Make your experience part of the social feedback loop

Today, social media is the glue that binds together the internet's content, especially as it emerges. As a content creator, it's your job to reach out to users in social media. If you can accomplish that, you might be asking, what's next?

Complete the cycle: Get users working for you by making it easy for them to share your content using social media. That way, they can do what they like doing best: investigating something interesting that one of their friends shares with them, adding to whatever conversation is going on about it, and re-distributing it in their own way.

If you can make your content part of the cycle, you'll not only notice that it gets spread around, drawing traffic. It also gets re-contextualized and delivered in ways that delight marketers and their audience.

If you have to advertise, maybe you're going too fast.

I understand the typical business development narrative:

1. Borrow money, make promises.
2. Spend the money on the set-up.
3. Spend more money on the advertising.
4. Spend more money solving all the problems.
5. Get cash from the patrons who saw the advertising.

The first problem with this is the borrowing-to-earn aspect. You're taking a step back in order to take a leap forward.

The second problem is the rushed problem-solving and damage control that accompanies rapid growth of a business.

The third problem is that once you enter the world of advertising, things really start to suck. It's pretty tough to know whether your advertising is helping or hurting your business, it's a lot of work to get your message out in a way that will be well-understood, and there's a real risk of making your business look desperate for business.

It's much easier and more cost-effective to depend on your customers to use your materials to advertise your business themselves, and to make sure that your information is available for those who are looking for it.

So here's the steps I recommend to get your business either off the ground, or to the next level:

1. Do what you can on the money you have, on a small scale, with friends as your first customers.
2. Take care of the basic problems while you get some word-of-mouth traffic.
3. Use the money you've earned to expand a little.
4. Get more traffic from each expansion, and more money from that traffic.
5. Get more expansion out of the money you make.

The Institution of Me: Selling Yourself vs. Adding Value

I do not know how to begin this article, because it's about a phenomenon that I can't pin down. It's about employment, youth, and the current economic climate.

A few things are adding up these days:

• Being an employee isn't so great anymore. It no longer gives you job security, a role in the decision-making, or a share of the company's identity. That means that people are navigating a course through one role after another, for one company after another.
• Our marketable skill base continues to diversify. People can't tell how focused they should be with their skill-building, and are aiming for the sweet spot between being the best at a trade that may disappear at any moment, or being a "jack-of-all-trades, expert at none." Of course I believe that one's implementation of their set of skills and talents forms their proficiency.
• The focus of prescribed youth culture has alighted upon discovery of and promotion of one's personality and skillset. From what I can see, it's been a collective effort of our societal focus on individuality and personal growth, as well as the dominating effect of hip hop culture which encourages youth to be their own biggest advocate, unabashedly singing their own praises and beating their own drums.
• All this focus on individuality is a bandwagon in itself, and the culture and language of self-promotion has spread and standardized itself. It's become the collective mantra of the next generation. I think that, paradoxically, it hampers creative individual discovery.

I'd like to come to my point now: I'm concerned that personal development can easily get overshadowed by self-promotion. When somebody can say "I've been working on this and have learned how to do that," it expresses something that is real, and that is beyond speculation. It's not bragging and it's not formulated specifically to influence other people's perception of a personal brand.

Really, we're all just people with unique combinations of activities and interests. If I develop an approach to some field of work, then that approach itself can be seen as a brand. If I use it to deal with several different services or products, each of those could be branded and promoted on its own, but what's the point in setting oneself up with more branding responsibilities than is necessary? If, on the other hand, I decide that I myself am the brand, and everything I do falls under one umbrella, that's another impossible branding challenge, because a personality just isn't tangible enough, and slapping a unifying label on everything I do would change the way I think of myself and develop. That just creates other problems.

So what I'm proposing is a middle-path solution to branding and self-promotion:

1. The pursuit of one's own interests and curiosity adds value to a uniquely diverse skill-set, whereas the construction of a prescribed, generic skill-set tends to limit one's opportunities.
2. It's easier for a person to talk about the things they're actually doing or curious about doing than to discuss their own qualities and proficiencies. It also makes it easier for others to set them up with opportunities.
3. It just looks better from the outside to see someone working hard on the things that excite them, than it does when they're working hard to get others to get others excited.
4. It's better to be known as an accomplished and active person than as a driven and ambitious one.
5. It's often easier for someone to excel at doing something in their own way, and to deal with the challenges of communicating that unique approach, than it is to make a generic and common approach work for them. It's also easier to find one's niches, and it seems like niches are where all the value is.

I certainly know both kinds of people.

I have a friend who's doing tremendously well with developing her career in production. She's not afraid to switch gears and learn new things even if it puts her back into the position of being a novice, because she knows that new skills add value to old ones. She never runs out of interesting things to talk about because she's always focused on doing rather than saying. She gets discouraged by setbacks but doesn't stop doing what she's doing, because to her it's not all about "me: the brand," it's about "the work I'm doing."

And I have a friend who's always talking about what he's going to be doing, asking people around him to recommend him to other people, and talking about the future. About the company he's building, about how he deals with people, about all the obstacles and people trying to keep him from achieving his goals. Meanwhile, not a lot of work is getting done on his actual materials. Hours are wasted on the phone, and months go by without any actual development being done. He's stuck, and because he's being told by people on all sides that he's got to "sell" himself, and because that's all he's ever been told, he feels really isolated and just digs himself in deeper, ramping up his self-promotion efforts instead of developing what he's offering for sale.

I've always felt like, in terms of my music career, I'd prefer to have a few really serious fans, who absolutely love my music and will love it forever, than a ton of fans who are just kind of into it. And it's the same with anything else.

Here are some rules of thumb that relate to this:

• Quality over quantity
• Show me (don't tell me)
• It doesn't have to be perfect (just better)
• Don't stop doing what you're doing ('cause you're doing it right)

Blogspot Mailing List Thing?

I found a nice little tutorial for adding mailing list functionality to a Blogspot blog.

What am I expecting from it?

• an e-mail address where people can send their subscription requests
• another e-mail address where I can send my mailouts
• a simple way for me to add people's e-mail addresses

What am I expecting to have to hack together afterwards?

• a sign-up form that I can paste into my blog
• a custom e-mail address for mailing list posts

The Deal With MySpace FAQ - aka How to Deal With MySpace

Everyone loves to hate MySpace:

This user study found only 20% of users could successfully upload a new profile picture and only 30% could figure out how to post a status update!

How's "LOZ ... MYSPACE IS TOO HARD TO USE, LOL YGM" for a profile name?

"MySpace is really Hard to use for me....."

"MySpace wants me to delete my account it seems. "

MySpace Employee: "[T]he primary failure of Myspace was usability."

"We need not look much further than the horrible user experience of the average MySpace user to find out why the crown is gone."

"facebook = Everything you want, Easy to use. MySpace = music, Emo's, Hard to use & navigate. [...] Myspace runs way too slow"

"If you’re able to use Myspace with no trouble at all you’ve gotten yourself into some really bad habits. Working around Myspace is really difficult, holes need to be jumped through over and over again."

"MySpace is messy, hard to use and impossible to even find new music with."

"What makes me mad is how can you save the changes you made on the Mypace editors. I tried to publish it but it'll just take me back to my old page."

"I hate the new myspace. it's to much and it's hard to work with... whats myspace if you can't edit it like you use to be able to?"

1. Why do MySpace profiles suck so much? Because people in bands are lazy or bad at customising stuff?
   
   No. Anybody with a MySpace profile knows how hard it is to customise it, even with a profile editor.
2. Do I really need to use MySpace?
   
   No. I recommend using it for the Friends feature - don't even get a music account, just use Blogger along with SoundCloud, PicasaWebAlbums, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and use your MySpace account to link to them. You can embed your music, videos, pictures etc, and then MySpace never gets control of your tracks.
3. What's wrong with trusting MySpace with my music?
   
   MySpace shuts artists out of their profiles all the time, claiming bullshit copyright violations. One of my MySpace profiles got locked, and now I can't do anything with it - can't update or remove tracks, change my layout or anything... and it's the one with my completely original songs! The one that contains tracks that are so sample-heavy that they're illegal got left alone. Go figure. Anyway, when you use embedded playlists from other sites, even if your MySpace profile gets locked, you can still keep control of your materials.
4. Isn't it kind of a pain to maintain all these different accounts?
   
   Nope. MySpace is so terribly designed and hard to use that it's less work to maintain your Facebook, SoundCloud, Twitter, Flickr/Picasa and YouTube accounts. Plus, with each one, you reach a whole new audience, and when you bring them all together with your Blogger or MySpace account, you get so much power to present media all in one place.
5. But isn't MySpace changing and improving to become more modern?
   
   Yeah, but because they don't do any user testing, analysis or Information Architecture work, it's just getting worse, not better.
6. Won't the MySpace people clue in at some point and start doing user testing?
   
   They've had a decade to figure this out. It's not going to happen.

Anatomy of a "Web-Assisted Sale"

A sales inquiry can come through a chain of events, starting with a search, a link, or a referral, and doesn't necessarily involve a custom website

Here's how internet traffic can be funneled into a phone call that will actually get you some cash:

So here's a typical web-assisted sale:

1. A "wanna turn into a" buyer is trying to solve a problem of theirs: they need and do not have something that you happen to have for sale (and just to brag, if you're among my clients, you're fortunately their best choice). So that's about whether or not they find you while on the hunt for something that you can get them. If, on the other hand, they're interested in you specifically, curious about what you offer, then a tiny, miniscule amount of work on your part can make you easily findable, which solves their problem, and then yours.
   
2. Whether they're searching for "lawn care in Toronto" or "A&B Landscapers," the search results will vary according to how online you are. The results might include your website, or it may turn up 3rd-party public listings sites, blogs, discussion sites and social referrals from their online friends. If you've been skillful or lucky, then your official page will be at the top of the results, followed by the other sites I mentioned. If "you" are already well-documented, then most of the work towards that goal is already done.
   
3. Your website or profile can help potential patrons decide what they're interested in, the specific enquiries that can help them to make a decision. It can also help them decide specifically which of your people to contact. It can even help them decide on their timing. This is how you can optimize your sales and customer service hours so much, you'll be able to give your front desk people additional responsibilities.
   
4. Your staff can devote their time to answering questions that are specific to each case, and use the internet to present information to the customer.

Bottom-line:

• A continuous and relaxed web strategy should pay for itself
• Increased sales, increased satisfaction and decreased presentation costs should recoup costs associated with an internet presence
• If web work is done incrementally, costs can be recouped continuously and a sensible budget can be maintained