Why Hire the Cow When You Can Get the Milk For Free?

As the internet makes ideas accessible to everyone and their grandmother, everyone and their grandmother has begun to believe they can do everything. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. After all, we've paid experts (people with extensive training and experience) a lot of money to do specific things for us for a very long time. Now that the ideas they deal in are laid bare for us to absorb on our own it can be very tempting to think that we can fully grasp and then execute those ideas; why hire the cow when you can get all that great marketing milk for free?

Trouble is, we're often wrong.

There is a difference, after all, between understanding that a website greatly increases one's chances of making a sale and understanding how to design and build (two separate things, people!) a website that sucks people in rather than drives them away.

John McCain's early dabbling with MySpace is a good example of this: someone on McCain's campaign knew enough to recognize the importance of MySpace among young potential voters, and decided to create a page for the presidential candidate. Only problem was, they weren't experts in MySpace functionality, nor in copyright laws and web design etiquette. So they nicked someone's css design and failed to give credit to the designer. And because McCain's crew lacked the necessary coding expertise, they outright stole the designer's bandwidth, unwittingly or not.

But the designer was an expert. So he swapped a little of his own code on his own servers, which resulted in a very public switch of McCain's political stance:

"Dear Supporters,

Today I have announced that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage...particularly marriage between passionate females."

Fact is, experts are experts because they know something we don't. And when we forget this, attempting to do what they do ourselves without due diligence, it often comes back to bite us in the butt (see yesterday's link to Dani's dissection of off-the-shelf templates).

One of the reasons we've gotten so turned off by experts—be they editors, designers, doctors or anyone else—is because so many of them (us?) rest on their laurels and don't live up to their promises. Seth Godin alluded to this in his recent post on the importance of editors:

"Great products, amazing services and stories worth talking about get edited along the way. Most of the time, the editing makes them pallid, mediocre and boring. Sometimes, a great editor will push the remarkable stuff. That's his job."

And therein lies the moral: know who the hell you're hiring. Know what they're good at, and how they got that way. And make damn sure what they're good at is actually what you want. Because a tall glass of free milk isn't worth it if it turns out to be sour.