Consider our friend the iPhone.  Millions purchased the original unit last year for $399 or more.  This past Friday, many lined up to spend another $299 for an updated 16GB version.

This is not an “I love iPhone,” post.  In fact, you can skip to 3:00 on the video to see exactly what I mean when I say that Apple does customer experience right.

Imagine how YOU would have felt to be one of the people descending those steps at 8:00am this past Friday.  Now imagine how to get your clients to feel the same way.

Alas, I do not have a home office.  Nor, I suspect, will I ever have one.

Make no mistake, I do work from home.  I also work from the courthouse, the local coffee shop (what a cliché), my parent’s house in sunny Florida, and the laundry room in the basement of my apartment building.  That begs the question - can I reasonably say that I have a “home office”?  I think not.

My office is located where I am at any given time.  Whether I have my laptop, my cell phone, or just a notepad and a pen (I don’t use pencils; the feel of the lead on paper has always freaked me out) I can transact business and do the work for which clients hire me.

So I suppose I have a mobile office.  But that’s like saying I’m a mobile person.  Still doesn’t fit.

Do I have a virtual office?  No, because I am not virtual.  I exist.  Flesh and blood, real me.  If I were virtual there is a good chance I wouldn’t leave my socks on the floor or dirty dishes in the sink.

I don’t think there’s a word for what I have, nor a term with which I feel comfortable.  My office - to the extent that I have one - goes where I go.  It resides online and in my head.  It sits in the car with me, on the train and on an airplane.  My office sleeps when I do, wakes with me as well.

We choose to have an office so that we may have a work-life balance.  But self-employed professionals and knowledge workers do not have a work-life balance; their work is their life, and their life is a part of their work.  It’s like saying you have an “eating-digesting balance;” sometimes you eat, sometimes you digest.  but it’s all part of the same organic whole, the yin-yang that makes up who you are.

I get that we all like a place to keep our stuff; it gives us a means of identifying ourselves to others.  We gain a sense of place, of grounding, by doing so.  But true mobility does not come from having a home office; all that does it tether us to a place, just like having an office in a downtown high-rise tethers us to a place.  Sit in a corner office, sit in your spare bedroom, sit at your kitchen table . . . it’s all the same save the rent.

So once again - I do not have a home office.  I am my office, and it goes where I go.

For example, a lawyer recently appeared on a listserv in which I participate.  It’s a high volume group, with information and news flying fast and furious.  About 2 months ago the group was introduced to a gentleman who was not only a bankruptcy lawyer but also claimed to have hit on a cure-all for lackluster profits and client volume.  He offered a free teleseminar via his email signature and invited everyone to sign up immediately.

Listen, I’m all for new voices in the marketing and practice management field.  I don’t pretend to know everything (in fact, everything I learned I adopted from other marketing and management people - I take what works and discard the rest), so I gladly signed up.  If someone wants to share a nugget or two with me, then so be it - count me in!

So I go to the website for the teleseminar and sign up, handing over my email address and name to this guru’s autoresponder system; now I’m in his clutches, but it’s alright.  After all, I’m on so many mailing lists that one more can’t hurt too much.

On registration I get an email confirmation with instructions to tape it to my forehead (or some such marketing guru nonsense) so I won’t forget this earth-shattering phone call.  A little hubris, but I can handle it.

Then in the days leading up to the call, one or two more dribble in.

Remember, I know NOTHING about this guy save that he’s obviously a bankruptcy lawyer with big claims to make.

Day of the call, I dial in and am treated to two hours of him telling me what to do.  Some good tips and tricks, but I know where they all come from and can even point to the relevant paragraphs in each book.  So he steals ideas - big deal.  As I’ve said, I never met a good idea that I didn’t make my own in some fashion.

The call goes fairly well and, though I gain nothing from it, I am sure others did come away with a gem or two.  He hits us over the head with his $1,000 “system” and tries to convert some of us into paying customers.

As I sit here on July 2, 2008, this lawyer has stopped posting altogether on the listserv where he appeared.  He’s disappeared.  No follow-up after the teleseminar, no offer to replay the call, no streaming audio on his website . . . nothing.  It’s as if he never existed at all.

And this isn’t the first time this has happened.  In 2006 my colleagues and I were subjected to another guru who popped onto the scene with a teleseminar.  This guy is well known in some circles (not bankruptcy) and came out with guns blazing.  Did his teleseminar and then faded away.

What’s the lesson here?  Longevity.  If you want to sell something to a group - or to a consumer - you must be prepared to invest time and energy into converting that prospect to a customer.  It may take weeks, months or even years but when it happens it will be worth it.

During that time, you’re establishing trust and creating a bond.  You’re engaging in a grand conversation, letting the prospect know that you have what it takes to solve the problem.

Jumping in and jumping out like these two disappearing acts . . . just not smart business.

Ellen and I have spoken in the past, so it was nice to see a comment posted from her on one of my recent posts.  She didn’t agree with my position - vehemently disagreed, in fact - but that’s no problem.  At least my post forced her our of exile, blogging for the first time in months.

But just like that, the post on her blog was gone.  POOF!

Ellen, where are you? And why did you take down the post about formatting of email marketing messages?  Did you change you position, take down the post because it was unsightly, or something else entirely?

I hope you didn’t remove the post because it came out against me, though.  I love divergent opinions, especially from someone as smart as you.

Susan Cartier Liebel explains in a recent post on Build A Solo Practice, LLC exactly why you should not use Blogger for your professional blog.  The upshot of the post is that it makes you look less-than-professional, a mere newbie in a sea of experts.  After all, you’re using the blog as a practice management tool for your law office - is it somehow not worth the measly hosting cost of under $100 per year to do a passable job of it?

TypePad carries a minor cost, WordPress is free (I’m talking about the downloadable version at wordpress.org, not the hosted version at wordpress.com).  And with many hosting companies offering a one-click installation of WordPress to help you along, it doesn’t get much easier.

Wait, you ask.  Doesn’t Google index Blogger more quickly than other sites because Google owns Blogger? The simple answer is a resounding NO.  Look, all Google wants is for people to get the best search results; if that search result is best met by a WordPress blog, that’s how it’s going to go.  Because when people get good search results from Google, they’re more likely to come back to Google.  And the more often people use Google to search, the more advertisers are going to pay to Google for the right to be on the search results page.  Round and round it goes.

But my blog is really good, you say.  You can’t tell me that having it on Blogger is going to cut against me.  If I”m really good then the readers will come! True enough, but let’s face facts - you’re not famous.  In fact, to prospects the likelihood is that you’re just another lawyer with a blog.  You may be good, but you’ve got no brand.  And the blog is your brand (at least, part of it).  So why go with a Blogger brand when for $100 per year you could actually have you own?

Finally, remember - Google can at any time and for any reason at all simply delete your Blogger blog.  Poof, and it’s gone.  Years of work, thousands of words, tons of goodwill . . . all up in smoke.  Want to read more about this phenomenon?  Just check out Search Engine Journal’s article, Reasons To Not Blog Using Blogger or Blogspot.

Is this all worth saving a measly $100 a year?