This morning I had the opportunity to meet a really nice group of freelancers here in Fort Collins, most of whom are members of Cohere, a co-working facility. The topic of discussion for the breakfast meeting was “how do you show your clients or customers that you care?” Most of the answers involved gifts. Things like a certain brand of chocolate bar (easier to mail because they are relatively flat), spirits with custom labels, forget-me-not flowers, restaurant gift certificates, and the like.

Those are all great ideas for gifts. However, gifts are not a common thing in the cartography/GIS business. Additionally, many of my clients are local government agencies where gifts above a certain dollar amount are prohibited.

I mentioned that I show I care in a different, although I hope just as meaningful way, by always being there for my clients. If something needs to be done over the weekend, I do it. I almost never claim that I am too busy to get a task done. How do I make this work, you might wonder? Because I will do whatever it takes to get that task done on time even if it means hiring sub-consultants to help out.

If I can give at least a portion of the task to someone else, I will (I’ve been very fortunate to have some great people to help out when needed). If the task involves something that is too complex for me to give to someone else, I’ll outsource other portions of my business tasks for that period of time, such as editing, organizing, writing, or invoicing.

This is why I love being a consultant. I can be this flexible with my duties in order to provide maximum return on my time and my client’s time.

A management consultant in the group mentioned that he shows he cares by always getting back to people within two hours. I do the same thing. Even if it is just a short email or call stating when I can get back to the person. There really is no excuse, in the age of email, texting, and twitter, that I can’t get back to someone in a short period of time. That’s right – even when I’m on vacation.

Now, the management consultant mentioned that occasionally he’ll have a client who will take advantage of this. However, I haven’t had that particular problem. People tend to respect other people’s time.

What are you doing for your clients to show them you care?

The GIS/cartography profession is mostly dominated by people who are working as employees for government agencies and private companies where they have to be experts at a certain field (e.g., oil, environmental management, real estate, transportation). If you want to become a freelance GIS/cartographer or start your own cartography firm your best bet is to market yourself as a niche expert in one of those fields and do contracting to those same government agencies and private companies. Some of the more map-centric niches that a cartographer could occupy as a sole-proprietor, however, are:

• Novelty mapping – use places like etsy.com, ebay, and cafepress to directly sell products with a mapping component to the public. There are people who sell shaded-relief maps on ties, people who cut up old historic maps and make jewelry out of them. Once, I sold t-shirts on cafepress with a map of the Hood Canal on them that said “home” underneath the map. Thinking up your product line is an important first-step but the biggest issue for you with this type of business will be on-going customer acquisition through blogging, getting featured in print magazines and newspapers, and other media marketing.
• City mapping – create maps of major cities or even small towns, to be distributed freely through chambers of commerce and other such outlets. Make your living off of the advertising that you must feature prominently on the maps, often including the advertising for local businesses directly on the map itself. Expect to market these maps to real estate agents, local businesses, and other people who can both distribute and advertise.
• Advert mapping – market yourself to small businesses who would like to give their customers a freebie that also advertises their business. For example, a bike store in Seattle distributes free maps of local bike routes to customers that has the bike store logo featured prominently in the lower-right corner. As another example, a museum may want to commission you to map out local outdoor sculptures to provide a walking-tour guide for patrons. Expect to spend a lot of time identifying potential customers and marketing yourself to them.
• Alliance mapping – form an alliance with other business people. You do the cartography, someone else does the marketing, someone else does the web-presence, etc. Operates much like a firm except that each of you agrees on projects as they come and allows you both autonomy and the ability to focus solely on cartography.
• Web mapping – provide the development expertise along with the design skills to produce custom web maps for businesses. Expect your work to be highly variable with difficult to pin-down scopes, but with a high potential return and a potentially high customer base requiring less marketing on your part.
• Book mapping – market yourself to publishing companies as a person who can create maps for books. You may focus on fictional or non-fictional mapping and may need to produce some of your work in black and white and in small formats. Payment could be offered in nominal terms (e.g., $400 for a set) but the best method would be to contract for a percentage of revenue / royalty on book sales. You may get this kind of work directly from authors but this would be more difficult than simply marketing yourself to the major publishers themselves, who could use your work in multiple books.
• Graphic design mapping – align yourself with several large graphic design firms. They may need your help gathering data and getting it into graphic-design software in a usable format to ready a project for the design phase.

I was recently reading someone’s assertion that paper maps were on the way out, to be replaced fully and completely by electronic maps on mobile and desktop devices. The conviction with which it was said was striking in that the author thought it was terribly obvious that this was something that would happen very soon.

I do not think it is that obvious. It’s possible, sure. But just because a trend has been occurring in the recent past does not mean it will continue into the future. It reminds me of a friend who ridiculed a school-board for failing to allocate sufficient money for fuel (for school buses) in the upcoming year. This was at the time when gas prices had been increasing rapidly for several years and, because of that, he considered it obvious that the trend would continue at this same rapid pace. It didn’t. It turned out that the school board did have enough to cover fuel costs because the price of gas went down – much to most people’s surprise.

When the internet began to really catch on people were predicting paperless offices and publishing companies going out of business as books went digital. Do we read books on the internet and/or on our computers now? Yes – I was just reading portions of a book on Google Books just last night actually. Does that mean I only read virtual books and never the hold-in-your-hand variety? No. I am one of those people who still does a lot of her reading the old fashioned way. This is probably because I spend almost all of my day on the computer. Getting off the computer to read a book is a nice change.

I asked colleagues on twitter what others thought about the idea of paper maps becoming obsolete. Some of the responses were:

mstoddard: Paper maps are so useful as working maps in meetings. Easy to carry, mark up.

mstoddard: Yep. People like to gather around a map and talk. And mark it up.

briantimoney: We need good web tools to generate the cartographic equivalent of the 3 paragraph blog post.

sbixel: without paper maps how would the #GeoNerds of the world wrap their presents? cc @map_maker (map_maker uses old paper maps to wrap presents.)

fgcartographix: I still prefer a paper map when travelling too.

*This is a post I made a couple of weeks ago on CartoTalk.

After I posted about my new Colors For Maps booklet (available here), someone suggested I write-up my experience building a webpage to sell items online. I think my advice will only apply to those who want to sell electronic products, but you never know.

The short answer is: I hired a good web designer and she did all the work.

The longer answer is that the web designer chose from a variety of products and possible combinations of things. In the end we decided to use E-Junkie (terrible name but a good product) in conjunction with PayPal and Google Checkout. E-Junkie is only $5/month to sell up to 10 separate products as long as they are under 50 mb in size. I happened to find a 90 day free trial coupon as well. My booklet is about 3 mb in size so it was no problem. Large map files would be more expensive to sell through this site.

E-Junkie interfaces with PayPal and Google Checkout – you have to get accounts at all three of these places. So the user can choose which option they want to use to pay. My booklet has only been for sale for one week now but I can tell there’s a definite preference for using PayPal – around 80% of the purchases are through PayPal. Both PayPal and Google Checkout charge you every time there is a sale. If you won’t have a high income through your sales you’re looking at something like 59 cents per item sold.

The nice thing about PayPal is that the buyer can use a credit card – there is no need for the buyer to have a PayPal account. Why not just use PayPal and Google Checkout – why use E-Junkie? Because E-Junkie handles the order fulfillment process. I don’t manually send the purchaser anything. All these services give you the email addresses of the people who are purchasing though Google allows the buyer to use an encrypted email address so that the seller doesn’t see the real address. Even though I have sold my GIS and Creativity webinar through Google Checkout for a long time now, I would never use the email addresses for marketing. Most individuals and businesses wouldn’t – I hope! I sell the webinar through Google Checkout (it’s a pretty big video file) and I have to fulfill the orders myself. Perhaps I will shell out the money to get this done through E-Junkie at some point though.

I’ve never been in an office with multiple cartographers. I’m not sure I want to be. Cartographers can be a particularly particular bunch – but not all in the same way. This, I imagine, could lead to difficulties. Euphemistically we might call these difficulties differences of opinion.

For example, I wonder how a coffee table in the lobby of a cartography office, laden with design, GIS, CAD, and cartography magazines and journals might morph over the course of a day. I think what would happen is…

First, Cartographer #1 walks in to the office in the morning, chipper and ready to start the day. #1 sees the coffee table with the magazines and journals and decides that they need to be arranged. Now, Cartographer #1 is an old-school type who favors traditional design. Accordingly, #1 fans the magazines and journals out on the coffee table in an orderly manner so that the beginning few letters of each title is visible. They cover most of the coffee table this way.

Cartographer #2 walks in a little while later with coffee in-hand. #2 is a modernist who sees the world in a more hip yet confusingly retro kind of way. (Thus – modern.) #2 sees the fanned-out magazines on the table, considers briefly that the magazine-fan method is reminiscent of visits to grandma’s, and proceeds to stack up the magazines and journals into one neat stack. #2 places the stack off-center, considering that this will give the whole thing a bit of an edgy feel.

Lastly, in walks Cartographer #3 (who could be the boss, perhaps). #3 remembers that there is a journal article that will assist in today’s work-tasks. With insouciance, #3 riffles through the stack, scattering magazines and journals about, until the right one is found. Cartographer #3 takes the journal and leaves the rest in a chaotic heap.

I believe that at various times, even during the same day, I would be like Cartographer #2 and Cartographer #3, but not like Cartographer #1. Except for the being chipper part. I am chipper at times. Which cartographer are you?