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From Laid Off to Entrepreneur

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Mar 19, 2009; Category: Business, Zeitgeist; Tags: Economy, Entrepreneurs; No Comments

Business Week’s SmallBiz Insider offers this look at Rebounders, people who were laid off recently who are now taking matters into their own hands with their own businesses. Just wanted to pass it along in case you need a little inspiration in the face of economic woes.

Blogging for Business: Where DO You Find the Time?

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Mar 18, 2009; Category: Blogging, Business, Communication, Marketing, Zeitgeist; Tags: Blogging, Communication, Marketing; 3 Comments

A friend asked me the other day where I find the time to post. Part of my job (I’m an independent business owner, so I get to define my job description) is selling other business people on the benefits of blogging, and concern about finding the time to do it is clearly the number one thing I hear that keeps people from going ahead. I completely understand. Blogging takes time, and time is a finite resource.

The short answer is, I don’t find the time. I take the time. That sounds trite and almost dismissive of the question, but it’s a very important distinction for those of us who don’t get paid (directly) to blog. So, let me expand on that and give the question the attention it deserves.

1. Make blogging a priority. At this moment, my to-do list has 14 things on it, not including blogging (which is always on there, BTW), many of which I get paid for when I finish. No one pays me when I write a post. If I didn’t understand that blogging is part of my long-term business strategy, I would put it off until everything else was cleared off my list. Which means I would never post, because things keep getting added to the list.
2. Make blogging part of your identity. I used to tell people I was a web developer. Now I tell them I’m a blogger-slash-web developer. This comes from an internal shift in my thinking about who I am, what I do, and where I see my business going. This didn’t happen the first week or the first month after I started blogging. Every week, however, posting becomes more fundamental to my business identity. “I blog, therefore I am” kind of thing.
3. Write down post ideas immediately when you have one. If you’re busy, you probably can’t drop what you’re doing and write a post. Neither can I, even though I spend a good part of my day at my Macbook. If I get an idea while I’m at the keyboard, I can quickly login and start a post, usually just a title and a key thought. If I’m away from my desk when an idea presents itself, I jot it down on a pad I’ve learned to carry AT ALL TIMES (yes, into the bathroom). Later, when I’m ready to post, instead of having to come up with an idea, a few are waiting for completion. There are some ideas that just don’t seem that interesting a day or two later, and even less so after a month, but they’re still sitting among my unpublished posts in case I’m re-inspired by them. Or desperate.
4. Make decisions about what you’ll give up to make time for posting. At our house, we got rid of our TV about 4 years ago (my wife is sort of a radical), so I didn’t have the option of carving out time to blog from that obvious time-waster. When I’m pressed for time, what I give up is all other forms of social media: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (especially Twitter). After that, I give up reading. In the last month I’ve been particularly busy, so I probably haven’t spent more than an hour on social media. I understand how important networking is, but in order to continue blogging when I’m really busy, that’s what I have to give up. I rarely have to give up reading, because I’m clear about it being more important to me personally than LinkedIn.
5. Learn to use and value blogging as a way of clarifying and strengthening your ideas. All of us have ideas and assumptions rolling around in our heads, many of them unorganized, undeveloped, and untested. The process of developing those ideas while posting helps to organize thoughts, making them more explicit, more clear, and more real. If you’re lucky, maybe even more useful.

Those are my tips for blogging while busy. No question, blogging takes time, and if you don’t have a really firm vision of where it is taking you and your business, you won’t do it. I hope this post is helpful for those who have trouble finding the time, and that your business will benefit as a result.

Seth Godin Talking about Leading a Tribe

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Mar 16, 2009; Category: Business, Marketing, Video, Zeitgeist; Tags: Seth Godin, Tribes; No Comments

Seth Godin talks about the failure of interruption marketing and the emergence of assembling a tribe as pathway to marketing success.

Book Review: Tribes by Seth Godin

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Mar 15, 2009; Category: Book Review, Business, Marketing, Zeitgeist; Tags: Seth Godin, Tribes; No Comments

I’m guessing Seth Godin, like the rest of us, is completely capable of not thinking clearly on occasion and saying dumb things. But you won’t find evidence of that in Tribes, a book in which he has clearly and compellingly laid out what it takes to be successful in marketing in 2009.

In this little more than pocket-size book, Godin explains the difference between a crowd and a tribe (crowds don’t have leaders or a means of communicating with one another), and notes "Most organizations spend their time marketing to the crowd. Smart organizations assemble the tribe."

Godin challenges people who are passionate about something to assume a leadership role. The tools, he points out, are there for anyone to use; there’s no longer an excuse to sit on the sidelines and complain about how you wish things were different. You can attract a crowd of like-minded people willing to work toward making things different.

Some of my favorite insights from the book:

• Leadership is too important to be left to the people in charge.
• Faith overcomes fear.
• Tribes are about faith—about belief in an idea and a community.
• Heretics are the new leaders.
• Leaders transform the shared interest of the tribe into a passionate goal and desire for change.

Click on the cover image of the book above and get it at Amazon. I think you’ll find it worth reading.

What's Wrong with Twitter

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Mar 15, 2009; Category: Business, Communication, Marketing, Zeitgeist; Tags: Communication, Marketing; One Comment

Actually nothing is wrong with Twitter, the application. The Twitter app is great, perhaps a work of genius. The problem lies with the culture that has developed around Twitter.

I’m a firm believer that less is more. "More," as in "more impact." Twitter culture, however, clearly believes more is more. If this was email, 90% of the stuff would be called spam, and there would be angry and alarmed calls for it to stop. In Twitterville, however, no one seems to mind. Of course, you can quit following people, but then the benefits of Twitter are also lost; not much of a solution.

The culture is being driven by some of the biggest names in social media, who live, eat and breathe social media. Chris Brogan, Darren Rowse, and Lee Odden, for instance, tweet as many as (sometimes more than) 20 times a day. Though I’m a fan of these people, I rarely follow any of their tweets. I know somewhere in there are some nuggets, but I don’t have the time or willingness to sort through all the stuff I don’t care about to find them.

My hope is that the Twitter culture matures into a platform on which the clutter is reduced, and clicking on a link in a tweet is more likely to have some value. I’m betting, however, that it’s headed for a scenario described by Yogi Berra referring to a restaurant: "Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too popular."