Communications

Let’s face it – U2 has been pretty much shit in terms of major release albums since the early 1990s. I think their main problem is that they take themselves too seriously these days. That aside, they actually caught my attention today when I heard on the news that they were getting shit from the Barcelona government for making too much noise and pissing off the neighbours while they rehearsed for the start of their world tour. [READ]

Big deal – rock band makes noise and pisses off locals. The real story here is that a band whose music is rapidly becoming too uncool for Apple TV commercials actually got some press coverage. This is a good thing! It’s going to build some buzz about what they’re doing and might actually drive up record sales. I’m still not going to buy their album because I’m a stubborn SOB. THEY’RE DEAD TO ME! DEAD! YOU HEAR? However, I wouldn’t change the station if the song came on the radio. I’m curious to hear if they’re rocking harder now.

I think there’s a lesson to be learned here from a marketing perspective – if you can’t do it right, do it loud. There’s a local jewellery chain here that has made shtick out of having the worst radio spokesperson in the business. This guy’s voice makes me want to drive my car into the first school bus or old lady I see. I pay attention though. I know more about this guys’ jewellery shop than I do any of his competitors.

I’m trying to think how to leverage the power of being loud in my own business. Suggestions?

According to When Did You Join Twitter, I started messing around with the service 419 days ago. In these 419 days, I’ve seen a few trends and have been a little taken aback from the recent jump in popularity. Its membership has been growing exponentially since the start of 2009. I lump most of the people I follow into a few categories:

1. Twitter Shitters
   

   These are folks who tweet about everything that they’re doing every moment of the day. I just stopped following three such people because they were driving me up the wall with the inane shit that they were posting. These people say that they’re the “real” users of the service. I think they just have too much time on their hands and an over-inflated sense of their own importance. I liken them to LinkedIn “LIONS”. [READ] They don’t really get what the tool is for.

   

2. Lurkers
   

   There have been a lot of studies coming out this week analyzing Twitter’s users. [READ] One interesting stat is that 40% of Tweeters never tweet again after their first day. Some studies are chalking this up to people who have forgotten their login information but I think they’re actually lurkers – people who like to read the tweets but never respond and never tweet. They’re like eStalkers.

3. Marketing Guys
   

   Someone in the last year put the bug in the ear of marketers that Twitter is a great platform for pushing your wares. Pho Citi Noodles (@phociti) in LA is a prime example. This Vietnamese restaurant tweets many times a day trying to get people to come in and eat at their restaurant. I don’t know how effective this kind of strategy is. It actually seems kind of dumb to me.

4. SEO Junkies
   

   I think I fall into this category. SEO Junkies are typically bloggers that are looking to increase the exposure of their blog to the masses by using whatever means possible. I have a plugin for my Wordpress blog that automatically tweets for me when I publish a new blog post. I see Twitter as a platform to increase my exposure and I follow a number of people who use Twitter in the same way. I find their tweets useful and informative and to be frank – I’m glad these people don’t post about what they had for lunch.

5. Facebook Lite Users
   

   The last category I would put people in are Facebook lite users who see the Twitter platform as a social networking tool. I’ve certainly responded to people who reach out to me via Twitter. I’ve had people in the last week as me for recommendations on moving companies, research methodologies, baby strollers and the like. I don’t mind answering these questions with a short reply or direct message. I think this is what Twitter’s founders were probably envisioning when they created the tool back in 2006.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m still not convinced that Twitter is a mature communications tool – especially when compared to other social networking platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook. It’s an interesting tool though and I’ll continue to play around with it. If I end up roaming into category 1 or 3, someone kick me.

I am going to start exploring the possibility of setting up a one-day conference for sole proprietors and people new to consulting in Vancouver by the end of the year. There are a lot of things I’ve had to learn the hard way over the last six years and I want to pack as many of those lessons and a host of guest speakers into the event to cover topics like:

• How to survive the first 10,000 hours of your consulting business
  
• Sales and lead generation for consultants
  
• The RFP circus – how to get on the inside track and win bids
  
• Branding and marketing for sole proprietorships
  
• Social media for small consulting firms
  
• Credentials and professional development
  
• Identifying and building up equity in niche markets
  
• How to grow your firm
  

I’m throwing this out there because I want to get a sense of who is interested in coming to something like this and what kinds of topics they’d like to see covered. Networking will be a big component of this and there will also be vendors on hand to share services that can make your life as a consultant easier. I’m starting a mailing list for this conference and have bought a domain name to host the event details/registration (miniconcon.com). I’m thinking Fall, 2009 in downtown Vancouver for the timing.

If you’re interested in getting involved in this as an attendee, a speaker or a vendor that would like to have a booth at the event, please contact me.

If this event is a success, I plan to run it in other Canadian cities and possible more than once per year in Vancouver. The format I’m leaning towards is like the TED Conference [LINK] where attendees get to hear a number of 20-minute power-talks by innovative, thoughtful and experienced people. Networking will be a big part of this event and a directory of attendees and their elevator pitches will be posted on the website.

Feel free to post your suggestions or ideas in the comments section below. Other topics we should cover? Potential speakers we should look at?

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you might have noticed that there were very few posts in April. Four, to be exact. That’s how much I used to blog in a week, not a whole month. There’s a couple of reasons for this – first, I got really busy with Federal Fiscal Year-End activities (many of my clients have a year that ends on March 31) and I didn’t get any time to post (or eat or sleep). Second, after a few weeks, not posting became a bit of a sick experiment.

I was anticipating that my Google Analytics account would show a marked drop in traffic the longer I went between posts when in fact, April saw some of my best, consistent traffic yet. The following is a screencap from my Google Analytics account which compares April, 2009 (when I only posted four times) to December, 2009 (when I posted 11 times):

This is an interesting look at the traffic. As you can see, my overall traffic is 15% higher in April than December and people are viewing 13% more content on my site after arriving. On the downside, people are spending significantly less time reading my blog. Since April was a bit of an experiment, I’m going to try a different experiment in May – one post every single day in May.

I want to play around with the content a bit too because some posts I’ve written are more popular than others – one post “How to Write a Great Consulting Resume“ has seen a massive spike in traffic in the past few months. Others, like my post about HHO fuel systems, has seen declining readership albiet from a pole position. In any case, it’s going to be tough to write every since day but I’m curious to see what it will do to my traffic. Stay tuned and I’ll cover this issue again in June and report on the results.

I wrote a posting last weekend on why I thought the Internet hasn’t yet killed traditional print publications [READ]. In a nutshell, I think that the Internet has changed the game for newspapers in and some ways, made their job easier but I don’t believe that blogs (and 100% online journals) can ever replace the credibility and resources at the disposal of a major newspaper. I think it’s all related to advertising revenue as well and advertising revenue is ruled by demographics. As long as boomers continue to prefer a newspaper over reading online, there will be newspapers. Blogs and electronic journals aren’t going away but neither are newspapers so that means we’ll all have to play nicely together for the foreseeable future. Here’s how I think we can make it work:

Bloggers be accessible to reporters

Bloggers are an interesting source of material for reporters – many of whom are in their early 20s. These young reporters are web savvy and they know the difference between good materials and fluff online – something that their older counterparts have trouble with. Many bloggers blog about their work or their volunteer work and leave morsels of story ideas lying all over the web for reporters to pick up. Here’s where bloggers can make reporter’s lives easier – answer the phone when they call to clarify something you’ve written or to ask for more information. No, you’re not going to get paid for it but you’ll increase the chances that your name gets in print and get on the inside track with someone who can get you a lot of publicity.

I was cold-called by a reporter last year who read something I posted on this blog and it led to my smiling mug landing on the top fold of the Working section of a number of major newspapers across Canada. I’ve also been on the other end of this scenario where I’ve been looking for more information and found a lead on a blog and have been frustrated on a number of occasions when that person never makes the time to talk to me. It’s happened twice in the past year to me. The more bloggers and reporters work together, the more we all walk away happy.

Cite your sources

This is a two-way street and while newspapers are quick to point the finger at bloggers for stealing their content, I believe that newspapers and television reporters are equally guilty of stealing content from the web. A good rule of thumb should be that if you quote more than a sentence from someone, cite the source. Bloggers, just put a [READ] link after the quote if there’s an online copy available. Mention the reporter’s name as well – they Google their own names as much as anyone, I’m sure. Reporters – dig a little deeper and make sure you spell peoples’ names/business names right when you cite them in a print article. Although I was flattered that I was featured in a newspaper article, they never spelled my business name right despite it being all over the website that they found me at. It’s also in my e-mail address which we used for corresponding about the article. It’s just sloppy when you don’t get someone’s name right.

Build up a mutually beneficial relationship

Bloggers, if you have a reporter whose work you like – set up a Google Alert to keep you posted on their writing. [LINK] That way, next time they write something interesting, you can catch it and blog about it. Reporters, bloggers love being quoted – if you find a blogger that’s intelligent and gives you story ideas, keep in touch with them. Even if you don’t end up quoting them, let them help you write better stories. If I had a good relationship with a reporter who was writing consistently about an area where I have some expertise, I’d feed them links and story ideas all the time.

Comment on each others’ work

Most newspaper articles end up online within 24 hours of going to print and an increasing number of these online versions of print publications allow comments from the general public on these articles. Most bloggers also actively encourage comments on their work. As a writer (for print or web) the best barometer of your work is if it stirs up conversation. Do each other a favour – keep the conversation going. Comments voraciously on articles that interest you. Bloggers and newspaper writers want the same thing – dialogue. Keep dialogue happening by being a part of the conversation. Comments on print articles help them draw the attention of content aggregators like Digg and subsequently drive more web traffic to the newspaper’s site. Comments on blog articles help them rise to the top of Google pageranks so that when someone searches on a topic, your blog posting comes out in the top search results.

Conclusion

This “pissing match” between the newspaper industry and Google [READ] doesn’t help anyone’s cause. It’s obviously borne out of frustration and I can understand that but as bloggers and reporters, let’s not let this argument stop us from floating all boats and making things better for everyone involved.

A few of my friends and colleagues have recently started using Twitter. Like LinkedIn, Twitter is fast becoming a viable social media tool for business. So, for my friends who are new to Twitter, I wanted to share some interesting tricks that I’ve picked up in the few years I’ve been using it. As an aside, if you want to follow me, I’m @Cruikshank. [LINK]

Tweet from Your Cell

No, not your prison cell… Unlike Facebook, there are no apps that you can download to your phone to enable mobile tweets. If you want to tweet from the road, you have two choices: use your mobile web-browser (assuming you have a smart phone) or SMS the tweet to your account. I prefer to use SMS (text messaging) because the web interface for Twitter loads really slow on my phone. Here’s what you do to tweet from your phone (in Canada):

1. Log into your Twitter account
2. Click on the Settings tab up in the top, right-hand corner of your account
3. Click on the Devices tab at the top of this page
4. Put your phone number with in the box in the following format: +1(your area code)(your 7-digit phone number)
5. Check the box and click Save. (Don’t worry – it won’t send you txt messages unless you ask it too and if you’re not a Bell customer, it won’t work anyhow)

1. If you did it right, you should get a screen that tells you to verify your phone by sending a six digit code to the Twitter SMS number (which is 21212 in Canada)
2. After you txt the verification code to 21212 (the Canadian Twitter tweet number), refresh your Devices page to see if it’s set up. It should look like this:

1. If you really borked it up, hit the Delete and start over button.
2. If the verification code doesn’t work the first time, try re-submitting it (by txting the six-digit code to 21212) a few more times. It took 15 minutes to verify when I did it this time.
3. Once you’ve got your device verified with Twitter, you can tweet any time from your phone by texting a message to 21212.

Tweet When You’re Asleep

Using an application called Tweet Later [LINK], you can pre-schedule tweets and have them send out at a specific date/time. This obviously has applications if you’re trying to work Twitter into a marketing/communications campaign. Check it out. I could also see this having some great applications for when you’re committing adultery or playing hooky from work. This is similar to the scheduled post features in Wordpress. For example, I actually wrote this post on April 4 but scheduled it to go live on April 6.

Search Twitter for Tweets You’re Interested In

There are a number of good Twitter search engines out there but search.Twitter is probably the easiest [LINK]. Like Google, you just type a search term in and hit “Search”. Why would one do this? It helps identify thought leaders in a particular interest area. For example, I typed in Nanotechnology as a test search and it came up with some great blog posts on nanotech that I might not have found easily through Google. Google can find anything but it doesn’t highlight the most interested things – Twitter can do that. People would only tweet about an article if it was something interesting that caught their attention, right?

Run Analytics on your Tweets

I use Google Analytics to track my blog traffic. As you can see from the screen capture from my Google Analytics account (below), I got 13 hits from Twitter in the last month. I can also see that people who come to my site from Twitter are spending more time reading my site and viewing more pages. However, if you’re not in love with Google Analytics or want to try an alternative, there are services like Tweetburner [LINK] and budURL [LINK] which allow you to see who’s clicking through on what URLs from your Tweets. These services have one major advantage over Google Analytics – they’ll let you track click throughs to site that you do not have Google Analytics access to. I can easily track when people come to my own site from Twitter but what if I post a tweet with a link to someone else’s site? How do I find out how many people clicked on that link? You’d have to use Tweetburner or budURL.

Get the Equivalent of Google Alerts from Twitter

If you don’t get time to surf Twitter all day, you’re probably missing out on the latest and greatest on topics you’re interested in. Tweetbeep [LINK] has got a solution for you. I set one up to send me a daily digest of any tweets about consultants or consulting. If you were say, for example, a professional organizer, I’d set up the keyword as “organizing” or something like that. From there, it’s a simple matter of inserting yourself into the conversation or finding new leads.

I am not eager to see local newspapers go the way of the dodo but with all the recent news about print editions of major newspapers shutting down [READ], it seems more likely that this 450 year-old medium is on its way to extinction. My friend who is a newspaper publisher attributes the newspaper industry’s current woes to the economic downturn. I have no doubt that the faltering economy has more than a minor role to play in the downfall of the newspaper as a viable business platform but I also remember this same publisher friend calling me well before the economic downturn complaining that their classifieds section was taking a beating from Craigslist. The real question in my mind is why the Internet hasn’t already killed this platform like pundits have been predicting for over 10 years?

The 10% Problem

There is an interesting trend in newspaper circulation and advertising rates vs. Internet circulation and advertising rates. For major newspapers, like the New York Times, the print publication reaches only 10% of the total audience that online version reaches but the online version only garners 10% of the advertising revenue that the print version does. [READ]

The reason for the disparity between advertising revenues is the fact that online ads are priced at a fraction the price of print ads. Online ads aren’t worth the same as print ads because they’re not perceived to be as valuable by media buyers. Either that or newspapers have intentionally kept the price of online advertising low so as to maintain the perception that it’s not valuable so that online real estate doesn’t cannibalize print real estate. At the end of the day, attribution of real value to advertising is almost impossible to do and pricing is dictated more by what the market will bear than real value.

The Internet Made Newspapers Better

As much as traditional publishers worried that the Internet would scoop them on every story, the Internet put some very valuable tools in the hands of journalists. Google, blogs, online databases, online archives and clippings services like Lexis-Nexis meant that any journalist anywhere could have access to the sources they needed to fact check, cross-correlate and research their articles. For example, I was featured in an Edmonton Journal article back in December, 2008 [READ]. The young reporter who interviewed me for the story found me through Google. She put “consulting” and “economic downturn” into Google and one of the first results she came across was this article I wrote in April, 2008 [READ]. With a few keystrokes, she found a unique perspective that allowed her to write an interesting article which subsequently got picked up in many major newspapers across the country.

The Internet also allows journalists in the field to submit articles and print-ready photos in a very timely manner. Print articles that are simultaneously posted online get a lot more traction than blogs (which are perceived to be of inferior quality to print publications), especially if the article makes it onto the daily roster of a major news aggregator like Digg.

Blogs Aren’t Journalism

Even though bloggers have many of the same tools at their disposal that traditional reporters do – there is a perception out there that the quality of most blogs is not up to the same standard as a newspaper or magazine. I concur. Blogs shouldn’t even try to compete with that medium. They’re something different. However, more than a few pundits have been watching the rise in popularity of blogs and forecast the demise of newspapers. Sure, the cost of production for a blog is far less than that of a newspaper but the branding that has gone into establishing newspapers is long-term and expensive. The only online publication that I’ve seen compared to real newspapers in recent years is the Huffington Post which is, in my opinion, one big op-ed paper. With the exception of technology news, real hard-hitting news is still found only in traditional newspapers.

Demographics

Generation Y/Millennials are probably not that enamoured with print publications but pretty much every previous generation (mine included) grew up with print publications. While I read online news far more often than I pick up a newspaper, my parent’s generation (the Boomers) will never be big consumers of online news. Until the Boomers stop reading newspapers entirely, that platform is unlikely to go away. Boomers also represent a much bigger base of disposable income than the more net-savvy generation.

Conclusion

I think after seeing how the Internet has been unable to kill newspapers over the past ten years, it would be safe to attribute their current woes to the economic downturn. Like other industries, these times will see closures and consolidations. These are things that happen in a free market economy. I don’t think we should waste any time bailing newspapers out. The ones that are making ends meet are tightening their belts and keeping their doors open. My friends’ newspaper – a small community paper in the Interior of BC – seems to be hanging on despite everything that’s happened. I attribute their success to his business savvy.

Natural Selection – the process by which favorable heritable traits become more common in successive generations of a population of reproducing organisms, and unfavorable heritable traits become less common (source: Wikipedia) – is commonly understood to apply to genes in reproducing organisms. The ability to speak (driven in part by the FOXP2 gene) is an evolved trait. Language – a natural byproduct of our ability to speak – could also be said to evolve. If one can accept this concept, is it not also possible that languages (and by extension ideas) can become less common like undesireable genes? A recent article in The Economist suggests that nearly 1/3rd of all the languages on Earth are at risk of extinction. [READ]. The question I ask is whether or not we should worry about it. If a language is worth saving, wouldn’t we instinctually preserve it?

Languages, like species, come and go. Wikipedia has an interesting list of extinct languages [READ]. Some efforts have been made to bring specific languages back from the brink of extinction (eg. Hebrew, Welsh and Hawaiian) but for the most part, when speakers of a language decide to change to another language (for a variety of reasons), the language withers and dies. In the past, I suspect that colonialism drove much of this change in parts of North America, Africa and Asia but in modern times, the three most popular languages in the world (English, Spanish and Mandrin) are the language of business. Many Germans, for example, speak fluent English. I don’t think German is on the brink of extinction but another 100 years of fluent English speaking within Germany and it might end up on the endangered list.

There’s two things to consider then:

1. Why should we save a dying language?
2. How can we save a dying language?

To address the first point, I think there are cultural merits for saving a language but beyond that – I don’t see the point. For practical purposes, the more we narrow the language spoken worldwide, the easier it will be to communicate. Now before you accuse me of justifying my own cultural imperialism – keep in mind that my children’s ancestors spoke German, English, Celt, Punjabi and Urdu. These days, we just speak English at home. Why? Because it’s easier to communicate. My wife would like our kids to speak Punjabi because she has living relatives that speak Punjabi and its her first tongue. In contrast, I am not worried about our kids learning German because I never learned to speak it myself despite being half German.

This is not to say that other languages aren’t beautiful and have merit in their own right, I’m not going someone who would ever support putting massive amounts of tax dollars into keeping a language alive when its own native speakers have abandoned it. For example, Welsh. Welsh is spoken by some 750,000 people worldwide. Only about 20% of the population of Wales can speak it. Welsh as a language just about died in the late 1800s. It took until the 1940s for the language to be taught in schools in Wales again. These days, Welsh is considered a “living language” in that it is adapting to the times and adding new vocabulary.

While not all languages can remain living languages forever, I think we can use modern technology to preserve dying languages. Like an electronic Rosetta Stone, we could record the grammar and vocabulary of languages on the endangered languages list along with some recordings of native speakers. At a later date, this could allow for the recovery of dead languages when interest in them re-emerges. It’s not unlike preserving the DNA of a species that you know is going to die off.

If you’re not from Vancouver (or don’t listen to the news), you might not have heard the story of Michael Cox, the 53-year old Vancouver bus driver who just lost his job because he posted some criticisms about the company he worked for on his blog. [READ] It’s an interesting story from several aspects:

1. He loved being a bus driver and only posted one or two critical posts out of dozens. The criticism was constructive and borne out of winter-weather related frustration at his bus getting stuck. Who can blame the guy?
2. Official communications people within the bus company were (allegedly) looking to partner with him because his writing about the life of a bus driver was so good.
3. He was still on probation and thinks that if he was in the permanent role, his status and the union would have prevented him from getting fired.

Now, I can sympathize with Michael. I had to leave a job once for making an honest (but critical) observation about a company’s HR policies on a web forum that allowed users to swap youth recruitment best practices. Turns out the company I had maligned on a small circulation forum was on the advisory board of my employers, read the post and demanded that I be removed from my role. I didn’t get fired but this event (and another unrelated incident) made it clear that my employer and I needed some time apart.

Michael, in a radio interview I heard this morning, said the same thing. Something along the lines of “even if they offered me my job back… I wouldn’t want it back.” He also made some great comments about his preference for “Marxist re-orientation training” as punishment instead of dismissal but the point was that the relationship between employer and employee was now broken.

I wanted to call attention to this story because we all have online lives now – Facebook profiles, LinkedIn profiles, blogs, twitter posts, etc… and those lives can affect the relationship between us and our employers. I think that the bus company should have given Michael a chance to make up for his (mild) public criticism of his employer because the resulting media attention has made the bus company look far worse than any small posting criticizing a logistical screw up ever would have.

I guess my take-home message is two-fold:

Employees – think before you post. You could get fired.

Employers – think before you fire. You might think you’re doing damage control when what you’re actually doing is making things worse.

My presentation on risk as a function of leadership for GenYers on Saturday went pretty well. The turnout was a lot smaller than I’d been led to believe – more like 20 people, not 40-50. I’m not complaining – I don’t do this to soapbox – but it felt like I put a lot of effort into the presentation for a much smaller audience than I’m used to. In any case, I think the people who attended (except the guy that slept the whole time) enjoyed the presentation and learned a few things.

I’d post my deck but I’m one of these people that leans heavily on images and animations instead of text so the deck doesn’t mean much without me talking as well. What I will do here is outline the key messages from my presentation.

Risk

There are mutlitude of theories out there on the way that humans perceive and respond to risk. I gave my audience a 5-minute crash course in these theories. The main concepts are those of perceived risk vs. real risk. I tried to frame the discussion in terms of what our society views as risky vs. socially acceptable gambling.

I put buying lottery tickets into the camp of “real risk”. The odds are greatly stacked against you when you give someone money in exchange for a lottery ticket yet many people do it daily.

Perceived risks are those where your experience, social pressure, the media, a lack of control and a lack of understanding about the true nature of that risk contribute to a scenario where you are disproportionately fearful of thing. Volcanoes, earthquakes, floods and the like fall into that category.

I also raised the issue of how people are more risk tolerant when they have something to lose versus when they have something to gain. What I mean by this is that when you have the choice between buying insurance or taking a chance that nothing will happen, many people opt to waive the insurance. On the other hand, when someone looks at a GIC vs. risk capital – people choose the safer (but lower payout) option over the potentially much larger payout with risk capital.

Generation Y

This was the hardest part of the talk to give. There have been many studies on the demographic cohort referred to as “Generation Y” or the “Millenials”. In essence, I’m talking about people born between 1980 and 2000. I had assumed that this group I was talking to mostly fell between 1986 and 1990 but I was surprized when one young woman told me she was born in 1992.

The real issue that I was highlighting for them is where the opportunities lie in their future. There is a demographic shift coming by 2015 where Baby Boomers will be retiring en masse and we will experience a labour shortage in Canada. It’s coming. The current economic crisis will not slow down its arrival. I wrote recently on this issue and how we need to prepare [READ].

What this means to GenYers is higher wages, better job security, decreased value of credentials vs. experience and/or willingness to try something. It also means that there will be a greater burden on this generation to support the Boomers as their health deteriorates. My key message to them was that “the biggest risk you face in your coming careers and lives is getting too comfortable.” I truly believe that what sets truly successful people apart from everyone else is leadership ability and the willingness to put their own neck on the line.

That’s what I was trying to drive at – a favourable labour market for GenYers is a good opportunity to accelerate your career and set yourself up for greatness. The rest of the presentation concentrated on practical ways to stick your neck out a little and pushing the envelope. For example, I talked about how you can have a job but still push the envelope by being an “intrapreneur”.

The funniest feedback I got from students who attended my presentation was “wow. That presentation was great. I’ve never seen anyone swear in a presentation like you did. Awesome.” I didn’t know the bar was set so low. There’s a key message there too – if you’re talking to GenYers, keep the conversation casual and funny. They get enough lectures as it is.