2011 MD Asteroid makes a good point about web development; Internet marketing

Los Angeles to Florida and back.

That round trip is how close an asteroid will come to crashing into our home planet as it races by Earth – only 7,500 miles above the surface – today, June 27, at about 9:30 a.m.

The Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project, a program funded by the United States Air Force and NASA, just recently found the asteroid, which they named 2011 MD Asteroid.

If we were that asteroid, we’d be a little upset. That’s a pretty weak name.

Anyway, the asteroid should be bright enough to be seen with a “modest-sized telescope” in areas in the souther hemisphere near the Atlantic Ocean.

Cool, but what does this have to do with Web Development and Internet Marketing?

Well, though the asteroid is not expected to strike the Earth, the outgoing leg of the asteroid’s trajectory will pass “well inside” the planet’s geosynchronous ring of satellites which is approximately 22,000 miles above Earth’s surface. The Moon, by comparison, orbits the Earth at an average distance of 238,854 miles away.

In fact, in less than two weeks, the NASA Near Earth Object Program has discovered more than 8,100 near-Earth objects. Of those, 1,236 have been classified as potentially hazardous asteroids.

But we’re not freaking out. Why? Because we know we’re not NASA scientists, and we trust them to watch out for us.

We don’t email them four times a day and ask if they’ve thought of this or if they’ve seen that.

They’re experts. We let them do their job.

Web Development and Internet Marketing are different.

Something about this industry causes some people to think they’re experts in them no matter how little they actually know about Technology, Marketing. software development or all of the above.

When it happens, it puts us in a tough position.

Let me use an example to illustrate.

If we’re launching a Marketing campaign with the goal of increasing conversions (conversion here is defined as a visitor who fills out a web form), we know how to make that happen. We’ve done it countless number of times.

Now, we also value transparency. As such, we tell our client exactly what we’re going to do to make that happen, and 99 times out of 100, the client asks a few questions to understand a bit better how it works, but then lets us use our expertise to help them.

Unfortunately, the one out of 100 does not, and this creates a really uncomfortable situation.

Think of it like this. It’s one thing to have a client berate your methods if you tried them and they failed. But what do you do if you’re not even given the chance to implement them?

Add to that, you’ve already paid for quite a bunch of time, resources and material over the original deposite. You can’t bail out of the project because, then you’d have to absorb a large loss or bill the client for the difference, upsetting them even further.

So what do you do?

Yes, you could pound the table and tell the client “We had a deal. If you want to keep delaying or preventing us from doing our job, we’re going to have to bill you more or bill you for our time and resources up to this point and walk away.”

But, in either situation, you’re left with an unhappy client.

If you’ve read our stuff, you know we say that this situation can be avoided by setting expectations upfront.

But sometimes, no matter how much you flash your credentials and tell the client that the asteroid is not going to hit Earth, they just won’t believe you.