. So as it is they’ve missed out on business because I’m not going to go to somebody and then say, “Oh, sorry my original choice has got back to me.”
Philippa: No, no you can’t.
Lorrie: But if you’re like me you can’t afford to just go chucking clients away. So my tip is this, if you’re going to go out of the office even for a day, even for half a day, let your clients know. You don’t need to tell them all because they might not get in touch with you that day, but schedule your out of office autoresponder. With Gmail you can schedule them so far in advance that you can just do it and forget about it.
Philippa: That’s really good advice. I mean, if you’re a freelance writer or something changes are you’re at your computer a lot of the time. But like you say, if you’re a window cleaner we understand that you’re not going to check your emails every half hour and that’s fine, but if you don’t get a response within a day you don’t know if that’s they don’t care, or if they don’t use that email account, or if they’re full up.
Lorrie: Or, out of business.
Philippa: Yeah, exactly or, whether they’ll be there the next day sorting it out. That’s a really good tip. My recommendation is something I only discovered yesterday but it’s brilliant. I was doing some proofreading and I was editing a document in Google Docs. Now, most of us, however much you might know and understand about language and grammar, most of us have certain mental blocks and for me one of them is complimentary with an i versus complementary with an e.
Lorrie: Oh, okay.
Philippa: Now, if you’re saying something nice to someone that’s a compliment with an i, I know that. But there’s also complimentary meaning free and there’s complementary meaning things that go well together and I can never remember between those two which is spelt with an i and which is spelt with an e.
Anyway this came up in the document I was proofreading in the content of meaning goes well together. So I knew I needed to double check whether the client used the right spelling or not. So I highlighted the word and I was going to copy it into a Google search and do some research but when I highlighted it and right clicked what I discovered is there is an option called research that word.
Lorrie: Oh, brilliant.
Philippa: If you click on that it starts at the top with a definition and then underneath that is links to the thesaurus page for that word.
Lorrie: Oh, that’s really handy.
Philippa: For instance complimentary with an i, the top is a definition, adjective and then it has a few synonyms and then there’s loads of websites like Merriam Webster Dictionary, Free Dictionary, grammar sites, thesaurus sites.
Lorrie: It does it all for you.
Philippa: Wikipedia even, they all appear just to the right. You don’t have to go into a separate page. If you want to know more you can click links to those other sites. But for me, I did it, I found out that the client had used the wrong spelling because complementary with an e means goes well together so I changed that and I was able to fix it without leaving the Google Doc I was in.
Lorrie: Sure.
Philippa: So that’s my Little Bird Recommendation.
Lorrie: That’s brilliant because it’s one of those things that you need to be able to pick up on yourself and you need to be able to not waste too much time because spell check is not going to get it.
Philippa: Exactly. I could have picked up a dictionary and looked it up and I could have done a Google search for the word, but sometimes you’re so busy that saving 10 seconds is still important.
Lorrie: Sure. It’s not so much the 10 seconds it’s the process, it’s the fact that you have to stop the process that you’re doing at that time and start a different process and then get back into what you were doing. You know as well as I do that once single click on the Internet when you’re in the middle of a really, really boring document can be fatal because you think, “Oh, I’ll just check my Twitter. I’ll just have a look at the news. Oh, what’s this?”
Philippa: Exactly.
Lorrie: You get distracted and you might lose a really good idea or you might just not go back to the document even though you really need to get a bit more done.
Philippa: With paper dictionaries I have a particular problem that a lot of linguistically minded people do which is if I look something up in a paper dictionary I’m reading it for 20 minutes because I then look up another word, and then another word, and then another word.
Lorrie: It’s like, “Oh, that one is nice.”
Philippa: Exactly. People last but I can read a dictionary quite happily so yes, that’s a relief for me. If I use a paper dictionary I will be distracted. Yeah, like Lorrie said if you go into a separate tab and look something up there’s always something because yeah, you’re out of the original document so you mind as well check Twitter, and you mind as well check your email. Whereas, if you can remain within the document itself and get the information you need just on the right hand side it’s handy, it’s quick, and yeah it reduces distractions considerably.
Lorrie: So I think that just about sums up our A Little Bird Told Me Recommendations. We’d love to hear any recommendations that you’ve got over the coming weeks. We are happy to feature them if we think they’re good. If they’re a bit rubbish, sorry no. You’ve got to be cruel Pip, you’ve got to be cruel.
Philippa: Cruel to be kind.
Lorrie: It’s true, we’re not having any rubbish recommendations. We really, really hope that you’ve enjoyed the podcast. We hope that baring our souls, if nothing else, has given you a bit of reassurance especially if you’re having a bad day or if you feel you’ve mucked up royally and nothing is ever going to be okay again. It will. It’ll be fine.
Philippa: Take heart, we’ve all done stupid things.
Lorrie: That’s it. Usually, things work out better than you think. Look at British Red Cross, that person lived to get slithered another day. I sweated my way through a presentation under the spotlight and that client is one of my best clients now. We’re human, we’re all human so try not to worry. If you do worry, come and worry with me and Pip. Come and have a chat with us.
Philippa: Exactly. I got the wrong hotel but I still got a cracking interview because thankfully I was a few minute ahead of myself in the first place. I swore at a man but that didn’t prevent any work I was going to get because I wasn’t going to get any work from him anyways, it wasn’t that kind of conversation.
Lorrie: Sure.
Philippa: Sometimes you might swear at a man and lose work and that would feel even more horrendous.
Lorrie: It’s not the end of the world.
Philippa: It’s not the end of the world, things happen.
Lorrie: There’s ways and means of repairing situations.
Philippa: There are.
Lorrie: Even if there aren’t sometimes it’s okay. We’re all still here, the world’s still turning it’s all good. The podcast is still podcasting, the most important thing.
Philippa: That’s the most important thing.
Lorrie: It is. It is, as long as this keeps going we’re all fine. If you have any worries at all or if you have any horror stories you want to come and share –
Philippa: We want to know your horror stories. We’ve bared our souls and we want you to do so now.
Lorrie: Come and share with us. You can find all the links to our social media feeds, you can find the link especially to the Podomatic page which is ALittleBirdToldMe.Podomatic.com and you can find our Facebook page from there so come and have a chat with us. Tell us what you’ve been up to. Tell us what you think of the podcast, the good, bad, we want to hear it.
Philippa: If we get any particularly good embarrassing mistake stories we will share them next time.
Lorrie: Which is a huge incentive for you to share them with us. The whole world will know so it’s all good. I’ve been Lorrie Hartshorn.
Philippa: And I’ve been Philippa Willitts and we will see you next time.