Danny Brown

podcaster - author - creator

Insights

A Quick Thank You to Evan Carmichael and Team

Evan Carmichael card

When something goes wrong, how it’s resolved says a lot about the person or business.

It can mean the difference between being perceived as not caring about your customers or users, or showing that you recognize your userbase is a key part of your success.

Evan Carmichael and team fall squarely in the latter category.

I recently became an author over at EvanCarmichael.com. It’s a well-respected resource centre for small businesses and entrepreneurs, and offers a ton of great advice for anyone from these fields.

I had set my account up to automatically share any articles I posted via the Evan Carmichael Twitter account. This worked fine until a couple of weeks ago, when the tweets went out with the article title but not the links to the pieces.

I got a couple of tweets from people that received notification, but couldn’t follow a link (since there wasn’t one). I replied that it may be a quirk with the @EvanCarmichael account so it could be checked.

Within about 20 minutes, Evan had replied, apologizing for any issues and advising that his marketing manager, Marija Sekularac, would look into it. Lo and behold, I got a great email from Marija shortly afterward apologizing and saying that she would keep an eye on things for me.

But this isn’t the best part (as great as that service is).

A few days later, a parcel arrives for me at Bonsai Interactive’s office. Inside are four really – and I mean REALLY – delicious brownies, and a card apologizing again for the mishap. The message (which is pictured below) made me chuckle too.

What really impressed me about this whole thing was that it was based upon a really small technical hiccup. It may have been an issue with Twitter’s API, which is never the most reliable. Or it might have been a feed-to-Twitter issue (which I’ve had numerous times elsewhere).

The level of follow-up from Evan Carmichael and his team on this makes me wonder what would happen if something really big crashed – maybe they’d send a jet! I’ll have to look into that…

In all seriousness, though, I just wanted to say a big thank you to the team. And now, because of that service, I’m far more likely to recommend Evan’s site if people are looking for small business resources than I am something like MarketingProfs or similar.

Which just goes to reinforce the fact that great service stands you apart from your competitors. And the best thing? You don’t even have to send out brownies and a card to show you have great service – just acknowledging and trying to help works wonders too.

Something a lot of businesses seem to forget…

Evan Carmichael inside card

Don’t Confuse Free With Free Exposure

Understand free versus paid content

There’s an interesting debate online at the minute about the AOL purchase of The Huffington Post for $315 million dollars.

The debate isn’t so much about the price – of the amount, $300 million is expected to be straight cash – but more around the contributors to The Huffington Post over the years, and the belief that they are owed some of that money.

The train of thought behind this is that, without the contributors, The Huffington Post wouldn’t have had anywhere near the content that led it to becoming one of the most popular sites on the web, with more than 26 million unique visitors per month.

So now there’s a backlash against The Huffington Post, and blog posts and social networks are filling up with ways to get back at Arianna Huffington for “selling bloggers and citizen journalists out.”

To me, though, this backlash is missing a simple point – the content wasn’t the property of the contributors once they signed their publishing “deal” with The Huffington Post.

Paid Content or Free Exposure

A caveat – I don’t know the contributor Terms and Conditions for The Huffington Post, but if it’s like any other main publication (or smaller one, for that matter), then there will be two options:

  • You become an official contractor for the publication, and draw either a salary or pay-per-published-post option.
  • You contribute for free, in return for the exposure and back-links to your own site or blog.

While being paid might seem the more attractive option straight up, very often the opposite is true. That’s a one-off (unless you sign a royalty and re-publish agreement).

With the exposure and authority that can come from being a contributor to something like The Huffington Post, that can set off a long-tail effect that is both constant and residual.

It’s the exchange mechanism at work – I accept I won’t be paid in hard cash, but I’m giving that up for the potential of grabbing a section of 26 million visitors to my own site, as well as being put in the spotlight for media interviews and quotes as a respected expert on a certain topic.

Pain Points or Sour Grapes?

I’ve made decisions like this in the past and will (possibly) do so again. My blog is syndicated to different networks, which has helped raise awareness of what I write about over here. I syndicate less now – or more judiciously – because the trade-off in syndication is often losing traffic to the syndicating source.

But you make that decision.

Jeff Esposito, who’s a PR Manager, makes a good point. “It’s just sour grapes of putting things on rented space since she owned the blog. It’s kind of like tumblr going down or people basing their whole community strategy on Facebook. What happens when the owner sells the site or just deletes it? You are shit out of luck either way and these folks are pissed because they only got paid in Skittles and viewers.”

Kami Watson Huyse, a 16-year PR veteran and co-founder of Zoetica, also sees it as misunderstanding of rights and property. “When you write for a portal like Mashable or HuffPo (or just on your friend’s blog) you agree to do it for the visibility and even the links back to your own site, which are a currency all their own. Many people write articles and scatter them all through the Internet on much less influential sites just for the SEO. In other words, you already accepted your ‘pay’ so move on.”

I have to agree with both Kami and Jeff, and the others that aren’t sold on the view that The Huffington Post should share the sale price with its contributors. That’s not to say I’m a fan of The Huffington Post – I think I’ve read it twice – but unless an agreement was put in place about profit share, the pay is the exposure.

Lessons Learned

Does it suck that Arianna Huffington will get millions of dollars while the people that helped build the site up to that sale price get nothing? A little, but that’s business – very rarely do 100% fair things happen when there are so many factions at play.

The Huffington Post and its contributors aren’t the first to be in this position, and they won’t be the last. Unless people take responsibility for their content and contributions.

  • Make your work Creative Commons. This means you choose how it’s used, shared and attributed. It gives you power to claim if the license is broken. This blog is Creative Commons, as shown in the sidebar.
  • Define your contract. If you want paid, make it a paid one. If it’s free for exposure, see if there’s a way you can share in profits for extremely popular content.
  • Ask for republishing rights. You give up a window of exclusivity, but after that period is over, you can republish on your own site and be truly recognized for it.

The web is awash with content and people wondering how to get noticed amongst the noise. Often the solution is to write for a hugely popular outlet and look to build awareness of yourself that way. But that means giving up a lot of your own identity in the process.

As the current argument over The Huffington Post sale shows, it’s a decision that shouldn’t be taken lightly, because everything has a price.

Whether you get a share or not is the question.

image: psd

Internet Fame and the True Impact of Influence

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You may be aware that there is a big debate going on in the social media blogosphere about ?influence? (and you can see links to several blog posts at the end of this one for examples of these discussions).

How we need to leverage influencers in our communities in order to get the word out about our causes, brands or services, etc. And that makes total sense from a generating-word-of-mouth point of view.

But hold on.

If you?re trying to do this, what if you don?t actually know who your industry influencers are? Perhaps because you?re not really immersed in your own open community, or because your community is too large or public-facing to be able to list your champions in an organic way, you?re just not seeing it?

So you begin to use some of the tools out there that purport to measure influence, and you start to think, ?This isn?t as easy as it sounds.?

Maybe you?re starting to think that influence is not about how many followers someone has on Twitter. ?Maybe you?re starting to think that ?influencer scores? are totally meaningless for your goals and objectives.

So what is influence, really?

Can it be measured (and if so, how)? How can you find the influencers in your industry? Do apps?like Klout or Twitalyzer really work to automate this? Or?is this all bunk?

A group of us are going to be talking about Internet Fame and the True Impact of Influence in a new BlogTalkRadio show on Wednesday February 9 at 10pm ET.

This new show is the brainchild of some really smart social media practitioners and consultants from various industries, and the purpose of the show is to debunk some of the social media bubble/hype around various issues. The tone will be irreverent, but the conversation and concerns around the topic are very real.

I hope you?ll be able to join us (expect the accompanying chat to be lively and extremely snarky!), or listen to the podcast afterwards (bookmark this page and come back to listen!).

I?ll be hosting this inaugural episode (uh-oh!) and Tamsen McMahon, Lisa Thorell, Allyson Kapin, Rich Becker and Olivier Blanchard will be chatting live with me on the night. But, as it?s BlogTalkRadio, anyone can call in and ask the panel questions. Lots of other people with thoughts on the topic will be listening in and participating by chat.

In preparation for the radio show, here are some of the blog posts the group may be referencing.

So put the kids to bed, grab your tipple of choice, and join us on Wednesday evening!

This post is derived from Maddie Grant and SocialFish.

Why You Don’t Need to Impress Gini Dietrich’s Mom

Impressing people

First, let me say right off the bat that Gini Dietrich’s mom is more than likely a very nice person. Heck, anyone that can put up with Gini’s wily ways has to be good, right? Anyhoo…

This post came about for a couple of reasons. The first was a post that Gini herself wrote over at Spin Sucks, about why your mom tells you what you want to hear. It’s a great read about conflict resolution, and worth checking out. I shared the post on Twitter, with a tongue-in-cheek addendum that Gini’s mom doesn’t tell me anything.

Gini replied about her mom’s probable thoughts on me, and this post was born. So, why don’t you need to impress Gini Dietrich’s mom?

Lets dig in.

Parental Approval or Parental Removal?

When I was in my late teens/early twenties, I kept losing girlfriends. It wasn’t that I was ugly (at least, not terribly so – who knows?); nor was it that I wasn’t a nice guy (or, at least, I thought I was nicer than some of the dicks I’d seen use and abuse their girlfriends).

But it didn’t matter what I thought I was as boyfriend material – every girlfriend I had never lasted more than a few months (with the exception of one long engagement).

So what was my issue? Simple – I was trying to impress the wrong person.

I was under the impression that if I got the mom to like me, then the daughter would see what a great guy I was and follow suit. After all, we’re always told that moms are usually the ones that wield the main influence in the household, right?

So, win the mom, win the daughter – easy as pie. Except I was wrong.

By trying so hard to impress the mom, I was missing out on trying to impress the one I really should have been impressing – my girlfriend. So what if her mom liked me, when I wasn’t really being the guy my girlfriend wanted, but a poor substitute for an approving mom instead?

Once I learned that harsh lesson, well then of course it was full steam ahead on the gigolo front. Yeah, right….

That Don’t Impress Me Much

Shania Twain had it right – trying to hard to impress usually won’t impress at all. It’s either obvious, and you look like a suck-up, or you miss the bigger picture and the real target you should be looking to impress.

I learned the hard way that girls aren’t impressed with you making their mom feel good (and don’t read that the wrong way!). However, it wasn’t all bad – because it helped prime me for my professional life (although I didn’t know it at the time).

Think about it.

  • Instead of trying to impress your customers with someone you feel they want you to be, be yourself and just do things right full-stop. That will impress them.
  • Instead of posting blogs solely for your readers because you think they want to read them, post for yourself first and be 100% happy with that. Because if that satisfaction comes through in your writing, the readers that are right for your blog will be there for you.
  • Instead of trying to impress your boss by doling out compliments, just roll up your sleeves and produce the results that will make your boss stand up and take notice.

Simply put, don’t go for false love that will up and leave you. Instead, concentrate on being what you need to be for the proper audience you need to impress and make sure you’re giving 100% to that. Everything else will fall into place.

And, somehow, I think Gini Dietrich’s mom would say the same…

Epilogue: Of course, if you want to impress Gini’s mom, or any other mom, then there’s nothing wrong with that either. Moms are cool.

image: Stuck In Customs

The Butterfly Effect of Entrepreneurship

Breaking out on your own is hard. Just ask anyone that runs their own business, and you can pretty much guarantee that the one answer that will be consistent across the board is that it’s hard to be your own boss.

No guaranteed pay-check; no water-cooler conversations to split the day up; no big corporate budgets for projects and pitches.

But no-one said it would be easy. It takes hard work, commitment, lots of compromise and hard knocks to get to the point where you want to be. But the satisfaction and kick-back that you get when you get there makes all the struggle worthwhile.

One of the ?tricks? I?ve used over the years (and offer up to clients that I feel fit the need for the example) is comparing entrepreneurship to the stages of the butterfly.

The Egg

A butterfly is one of the most beautiful things that nature has ever produced. Multi-faceted, colourful, elegant and varied – all the things a great business should be. All the things your business should be.

But a butterfly isn?t born this way. It starts off as an egg – tiny and in need of food to survive.

Your business is the same. No business is born huge; no entrepreneur starts with millions. It comes from small victories and winning the scraps you need to feed yourself and those that depend on you, and keep a roof over their heads.

The egg is where it all starts, so plan ahead:

  • Think about what you need to do to survive the egg stage.
  • Have enough savings to get you through six months with no paycheck.
  • Grab the food around you and keep looking for more.

Eggs are fragile. Their shells can break with the right amount of pressure; so plan to avoid the fall that could crack you.

The Larva

When a butterfly egg hatches, it?s still not the butterfly that?s inside – there?s still a way to go before the beauty of the butterfly reaches its full potential. Instead, you get the larva.

You probably know the larva in its most common form of a caterpillar. This is a big change for the egg, since it now moves from chasing scraps of food to having a ferocious appetite and eating everything in its way.

Once your business has moved past the gestation period of the egg/birth, you?re hungry for more. You?re ready for bigger clients; bigger projects; bigger paydays. The thing is, your current set-up may not be ready for this. But that?s okay.

A caterpillar can go through five or six growth spurts before it?s ready to move to the next stage. Your business can be the same.

  • Feast on the business that will help you grow.
  • Stay hungry and eat what you can.
  • Acknowledge that growth means change, and plan for staggered growth.
  • Prepare yourself for the ?wrap period?, where the finish line is in sight but you?re not quite there yet.

Caterpillars shed their skin as they grow. Don?t be afraid to shed what you?ve encountered so far – new is good, and the only way to truly grow.

Business growth

The Pupa

The third stage of the butterfly is where things get really interesting. As the caterpillar feasts to fill its over-sized appetite, its skin struggles to keep up. Instead of stretching, it sheds the old skin and replaces with a new one.

After five or six of these, it eventually stays inside the last skin, called the pupa. This skin envelops the caterpillar, and it?s in here that the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly takes place.

The funny thing with this stage is that it looks as if nothing is happening – the pupa attaches itself to a twig or branch, and lays pretty much motionless until the butterfly is ready to break out.

But thinking that nothing is happening will see you miss all the activity inside. The caterpillar?s body is being broken down to change to the butterfly, and all the food the caterpillar ate during its binge eating is what?s keeping the butterfly alive now, during the change. This process can take anywhere from a week to a year to happen, depending on the species.

Now think of your business. Your slow time usually comes after your early burst of activity when you?re new, as you chase clients and projects down. You use the money from that to help you grow to your next stage.

This is your own pupa stage.

  • Look at your business and see what you can eject, and what can grow with you.
  • Make sure you save enough from the early activity to see you through quiet times.
  • Make the changes slowly and with purpose to take you to the defining moment of your business – the identity.

Pupas are the heartbeat of life for both caterpillars and butterflies, and effect the transition from one to the other. Think of what you can achieve with your business in your pupa stage, as you get ready to unveil the complete you.

The Adult

The caterpillar is no more. The hibernation period is over. Everything the egg, then the larva and then the pupa has been working toward is finally here – the adult butterfly is born.

The pupa breaks open and the butterfly emerges. Its colour and shape is defined by the pupa stage. Now the real beauty is unleashed on the world, after taking the time to make sure it?s ready for the public gaze. Emergence; mating; and the cycle begins again.

Your business has been building up slowly, and eating what it needs to survive the early days. You?ve been working behind-the-scenes to plan your growth, and your transition from small business to medium and upward.

Now?s the time to let your business become an adult.

  • Emerge from the the cloud of preparation into the sunlight of opportunity.
  • Think of partnerships (strategic and otherwise) to mate to your goals and business.
  • Think of how you can continue the cycle, and the people and properties you need to make this happen.

An adult butterfly has a life cycle of around a week or two, but some can last a year and a half. Let?s say a butterfly week is equivalent to a year of a person. Think of your business?s current life cycle as a year or two, then look at refocusing again and choosing direction.

If you need to, cocoon yourself away again into your pupa, and plan for the next stage. The ever-evolving business is the one that will be ever-persistent to succeed.

And we all want that, right?

image: rondeboom
image: JarkkoS

This post originally appeared over at Beyond The Pedway, a resource centre for entrepreneurs and creative thinking. Hosted by Tim Jahn, it’s full of informative video interviews, tips and advice for starting and running your own business.