This is primarily a reaction to recent posts by Adam Hafdahl and Michael Chernick. I won't pretend to have answers, just an anecdote from which one might be able to derive a few tentative principles.
A little background will help you situate these remarks and apply them to your own circumstances. I have been making a living as an independent statistical consultant for 15 years, after owning a small software development company and then working in technical, management, and marketing positions for a large engineering consulting firm. I love solving problems for people: having the opportunity to engage in this, in an ethical manner, is what keeps me going. I would prefer spending my time in problem solving or learning skills to help me do this better. Although marketing is crucial, I don't like doing it and, quite frankly, overt marketing efforts (like ads, conference booths, and so on) have never paid off for me.
One aspect of my marketing efforts, though, has been worthwhile: a focused Web presence. When I first created a Web site in the late '90's, the chief question was what to put on it. Most consultants in my field were creating beautiful pages that laid out their qualifications and accomplishments. I reasoned that what matters to people is content, especially original, helpful content. I therefore set out to publish new material that would be genuinely useful to visitors. To work,
such material has to be user-centric: it must address their problems in their terms without being overt advertisement for my services. I viewed these people not as potential clients for whom I was doing free work, but as publicly visible examples of the kinds of solutions I could provide. Advertising by doing.
Over time, this material came to include the contents of workshops and even semester-long courses. By around 2005, though, course material developed in academia began to be sequestered, available only to enrolled students, so it became impossible to re-use it on my own site (which has scarcely been updated since then, I confess, but it still gets some 12K-15K unique visitors per month). To maintain visibility, I began actively participating in Web-based support sites and Q&A sites. (This was a natural continuation of my participation on listservers, which dates to the mid-90's. I even started a bunch of listservers in the late '90s, which was a very effective way to stay in people's minds.) The principle remained the same: that
by providing the best possible solutions (within the constraints of these media),
the marketing would take care of itself. The beauty of these support sites is that people show you the kinds of problems they are facing: you don't have to invent problems to show what you can do. You know your solutions will interest somebody! And you don't have to tell people what you are good at: they see it for themselves. It's low key, guerrilla marketing.
These sites were
not focused on statistics, but rather on the kinds of applications my clients were interested in, such as GIS (which is a wonderful vehicle for spatial statistics). More recently, some good stats-oriented sites have appeared, such as
http://stats.stackexchange.com, which attract many non-statisticians, so I have contributed to those, too.
In 1999, after almost three years of dedicated activity on listservers (about an hour a day), I began to get inquiries directly as a result of these efforts. They came from people whom I never would have reached in any other way; for example, the first job sent me to the Netherlands for a week, a place where I had no previous contacts. Every year since then, I can trace at least a small part of the work I do to contacts developed over the Internet and in some years a great deal of it arises that way. I have never met many of my clients in person: with some, all interaction has been by e-mail and telephone.
This three-year lead time is not unusual. In a symmetrical way, it corresponds roughly to the amount of time it takes for a statistician (or other technical consultant) to use up the contacts they may have developed while working in industry before they set off on their own. (During the first heady year or two after you start up, it's easy to deceive yourself into thinking that marketing is unnecessary or that work-of-mouth is all you need. For some people that may be true, but for the rest of us--or just to be prudent--it is important not to confuse this backlog of work with a stream of new work. The time to do the most marketing is, unfortunately, exactly when you are busiest.)
Of course I have used other marketing methods, such as conference talks, short courses, workshops, Webcasts, brown-bag seminars, directories of experts, etc., as well as some of the "social media" that are the focus of this thread. On the whole, the best return for the effort has been through the activities described here.
--Bill
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William Huber
Quantitative Decisions
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