These are some posts I noticed during the week. I keep track of them because I intend to do a post of my own on the same thing, but sometimes it’s better to just highlight them and share. These all seem useful to the small business owner and entrepreneur.
Six Companies That Did Not Survive 2010 on NYTimes.com is a great collection of quick but still very useful summaries of failures.Who they were, what they did, and what happened.
How to turn dating agony into sales success, by Pamela Slim, on Copyblogger. Don’t you love that title? I’m a big fan of Pam’s work, this one is longer than most blog posts but also rich in practical suggestions and thoughtful and well worth the extra length. Good for one-person entrepreneurs and small company owners alike.
How to fire an employee the right way, by Shira Levine, on Amex OPEN. Somebody told me the other day that she was good at firing people, and I was amazed. Can anybody be good at that? Hence, this post.
Does this happen to you? You read something, love it, realize you sort of knew it, but this author puts it in a new context, new light, or new list, so that it’s very useful to you just to see it again? I found three of those this week in three blog posts:
Donna Fenn posted The Top 10 Best Ways to Fail as an Entrepreneur on BNET. Manage partnerships poorly … hire too fast — grow too fast … delegate sales. She has some useful surprises and good reminders.
For a good practical review of what makes your website work, read 6 Must-Haves for Your Small Business Website, by Lisa Barone, on Small Business Trends. She mentions intuitive navigation, sticky content, a blog … that’s another good collection of reminders.
Seth Godin is amazing. He so often says so much in so few words. His post Pleasing is maybe 100 words long. If you’re in business, read it. You know what he’s saying there, but you keep forgetting.
I saw an interview with Seth Godin where he says he puts labels on things we already know. I think he’s underestimating himself with that description, but still, give me those labels. Well done.
Here’s a continuing trend: tips and what-not-to-do lists get better readership as lists of mistakes. It’s not a new trend, it’s not a surprising one, but one worth remembering.
What reminds me this morning is a collection of posts by Geoffrey James on BNET:
Notice on these posts we get a double dose: Not just mistakes, but superlative mistakes, and in an “of all time” context. It’s an interesting approach. The lists include some I’d never heard of (I’d never heard of Six Sigma, listed as the #1 stupidest management fad of all time), some very general (“leadership” is listed as #2 dumbest management concept of all time), and several well reasoned takes on long-term thinking, well worth reading. Geoffrey does a good job at standing back and poking holes on some overused phrases.
On the same theme, you might notice in my illustration here that the most popular item at BNET today is “Business Blunders of the Year.” There are some mixed reviews on that particular piece, by the way, perhaps because a slide-show format, nice for lists of five or 10 points, doesn’t hold up to lists of 75 (yes, that’s 75 business blunders).
The good news and bad news about blogging is editing and editors.
Good news: anybody can blog without going through an editor as a gatekeeper. Back in the old days we used to strive to “get published.” Now we just publish. Hooray, we’re free.
Bad news: nobody is so good that good professional editing doesn’t make them better. I consider myself a good writer and I’ve been doing it professionally for several decades. But everybody makes mistakes. Everybody who cares benefits from having somebody on their own side, reading, suggesting, commenting, and correcting. It’s just a fact of life. If you think you’re too good for editing, you’ve never had the pleasure of dealing with a good editor. Consider that an extra pair of watchful eyes.
True Story: By the time I was in my middle 20s I thought I was pretty hot stuff with journalism and writing. At that point I had honors degrees in Literature and Journalism. But I learned to write simple English (I hope) from the overnight editor at United Press International (“Berry, you write like a god-damned literature major“) named Norberto Swarzman. And I learned about structure (I hope) from a foreign editor at Business Week named Hugh Menzies, who rewrote every story into nine paragraphs with subheadings after the third and sixth paragraphs, and topic sentences for every paragraph.
And, while I’m on the subject, I have the luxury of editors for this blog, a team at Palo Alto Software, who catch errors and suggest changes.
Suggestion: If you’re out there on your own, with no editing whatsoever, maybe you could find a freelance editor as an ally. Think of innovative compensation, and maybe you can afford the help. I’m just suggesting, so don’t be offended.
Editing is a luxury, not a problem. Who wouldn’t like an extra pair of eyes?
Last night I was halfway through a draft post patting myself on the back, illustrated with champagne glasses, when my youngest daughter, Megan, called from San Francisco, where she lives now. That’s @MeganBerry to you, blogger and social media expert, marketing manager of Klout.com. So I asked her this: “What do I do with my 1,000th post?”
“Do something that matters,” Megan answered. “Do something special.” She talked about favorites, lessons, advice, and reflections.
So, about 12 hours later, this is it, number 1,000. Gulp.
I started in 2006, but did only a dozen posts in the first year. I really started in April 2007, with reflections on family business, a personal note about passing the torch to a second generation. I changed jobs then – my choice – from owner-entrepreneur-president to blogger president of Palo Alto Software.
My personal favorite posts are on the sidebar here to the right. My favorite search is the one for fundamentals, particularly the series of 5 posts on planning fundamentals. My favorite categories come straight from the blog title: planning, startups, and stories: that’s specifically the categories planning fundamentals, true stories, and starting a business. And I also really like advice, reflections, and business mistakes. But I like most of my posts here. You kind of have to, to keep doing it.
Here are 10 blogging lessons I’ve learned:
Imitation isn’t just flattery, it’s learning. When I said I wasn’t a blogger, Sabrina Parsons said “you will be. Just start reading blogs.” So I did. And I imitate a lot of other bloggers I like to read. So many that I can’t name them all here; but my thanks to Guy, John, Pam, Anita, Ann, Steve, Seth, Matthew, Ramon, and so many others. Every blog on my blogroll here to the right.
Titles make a huge difference. That’s not just blogging. It’s been true for a long time. My daughter Andrea Breanna, CTO at Huffington Post, teamed up with his younger sister Megan to teach me titles. And Ironically, what they taught me was a lot of what I learned at UPI plus the power of questions, and lists of 5 and 10.
Short and simple: short sentences, short posts. Short thoughts? I like one-word sentences, and one-sentence paragraphs. And short posts, in theory: despite how much I admire Seth Godin’s short posts, I try, and usually fail.
Break grammar rules. Carefully. Rarely. Like right here. There’s no verb in either of the previous two sentences, so this post would have gotten me an F in Brother Salvatore’s 12th grade English class. 30-some years later, I’m glad he gave me that F on a 10-page paper for using “it’s” instead of “its” once. That lesson was worth it. But jeez!
Pictures add meaning. Thanks to John Jantsch for that one. And to Shutterstock for supplying me with the bulk of the pictures I’ve used on this blog for the last year. And don’t ask me to explain the illustration on this one. I didn’t want champagne glasses or cakes and candles.
Write Often, and keep writing. Find your pace. Honor consistency. Once a month doesn’t feel like a blog, but three good posts weekly is better than two good and three not so good. Break your routine occasionally for mental health. I write a lot and like it. I’ve done 1,000 posts here in three years. Plus 700 on Up and Running, and another 200 or so on Small Business Trends, Huffington Post, Amex Open, Industry Word, and Planning Demystified. Plus some guest posts on others. It’s easier to maintain momentum than overcome inertia.
Love the comments. Thank you. Not you spammers. But even you critics with annoying comments. Especially you critics with smart well written disagreements. Not the dumb generic praise intended only for your own SEO benefit, which I delete. But I love the comments, they make it live.
Love Twitter. Twitter has done wonders for my blogging, my daily work flow, and my growing satisfaction with web 2.0 or social media or whatever you call it. If you don’t get twitter, it’s not clutter, it’s not what they had for lunch, it’s blog posts and links and what’s going on in the world, as shared by people you like, now. My 18-point Twitter Primer feels as valid today as when I posted it.
Tell the damn truth. You can’t fake it for long. Keeping track of all your various personae is exhausting. Write as yourself, or maybe (just maybe) who you really want to be. I know this is a lame old quote, but I heard it first from Chris Guilleabeau and I like it: “I have to be myself. All the other people are already taken.”
Tell don’t sell. Lots of us blog for business. Much as I sincerely love the books and software I’ve done, I don’t blog about them here. Sure, the sidebar sells, I hope, but my posts don’t.
Here’s advice, in honor of this being post number 1,000:
Anything anybody can believe is an image of truth (paraphrasing William Blake).
Time is the scarcest resource. Time, not money.
Your relationships with the people you love are WAY more important than proving that you were right.
By guru business I mean the expert business, and particularly the one-person expert business. I mean consultant, coach, adviser, researcher, business hired gun, life coach, trainer, and so on. I mean a person who makes a living by selling (real or imagined) expertise, experience, and knowledge.
I was a business planning consultant for most of the 1980s and early 1990s, working almost always alone, just myself, no company. So that’s an example of an expert business. And I’ve been thinking lately about how much social media has changed that business model for the better. In this case – but with one notable exception – change is good.
Benefit 1: Marketing your expertise is way easier
There is a new way of marketing that is so much better than the old way. Call it the Web, social media, blogs, Twitter, or the combination; it means way more reach, automatically, if you do it right.
Consider the comparison, now vs. then: I lit out on my own as a business planning and market research expert in 1983. I had my credentials, of course, including academic degrees and a fancy title with a brand-name consulting company, plus some published works. But how did I make myself known? Word of mouth from clients who’d worked with me as an employee, yes. But from there it was a struggle to get my articles into magazines, my self onto the podium at the big trade shows (such as Comdex), and to finish a couple of published books on my main subject matter.
Today, in comparison, successful experts build their business by a combination of useful blog posts, active mini-blogging on Twitter, ebooks, and work with Facebook and LinkedIn. Do you see the pattern there? The gatekeepers are gone.
Where it used to be important to validate your expertise by getting through the gatekeepers in corporate branding and publishing, nowadays can’t you validate your expertise by making good sense on your blog? Believe me, that’s so much easier than the old way of publishing, speaking, and giving seminars.
Benefit 2: Acceptance is based on expertise more than setting
I posted this related thought on this blog Tuesday, about how clients can get better value from a one-person business with no overhead. Who does the work? The client is much more likely today, compared to 20 years ago, to accept and even approve of the fact that you’re on your own. Not having a company around you is no longer cause to wonder what’s wrong with you.
Benefit 3: With gatekeepers devalued, it’s the work that matters
And then there’s this last thought, which I hope is true: today we judge experts by their work, meaning their writing and speaking (and tweeting), much more than we used to. Today an expert’s work is more immediately available, and with less distortion through gatekeeper filters, than ever before. Isn’t it?
How do you evaluate a guru ahead of time? Usually the about page and the content of the blog. There’s less interference there. Back when I started, it took getting through magazine editors to get published, or event managers to get a podium, or joining or creating a company.
Do you frown on an ebook because it wasn’t published by a name-brand publisher? Do you mistrust a blog because it isn’t in a major business publication? Not so much. Am I right?
And the warning?
The bad news is the other side of the good news: It’s the work that matters. Today you have to either do good work or settle for clients you can fool. It was easier back then to hide mediocre work with a company around you, or an editor of a magazine to rewrite it. Today, if you claim to be an expert, you’d better create some content to back that up. Transparency is cool when it’s a bright and beautiful looking glass that highlights and spotlights you. It’s not so nice when it’s a magnifying glass that’s going to burn you like an ant in the backyard on a hot summer day.
This is good advice for any father, any day: Top Ten Father and Daughter things to do, by John Espley on an Accent Inns blog; but I’m posting about it for its blogging and business implications more than just its content. If you’re a parent, of either gender, and whether you have daughters or sons or both, it’s good advice. And whether or not you’re a parent, it’s an interesting example of business blogging.
Here’s why:
1. Focus is better than general.
Having been a father for 38 years now, and a son for 62, I feel like I know this territory pretty well. I’m father of four daughters and one son. The advice John gives on Father’s Day, focused on father’s and daughters, is as valid for fathers and sons, or mothers and daughters, or mothers and sons. Okay, there’s some male gender stereotyping, perhaps, in camping and fishing; but it’s still valid on a larger more generalized scale. By focusing on fathers and daughters, and doing it on Father’s Day, John makes it more powerful, not less.
2. You can’t fake real. You have to be authentic.
I’ve never read John Espley but as I read his post today I totally believe he’s the father of a young daughter. He couldn’t fake it. That makes his focus in point #1 stronger. He adds real details. His father-daughter suggestions are all things he’s done with his little girl. It’s obvious. And maybe this is why focus works — if he talked about father-son or parent-child, it wouldn’t be as specific, and the details wouldn’t feel as real as they do.
3. Attack the expected. Blow stereotypes apart. Surprise people.
It’s sad that camping and fishing are stereotyped as father-son activities, but it’s also true. So when John leads with camping in father-daughter mode, he goes off track. It’s unexpected. Dog bites man is boring, so this is man bites dog. That’s always more interesting. Screw stereotypes. That makes better reading.
4. Authentically personal stuff can be good for the business
John is business development manager of Accent Inns. Notice that his post isn’t about Accent Inns or the lodging business or travel in British Columbia; and it starts out recommending camping, not staying in an Accent Inn. However, I think it still fits, somehow, with John’s business position. Here I am blogging about Accent Inns, because of his post. I’ll look at them first the next time I’m headed for BC, because I like that post. And camping and fishing gets people out and about, and could involve a stay at the inn as part of the program. I think this is a good example of how personally authentic is also business friendly.
Frankly, I struggle with this a lot. Blogging is a big part of my job, but nobody pressures me to post about the company or the product. Occasionally I do because I can’t resist. But my blog is about me and what I think, stories I want to tell, advice I want to give, mistakes I made that you should avoid, and so on.
Lately I’m watching this same struggle again (and funny how this goes back to the father-daughter theme this post started with) as I watch my daughter Megan blogging as marketing manager for Klout, which measures online influence. She just did a great post on Mashable on Twitter strategies, without specifically mentioning Klout. But metrics are critical to strategy and Klout is the best in the business on Twitter metrics. Should she have mentioned Klout specifically? I doubt it. Does she lose credibility if she does? I think so. No matter how well you do it, if you’re pitching a product people sense it and it diminishes the realism and authenticity.
(ps: thanks to Ross Dunn for putting that post on Twitter. I wouldn’t have seen it otherwise.)
Do you like my headline here, on this post? Can you write a better one?
Headlines are critical. I’ve noted that, with some frustration (I’m not so good at headlines) on this blog before, here.
Headlines come up today because being in New York last week to judge the Forbes.com business plan contest gave me a chance to visit with my son Paul, who lives in New York, and is CTO of Huffington Post. And he told me what they’re doing on the Huffington Post about headlines.
Why do you care? Maybe because (whether you like its political views or not) in the last 2-3 years Huffington Post has posted huge growth in traffic and advertiser and investor interest and visibility and traffic. So they have to be doing a lot of things right. And, if you’re writing or blogging, you should know about how they do headlines.
The Huffington Post applies A/B testing to some of its headlines. Readers are randomly shown one of two headlines for the same story. After five minutes, which is enough time for such a high-traffic site, the version with the most clicks becomes the wood that everyone sees.
And then there’s Twitter. As a Twitter user, I enjoyed reading Huffpost crowd sources headlines in Snoo.ws. Here are highlights:
Using the hashtag #headlinehelp, visitors will be able to click on a link to an article and help write an appropriate headline that fits the story. Through social byproduct, the best headline will filter through to editors.
The Huffington Post made its first attempt at using the hashtag late yesterday asking participants to replace the headline, “No, YOU Lie,” regarding a story about Rep. Joe Wilson’s interjectory fireworks during President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress.
Hashtags are not perfect aggregators by any means, as previous use of them has seen contests hijacked and critical messaging spoiled. With Huffington Post’s reputation, they surely have gained some followers who may wish to use this idea in a negative way for the company.
How cool is that? I’d love to copy that idea. But reality rears up its ugly head: Huffington Post has hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter; I have barely four thousand. Mine are smarter and better looking, but still …
Or no, perhaps, not so cool? Maybe data-driven headlines are a problem (quoting The Noisy Channel on this subject):
I’m sure this approach must rattle some old-school journalists. And there is a real danger of optimizing for the wrong outcome. For example, including the word “sex” in this message might improve its traffic … but to what end?
OK, good point, but the discovery that there are some words (sex, violence, naked, brutal) which get better results is nothing new. It’s older than I am (I posted about words I won’t put into titles despite the temptation on this blog a couple of years ago). What’s new is the ability to test quickly and bring a crowd into it in a practical way.
It’s not about asking people what’s new, or changing the news content. It’s about headlines. And gaining readers.
It was sometime in the 1970s when I first ran across the Procter and Gamble one-page memo policy. I was a journalist then, interviewing an executive from P&G. It seemed to make so much sense. The people who worked there, I was told, loved it.
What can’t you say in a full page?
Think about emails, which are the memos of this millennium. What can’t you say in a page? Sure, there are special cases, but those are special cases. Most of the time, shorter is better.
A great learning moment for me, years ago, was when the editor of the business school resume book insisted that no resume be more than one page.
“Even the president of the United States can do a one-page resume,” she said. “Summarize.”
For better or worse, one of the things happening to us as we approach the second decade of the third millennium is fewer words. And I hope better words.
Blog posts seem to do better when they’re shorter. The better books break things into smaller pieces.
True confession: I love writing. I love short sentences, strong words, making myself understood.
I think most, if not all, good bloggers like writing. Video people do vlogs and YouTube, poets go to Twitter (say, what?), but bloggers are writers. Almost all of my favorite blogs — I’ve got the blogroll on this blog, rightmost column, near the bottom — are written by people who care about writing. Not that they don’t care just as much about business, their main content area; but they’re writers.
Yes, I’ve done all the startups in my bio; yes, I have the MBA degree; and yes, I built Palo Alto Software. But if I could have made a decent living just writing, I would have.
Flashback: 1970, I was 22, wanted to write, studied literature. I was in a PhD program in comparative literature, briefly; ended up with MA in Journalism. UPI, McGraw-Hill, Mexico City, and whoosh, the 1970s all gone.
Flashback: 1979, journalist, bored filling space between ads, enrolled in Stanford University business school. Then I fell in love with business planning, helped to start Borland International, founded Palo Alto Software, founded bplans.com. And grew it, slowly for years, no outside investment. Tough times, good times.
And suddenly it was 2007, 40+ employees and a great management team, me struggling with changed technology, and I changed jobs. And started blogging. That change was Part 1 of this series.
So what helps me a lot is that I like writing. As a journalist I wrote a lot for many different publications. I also wrote published fiction (not very good, by the way, not worth citing, but they paid me) (and I’m not including market research that was wrong, either) and a full-length novel that got some second looks, but never got published.
So now, you can see how much blogging I do by looking at the sidebar here on the right. You can’t see that I’m also writing a lot on a family site, a personal site, and even an anonymous pure writing site.
If you’re going to be blogging a lot, you have to like writing.
