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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Entrepreneurship

13 Ways Entrepreneurs Abuse Social Media Tools

By Monica O'Brien on October 6th in Entrepreneurship 3 comments

I’m departing from the normal format of this series to write about my experiences working with startups on social media. Because most entrepreneurs are independent, do-it-yourself types, they are not as accustomed to hiring or outsourcing projects. This is a mistake when it comes to social media, especially if you don’t use the tools in your personal life. I hope to build awareness about how important it is to get some help with social media, especially when your company is first starting out.

Some of the most common mistakes entrepreneurs make with social media revolve around making decisions that aren’t consistent with having good business sense. Because social media tools are free, startups and small businesses tend to take the pasta approach: throwing noodles at a wall to see what sticks. Here are some of the most common mistakes to avoid with social media:

Not developing a social media strategy

Because social media is the hottest trend in marketing, companies assume that all they have to do is set up a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page. This is the equivalent of pulling random magazines out of off the rack and purchasing full page color ad in each one, then throwing together a quick and dirty PowerPoint flyer to run. Just like any other communication medium, social media requires a well-thought out marketing strategy plan.

Perfecting a social media strategy

Even though a social media strategy is important, don’t wait for the strategy to set up your company’s accounts. Reserving your company’s name on various social media sites is of the utmost importance. Furthermore, because it takes time to build social media accounts, every minute you waste by not being there is followers you could be losing.

Thinking the tools are everything

Most social media talk revolves around tools – ie: 10 Ways to Get More Followers on Twitter. While it’s useful to get into the details and tactics of social media, a solid marketing strategy should work no matter the medium. The smartest companies will focus on strategy because in the world of Web 2.0, the tools are constantly changing.

Not using the tools correctly

It takes a long time to build credibility, especially as a company because individuals are taught to be wary of anything that looks like marketing or spamming. Unfortunately, it only takes one discrepancy to do damage to a company’s reputation. Err on the side of caution with each tool, and take time to listen to the conversations and learn the etiquette for each medium.

Not using the tools at all

Many corporate social media profiles make the company look like it went out of business, because the company doesn’t update regularly. Every tool holds opportunity for companies, so companies must be willing to experiment. Rest assured your competitors will be experimenting, so don’t let them set the tone or build equity without having your own presence.

Putting all eggs in one basket

It’s exciting to see extraordinary results on one form of social media, and tempting to invest all your resources into what’s working. Try to resist. With the speed at which technology changes, social media is starting to look similar to the fashion cycle: one day you’re in, the next day you’re out. Tools fall in and out of fashion all the time – remember Friendster, and more recently, MySpace? Companies that build a large equity on one tool will find themselves with nothing if the tool loses popularity.

Gathering followers rather than building a network

There are no shortcuts in social media, and the bottom line is companies have to build relationships with their customers before they can sell anything. Social media may seem free, but the hidden time costs to build relationships Social media is not a quick way to make more sales; in fact, social media actually adds cycle time to the sales process. Just like any other process, a company must consider how much of its resources to invest.

Putting the horse before the carriage

Another cliché is the company that doesn’t follow a logical process with social media and then wonders why it isn’t seeing results. Common sense comes in handy here. For example, consider a company that doesn’t currently have many customers, but creates a Facebook fan page and starts promoting it with Facebook ads. The keyword is “fan;” people who haven’t experienced the product are not likely to join a fan club for it. Make sure your company is following a logical customer acquisition process by thinking about social media from the user-perspective.

Pitching poorly

Every social media user has a very clear idea of what social media means to them, and how they want to be approached by companies on social media. Most companies don’t realize that they way they approach social media sends its own message to consumers.

Creating impersonal accounts

Users don’t follow companies; they follow engaging people who work at companies. Unless the tool is meant specifically for companies to use (ie: Facebook fan pages), every account should be an actual person who has a name and a title that clearly signifies him or her as a face of the company. This person should write with a conversational tone and respond to other participants in the conversation. Automated accounts or accounts that are updated with a stream of links do not produce results.

Controlling the message

Social media is not about controlling a message. In fact, the very nature of social media is such that no one person or organization can control the message. Because social media is a medium to share information through a network, companies must realize that once they put the message out there, they have no control anymore. Users can choose to edit the message, inject their own opinions into the message, share the message, or ignore the message. Furthermore, companies can’t even control where the message starts: a user can also create a message about a company without having any affiliation to them. Because of the nature of social media, companies that try to control the message will have difficulty reaping any of the benefits of the medium.

Not controlling the message

While companies should be careful about trying to exercise too much control over the message, there is also the opposite end of the spectrum to avoid. Companies often cite “control over message” as a reason not to participate in social media, but the truth is that companies have lost control of the message whether they participate or not. This is because, as mentioned earlier, users can create a message and drive the conversation surrounding that message.

So how can companies exercise some control over a message and still reap the benefits of social media (rapid diffusion of information through people sharing messages with their networks)? The answer is that companies need to participate in the conversation. Responding to complaints and stressing the benefits and what the company does well; these are all ways for companies to control the end-consumer’s perception of its products.

Abusing permission

Abusing permission is by far one of the worst mistakes a company can make with messaging. An example would be if a company collected emails from various blogs in a certain niche and started sending weekly newsletters. While this seems harmless on the surface, none of these bloggers signed up for the company’s weekly emails, and thus have not requested the information.

Abusing permission is a fast way for companies to lose credibility, damage relationships, and generally make a bad name for themselves in social media. So where do you draw the line with abusing permission?

Unfortunately, this question is similar to asking where comedians draw the line with potentially offensive jokes. The truth is that different users have different levels of tolerance. Just like a comedian might experiment with messaging based on the feedback he or she is receiving from the audience, your company must experiment with the right level of communication, erring on the side of unobtrusive.

Has your company made mistakes on social media? Have you had a bad experience with a company on social media? Let’s talk about it in the comments section.

Business Networking for Entrepreneurs

By Monica O'Brien on October 5th in Entrepreneurship 7 comments

Over 70% of people get a job from networking. As a entrepreneur, you technically already have a job; but you will inevitably go to informational/networking meetings to sell an idea, convince clients to hire you, or secure funding. Here’s how to get started:

Action Item #1: Land the meeting

It’s not easy, but I get meetings with many CEOs and other executives in the Chicago area. When people ask me how, I tell them it’s a fairly basic process – I email people and convince them to meet with me. If I’m trying to reach the CEO, I sometimes schedule a call with one of his direct reports first. I sometimes send a couple of follow-up emails. I sometimes ask other people in my network for referrals.

Be persistent. There are many ways to ask for something, but the key to getting it is almost always persistence. Everyone calls once, some call twice, but the people who land the meetings are the ones who called for as long as it took.

Action Item #2: Ace the meeting

It is not as difficult as you would think to research a company or a person thanks to Google. I research all sorts of things, from industry statistics, to competitors, to website statistics, to hobbies of the person I’m meeting. I also read through press releases and media coverage (all found on the internet) to understand the history of the company, the pain points, and what the management team cares about. If you do your research beforehand, you can make a good impression at the meeting.

Based on your research, you should know how much you can actually contribute to the networking meeting, and how much information you will have to ask for. This will help you set expectations for yourself and the person you are meeting with.

It’s essential to set expectations for a networking meeting so you don’t waste someone’s time. I have gone to meetings where a CEO just wants to chat over beers, and I’ve gone to meetings where the CEO wants a PowerPoint deck of my ideas and how to implement them. If you set expectations well, you can avoid being under-prepared and making a bad impression.

Also, don’t forget to articulate your interest and your value. There are two things people want to see in a networking meeting: enthusiasm or passion, and what you bring to the table. Make sure that you incorporate both these answers into your story about your history and your goals.

Use language that ties both of your interest and your value to the company, the person you’re meeting with, and yourself. It’s a tough balance, so practicing beforehand helps!

Action Item #3: Follow up

Often, you will not get an immediate offer from a networking meeting. That doesn’t mean it was a waste. Instead, you’ve gotten a contact, information, or a referral. Or you found a way to help the person with one of these three things. Be open to what someone can help you with, and good things will come.

Because networking meetings are not for closing deals, you have to follow-up and check in on the person within a reasonable time frame. This reminds the person of what you discussed, what you want, and what value you have to them. I generally follow up with a thank you email to begin with, and then follow up once more within a month.

What’s your most outrageous networking story?

Start up your business today

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

So 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?

Entrepreneurship is about changing the game

By Monica O'Brien on October 2nd in Entrepreneurship 5 comments

One of the most famous dot com failures was a company called Kozmo. Kozmo entered the market in major cities with dense populations. If you wanted a small purchase, say a pack of Jolly Ranchers, you could get on the internet and enter your order at Kozmo.com. Kozmo would deliver your purchase by bike messenger within an hour, at a slightly marked up rate from what the item(s) would normally cost.

The company raised $250 million, entered 18 locations, and had over 1000 employees. The company thought that it could keep costs low by delivering only in areas with a high concentration of internet users. Though it seemed like a smart idea in theory, the company lost money on most of the sales it made, due to expensive city warehouses, inability to stock a large variety of items at wholesale rates, and the high cost of delivering small items in a short time window. The company went bankrupt in 2001.

The company suffered from a problem that most dot com companies suffered from – the internet was simply not a game changer for this type of business. There was a reason no one had entered the business earlier, using phones as the point of order instead of the internet. It was an expensive delivery business, and the business model was broken.

I did a call with the HR manager of a huge industrial supplies company in Chicago about using social media to recruit candidates. We talked for 30 minutes, and my conclusion at the end of the call was that social media was not a game changer for his company.

The company does not brand itself for strategic reasons, and its main method of recruiting is finding passive job candidates through data mining and calling them to see if they are interested in interviewing. The problem is that the company currently looks for smart people based on a resume, and by the time they find a good candidate it might be three months after the person applied.

I told him, “Social media is perfect for data mining, and with blogs and LinkedIn, the data is much more dynamic than a resume. The most you might want to do is add another step in your process – email or Twitter candidates as a first point of contact rather than call to qualify them and save time.”

It begs the question – is the internet and social media really a game changer for the company you want to start? The revolution you want to lead at work? It’s worth thinking it through:

Action Item #1: Identify the most important aspects of the business you want to get into.

When I wanted to get into the publishing business, I thought about what publishers truly do for first-time authors. I came up with three major things: give authors credibility, help with product design/marketing, and handle distribution. What matters for the industry you are trying to enter?

Action Item #2: Figure out how people typically do it.

Credibility in the book industry is not something a small press gains overnight, so instead I read everything I could about the marketing and distribution processes for books. This is an essential step for any business you start – how are people already doing it? The tried and true is that way for a reason – you can’t revolutionize the industry without understanding it first.

Action Item #3: Identify the real game changers.

The internet in itself is not a game changer. Social media is not a game changer for every industry. The question I had to ask myself was whether the internet and social media were game changers in the book industry.

For the book industry, the game changers are in the marketing and distribution of the book. Marketing can be done online and through direct mailings rather than through expensive traditional advertising, and online distribution is much easier to break into than bookstores. Furthermore, some credibility can be gained through consumers who purchase products online and care more about customer reviews than a brand name.

When you are looking at game changers, remember that it’s very difficult to change behavior. If you have to sell someone on the switch in behavior first – before they’ll even try your product – you have an uphill battle, not a game changer.

What are your thoughts on game changers? Share your action items on your blog or in the comments section. If you have additional thoughts about entrepreneurship, send me the link and I’ll share it on my blog.

How to be an entrepreneur despite your personality type

By Monica O'Brien on October 1st in Entrepreneurship 9 comments

This past month, I’ve been editing and putting the final touches on my upcoming book. (I’ll be talking about it soon, but here’s a primer.) Having gone through the experience once now, there are many things I will be doing differently for my next book.

For example, I am not comfortable writing in a vacuum. I love getting feedback on my ideas, and the thought of publishing my first book with very little community feedback is making me a little crazy. So for my next book, I’m going to get some online feedback early.

60 Days to Entrepreneurial Freedom – The Not-yet-a-Book Experiment

I wanted to re-kick off this blog (after a short hiatus) with a series about something I write about often – entrepreneurship. I’m calling the series 60 Days to Entrepreneurial Freedom, and every day for sixty days I plan to write about some topic in entrepreneurship, with 3 actionable items to help you succeed as an entrepreneur. At the end of the 60 days, I might take some of the material, edit it, restructure it, add to it, clarify it, and turn it into a book. Or I might not. I’m simply using this blog as a playground to test ideas about (and my understanding of) entrepreneurship.

If this sounds completely vague, it is. But if you are interested in starting a business, hang out here every day for the next two months and let’s just see what happens.

Which brings me to…

Action Item #1: Discover your personality type.

Many people would not be okay with starting a 60 day series on their blogs without knowing what they were going to talk about, but I am. That’s because I’m an ENTP, and we’re comfortable with blueprints and improvisation.

I strongly recommend that everyone understand their personality type before trying to start a business. You need to know what your strengths and weaknesses are, and if your company ever starts expanding, you will need to know the strengths and weaknesses of your coworkers.

There is also strong evidence that small companies take on the personalities of their founders, and that the founders’ personalities become embedded in company culture long after the company passes out of the startup phase. One example is Steve Jobs and Apple – another example is Walt Disney from Disney.

So if you are serious about building a company, you better know yourself. Take an online Myer-Briggs test here.

Action Item #2: Learn as much as you can about weaknesses of your personality type.

I read tons of descriptions of my personality type so I know where I’m going to fail, and so I can hopefully circumvent the process. Here are some things I struggle with:

Finishing Projects

I am a classic “P” – I like to start things, but I have trouble finishing them. While I am capable of managing projects well, I have trouble when I must both manage and execute the project. Not only that, but I start way more projects that I can finish, keeping me slightly more busy than physically possible most of the time.

Taking Risks

I have a tendency to dream big and as such, rarely take the traditional route. While I try to take calculated risks, some of my ideas are really out there. This is typical of entrepreneurs, but knowing when to not pursue something or when to quit something is valuable. Sometimes I have trouble seeing that.

Abandoning Relationships

I like relationships that help me grow, and I am quick to end relationships that don’t. This can come across as harsh or unkind to some people, when I’m really just trying to manage my time better. I don’t take emotions into account often enough in my business dealings.

Action Item #3: Plan an attack on your weaknesses.

To give yourself a better chance at whatever entrepreneurial pursuits you undertake, it makes sense to figure out how you are going to compensate for your weaknesses. I’ve come up with three ideas, one for each weakness I’ve uncovered:

Finishing Projects Solution

Hire or find someone to manage you. For my upcoming book, I hired an editor who is also an excellent project manager. He not only edits my book, but helps me keep the entire book on schedule just by talking me through deadlines. If you can get a spouse or coworker to manage your creativity, even passively, you will accomplish much more than you can on your own.

Taking Risks Solution

I stay grounded thanks to my husband. He’s happy to give me a reality check, so I run all my ideas by him and talk it out with him. Find a confidant who has an opposite personality type – he can balance the extreme aspects of your personality.

Abandoning Relationships Solution

I try to relax at least a few times a week with people I don’t feel pressured to “optimize” – like my spouse, friends, and extended family. I remind myself to just have fun with people, and to not make everything about business. I try to convert business partnerships to friendships when I enjoy talking or hanging out with the person, so that the relationship doesn’t end when the partnership does.

Notice that with each of the solutions, I don’t necessarily try to change any of my weaknesses. For the most part, you can’t. What you can do is make a small improvement on your weaknesses and find someone else with those strengths to help you balance.

What’s your personality type, what are three weaknesses you have that could impair you in entrepreneurship, and how can you combat them? Feel free to respond to the action items in a comment, or share your results on your own blog.

If you have an idea for future topics, I obviously could use some. Feel free to email me at m@twentyset.com.

I look forward to hearing about your path to entrepreneurial freedom!