Entrepreneurs: We'll Sleep When We Are Older

A week or so ago, I wrote a post in which I admitted that I work in retail at the moment. And that I am still in college. I know, publicly displaying those two things probably does not make me look like the most professional sales rep in the world. But it kept me honest, and I believe that honesty and integrity as a salesperson is more important how “big” you look. Full time retail does have some perks, specifically the ability to organize my schedule with some degree of flexibility. The only downside is that I am 100% location dependent in my day job.

I have to be physically at work when I am working.

So what? Well, that means that while I am trying to build up my little seed of a business idea into something remotely resembling a startup, I’ve got 47 hours (including transportation time) immediately cut from my available time each week. Factor in part-time school, and that brings the total to 54 hours that I don’t have to put towards my business.

The only thing I’ve really got time to cut out on any regular basis is sleep, so that’s what I’ve been doing. Bad idea? Probably health-wise. Yet at the same time, while I’m downing my 3rd shot of espresso during the work day, desperate for a much-needed jolt, desperate for a jolt and already anticipating another late night, I am excited. I’m excited that I’m building my network, turning a hobby I’ve loved for years into something that will be (hopefully) profitable, and working towards the future I envision for myself.

I’ll sleep when I’m older. I’ve got work to do now.

Get Your Sales Team Using Social Media: Customers Want to Deal With People, Not With Companies

I don’t understand why large companies create a single big Twitter account or blog that is named “@companyxyz” or “The Company XYZ Blog.” Usually these accounts end up just facilitating nothing but a long stream of advertisements and press releases, disguised in the form of tweets and blog entries. There is no hint whatsoever that an actual human being is behind these communications.

Customers don’t want to interact with companies. They want to interact with people.
Often companies are afraid to let individual employees publicly represent the brand, so a typical, misguided solution is to have a designated “Social Media Person” of whom nobody outside the organization ever knows the identity. Customers will not buy into this because they know that companies don’t help people. People help people.

Teach your salespeople, customer service reps, PR team, and anyone who has direct contact you’re your customers or the public the basics of social media. Invest in the digital communication skills of your team, and teach them how to use these mediums responsibly, but personably. Instead of one company blog, rotate the employees whose posts are featured on your blog page. Have several employees tweeting about everyday life at the company. Because nobody wants to hear what Big Company, Inc. thinks about *insert Next-Big-Industry-Trend here*. But they probably wouldn’t mind hearing what Bob from Sales thinks about what it means for them.

If your people truly are on board with your organization’s goals and passionate about what it does for its customers, you have nothing to worry about. But if you don’t trust your own people enough to excitedly represent your company on a personal level, then you have far bigger problems than social media.

3 Big Mistakes Businesses Make With Their Blogs

I can’t tell you how many businesses’ blogs are out there that were clearly only started because some “social media guru” told the owner, “Your company needs a blog! NOW!” While many types of businesses can benefit greatly from participating extensively in the blogging arena, lots of them get it completely wrong. Jeremy Griffin of Ignite Social Media even recently wrote a blog post giving detailing situations when social media is not the answer.
Here are some signs of doomed blogging strategies:
1. The bloggers do not respond to comments: Comments are there for a reason. They facilitate conversation and encourage discussion about the topics on the blog. They are a way for readers to give feedback, share opinions, and communicate with the blogger and other readers. Now, I understand that many blogs get a ridiculous amount of traffic and comments, so I don’t expect every single idiotic hater’s diatribe to be dignified with recognition. But if you are not responding to at least some of the relevant comments on your blog posts, readers (i.e. customers) will soon realize you really don’t give a damn what they have to say, and will go elsewhere.
2. The blog is purely an advertisement: This is the big offender. If your business has a “blog,” yet all it contains is an endless stream of updates about your website and testimonials about your products, potential customers will call “BS!” on you in a second. Successful blogs provide valuable, relevant content, and do it in a targeted, engaging way. Don’t get me wrong, I believe it is absolutely okay to occasionally tie yourself, your business, or your products into the bigger issues in your posts. But constantly talking about yourself and nothing else drives people away from your brand.
3. There is no visible person behind the blog: People want to communicate with other people, not companies. If you do not have regular bloggers with photos, short bios, and some actually personality, your readership and customer response will be lackluster.

What other bad blogging strategies have you seen? Is your company currently using any of these on their blog?

I Work in Retail, or Social Media Makes You As Big As You Want to Be

I work in retail.

There, I said it. I am a sales manager at the store level for a luxury home retail chain. For some reason, I excitedly tell all my friends and family what I do when they ask, but I have been very hesitant to tell complete strangers on a career website what my current industry and position actually are. Why is that?

I really like what I do. I don't plan to do it past the end of college, but it's fun and it's taught me a lot. I make pretty good money for a student. My job gives me a substantial amount of responsibility, but also gives me a lot of flexibility, too. I work a full time schedule, I have good health insurance, 2 weeks of vacation, sick pay, paid holidays and personal days, tuition reimbursement, and all the trappings of a “normal, adult” job. I have one-on-ones with my staff, biweekly management meetings, I complete sales reports and handle payroll adjustments when necessary. I do all of the things that your typical sales manager in most industries does.

So why did I not want to let this piece of my identity get out online for so long? It hit me as I was driving home from work, sipping a watered down Dr. Pepper from a Quik Trip convenience store: Retail makes me feel small. When I am participating in social media, I feel just as big as Kyle Lacy, Holly Hoffman, or Rebecca Thorman; my piece of the conversation is just as important and valued. However, when I contrast my relatively short list of credentials and accomplishments with those of the people I communicate with online, it is easy to feel dwarfed by these Gen Y giants.

As soon as I came to that realization, I was free. Free from tiptoeing around my words to sound “bigger” and “more important” than I am when I blog. Free from my own subjective self-judgment. Because that’s the beautiful part of social media: what you’ve done or haven’t done up to this point doesn’t really matter. What matters is what you are going to do now. And I’ve got big plans. Do you?

Blogging is Even More Important During Unemployment

TJ Wihera at Whys Perspective recently wrote a blog entry questioning whether Gen Y has an over sensitivity about blogging. The idea for the post was born after he witnessed a Twitter exchange in which someone scoffed at unemployed Gen Yers blogging about careers and business, and some Gen Yers then replied with offended responses. And this got me to thinking that the author of the original tweet, @AlexJMann, might not understand how blogging (and a history of it) can actually be even more important when one is unemployed. And then I thought, hey, maybe others don’t either.

So here is my short testimonial of how blogging can help you through unemployment:
· It can help you sort through your thoughts: Being unemployed, even for a short period of time, can wreak havoc on your confidence, your sense of self, and even your understanding of what your passions, strengths, and weaknesses are. Blogging provides a canvas on which you can paint your thoughts, organize them, and gain support and ideas from thousands of differing perspectives.
· It acts as a living resume: As pretty much everyone who has ever had to hunt for a job online knows, a one-page MS Word resume (and it should be ONLY one page) by itself is an incredibly tough way to impress anyone enough to call you back. However, if you have a blog to link to, recruiters can see your ideas and communication skills immediately. Additionally, regularly updated blog shows recruiters that you are actively managing your career, even in downtime. You will shine through as a superstar when compared with traditional job hunters.
· It is something consistent and positive when nothing else is: Unemployment is a scary, uncertain emotional rollercoaster. There are only so many jobs you can apply for in a day before you want to tear your hair out and scream from the lack of good news. Blogging makes you feel better because it is constructive. It exercises your critical thinking and writing skills, helps build your personal and professional networks, and is an outlet for the pent up stress inside you. Blogging during unemployment actually gives you the opportunity to publicly and honestly examine your thoughts on your work history, your industry, and your field without fear of any real backlash.

In short, I believe there is absolutely nothing wrong with blogging during periods of unemployment. I blogged through my short stint of unemployment earlier this year, and it was incredibly helpful. What are your thoughts? Does being unemployed disqualify someone from contributing to the conversation? Does a temporary lack of a job completely discredit a person’s ideas?

Is Your Weird, Stupid Business Idea Really That Weird and Stupid?

Do you have a fascinating business or project idea that you have never tried because you just know there is no audience for it? So many interesting ideas get squelched because their creators discount their value before they ever test them out. But with a little courage and curiosity, you might just find they have more value than you think.

Not too long ago, I tried a little experiment to test my writing skills and also my ability to think outside the box. I started a blog called GoblinStop.com, which married topics related to social media (one of my newer interests) with Dungeons and Dragons (something I’ve been doing for most of the last half of my life). This was purely meant to be an amusing diversion, as I thought there surely would be no audience for such an odd combination of subjects.

After the first blog entry gained me exactly 3 page hits, probably all of which were accidental, I started writing notes in Facebook with sample text and links to the site, and I even started adding images to each. I had also begun playing around with Reddit some recently, so in addition to forwarding others’ blog posts and articles, I placed links to my own entries on the RPG board. I even used Twitter a couple of times to link to posts. Within a month, I was consistently getting between 150 and 200 hits a day, and I even got offered a full time blogging job for a copy-writing company (unfortunately they couldn’t work with me quite enough on my school schedule, so I had to decline). I know this is small potatoes for many bloggers, but it impressed me that such a niche topic would gain that much of a following in just a month.

That little taste of success has caused me to seriously reconsider GoblinStop.com’s viability, and I have taken a little hiatus from the site to regroup and consider if and how I might be able to really turn this into something. It still might be a stretch, but now I have tested the waters a bit and I know there is a bigger audience than I thought.

And that’s what this post is all about. We tend to beat our own ideas to death before we ever test them out, coming up with seemingly endless reasons why they wouldn’t work. I’ll bet you can think of 50 reasons why your business idea would fail miserably, but how will you ever know unless you try it, even just on a small scale? The truth is that you don’t know if a market exists for your ideas until you share them with some people.

What business ideas have you had that seem kind of crazy/weird? What advice would you offer someone who is tiptoeing to the edge, getting ready to take the entrepreneurial plunge?

Learning from Other Sales People

A couple of weeks ago I was mentally brainstorming topics for posts as I meandered about Guitar Center (I know this sounds like an odd place to think about business writing subject matter, but trust me, I do some of my best thinking in Guitar Center). In doing so, I stumbled upon an interesting opportunity for eavesdropping. A 40-something man approached a seemingly time-killing sales person and began asking questions about a particular guitar that his teenage son was fiddling around with a few feet away. I immediately began keeping one eye and two ears on this exchange, breaking down the sales guy’s entire game, from product knowledge, to communication skills, to how long he paused to think before answering questions (unfortunately for him my analysis was not very favorable, but that’s neither here nor there). The point is that listening in on this situation caused me to project his selling behaviors against my own so that I was thinking about my own skills in relation to those of another sales person.

I think using one’s experiences with other salespeople to improve their own abilities is an excellent tool for success, and we all already go halfway there without even thinking about it. Much the same way that an actor cannot simply watch a film for the fun of it without subconsciously breaking it down and critiquing the acting, cinematography, musical score, use of light, etc., we sales people cannot be given a pitch without analyzing seller’s confidence, knowledge, body language, etc.

The trick is going that extra step, and actually taking our analyses and applying them to our own selling behaviors. Now that you know what you liked and didn’t like about another sales person, what can you learn from them to improve your own abilities?