Monica O'Brien is the author of the book Social Pollination: Escape the Hype of Social Media and Join the Companies Winning At It. The book is a step-by-step guide for small and mid-sized businesses that want to find more customers effectively. Get the book:

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Beliefs

Gen Y Cares About Conversation; Everyone Else, Not So Much

By Monica O'Brien on March 11th in Blogging 51 comments

Back in college, my sorority had a rule when we were voting in new members: anyone who used the word “nice” to describe a rush candidate got sprayed with a Super Soaker.

Yeah, it’s weird. But we never made the mistake of voting in women just because they were nice. That’s the point.

It amazes me how many PR and marketing professionals talk about the importance of conversation – that numbers and fans and followers don’t matter, and that’s it’s actually about building relationships. I don’t disagree with them. The part I disagree with is the conversations they seem to want.

The conversations most people want are the ones where you nod your head in sheep-like agreement, write a comment like “Wow, that’s amazing!” and generally participate in the virtual circle jerk.

Continue Reading…

Start up your business today

By Monica O'Brien on October 3rd in Uncategorized 7 comments

60 Days to Entrepreneurial FreedomSo you want to become an entrepreneur. But where do you start? You don’t have a big idea that’s going to change the world, you don’t have partners to found your company with, and you don’t know how to even start pitching for funding.

Well, the truth is only 4% of small businesses are true start-ups that require angel or VC funding. In fact, if you want to even think about funding, you should know that investors expect a 10x return on investment. So unless you are building a disruptive technology, you don’t need to pitch for funding.

Sidenote: Here is a test to see whether you are building a disruptive technology:

  • Is your product a radical new way of doing something that people already do?
  • Does your product suck compared to current alternatives? If you improved the product enough, would people choose it over the current alternatives?
  • Does your product provide something that will democratize the current method of doing something (ie: will it provide free or easy access to something that used to be out of many people’s price range?)
  • Can your product bring death to an entire company or industry, the way cell phones brought death to landlines, or the way digital photography brought death to Kodak, or the way computers brought death to typewriters, or the way guns brought death to warrior swords?

If you didn’t answer yes to these questions, then you are probably not eligible for angel or VC funding. Keep reading.

The second way to get funding is through loans – from the bank, from your friends and family, or from your credit cards/home equity/personal savings. While you don’t pay back funding, you do pay back loans, if you can even qualify for them in the first place – which is getting more difficult every day.

This is all dismal news for aspiring entrepreneurs. And it makes it even harder to know where to begin building a new company.

The answer is that you start your company by yourself, part-time.

While there 60 million people who work for small businesses in the US (businesses with 500 employees or less), at least 30% of the group is working for a business with only one employee.

The chance of starting your huge business as a freelancer or consultant, then building your business one additional employee at a time, is quite high. In fact, it’s the way almost every business is built (aside from the start-ups, who artificially inflate their cash flow to gain market share quickly, because they are building disruptive technology).

So even if you have a full-time job right now, you can venture into entrepreneurship part-time, until you have enough steady business to match the suggested 50% of current income. The internet makes it easier than ever before.

Action Item #1: Set aside time for your new business.

If you are working 40+ hours a week, you already know that your time is valuable. How much can you afford to put towards your dream business? For me, it helps to think in daily terms, because then I budget enough hours to make progress during the week.

Action Item #2: Turn your business dream into a part-time, freelance, or consulting job.

Let’s say you want to open a coffee shop. Well, you can’t exactly do that part-time, single-handedly. What you can do is start a coffee blog. You can open an e-commerce site and sell imported coffee grounds online. You can decorate coffee shops, or teach coffee shops how to use social media. You can invent new drinks and sell the recipes to local coffee shops. Or you could just work part-time at a coffee shop, to gain the experience.

Whatever you want to do, take one step towards doing it today. There’s no excuse.

Action Item #3: Create your transition plan.

At some point, you will have to make the leap from your coffee blog to your coffee shop. In some cases, you will take many jumps before you even get into a position to leap. But once you have a goal in mind, you can create a timeline – transition plan to get there. Consider these questions:

  • What is your unique selling proposition?
  • How much do you need to start your company?
  • How long could your company survive without revenue?
  • What is the breakeven point for your company?
  • How are you going to fund your company?
  • How much do you need to be saving (personally) to make the leap?
  • When can you expand? How will you expand?

This is just a scratch of the information you may need to start a business. What do you want to know more about?

If You Don't Want To Be Challenged, You Don't Have An Opinion

By Monica O'Brien on January 4th in Personal Development 18 comments

I’m the type of person who enjoys a heated debate. As a blogger, debating is a great skill to have, but it also irritates people when they don’t share my views. After being called a devil’s advocate, instigator, and dissenter by some of my closest friends and family (and worse by those who aren’t), I decided to tone down my debating nature and accept the fact that not everyone wants to explain or defend their thoughts in everyday conversation.So I stopped what people called “arguing” with them, and my popularity went up. At least in person. I still wrote about my ideas on my personal blog (before Web 2.0) and annoyed a lot of my friends, especially during election season. But for whatever reason, those same friends read my blog every day, and once in awhile someone would be brave enough to write a comment about how much I irritated them by forcing them to think.

With that said, let me force you to think a little. If you are a person who shies away from debates that challenge your point of view, it’s because you don’t have an opinion. Let me explain why…

The Process of Forming Opinions

When we form opinions, we take lots of information about a topic and decide on a “right” answer in our eyes. We know there isn’t a real right answer but we find one that works for us. It’s unbelievable how much information we use to reach our conclusions: past experiences, morals, ideas passed to us by people we trust, what we read, what we hear. Then, we assimilate all that information and form an opinion.

But opinions don’t stop there. They can’t, because we are constantly finding new information, new research, new books, new experiences, and new ideas from others about topics we have already formed opinions on. If we don’t reevaluate our opinions every time we receive new information, they stop being opinions and start becoming beliefs.

Opinions vs. Beliefs

Let’s look at the American Heritage Dictionary definitions of an opinion and a belief:

belief -

  1. The mental act, condition, or habit of placing trust or confidence in another: My belief in you is as strong as ever.
  2. Mental acceptance of and conviction in the truth, actuality, or validity of something: His explanation of what happened defies belief.
  3. Something believed or accepted as true, especially a particular tenet or a body of tenets accepted by a group of persons.

opinion -

  1. A belief or conclusion held with confidence but not substantiated by positive knowledge or proof: “The world is not run by thought, nor by imagination, but by opinion” (Elizabeth Drew).
  2. A judgment based on special knowledge and given by an expert: a medical opinion.
  3. A judgment or estimation of the merit of a person or thing: has a low opinion of braggarts.

Do you see the difference? We use these two words interchangeably, but their definitions are full of nuance when compared.

A belief is acceptance of truth, while an opinion is judgement of truth.

If you do not allow your opinions to be challenged, you are choosing to believe you are right rather than judge the new information and come to another conclusion. That conclusion could be your opinion hasn’t changed the slightest because the new information either supports your opinion or is not persuasive enough to create a strong argument against your opinion, and that’s fine.

You could also find the new information is so convincing it completely blows your old opinion out of the water. When this happens, you’ve experienced personal growth and reached a new understanding of who you are and how you think. That’s what personal development is all about – finding out how little you know, finding out how wrong you are, and learning new thought processes. In order to get to that next level, you must be willing to debate and challenge your opinions over and over again.

To summarize, you must challenge your opinions or they become beliefs. Opinions are ongoing judgements of new information, while beliefs are acceptance of old information with disregard to new information. A key element to growing as a person is forming opinions, then challenging them.

So ask yourself these questions: Do you have opinions or beliefs? Are they affecting your ability to grow and develop into a better person? Then, join the debate by adding your thoughts in the comments section below.

Citations:

belief. (n.d.). The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Retrieved January 04, 2008, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/belief

opinion. (n.d.). The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Retrieved January 04, 2008, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/opinion