Category Archives: Weblogs

Blogging: 10 Things To Do with A Bad Headline

Weblogs, Writing, , , ,

I thought it was one of my better posts ever on Huffington, A Great Debate About Ideas, because it covered something really important — the battle of free vs. not — and tied Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, and Ellen Goodman together.

But it wasn’t, it turns out, because of a dull deadline. Maybe I should have called it “The Battle of Free vs. Not.” Hmm, no, see, I’m not that good at headlines. “Naked idea orgy?”

  1. Delete it
  2. Start over
  3. Make it a list of 10
  4. Make it a list of 5
  5. Insult somebody famous
  6. Find a way to add one or more of the words “naked, brutal, violent, sexy, stripped, revealed, angry, face-off” … or something like that.
  7. Blame it on the readers, the editors, or anybody else you can think of.
  8. Take a walk, and think about a single sentence that would make you want to read the rest of the post.
  9. Go browse a blog reader like Google reader set to show just headlines.
  10. Go back to point 1 and go right down this list again.

True story: when I was young, working with UPI in Mexico City — we’re talking about early 1970s, so seriously, a long time ago — the system we used to report Mexico news to New York Editors showed them the first sentence only; from that, they had to decide whether or not they wanted to see the whole first paragraph. And, with that, they had to decide again (push a button) whether they wanted to see the rest of the story. So I should be able to do this.

And something else, that I’ve learned, in a lot of years writing: there are many different varieties of writing. Being good at one doesn’t mean you’re good at another. I used to think I was a good writer, but copy writers amaze me. And in newspapers, reporters don’t write the headlines. And writing and creative fiction plots are totally different skills.

Damn headlines.

Twitter Pitter Patter Twop: Hating Twitter.

Current Affairs, Web/Tech, Weblogs, Writing,

I like Twitter and I use it a lot, but really, I don’t care if you do, or if anybody else does. And I don’t get why people seem offended by it, but they do, a lot. What’s up with that? Is it politics or religion? Defensiveness maybe?

For example, this rant appeared as a comment underneath my loving and hating Twitter post on Huffington Post:

Why should Twitter and tweets replace perfectly good ways to send the same information, or even more/better info? It seems to be like saying “the telephone is not good enough, we need to return to telegraph.” Why can’t we just send an email saying the same thing as a tweet, and the email recipient gets a “inbox from __” alert email? Why can’t the tweet be posted to FB’s “what I’m doing” box, or why can’t a blogger’s blog be where the post is posted, with a service that sends an email to followers that tells them a new post is available or repeats the post?

This new tech is redundant and does not improve the old model; instead it hamstrings it by limiting the text. Twitter just doesn’t make sense. Half the people who sign up for it right now are doing so because they want to see why all the comedy shows are mocking it.

In the end Twitter will become a national joke and then recede until it fails like so many other net companies. (Unless they change their business model and then they won’t be Twitter so much anymore but Facebook with less benefits.) However there is a new tech better than Twitter: it is called the telephone. You’ll never have to type a teletype again to communicate– save time, leave tweets on people’s phonemail… viola! I’ve heard this telephone thing saves time and trouble, why not try it?

What interests me is the apparent overreaction. That commenter doesn’t see the difference between publishing 140-character pieces to as many people as choose to get them, all at once, and a telephone call or an email. Obviously he or she doesn’t get Twitter. So why comment at all? The post doesn’t accuse non-Twitter-users of anything.

And another commenter wrote:

So it’s sort of like IMs. Which are an obnoxious, invasive interruption. I check my email compulsively, but IMs are like the person next to you on the plane who won’t shut up.

There again, since that person obviously doesn’t get it, why so much anxiety? I’m still shocked with this one. There’s somebody who should not have the instant messenger running on his or her computer, right?

Last week I took my Twitter etiquette list, which I put here on this blog first, and put it onto the Huffington Post. And somebody took the time to comment:

The mundane details of people’s lives are all Twitter is. That and spamming.

There again, somebody who obviously doesn’t get it, but cares a great deal about it nonetheless.

Not that any of this matters, but I’m just curious … is there some moral issue related to Twitter? Or political, maybe, or religious? What’s up with that?

Boomer Business Blogger Part 4: You Have to Like Writing

Baby Boomer, Blogs and blogging, Journalism, Social media, Web/Tech, Weblogs, Writing, , , ,

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.

Boomer Business Blogger Part 3: Is It Good Business?

Baby Boomer, Business Strategy, Marketing, Social media, Web/Tech, Weblogs, , ,

A nice person almost apologized to me for not having her business on Facebook. I said: “but why?”

Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest of that “social media stuff” may or may not be good business. But not just for its own sake. It has to be part of a strategy.

Otherwise, it may or may not be fun, depending on who you are and what you like to do; but it’s not good business without a related plan for how it’s supposed to help. Does it generate leads? Page views? Validation? Or is it just a rationalization for spending time doing something you like, like keeping up with friends, being clever.

My blogging has a business strategy. I don’t sell anything, but I do talk about business planning and business management. It relates to my books, my software authorship, and the company I founded. It generates page views in the Bplans.com domain. It validates.

So it’s fun, but it’s good business too. In this case, at least. It relates directly to validation of product, to page views, and to marketing objectives.

What is it for you? What’s the business objective? How to you measure achievement of that objective? Do you have metrics to review? Do you remember to review them?

Boomer Business Blogger Part 2: It’s A Full-time Job

Baby Boomer, Blogs and blogging, Social media, Weblogs, Writing, , , ,

Benjamin Floyd of Read Click Done asked me after yesterday’s post: “how do you do it?” Two books, 1400 or so posts, 1300 or so tweets in the last two years. “Where do you find the time.”

Fair question. Reminds me of Bob Sutton’s Really, I Write it Myself. So do I. Bob thanks his editors, and so do I. But yeah, I write it all myself. (Well, there was that one guest post on angel funding, but it was the only exception.)

It’s a full-time job

To all the real business people feeling insufficient because experts say they’re supposed to be doing all this as a sideline, I say: relax. That’s a myth. A post now and then and some tweets here and there, maybe; but this blogging I do is a full-time job.

I go to the office every day, and I’m there all day except meetings (and traveling, and teaching, and speaking gigs, and angel investment, but that detracts from my point, so forget I said it).

I’m often writing at night too. And on weekends.

I also use scheduling. For example, I’m on vacation with family today, so I wrote this last Saturday, to be posted today.

Repeat: it’s a full-time job. It doesn’t just happen.

It’s no coincidence that my new life blogging and writing and speaking and teaching, and tweeting too for the last few months, was a delightful baby-boomer late 50s career change. While I’m still employed full time by Palo Alto Software, the company I founded, I don’t run it. Nobody reports to me. As I said in yesterday’s part 1, my business card says “President” but it should say Chief Blogging Officer.

Dan Schawbel, Me 2.0, and Personal Branding

Books, Business Plan Marathon, Social media, Weblogs, , , , , , ,

What does personal branding mean to you?

To me it used to be about well-known experts whose names became brands in an almost-traditional business sense: Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Tom Peters; they were experts whose names sold books and speaking engagements. Lately my view of personal branding has expanded as I start following John Jantsch, Anita Campbell, and Pam Slim, for example; bloggers, tweeters, authors, and experts.

I like to think that my favorite experts, my favorite personal brands, are authentic. Guy Kawasaki really is an investor, really was an Apple evangelist, and believes every word he says. Seth Godin has built his remarkable name around remarkable marketing. John Jantsch lives for Duct Tape Marketing, and Anita Campbell for Small Business Trends. These are real people.

And, whether you like it or not, you too are a personal brand. Much as I dislike the phrase personal branding it’s not just for big names any more. It’s for just about everybody who has enough online access to be reading this post.

Whether you like it or not. Which brings me to Me 2.0, Dan Schawbel’s new book — due out today — on personal branding. 

Reading Dan Schawbel on personal branding is something like a mirror image of a mirror. He has a great personal brand. He’s always on Twitter, often on major business blogs (not to mention his own) and is frequently quoted in business magazines. And he’s only 24 years old.

Like his book, and his quick career success, Dan is completely immersed in the realities that have grown up in just the last few years: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on.

It may be that being young wasn’t even an obstacle, in his case, because that whole world began on college campuses (mostly) and then spread to the old folks like me. So of course he’s only 24. How could he not be?

And he’s got some very good advice to share. Beginning with his main point, the “like it or not” truth about it. Personal branding is no longer an elite concept reserved for a few big-name authors, columnists, or experts. The new world of the 21st century, with social media and Web 2.0 and Google and friends, makes it a fact of life for just about everybody.  He tends to focus a lot on the Gen Y college student looking for a job and starting a career,  but he would, wouldn’t he. There’s a lot of specific, detailed, real-world advice here about how to get your first job and manage your career, in the context of social media, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and friends.  And a lot of what he says applies just as well to an old guy enjoying his journey into social media. I had to chuckle: what is “Me 2.0” to Dan is something like “Me 11.0” to me. I’ve been around longer.

I still hate the phrase. Personal branding sounds to me like white suits and pink ties and gold chains. I wish we’d called it personal footprint, or something like that. Maybe just engrave the phrase “this goes on your permanent record” on every keyboard.

When I started in journalism close to 40 years ago, one of the better teachers suggested that we also keep an ego file, always, of things we’d written. Today it’s almost reverse — Google and friends keep the file of things you’ve written, whether you like it or not. And Dan points out that you should think about it ahead of time, and make sure you like it.

He tells some good stories: Facebook stupidity, for example — the guy who was convicted for a crime from evidence he posted on Facebook, and the almost-urban-myth of the woman who skipped work because she was “sick” but posted her free-day fling on Facebook.

Much more important than that, however, is a well structured review of how the new world almost requires an awareness of personal branding. Unless you’re outside that new world you can’t escape it, and you can, with some good thinking and organization, manage it. Visibility is there.

Some key points that apply to me and my baby-boomer friends as we enter into social media:

  • Authenticity: You can’t fake it for very long. You have to actually be yourself, or the effort to be that other person is overwhelming.
  • You have to live with who you’ve made yourself to be in things that show up in Google and friends.
  • Better to think about it and organize it — like a standard profile, picture, and personal statement — than to let it be random.

It’s amazing to me that Dan is only 24 years old. But maybe that’s the point. He’s onto something.

The New Web: Your Money or Your Life

Reflections, Web/Tech, Weblogs, Writing

Your thoughts, your pictures, your daily life … maybe it’s your journal, or your diary. Do you own it? Should you? Facebook backed down last month when people said its user agreement gave it ownership of users’ pictures.

Anita Campbell started me thinking about this yesterday, with her post on digital sharecroppers.

Is your life on Facebook? Twitter? Your blog? Or, perhaps, this question instead: who’s making the money?

Facebook makes money off the ads it puts on your page. Twitter intends to make money some day; in the meantime, it builds users.

When I post on this blog, at least, my writing is mine; and the ads you see here are for my own work. When I post on other blogs, like Up and Running, or Huffington Post, I get satisfaction, somebody else gets ad revenue. What about your blogging?

Me? I’m okay with it. Facebook and especially Twitter feel to me like I’m connecting with friends, I like it, I do it on purpose, and I’m not concerned with protecting rights or intellectual property. Actually I’m grateful for the platform. My blogging on the big sites gives me a voice, and that’s worth it to me.

How about you? Is it working for you? It’s a question worth asking.

Richard’s New Rules and Page View Paradox

Reflections, Web/Tech, Weblogs

Now here's a good rule to live by:

1) Do unto others as you would have them announce to 100,000 people you have done.

I had seen this one a couple of days ago on the Huffington Post, part of Richard Smith's 10 new Golden Rules for Living in a Web 2.0 World, a thoroughly enjoyable list. Good advice for a not-so-big world.

But wait. What if there's a corollary? You do unto others nicely, as implicitly suggested above, and nobody will announce anything to anybody, because that's boring. Do something dumb, mean, or otherwise embarrassing, and that will spur an announcement. We should call that the page-view paradox of Richard's rules.

Remember the old saying, "Nice guys finish last?" Bad news travels fast, and good news doesn't. Bad reviews are more fun to read than good reviews.

I still remember the line in a movie review, from 30 years ago, where the reviewer said the director had "delusions of adequacy." Panning is more fun than praising. I don't remember lines from good reviews.

I looked back at this and Richard's rules today after I read Michael Arrington's startling spit-in-the-face story on TechCrunch. Which, I should add, I had found because somebody I follow in Twitter commented on it with the phrase "you reap what you sew (sic)." Gulp.

Arrington, clearly still reeling from the unnerving experience of having such a vivid expression from someone he didn't know at all, says he's going to take some time off, and think about it. He tells of death threats a few months ago, and expensive security.

TechCrunch, the blog, and Michael Arrington, its founder, play a king-maker role in high tech. A good review on TechCrunch can make a company suddenly real. A bad review can hurt, but even that's better than no review at all. Arrington's in a tough position, in my mind. He can't do what he does well without disappointing a lot of people. I don't know him, but I've seen him perform, I've read his work, and I feel for his dilemma. You can't do a job like his well without making enemies.

And in his case, it's not even a matter of bad reviews: the worst thing TechCrunch can do to an aspiring new company is nothing at all; there is no news worse than no news. In other words: silence. That's a tough world to live in.

Which brings me to two more of Richard's suggested golden rules:

9) The day your name hits the top of the Google search rankings will NOT be a good day.

10) It is more compelling than ever to simply do the right thing for yourself and for the world. Positive actions have now been gifted with incredibly long tails.

These two go together because rule 9 is a restatement of the page-view paradox. Bad news is far more interesting than the opposite; and the opposite of bad news isn't good news, but rather, no news. So that contradicts rule 10. Damn! I want to believe that positive actions are now being gifted; but I don't see it happening. At least, not often.

It was about a generation ago that Thomas Harris' book I'm OK-You're OK was a best seller. It pointed out (among other things) that two random people sitting together on an airplane seat were far more likely to start talking by sharing the negative (these planes are always late … these seats are too small …) than anything positive. This seems to be a general rule. And it relates to the power of the negative in blogs, reviews, and general human behavior. We are all pretty annoying, you have to admit.

So I wonder. I get it that the new world can turn out and expose phonies and cheats faster than ever. But don't they — the cheats and phonies and all — get more page views too?

Down the Social Media Rabbit Hole

Web/Tech, Weblogs, Writing

Last week John Jantsch posted My Social Media System, detailing his twice-daily, daily, weekly, and monthly routines in blogging, twitter, and so on. In email he asked me (and several others) to join in:

I would love it if you would consider writing a similar post on your blog and then let's hook them all together and create an "at this moment" guide. I think this would be a very instructional free guide in PDF form and I would be happy to collect, document and share for everyone's use – this could change over time obviously.

That's an attractive invitation. For me, though, it's not so systematic. In fact, my 18-month journey into the soft white underbelly of social media is more like delightful, alluring, distracting, disorderly chaos. I'm 61. If this post had a sound track, it would be White Rabbit, by Jefferson Airplane. In fact, I just put that onto my iTunes, while I write this.

About Blogging

"But I'm all about business planning," I said. "It's not a blogging thing. It's static." OMG, how wrong I was with that one! Falling headlong down the hole. That was April of 2007. I'd just decided to step down from managing Palo Alto Software. The new team wanted me blogging.

"Don't worry," Sabrina said. "You'll get it."

"Install Google Reader," Noah added, "and start reading the blogs. You'll see."

And I saw. Since then I've done more than 1,000 posts on Planning Startups Stories, and Up and Running alone, not to mention Planning Demystified, and dozens each on Small Business Trends, Huffington Post, and Business in General.

Blogging Tips and Tools

  1. The draft blog. Wherever you've got a blog set up, as long as it's on one of the major blog platforms (I use TypePad, WordPress, and Blogger), it's very easy to set up a draft blog. Use your control panel to keep it private, not indexed, not searched.
  2. Use "Post automatically" tools to catch ideas. On my Windows systems, I have Windows Live Writer set up, and on my Macs, Mars Edit, so on either one when I'm browsing something interesting I can automatically post it into my draft blog. No thinking required. Save for posting later, or thinking, drafting, and if not a post, then delete it. Where others use del.icio.us to keep track of these things, I like my draft blog.
  3. Focus on headlines. People browse headlines in the reader, or they catch them in Google. Lists are great, buzzwords, surprises, challenges are good. Don't trick people with bait and switch headlines.
  4. Be real, be yourself, pay attention to style, throw change-ups occasionally, read as much as you can, comment, track back to other blogs, be worth reading.

Managing Twitter

I'm new at Twitter; still getting used to it. I'm following a few hundred people, and a few hundred — almost exactly the same number, but not all the same people — follow me. You're welcome to follow me as timberry. And here's what I've figured out so far:

  1. I use twitterfeed to automatically tweet my blog posts. It works for me pretty well.
  2. I use TwitterFox for most of my tweets; it's in the lower right corner of Firefox, and the coolest thing it does is automatically create a tiny URL from a larger URL. So I copy the URL and type into the box in Twitterfox, making tweeting quicker, just a single step, instead of doing the tiny URL step first.
  3. I asked the Twitter world: do I follow people I disagree with (politics, religion, etc.)? Is it rude not to follow? I got lots of contradictory answers. My favorite was Evan saying, "If you follow users you aren't interested in then you break the metaphor." Second favorite is JonDiPetro's answer: "It depends on your agenda – if u r here for bus. leave ideology at the door (imo). If u r here to meet like minds, filter out." So I left ideology out of it. I follow people who follow me as long as they're tweeting in English or Spanish, and are not strident one-issue tweeting repeatedly, or simply sales shouting.
  4. I refuse to add information clutter. I try to tweet posts, issues, and thoughts; not ever where I am or what I'm doing. Sure, I fail at it sometimes, but at least I try.
  5. Confession: Twitter is overwhelming. I could watch it all day everyday, and do nothing else. So I simply stop looking after a while. Then I go back a few hours later to see if you or anybody else has started following me; and I get hooked for another hour or more.
  6. On the other hand, counter-confession: I follow some very cool people in Twitter, and they come up with some great ideas and great links. It works very well for blogging.

Which brings me back to the idea of chaos, and getting lost in wonderland. I can't write about this stuff without admitting that I don't understand it all that well. I've only got a dozen or so Facebook friends, exclusively family, and I'm turning down friend requests because I can't deal with them. I do have a few hundred LinkedIn connections (I'm Timberry there too) and I've answered a bunch of questions on my favorite topics (business plans, startups). So with that in mind, my next section is…

Where Social Media Things Baffle Me

  1. How do you manage your time with all this? How does anybody find the time to follow all those great blogs? What about time for Twitter? The tweets go by and I click the links, mesmerized, fascinated — I've been accused of acting like a fish following the latest bright shiny things — and the hours go by. If I had a real job, instead of just blogging, writing, teaching and speaking, I'd be really lost.
  2. What do you do with people you don't know wanting to "friend" you? I get it in Twitter, the answer is always "yes." But in Facebook and LinkedIn, it feels mean to just ignore such requests, but why does anybody want friends they don't actually know? See, I guess I'm incorrigibly too old. I've been linking in only to people I know, business people for the most part; and I've been keeping Facebook for family only. Is that crazy? Social media suicide?

Valuation Questions, Web 2.0, Real World

Venture Capital, Weblogs

I think valuation is fascinating. What is a company worth? With the larger publicly traded companies you can easily calculate a valuation using the wisdom of the crowd, the market itself, by multiplying shares outstanding times price per share. But in the real world of small business, gulp, this is much harder.

Concretely: how much is your business worth? How much could you sell it for? How would you decide? What formulas would you use? More importantly, what formulas would your hypothetical or theoretical buyers use?

Ultimately, like it or not, just about anything is worth what somebody else will pay for it. Your business is worth what you could sell it for.

And what would that be? Well, that's really hard to know, until you go to the market. Some people talk about 5 or 10 or more times profits, but then face it, in small business, in the real world, profits is a very vague number, an accounting conceit. Some people talk about 1 or 2 or more times sales, which eliminates a lot of the accounting fiction. Others talk about valuations based on book value, or assets.

I'm amused at how much of this stuff is loosey-goosey, even though it's in the realm of finance, which is supposed to be mathematical and exact. And isn't.

I posted here last Fall about BizEquity.com, Tom Taulli's really intriguing site that's attempting to create a database of first-cut estimated valuations of businesses all over the United States. I talked to Tom last month after the big meltdown, and found, happily, he's still optimistic about the long-term value of the BizEquity site. They're working on it. I suggested he take his September data and multiply it by about 0.5 or so; and I was only partially joking. Tom knows this area very well, but of course the whole volatility burst has been a challenge. Last summer might not have been the most opportune time for Tom and his backers to start.

So I was interested yesterday Monday morning as I soaked in coffee and I noted — thanks to Ann Handley in Twitter — Advertising Age's Simon Dumenco's angry analysis of the Huffington Post's recent venture capital infusion at a valuation of $100 million.

His title, unfortunately, is What's $200 Million Divided by 2009 Reality. That's too bad, because the $100 million (or less) estimated valuation was widely publicized when Oak Investment Partners announced the investment last November. Simon doesn't enhance his argument by referring to the twice-as-large-as-fact figure, $200 million, that actually appeared much earlier, last Spring. The phrase "straw man" comes to mind. 

That glaring error aside, he seems offended by the VC's reported valuation. He has references to the big Internet bubble of the late 1990s. It should be only $2 million, according to him.

I think he exaggerates his point, not just by doubling the figure, but also by lowballing his real estimate. The Huffington Post has made huge (and well reported) gains in traffic. Furthermore, unlike a lot of the Web 2.0 sites he wants to knock, this one has an actual revenue model. For better or worse, the Huffington Post is almost like old-fashioned media. It generates readers with news and opinion, and it sells advertising. So somewhere in the numbers — which are not public — is a number for revenues, and a valuation based on (among other things) revenues as well as traffic.

And it all goes to illustrate my point, today: valuation is hard to figure. It's also important. And, in the end, a company is worth what buyers will pay for it. In the case of Huffington Post, it's not a vague theoretical guess. The VCs who invested in Huffington set a price, and, with that, a valuation.