I've been talking to quite a few of you PR mavens, marketing strategists, social media strategists, and branding experts lately. You all have the same story, more or less:

1) You really love what you do. Figuring out a company's strategic challenges, addressing the root causes of those challenges, and crafting interesting responses to those challenges--all of it makes you happy.

2) Inevitably, you do such a good job that you get asked by clients to help implement all the things you've been talking about. At the end of the day, someone has to install Wordpress, launch articles on the web site, maintain and monitor a social media presence, and do all the other activities associated with the big bad digital world.

3) Universally, you view these kinds of tasks as annoying at best, and dreadfully non-scalable for your business at worst. Welcome to the socially-connected, mobile digital hashtagged world. Hooray!

When I asked you why you didn't have a go-to firm to help do all of this stuff, the response has been something along the lines of this: it's really hard to get good technical help these days. Why? Well, I have a theory about this, and I'm sure I'll get some grief for it, but here goes.

Web developers, over the years, have developed some kind of DNA mutation that makes it nigh impossible for them to build a recurring, stable, reliable business that delivers consistent value over the very long term. Believe me when I say this that I speak from personal experience. When I look over my career, its a long series of incredibly short and stress-filled engagements with long spaces of boredom in between.

You see, we've overspecialized a bit, in that we're awfully good at sprinting: work for 8-12 weeks on a new web site or software product (and work very hard, indeed, with late hours and lost weekends), take a break, then repeat. On the other hand, what many businesses today need is a different kind of digital worker; not a sprinter, but a distance runner, someone who can reliably churn out 10-minute miles for hours.

There's also this annoying habit that we've developed as an industry, and if you're a developer you know what I'm talking about, that just destroys trust and customer loyalty. I'm talking about the kind of thing where the developer tells the customer something'll take 5 hours but it really ends up taking 15--maybe out of ignorance, maybe because something really did throw a curveball at you--but no matter, the damage has been done. Not good from a "we're trying to build a business here" standpoint.

I'm writing this blog post for two reasons. One reason is blatant and shameless self-promotion. I try to limit this kind of activity to a bare minimum, just because I'm always uber-aware that the King Douche title is never far off. I hope you'll forgive me (some of you social media purists won't, but that's okay too).

The other reason is very simple: I want to draw a line in the sand.

I'm saying: I'm tired of the cash flow roller coaster. I'm tired of putting myself in situations where the customer ends up hating me, or vice versa. I'm also tired of seeing my clients get taken advantage of by some extremely unscrupulous people, the kind that sleep well at night after billing someone $5,000 to set up a Twitter account.

It's time to change the game a lot, and here's what I'm proposing.

If you're a strategist, branding expert, social media expert, PR maven, or other communications strategist, and you don't want to keep doing all the little tasks that you get asked to do, then come talk to us. We can help you take care of lots of stuff. And we'll be open and fair with our pricing, and stand by that price.

What kind of stuff?

* Setting up Twitter accounts and custom Facebook fan pages
* Monitoring social media accounts
* Installing CMS or blogging software
* Upgrading CMS or blogging software
* HTML production
* Updating web site pages
* Microsite/landing page production
* Image cropping/resizing
* Content archiving and migrations
* Installing plugins and modules
* Installing analytics

None of this stuff is that complicated, so I'm ready to provide these services as fixed bid, based on units of work for standard services. This way you (and your clients) can continue to get ongoing help for all those things that just have to get done. You won't have any nasty surprises or situations that involve huge changes. If we say something will take 2 hours, you get billed for 2 hours, not 10.

For some of you, this will mean a pay-as-you-go type of deal, but for others, you'll want to use a monthly or quarterly retainer. The retainer stuff is good for you in that you get a reduced rate, and good for us, because we build cash flow and can help you plan the work you need to get done over the long term.

Download our PDF rate sheet for more info: http://bit.ly/9eJHRA

If you have any questions about any of this, feel free to leave a comment here or send a tweet to @tripledogs.