Photography: MorBCN

There was a time when “self-publishing” was just another word for “loser.” It was what bad poets did when they ran out of magazines to reject them and what grandchildren did after they’d finished putting together their grandparents’ memoirs. But publishing is changing. Print-on-demand, “entrepreneurial publishing” and digital books have put the entire process from writing through publishing to distribution at the hands of anyone who wants to put their knowledge and their experience into a book form. And the results of creating your own book can be tremendous. It’s not just the money from sales — which actually might not be very much — but the ability to bill yourself as “the author of,” to show off your expertise and to pass on your knowledge to others who might find it useful. For many self-published authors, writing and then producing their own book isn’t just satisfying in itself but it’s the first step in preparing a massive boost to their careers.

Seth Godin, for example, recently announced that he will no longer be publishing books in a traditional manner. That might sound like a revolutionary move from someone who describes himself as a former “book packager,” has created 120 published books and written a dozen bestsellers himself. But it’s also a step back. After publishing Permission Marketing with Simon and Shuster in 1999, Godin released his next book Unleashing the Ideavirus as a free, self-published ebook. In effect,  he was putting the idea in the book to the test, releasing it into the wild to watch it spread and see how far it reached.

The Most Popular Ebook Ever Written

And it worked. Described as “the most popular ebook ever written,” Unleashing the Ideavirus is believed to  have picked up more than 200,000 direct downloads and a further 300,000 from other sites. It went on to win traditional publishing contracts in 41 countries and launch Godin’s professional speaking career. It might not be a strategy for everyone but if you’ve got the platform and the right content then giving away an ebook online, something for which you don’t need a publisher, can win you attention from publishers and build your platform.

Seth Godin’s book was in a traditional format but produced and distributed in an untraditional way. When Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson produced The One-Minute Manager, they wanted everything to be traditional, including the $15 price tag. The industry told them it wasn’t going to happen, that a book that short would need a cut price too. Rather than compromise the value of the information in their book they decided to go their own way.

At that point, their book should have gone the same way as most self-published business books: into large piles of boxes buried in the garage. Instead, within three months, the pair had sold more than 20,000 copies in San Diego alone. Shortly afterwards they were holding a contract from William Morrow — and in the 30 years since then, they’ve seen their $15 book sell more than 12 million copies in over 25 languages.

That’s unusual. It’s usually difficult to sell your own business books unless you have a platform as large as Seth Godin’s — or the determination to fill halls, speak to crowds and push your product yourself. But if you’ve done that, you’ll have the proof that doubtful publishers need to be willing to lend a hand.

Richard N. Bolles had much smaller ambitions for What Color Is Your Parachute. Originally intended as a job-seeking guide for Episcopal priests heading into the secular world, the book was initially self-published and passed around inside the Church. That was always going to limit the audience though, and the positive feedback the guide received suggested it could do much more good if more people could read it.

Ten Speed Press bought the rights, and the book went on to spend 288 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, returning to the bestseller lists with each annual update.

It’s possible that the success of What Color Is Your Parachute was a pleasant surprise but there’s a little more to it than that. Bolles wrote a book for a specific audience but which contained information that was also universal. When the feedback came in saying that the book could have had a more general audience,  he was quick to act on it and put the book in the hands of a publishing company with longer reach than his alone.

Know Your Market Better than Publishers

Writer E. Lynn Harris did something similar. He tried the traditional publishing route first for his novel Invisible Life but came up against the wall of rejection that meets most first-time novelists. So he turned to a market he knew. He printed the book himself and placed it in beauty salons and bookstores owned by African-Americans. It was a case of the author knowing more about a segment of the book-buying public than the publishing giants did. E. Lynn Harris sold 10,000 copies of the book before Doubleday/Anchor offered him a contract. His novels have since sold millions and repeatedly hit the New York Times bestseller list.

And if all of that isn’t inspiring enough there’s always Tim O’Reilly who began his career with a degree in Classics and as a self-publisher of books on Unix. O’Reilly & Associates is now one of the world’s largest computer book publishers as well as a conference organizer.

Of course, none of this means that if you lay out a pile of notes to a vanity publisher to print your book that you’re immediately going to hit the big time. Most self-published books don’t sell. But if you know your market, if you’re willing to do the marketing, and if the content within the book is valuable enough, then you too can build a platform, boost a brand, construct a company, and if you’re really lucky — and still want to — maybe even interest mainstream publishers too.

In a recent poll, tech blog Mashable’s readers voted overwhelmingly in favor of freemium products over ad-supported products. Of the 1,250 readers who voted, 461 chose freemium as their preferred way of enjoying goods without paying for them, while just 305 would want more features but also lots of ads. That looks like a big thumbs-up then for products that give the basics for nothing, charge for the extras but keep advertisers away. But look a little closer at the figures, and the picture starts to change. The second-most popular option after “freemium” wasn’t “ad-supported.” It was “tie: both work.” The difference between that shrug and freemium came down to less than 40 votes. And that was a poll of users, not producers. If even customers are confused about whether freemium or ads are best, what are creators supposed to do? Should they be giving away the store but packing it with ads? Or does it pay better to give a little and charge for the rest?

Part of the confusion lies in the complicated nature of freemium. Chris Anderson, author of Free, a comprehensive look at the free economy, has identified four different kinds of freemium models: time-limited products allow users to try for a set period, commonly thirty days, before forcing them to pay; feature-limited products give away the basics but charge for more advanced features; seat-limited products let a small number of people use the same license but charge for mass use; and customer-type products let certain kinds of customers, such as small businesses, use the product for free, but charges those who can more easily afford it.

Cannibalizing Your Customers

Each of those models has its strengths and weaknesses. Time-limited products give users little opportunity to get to know the product well enough to find it invaluable, says Anderson. Customer-type products require difficult enforcement. And other models risk cannibalizing the low-end of the market by giving away the store to people who might have been willing to pay for it. Choosing between those models then looks difficult, but in practice, the nature of the product will play a big part in determining the most appropriate model. Seat-limited and customer-type products are only useful for software that might be used by office-loads of people, such as Intuit’s QuickBooks and Microsoft’s Bizspark. A feature-limited model will be of little use to a very simple program, such as a YouTube downloader; and a time-limited model would be a poor choice for a program that might be used to solve a one-off problem. Most producers then are likely to find themselves wondering whether to limit the features or restrict the time.

That choice should come down to money. Michael Mullany, vice president of marketing at Engine Yard, a ruby-on-rails app company, has tried to produce a mathematical equation for freemium models which, according to CNet means that:

freemium will be a better choice when:

Conversion Rate % > (Cost to Serve a Free User + Cost to Acquire a Free User)/Cost to Acquire a Paid User

Conversion rates for freemium programs tend to be between 2 and 8 percent. (Despite claiming that TurboTax online has a 70 percent conversion rate, Chris Anderson reckons that companies should target around 5 percent.) So for free or freemium to pay, Mullany concludes, free users have to cost between one-twelfth and one-fiftieth of the cost of picking up a paying customer.

But that’s comparing free or freemium to paid models. What happens when you compare freemium to the revenues that might come in through advertising, one particular kind of free model?

Ad Revenues are Unpredictable

First, things start to get more complicated because the revenue streams are more complex. While a paid business model will have a fixed income for each license sold, ad revenues can be fluid and unpredictable. A gaming company, for example, might give away the first level of its game for nothing, and have a 5 percent conversion rate of free users to customers willing to pay $10 for the full version. As long as it costs less than half a dollar to acquire each of those free customers, then the company will be in profit. But if the company is planning to make money not by persuading one in twenty to pay but by charging advertisers on a cost-per-click or cost-per-mille basis — or both — then it’s dealing with revenue figures that are a lot less clear than a sales price. The value of a cost-per-click will vary depending on the conversion rate and the price the advertisers are willing to pay for a lead. Cost-per-mille prices, too, can depend on the subject of the content. And the platform matters as well. Greg Yardley of Pinch Media, a mobile analytics firm, famously crunched the numbers and concluded that advertising on iPhone apps just doesn’t pay; even charging 99 cents, he argued, makes better sense.

Those low CPMs were partly down to a quirk in the iPhone. The lack of multitasking meant that clicking an ad yanked the user out of the app, making banners less effective than they should have been. The launch of a multitasking function in OS4, coupled with iAds, Apple’s new advertising network, has changed that situation. Large advertisers are reporting that they’re pleased with the network’s performance. Apple has now picked up $60 million in advertising commitments to see out the year and publishers are already feeling the benefits. According to the LA Times technology blog, Dictionary.com has managed to raise the price of its ad space by 177 percent since its enabled iAds in its iPhone app.

For developers then, choosing between freemium and ads still isn’t easy. There’s no overall strategy that fits every kind of product but rather some difficult cost and conversion calculations to compare against clickthrough rates and expected CPMs. Picking up all of that data won’t be as easy as it sounds either. Ask yourself whether you should go for ads or freemium and the best answer is likely to be the same as that given by users: a shrug and an “it depends.”

It’s not easy to think about bizarre business success stories after Twitter. When a company built on the concept of public SMS messaging can pick up tens of millions of dollars in start-up funding and go on to become a phenomenon, anything is possible. But Jack Dorsey wasn’t the only one to come up with an odd idea that become a success (his new payment system looks a little more conventional.) There are plenty of other people who have thought of some weird concepts — and discovered that it’s just what the market needed.

A Novel About You

Part of the appeal of a good novel is the fantasy of being someone else. But when Katie Oliver was looking for a gift for her sister-in-law, a fan of romance novels, she stumbled on an idea for a very different kind of book gift. She set up UStarNovels.com, a business that puts the reader in the heart of the action. Buy one of the books available on the site and in addition to entering a dedication, you’ll be asked to substitute the name of the lead character with the name of the recipient — and to swap other characters for their friends and partner. The site offers a range of classic (for which read “out of copyright”) books but also a number of romance novels and, in response to demand, a range of erotic novels too. At about $40 a copy, they’re not cheap but they are selling. In one week alone, Katie Oliver told NPR that she’d processed more than 1,500 orders.

Forget e-books; maybe the real future of publishing is in designer books.

Personal Cakes

A good sign that a bizarre idea is a good ‘un is that the most common reaction to hearing it is: “Why did no one think of that before?” That has to be the most common reaction to the success of Crumbs Bakery, a chain that was launched in 2003 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan by Mia and Jason Bauer. The bakery sells the usual range of cakes and baked goodies but it’s really built its reputation on cupcakes — ornate, personal-sized cakes that are small enough to enjoy without having to feel you should be sharing them.

The product idea was smart enough but the concept came with an ambitious business plan too. That one bakery has now spread across America. It has branches in four states with more ready to open soon. Inc. Magazine has named Crumbs one of America’s fastest-growing companies, quoting its 273 percent revenue growth between start-up and 2008 when employees topped 200 and revenues reached $8 million.

That’s a lot of money from some very small cakes.

Money from Free Listings

The most bizarre aspect of Craiglist’s success is that it’s been successful at all. The list began way back in 1995 when Craig Newmark arrived in San Francisco and put together a listing of events that might interest other geeks. Initially, he distributed the list by email. It wasn’t intended to make money, and it wasn’t considered a business. But it became popular, grew, took on more cities, more countries, and more services. It also started to accept money: $25-$75 for job ads and $10 for some real estate listings.

The traffic the site has generated has turned those small payments into giant revenues. As a privately-owned business, Craigslist doesn’t report its earnings but estimates have put its annual revenues as high as $150 million.

And yet the site looks like it hasn’t changed since it moved from email to the Web. There are no graphics (the “Best of Craigslist” section is decorated with ASCII!). There are no social media widgets, no way to target listings except by category, no way to track results and no additional features at all. Most notably, there are no banner ads so no way to cash in on all of those users looking at the free listings.

It all comes down to the philosophy of Craig Newmark himself, who sees the site as primarily a service provider rather than a for-profit corporation. With an enormous readership and a price point that’s mostly zero, he’s created a very successful business though.

Selling Used Boxes

Marty Metro graduated cum laude from the University of Maryland. By the age of 23 he was completing his MBA, and before he had even graduated was recruited by Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), where he spent ten years as an enterprise technology consultant. In 2002, he turned his back on the giant tech companies that he’d been helping, and started selling cardboard boxes. Not just any cardboard boxes though: used cardboard boxes.

The idea was that people who had moved had boxes they wanted to get rid of, and people who were moving were willing to pay for those boxes. No less importantly, it was more environment-friendly to continue reusing the cardboard than to recycle it after one use.

Today, UsedCardboardBoxes.com buys stacks of boxes from large companies, paying more than they would receive from a recycler. It sorts them, pulps the ones it can’t use, refurbishes the ones it can and sells them on for less than the price of a retailer. It’s a system that’s simple, remunerative and planet-friendly enough to make the business a finalist for Green Business of the Year in 2009. Recyclers have long turned garbage into cash. But Marty Metro has managed to make cash by reusing garbage.

Bringing China to the World

If cupcakes and used boxes look so obvious that you would have thought that someone would have got there first, then at least when it comes to Alibaba.com, they did get there first. When Jack Ma, an English teacher from Hangzhou, created China Pages in 1995, it was the first Internet-based company in China. When he launched Alibaba.com in 1999 it went on to become one of the world’s biggest Internet companies.

The site acts as a giant wholesale market, offering products made in China to retailers around the world. Its Chinese site, www.1688.com (“yiliubaba” in Chinese), functions as a B2B site within China, and the company also has a Japanese version, and runs Aliexpress.com, a place for smaller retailers looking for fast shipments of smaller units. Together, those services are said to have over 50 million registered users. The company also owns China Yahoo!, AliPay, China’s most popular payment platform, and Taobao, an auction site that drove eBay out of the Chinese marketplace. When Alibaba had its IPO in Hong Kong in 1997, it raised $1.7 billion.

The ideas themselves weren’t odd, but doing it in China at that time was, and that first mover advantage turned the former teacher into a billionaire.

When it comes to face-to-face business meetings, the rituals are clear. You shake hands, exchange cards, get down to detail. People have been doing it for years. Facebook though is relatively new and its use as a business tool even newer. So what’s the correct way to use Facebook professionally, maintain your audience and keep your market feeling friendly?

1. Split the Personal from the Professional

Before Facebook launched its “pages” Facebook users were forced to combine their personal accounts with the business profiles. It was a mess. Not only were accounts capped at 5,000 “friends” but there was no easy way to separate personal details from professional information.

Today, that’s no longer the case. It is possible to maintain two completely separate identities on Facebook. Friends and family no longer need to be bored by your product announcements and potential buyers don’t have to shift uncomfortably in front of their screens when you mention something cute your child just said.

That allows you to keep your professional page professional. You’ll be able to talk about your business, show pictures that only relate to the work that you’ve done and discuss industry news. You can still be friendly — small talk has its place in business too — but the main focus of the page will be professional.

2. Don’t Skip the Middleman

Keeping your professional page professional is fairly straightforward. Using your contacts is a little tougher. There’s nothing wrong with looking through the friends and contacts of your contacts — that information is public — but there is something wrong with approaching a complete stranger in the hope of developing a business relationship. You don’t know each other so the only reason you’d want to know that person is that you want something from him. That’s not how relationships begin.

You do have something in common though: the person you both know. So ask for an introduction. When you’ve got a friend to bring you together, the join is lubricated and both of you want to make your contact happy by making it work. It’s not just polite, it’s also more effective.

3. Keep Your Content Relevant

Part of maintaining a professional presence on Facebook is avoiding the temptation to not just post personal information but to share irrelevant information. When you’re chatting with your friends, it’s fine to offer links to content that made you smile and videos that you found shocking. It’s a social time so you can fill it any way you want. When people visit your professional page, it’s on their business time and that means you don’t get to waste it.  They can find fun content everywhere else on the Web.

You will need to post interesting content if you’re going to keep your audience engaged but that content has to be related to the subject of your business. That’s why people are following you.

And of course, you don’t get to spam either. Facebook is not the place to send a stack of unsolicited marketing emails to everyone who follows you. Even those who have “liked” your business page will still regard the Facebook mailbox as a personal space. They won’t want to see business messages in it. Assume that your Facebook friends are also your newsletter subscribers (and encourage those who aren’t to sign up) and send your marketing emails to their inboxes.

4. Look at Their Eyes When You Speak

In a face-to-face meeting, you’ll expect the person you’re speaking to look at your eyes. You can’t do that when you’re chatting on Facebook but what you can do is understand who you’re addressing.

A general status update posted on your professional Facebook page is addressed to everyone. You can use plural verbs, talk to an audience, refer to “you guys” or thank “everyone.” Readers know they’re looking at a public space so while people always like to feel that they’re being addressed personally, asking if “anyone is interested” or how “you’re all getting on” with your product update is fine.

When the replies come in though, respond to those comments personally. Ideally, you’ll want to do it right away so that your response sits under their message. Miss a few though and you’ll need to indicate who you’re replying to by mentioning them by name. It’s an approach that keeps a conversation personal even though it’s public and lets you “look” at the person you’re having a conversation with.

5. Be Polite, Not Clever

Real conversations are lubricated not just by small talk but with small jokes as well. They’re helpful at breaking the ice, creating shared experiences and bringing people together. But jokes are dangerous. It’s embarrassing when they fail and it’s even worse when the jokes themselves are offensive, rude or inappropriate. In a real social context, it’s possible to clean up quickly by moving the conversation on.  Online though, your misjudgment is likely to hang around where everyone can see it. Instead of being forgotten, it can be seen by everyone who stops by your Facebook page where it continues to do damage.

When the cost of being funny and failing are so much higher, you have to be much more certain that the risk is worth taking. In general, you’ll want to be at least as polite on Facebook as you are in real life, more optimistic about the future and more positive generally.

The goal of any professional Facebook account is to create relationships with people who like you. When they like you, they’ll do business with you. Smiling a lot makes people like you. Inappropriate comments though will quickly turn that like into a strong dislike.

Facebook’s business pages are both a new and a unique social environment. It’s a place that’s proven to be effective at turning leads into customers but it’s also one in which brands have made enough mistakes that have harmed their earning potential. Fortunately, it’s not difficult to get the usage right. Keep things polite and professional, understand who you’re talking to and work relationships rather than leapfrogging them and you should find that your leads keep liking you and buying from you.

The most interesting ideas are always our own, and we have them all the time. It’s unlikely that there’s a single iPhone owner who hasn’t come up with at least half a dozen ideas for apps that they’re certain would make them a mint. Creative types will come up with more; entrepreneurial types will do something about them.

But how can a successful creative entrepreneur sort through all of the ideas that pass through his head every week, ensuring that he only invests time, effort and money in those most likely to succeed? How can he filter out the bad ideas?

Addressing the Web 2.0 Expo in New York a couple of years ago, Clay Shirky, a new-media professor, writer, and consultant, pointed out that information overload, the abundance of ideas and data available on the Web, was nothing new. When Gutenburg created the printing press, he noted, he put the literate public in a unique position. For the first time, readers had more books than they were able to consume in a lifetime. If they weren’t going to waste their candle light, they would need a way to filter out the bad ideas coming off the presses from the ones that were worth reading and thinking about. Fortunately, the solution came built in to the economics of the new publishing industry. Presses cost money and so did the printing process. Publishers could only make their investment back if enough people bought their books. Owners of printing presses then became not just mechanical engineers and book marketers but filters sorting out interesting ideas from those that would be ignored, a role they still hold today.

Clay Shirky went on to explain how those filters have now broken down. When anyone can publish online, there are no risks to publishing an article and readers have to apply their own garbage filters as they surf the Web for interesting ideas. As anyone who has ever searched for specific information on Google has discovered, it’s not easy sorting the good stuff from the dross.

Filters for Companies

But that lack of an online filter is only a problem when you’re sorting through the ideas of others, and the cost in wasted time when you click to a site filled with more AdSense units than useful content is small. A bigger worry is for corporations. Writing on Cloud Ave, Hutch Carpenter, VP of product at Spigit.com, has proposed an ideas filter for the business world. A company may have thousands of workers, many of whom will be buzzing with bright ideas, he explains, and some of those ideas could be useful to the company. Usually, the difficulties involved in pulling those ideas out and assessing them means that they tend to be ignored. Employees implement the ideas that are passed down from senior management while their own insights are overlooked.

That was a waste of thought that Google tried to capture through Innovation Time Off. Giving employees one day a week to work on their own ideas is said to have produced Google News, Gmail, Orkut and even the cash cow AdSense. But it also presumably produced plenty of half-built prototypes and failed concepts.

Hutch Carpenter’s suggestion might produce a more efficient corporate ideas filter. He proposes that the employees don’t just function as the source of ideas, they also assess them, voting for proposals they like. The ideas are shared by email and tagged by keyword, categories and individual (ideas from experts may be more powerful than those with only a vague knowledge of the subject.) In addition, experts will look through the ideas that company is generating, hoping to spot half-formed concepts that have been missed.

It’s a mixture of crowdsourced filtering and expert oversight that retains the problems of both. In any reasonably large company, the experts are going to be overloaded with potentially good ideas and crowds aren’t always as wise as they’re made out. That’s especially true when the only cost to approving an idea is paid by shareholders, and not by the employee himself.

The Entrepreneur’s Overlapping Ideas Filters

That’s not the case though for small entrepreneurs. They will have to pay when they pick a bad idea to work on and the losses in terms of time and finance can be painful. Getting Things Done, David Allen’s productivity system, will be of limited help here. His system organizes lists; it doesn’t help to determine the value of different items on different lists. In practice, entrepreneurs apply a series of overlapping filters that take into account a number of factors.

Ease of execution will be one of them. Ideas that are difficult to implement, that require a great deal of research or complex equipment are more likely to run into catastrophic problems. Riskier ideas need higher rewards to keep flowing

Cost will certainly be another. Few ideas worth enacting can be developed without a budget. While that sort of practical constraint might not be a good reason to stop a valuable idea from taking off, it’s probably the most common reason ideas aren’t implemented — together with time, a factor that includes both development time and the amount of free time available to work on the plan.

But the most important filter of all is passion. Without a genuine desire to see the idea implemented, a desire that goes beyond the dream of selling up and retiring to Hawaii, development tends to fail.

Those filters aren’t methodical. They can’t be gradated, and no points system is going to accurately measure the difficulty of turning an idea for an iPhone app or a new kind of social media site into a working model. When Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams began working on Twitter, they didn’t stop to count up the scores for each of those qualities. They did it because it was more interesting than the work they were supposed to be doing and because they had limited the amount of time they were willing to spend on it. They had a passion for it and the costs and time seemed negligible.

When your ideas pass through those filters, they’re worth working on. The ones that get left behind probably deserve to stay there, at least until the size of the holes in the filters change — or the economics of the development process.

BP’s apology for spilling 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico came with a giant penalty. In addition to serving itself an enormous slice of humble pie, the company also agreed to set aside $20 billion to compensate those affected. That apology was then followed by a second apology, this time for the apology itself. Announcing the compensation, the company’s chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg had tried to stress that his firm really wasn’t like other oil giants:

“I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are greedy companies who don’t care, but that is not the case in BP,” Svanberg said. “We care about the small people.”

Saying sorry never feels pleasant, and you might be forgiven for not thinking the most generous thoughts about the people you’re apologizing to, but it’s never a good idea to fold an additional insult into your regrets.

But even company chiefs whose mother-tongue is English can still struggle to say the words “I’m sorry” in a way that placates the masses. And it is necessary. Companies will make mistakes, some more serious than others, and if there’s one thing that PR pros can agree on it’s that when there’s a cock-up, firms should ignore the legal team and apologize fast.

Even Apple Isn’t Perfect

That’s not what Apple did, of course. When word began to spread that the iPhone 4 lost reception when held in a certain way, Steve Jobs could have responded by saying “Sorry to hear that. We’ll look into it.” Telling complainants to hold the phone differently — a way of saying it’s your fault if our phone doesn’t work — was hardly likely to make them feel better. Even when the company did get around to admitting that something might not be entirely right, its letter didn’t address the main issue. It took a snowball of media articles and an on-stage mea culpa from Steve Jobs himself to point out that even Apple isn’t perfect — and to hand out free bumpers.

And even then, Apple’s boss was keen to point out that everyone else was having the same problem and that his firm had gone to great lengths to test the phone’s reception. All of that might have been true but expectations of Apple are higher than those of its competitors so while they didn’t have to apologize, Apple did — and not doing it right away meant that the company had to wheel out the CEO and effectively say sorry for its response as well as for the error.

It might not be fair, but the expectations of an apology do differ from company to company. While small firms can get away with a small “Sorry, we’ll fix it,” big companies, whose mistakes affect larger numbers of people, have to move faster and speak louder.

Much though does depend on the nature of the mistake. That wasn’t the first time that Apple has had to squeeze out an apology. It has said sorry in the past for failing to meet delivery deadlines, regrets that rarely do the company any harm. On the contrary, apologizing that your products are so popular that you can’t make them fast enough is a bit like an interview subject admitting that his biggest weakness is his workaholism.

I’m Sorry We’re So Clever

But it only works well if the fault isn’t yours. Apple doesn’t manufacture its products; it only designs them then outsources the soldering to firms around the world, particularly in China. In effect then, while an apology for failing to meet demand is an admission of faulty planning, it also shifts the blame onto manufacturers while keeping the shoulder pats for your own smart thinking.

When the company is doing the heavy lifting as well as the smart thinking though, then an apology for delivery delays looks a lot worse. That’s just something that HTC, manufacturers of the Hero mobile phone will have to accept. The iPhone competitor is still running Android 1.5 even as competitors have moved on to 2.1 despite repeated promises of an upgrade. The apology might have been honest and welcome, but it does suggest  there’s a problem with the company that hasn’t been fixed.

As painful as that apology might have been to make it was still better delivered than the reaction to complaints on Facebook about AT&T’s lack of information regarding forthcoming Android releases. Challenged to reveal what was coming, one bright wag at the phone company decided that rather than apologize for the lack of information or even to offer an explanation, he would post a picture of the next great phone the company would offer. Not everyone found the response funny and the poster did eventually have to explain why AT&T was being so coy about its plans.

Good apologies then are direct and to the point. They’re also fast, as Google’s apology for launching Buzz in a way that revealed users’ contacts list was. And the very best are followed by quick action to remedy the error, another strategy followed by Google, which moved swiftly to close the privacy gaps and start again. Facebook was both slower and clumsier when it ran into its own privacy issues.

And compensation can be nice too but it’s not always necessary and it may not help to silence the critics. Ubisoft’s offer a free download to players of Assassin’s Creed 2 was generous, but until the server error that locked gamers out is fixed, users are going to remain angry. Unless of course, the company is willing to set aside $20 billion for them.

The best strategies when it comes to saying sorry then is to check so carefully before launch that you have to do it as rarely as possible. If the complaints do come in then make the apology fast and unambiguous (and without additional insults), and work to make things better even faster. However painful an apology might be to make, it’s a lot less painful than writing compensation checks.

Photography: Giorgio Montersino

Summer is the season that does the most to separate the employees from the freelancers. As the wage-slaves walk away from their cubicles and head to the beaches, leaving all thoughts of work behind them, the self-employed are just as likely to be packing their laptops along with their suntan lotion. It’s not the best idea; time away is vital for recharging batteries, rebuilding enthusiasm and rethinking strategies, but when clients need satisfying and you’re your own boss, there’s no getting away from The Man even when you’re on vacation… because The Man is you. Here are six rules for the best ways to combine work with pleasure.

1. Forget About Working on the Beach

It’s the ultimate cliché for freelancers, the image presented by Internet marketers across the Web. You get to work while lying on your lounger, sipping a margarita and soaking up the rays.

And it won’t fly.

Good work requires focus, and you’re not going to find that focus when the water is calling you in and you’re worrying about sand getting sucked into your laptop fan. The beach is not an office, and anything you can do while working on your tan can be done a lot faster — and a lot better — in a more professional environment.

Head back to your hotel room, drag your computer into the lobby or better still, make use of the hotel’s executive lounge or business services room and give your work an hour or two of undivided attention. That will free up undivided hours of fun.

2. Do the Minimum

Even in a business lounge, you’re going to feel the pull of the pool and the drag of the daiquiri. You’re not going to be as productive, as focused or as inspired as you usually feel when you’re in your office and know that you’ve got the entire day to do your work.

So only do what you really have to do, and try to make the work as brainless as possible. Emails are fine, necessary organizational work can pass, reading, editing and analysis can even be enjoyable. But try to do something that requires serious creativity and deep concentration, and there’s a good chance that you’ll be coming up short. Your client would rather wait and receive the best.

3. Use Automated Messages

Even if you’re checking your email daily, it’s reasonable to assume that your response times are going to be slower than usual, especially if you have to hand out a long reply with lots of details.

Give yourself an excuse.

Use the automated message system to let people know that you’re away and will get back to them when you return to work. If they hear back from you sooner they’ll only be impressed by your commitment and dedication to their needs. They’re also less likely to demand a quick turnaround.

4. Don’t Make Any Promises

Coming up with deadlines and time estimates is difficult at the best of times but it’s even harder when you’re having the time of your life. You might have set yourself two hours of work every day you’re on vacation, but there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to keep to that commitment, and you’ll have little idea of how much you’ll actually be able to get done in those two hours when everyone else around you is having fun and you keep looking at the surf visible from your window.

Keep any delivery dates vague, mention that you’re away and promise to hand the work over as soon as you can. Clients tend to be understanding about vacations and downtime — they wouldn’t want their own vacations disturbed — so this is an opportunity to make small promises, pull out your excuse… and then win points by overdelivering.

5. Consider Your Partner

Anything you do for your clients while you’re on vacation will make them happy. But working for your clients means that you’re not spending time with your travel partner, and that’s going to make them unhappy.

The person you’re with needs to be considered too so pick work times that interfere as little as possible with their plans. Even pool times can be tricky: people tend to want company while they’re lying by the water, even if it’s only a pair of extra hands to slap on the oil. But vacations do have their own rhythms and schedules so there’s often a time in the late afternoon, when the sun is sinking and the touring is over, that vacationers tend to settle down with a book or a light snooze before dinner. That can be a good moment to fire up the laptop and shoot out those emails. Talk it over with your partner beforehand though so that he or she knows what to expect and can plan time alone. Work might be hard to avoid but skipping disappointment should be easy.

6. Clear the Desk

The most important rule when it comes to working on vacation  is to plan ahead. You want to be going away with as little as possible to do: just enough to keep things ticking over.  So write blog posts in advance so that you only have to publish them. Do the research early so that you’re not making phone calls from your hotel room. Tell your clients in advance so that they don’t have great expectations.

And assume that when you get back, you’re going to be snowed under for the first few days.

Tell people that you’re taking your laptop on vacation and they’ll tell you you’re mad. That’s a  reaction that only tells you that they’re not self-employed. Work-free vacations might be ideal but for freelancers who make their own income, they’re also almost impossible. Assume that you’ll be working on vacation but work to make sure that when you’re away, you’re also working as little as possible.

Because if anyone deserves a real break, it’s the freelancers and entrepreneurs who take their bosses with them on vacation.

Photography: russelldavies

Twitter’s launch of @earlybird at the beginning of July, an official timeline channeling discounts to followers, suggests that the company sees a future in tweet-delivered marketing offers. Despite the name of their new timeline though, the company’s a bit late. Businesses have long been using their Twitter accounts to do more than build a community, broadcast their brand and deal with customer relations. They’re also selling their goods with mini discount coupons. So what makes for an effective Twitter-based offer?

The format is important. In 140 characters, you’re not going to have a lot of space to deal with objects, build desire or even write headlines, the key ingredients of successful copywriting. One @earlybird tweet reveals just about all that can be squeezed into a sales tweet:

Great deal from our friends @moxsie- Their best in shoes, headphones, apparel & more, for 30% off. Today only! http://t.co/NGizKAe

It’s brief, of course, but still long enough to include the items on offer, the size of the offer, the duration of the offer and a link that allows followers to make the most of that offer.

Repeat Your Sales Message… In a Fun Way

It’s also repeated, an important consideration for followers who follow lots of timelines. If you have hundreds of tweets flowing through your Twitter page, many are likely to be missed so sending the same message multiple times is an essential element of Twitter-based marketing.

The risk though is that followers who do see the same tweet repeated will want to unsubscribe, something that @earlybird has been bright enough to recognize. Although @moxsie’s offer was mentioned five times, twice as a retweet of the offer that appeared in the advertiser’s own timeline, each appearance was phrased differently, an easy way of avoiding reader boredom.

But the ads aren’t targeted – at least, not yet. Twitter has stated that it’s considering making offers location-based (they’re currently only available to US buyers), and also category-based so that followers will only see offers for certain kinds of products. While they’re testing the idea though (and building advertisers) the timeline is going to be filled with all sorts of products that the followers won’t want to buy.

Other sellers are already ahead of Twitter there. Amazon has an “official Twitter feed” but also runs several other timelines, including the general @amazondeals, which lists all sorts of quick bargains marked as “Lightning Deals!”, and specific category timelines such as @amazongames. That timeline contains a number of different kinds of tweets. The account’s 20,000-plus followers can read specific game-related “lightning deals,” news about product releases, and of course, cash in on offers that are time-limited, supply-limited or both:

Limited Time: Assassin’s Creed II for PC is $14.99 while supplies last. http://amzn.to/bH9Ac7

Tweets that are that specific might reach fewer followers than @earlybird’s 100,000-plus readers but the clickthrough rate will be higher.

The Relationship is as Important as the Offer

Creating multiple Twitter accounts to manage different product categories is an important solution for large retailers but it’s not one that’s going to bother smaller firms who sell only one type of product. For those businesses, the nature of the relationship is as important as the ability to squeeze in all the offer details and repeat them without boring readers. Twitter is a personal place and businesses do best when they can create real relationships with their followers.

Dell, for example, has become one of the leading commercial users of Twitter with a reported $6.5 million-worth of sales through the site. Even though its main sales timeline, @DellOutlet, is part of a large corporation, it still includes the name of the person who writes the tweets and provides a picture of her. The timeline also combines sales work with customer service representation by replying to followers’ questions, and most intriguingly, is sometimes able to direct followers to specific coupons. In reply to one request for M15x coupons, for example, Stefanie Nelson, who writes the tweets, tweeted:

@auzzebear There is a 15% coupon here that would work: http://del.ly/6016E6I

That kind of personal service helps followers to see that the company genuinely wants to assist them. Stefanie also noted that coupons are distributed by email as well, a reminder that while Twitter is a valuable way to distribute time-limited offers, it’s not the only method.

Building that personal relationship is a bigger challenge for large faceless corporations than it is for small businesses though. Coupa Café is a family-owned chain of café and restaurants with branches in Beverly Hills, Palo Alto, Stanford and Caracas. Their timeline consists mostly of conversations with regular customers, giving it a friendly, homely feel but some of the offers it scatters throughout the timeline are carefully targeted. Like many bricks-and-mortar businesses that can’t take online orders, Coupa Café provides a “whisper word” that followers can use when they visit the café to receive a discount. That word may be incorporated into a regular, limited offer:

Did you use the whisper word today? Tell your friends, first 25 to say “Bourbon” to our baristas get a free drip coffee!

Or the bargain may be aimed at a specific group of people:

Hi #sas10 attendees, walk over to Green Library’s Coupa Cafe for lunch and say “Bourbon” to our baristas to get a free drip

By using a hashtag rather than aiming at regular readers, the café is even able to reach people who aren’t following its timeline and who aren’t yet customers.

Creating and delivering effective limited offers on Twitter then isn’t difficult. You’ll need to squeeze in all of the offer’s details, including a short URL if you’re selling online, and a “whisper word” if you’re not. You’ll need to repeat it to make sure it’s seen (but do it in a way that doesn’t become boring) and target it to ensure a high clickthrough rate. And you’ll need to keep your timeline personal so that you can build a relationship with your customers and keep them engaged.

And, of course, you’ll need to have products that people want to buy!

The Old Spice ads, starring former NFL wide receiver Isaiah Mustafa as The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, might just have been the most popular viral ad campaign ever created. The original ad has picked up over 15 million views on YouTube, the follow-up just over 11 million, and according to Visible Measures, a firm that tracks the popularity of online video, the real-time responses generated almost 6 million views in 24 hours, beating even President Obama’s victory speech, President Bush’s shoe-dodging, and Susan Boyle’s singing. The staff at ad agency Wieden + Kennedy have set a standard and a model that other social media marketers — large and small — will try to follow. Most will come  up short, but the ads contain a number of key ingredients that can be incorporated into even the most budget-conscious of viral ads.

That might not be apparent in the original ad which began with Isaiah standing in a bathroom, showed him on a boat and ended with him sitting on a horse, all apparently in one take. In an interview, Craig Allen and Eric Kallman of Wieden + Kennedy, explain how that ad took three days to shoot. The bathroom was placed on a set and hoisted away by a crane, and a specially-constructed dolly moved Isaiah invisibly from the ship onto the horse as he talked to the camera. CGI was only used to turn a shell into diamonds and the diamonds into a bottle of Old Spice.

Seven Minutes for Every Video

The real-time responses too looked simple but a photograph of the studio on ReadWriteWeb shows just how complex the production was. There’s a team of staff, banks of monitors (apparently showing Twitter), a teleprompter and a host of professional gear beyond the budgets of most one-man businesses. Two social media experts were tracking responses, and a technical expert had built a workflow that identified the best questions, passed them onto the copywriters and allowed the film to be edited and uploaded quickly. The 180-odd videos that the team produced took an average of about seven minutes each to create, something that could only have been done with a super-efficient and well-prepared team.

Wieden + Kennedy haven’t spoken about the workflow they created, but that’s something that could have been done without too much expertise. Dashboards like Hootsuite allow multiple users to manage one Twitter account, broadcast messages across social media platforms and monitor mentions. Old Spice’s Twitter timeline consists mostly of short sentences and links to YouTube, rather than interactions with other twitterers, and tracking the comments on YouTube and Facebook could even have been done with manual refreshes rather than an API.

What was most impressive about the response videos though was the speed and number of films that the team created, and the variety of social media sites — from Reddit to 4Chan — that they interacted with. Again, that wouldn’t have been something that required great technical skills but it did require a breadth of social media knowledge that few people possess.

And that knowledge was deep as well as wide. Talking to ReadWriteWeb, Iain Tait, Global Interactive Creative Director at Wieden, explained how his team chose the messages they responded to and what they did with them:

We’re looking at who’s written those comments, what their influence is and what comments have the most potential for helping us create new content. The social media guys and script writers are collaborating to make that call in real time. We have people shooting and we’re editing it as it happens. Then the social media guys are looking at how to get that back out around the web…in real time.

So a number of factors were going being considered as the replies came in, including not just how the scriptwriters might answer the questions but the “influence” of the commenter, something that would have been measured by the number of followers they have, the number of messages they receive or the size of their YouTube audience. It explains why so many of the videos were addressed to celebrities with large followings like Demi Moore and Alyssa Milano, whose interactions alerted other people on the Web to the ads and helped to spread the message.

Getting the Content Right

The technical side then is simple enough to replicate. A smaller budget — or no budget at all — might mean fewer videos shot in a day, a longer turnaround, less engagement with smaller social media sites, and clips that are less slick than Old Spice’s but the mechanics of tracking responses and choosing replies to questioners with the greatest influence is straightforward enough. To make your own ads, you wouldn’t need more than the following equipment:

• 1 Charming actor
• 1 Witty scriptwriter
• 1 Efficient director
• 1 Social media expert
• 1 Video camera and lighting equipment
• 1 Editing suite
• 3 Computers (one each for video editing/uploading, social media monitoring, and scriptwriting)
• 1 Hootsuite (or Brizzly) account
• 1 Tabbed browser open to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and any other social media site you intend to engage.

Much harder to get right is the replies themselves. Although they’re selling a man’s product, the ads are aimed at both men and women. Proctor and Gamble, the makers of Old Spice, knew their market and they knew that while men use Old Spice, it’s women who buy it for them. Throughout the ads Isaiah Mustafa refers to products that smell like lavender and daffodils as the competition, communicating to men that Old Spice is a product for them, while telling women that if they buy Old Spice, their boyfriends would at least smell like the star of the ads even if they can’t look like him.

To engage with that audience though, they needed to get the character right, and even Wieden + Kennedy had got that one wrong in the past. Other Old Spice ads, starring Terry Crews, went heavy on an attempt to include power in the brand but lighter on the irony. They were creative enough to win some popularity but didn’t do as well as Isaiah Mustafa’s self-awareness and self-parody.

But it wasn’t just that these Old Spice ads were absurdly funny, they also fitted the product’s notion of manliness, sophistication and confidence. They took an essential part of the brand and satirized it, allowing the audience to feel clever enough to see beyond the marketing message while still absorbing that message.

To make your own Old Spice ads then, you’ll need first to create an ad with a character that users show they like — and you might need to create more than one ad before you hit on the right one. You’ll need to set up monitoring systems across social media sites so that you can gather responses and choose the responders with the most influence. You’ll need to have a studio — however makeshift — ready to film the replies, edit them and  upload them. And most importantly, you’ll need to have a really witty scriptwriter who can mock your product without damaging the brand.

If you can get all those together, then you too can make your own Old Spice ads.

Photography: Markus Merz

Personal branding isn’t new. It’s been around the since the days of P.T. Barnum, since Buffalo Bill turned himself into a one-man sideshow, since Walt Disney decided to name the studio after himself, and it’s been a staple part of marketing Hollywood stars for as long as there have been movies. The idea that personal branding can be applied to anyone, that it’s possible — and essential — for even a corporate drone to create a self-image and market it, is new. That idea has only been around for as long as social media has made it possible for individuals to create personal profiles on websites and social media platforms, and put them in front of anyone they can bring to see them. Dozens of writers now have written books explaining how a personal brand can help to win jobs and build careers, as well as sell products and help entrepreneurs. But while the techniques and strategies of turning a life into a brand are clear, it’s much harder to know where to place the boundaries. What are the limits of personal branding, and how do you know when you’ve crossed them?

To some extent, the answer is personal. Different individuals will have different sensitivities to sharing aspects of their personal lives. Evan Williams and Biz Stone, both founders of Twitter, are happy to post occasional tweets that mention their wives (and in Williams’ case, his child too) but are miserly when it comes to details about the work that they’re doing for Twitter. Actor and technology geek Stephen Fry, on the other hand, has averaged just over eight tweets a day in the two years he’s been on Twitter and talks about his TV appearances, his charity work, his scriptwriting, speeches and product reviews. He regularly replies to tweets sent to him and comes across as open and direct, all of which have become important aspects of how the public sees him. And yet in none of his tweets does he ever mention his life with his partner, an agreement the couple made when he began using the site.

No Family and No Friends

Your own personal comfort level then will be one important guide to where you place the boundaries. There’s nothing wrong with leaving your family out of your personal branding — and certainly many people do — but there is a price to pay for that gap. Everyone has some form of family life so if it’s missing from a Twitter stream or not included in a professional Facebook page, the proximity to the reader is affected. The reader will know you’re not being fully open, and when someone has information he’s not prepared to share, he’s not just protecting the privacy of the people he loves. He’s also declaring the nature of his relationship to the reader.

He’s not as close to the reader as the reader might like to think.

The same is true of friends. Facebook pages, tweets and LinkedIn profiles will contain plenty of references to colleagues, partners and associates. But it’s less usual to find public information that reveals the relationship between two pals, and tries to use it for branding.

That’s a much more solid limit and one that’s particularly revealing about the factors that go into personal branding.

Colleagues bring something to the power of your personal brand. When you mention that a well-known figure in your field is a friend of yours, you win some credit by association. It’s why people name-drop, and it can be an important part of personal branding. Marketers, in particular, like to build their own reputations by attaching them to the reputations of others. It’s also a strategy though that fulfills the need to show that you’re a well-rounded, normal and popular individual with an active social life.

Just as people know you have family, so they’ll assume that you have friends — and they’ll become suspicious, or at least distant, if they’re not mentioned.

Talk about a friend who works in a completely different field however, and while you will come across as human and personable, you do nothing for your reputation as a professional.

It’s not possible then to place a limit on the mention of family without paying some sort of price in personal branding power. But it is possible to swap friends for colleagues, and keep your social life private.

Limiting Your Professional Life

There should be limits too within your own professional life. Personal branding, whether you do it through a website, a social media platform, or both, is essentially an advertising tool. It’s not meant to show everything you’ve ever done — including those projects that didn’t work out, the clients who fired you and the companies that made up for the loss of your intern work by hiring a coffee machine. It’s meant only to show what you can do. That means that while you talk up your successes and most significant projects, the work that failed or was insignificant can be swept under the carpet. It’s not something you want to hide or deny. But if it’s not worth mentioning, don’t mention it.

Personal branding then comes with its own paradox. It’s easy to construct and simple to maintain. It’s meant to show not just what you’ve done — which has always been the role of a resume — but what you can do and, more importantly, who you are. It’s supposed to be honest and open and comprehensive too. And yet, it’s also clearly a marketing piece, a kind of multi-platform brochure that can manage both advertising and distribution. Readers expect it to show every aspect of your life, both professional and personal, while still understanding that you’re only being this open with them because they believe you might have a position or a job that you’d like.

It is possible to place limits on your personal brand. It’s also acceptable and understandable. But the final impression should still be that you’re capable, reliable and likeable. Get that right and there are no limits on what your personal brand can do for you.

Photography: callisto

When you market yourself as a freelancer, you try to be as open as you can. You might launch a blog to bring traffic to your website and demonstrate the way you work. You hit up clients for testimonials so that leads can see you have experience. You put up samples and portfolios so that anyone can browse the work you’ve produced and see what you can do. It’s all a matter of trust. The more secure you can make a lead feel about hiring you, the more likely they are to get in touch and hire you do the job. But when it comes to the new clients themselves, the same openness doesn’t apply. Clients tend not to be as forthcoming about their identity, their ideas and their experience as the freelancers they employ, and yet there’s plenty of risk on the freelancer’s side too. You can find yourself working for the kind of business that doesn’t pay until it sees a letter from a lawyer, or you can find that because you have little idea about the firm, you have no idea how to please its customers.

Neither of those two pieces of information is particularly easy to come by. Some freelance websites do allow service providers to write reviews of the hirers, which can give an indication of whether a company is likely to argue about the bill — or not pay it at all. But not all sites offer this and even contributors have an incentive to be nice about the people they’ve worked for: if they’ve said something nice, there’s always the chance that they’ll work for them again. Reviews on freelance sites then tend to either very good or very bad.

Google Only Tells You So Much

Googling too can only bring up what other people have chosen to put online. Not every swindled freelancer wants to advertise the fact that a client disputed the value of their work, let alone name the client, so while a reference to no pay should set off a warning light, the absence of a complaint doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is okay with your new paymaster.

A website can be a reasonably good indicator of a client’s professionalism. A cheap, unprofessional site suggests that the client is more interested in saving money than creating results. A blog that’s updated regularly shows that they have an eye on the future and that they’re willing to put in the day-to-day effort required to maintain a business.

But social media can be an even more helpful guide to a client’s reliability. If a buyer has put a lot of effort into maintaining a Facebook presence, a LinkedIn page and a Twitter stream then they’ve built a reputation. That reputation can be quickly damaged by allegations that the client doesn’t pay his bills or disputes every invoice in the hope of getting bargains. That doesn’t mean that every social media user is reliable. But when social media makes damaging a reputation this easy, bad clients are likely to have taken those blows already.

Rather than trying to figure out whether a client is reliable though, which often boils down to a sense of whether a job feels right than a definitive piece of evidence that it isn’t, it’s always better to make sure that you have built-in safeguards: milestones for payment and delivery; escrow for large payments; samples to ensure that you’re on the right track before you reach the end.

No less important though is information that can tell you what you need to do to please the client’s customers — and please the client.

Who Are Your Client’s Clients?

It’s never enough to rely on the client’s own description of their target audience. They might have an idea that they’re reaching a certain age group and a certain way of living  but the client has hired you because you have an even better idea, and he or she thinks that you can appeal to it. If you didn’t have the skills to program software that his target market uses, if you can’t write copy using language that appeals to the company’s demographic or design websites that match their expectations, then the client wouldn’t be hiring you. He’d be hiring someone else.

Rather than rely on the client’s own characterization of their audience then, you’re likely to be better off making your own judgments based on the nature of the product, the style of their marketing material and your awareness of the market. This is a time when it’s more important to know yourself than know your client.

But you’ll also need to know how your client wants to work, and that’s something only they can tell you. Every client is different. While some are happy to work entirely by email, receiving the work when it’s finished, others prefer regular Skype chats and even the odd personal meeting if possible. One of the first questions you’ll need to ask of a new client is how they want to communicate. (And while you might have your own ideas and your own preferences, as long as they’re paying the bills, the client gets to choose the communication tools.)

Every new job comes with a certain amount of mystery. You don’t know whether you’ll enjoy the work. You don’t know what the client will be like to work with and whether he’ll pay on time, if at all. You don’t know how long you’ll be working with him or whether you’ll want to continue working with him for a long time. Those first points of contact then are a little like a blind date. You test each other out, try to get a feel for who the client is and how they’re likely to behave, and slowly you begin to build a relationship, forgetting the baggage of previous collapses and hoping that this one will work out fine.

Because if it does, you’ll have another testimonial to add to your marketing material and bring in even more new clients.

Photography: hawkexpress

For David Allen life is full of “stuff.” For people who have never heard of David Allen, never tried to read his geek productivity bible Getting Things Done, never wondered how to label a file or categorize their lives, that’s as unhelpful a truism as declaring that work is difficult. But for the followers of GTD, people who have been accused of regarding Allen as a kind of cultic leader (the same kind of leader he himself once saw in John-Roger, leader of the New Age Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness in which Allen remains a minister), it’s an eye-opening revelation. Employ a process that pushes that “stuff” out of the way and what remains will be only the most important elements. Instead of wasting their hours on life’s minutiae, they’ll be able to devote their time to the big things. They’ll get things done.

Mostly though what they’ll be getting done is the process of doing things – and that’s if they can figure out the process. Allen doesn’t just earn revenue from his best-selling book and its sequels. His seminars cost $695 per person, a sign not just that his followers consider his techniques valuable but that they’re so complex they have to fork out almost 700 bucks to figure out how to use them. Allen’s system requires multiple levels of categorization and treatment for every aspect of life from going to the dry cleaners and vaccinating the dog to launching a website and changing jobs. Every task has its moment, sometimes timed to the minute. Every chore receives attention according to its apparent level of importance, but only after you’ve put it through a system that awards it an appropriate priority level.

Getting Things Done, a System Dedicated to Geeks?

43Folders.com, a site dedicated to GTD, has argued that the system is ideal for geeks – people, it says, who tend to be disorganized but “love assessing, classifying, and defining the objects in their world,” who “crave actionable items” but “have too many projects and lots and lots of stuff.” But that’s a narrow definition of a geek. “Geeks” today are more than bespectacled programmers with ponytails, beards and an unhealthy knowledge of Apple mouse designs. They’re specialists, experts in one particular field whether that field is Java programming, gardening or marketing coffee beans. They’re not interested in creating order in their day; they’re interested in seeing the results of their creation.

For followers of GTD, nirvana lies in the process of organization. For geeks, process is the means to an end and nirvana for them is in having nothing left to organize at all.

The difference lies in two key ingredients missing among the files, folders and labels of GTD: creativity and vision.

Every successful business begins with an idea. But ideas are common, successful businesses relatively rare. Between the concept and the IPO, the buy-out and the private Caribbean island lie years of small achievements: websites built and tested, products designed and prototypes checked, clients won, satisfied and retained. Those small steps are the sorts of things that GTD was designed to deal with, organize and prioritize, but while plenty of corporations have invited David Allen to put on his seminars to organize their workforce, it’s hard to identify a list of entrepreneurs who have relied on GTD to build their path to success.

GTD Gets Things Done, Outsourcing Gets Results

That’s because a successful entrepreneur develops a vision of his end goal and is able to maintain it all the way through the process of building success. The same creativity that gives them a picture of what they’re trying to achieve also enables them to see the obstacles that can prevent them from achieving it and the force to push those obstructions out of the way. David Allen has described his system as helping users to find their way through a thick forest in which the trees are “stuff” hiding the items of real value.

“Any email could be either a snake in the grass or a berry,” he explained once in interview with Wired Magazine.

But successful entrepreneurs don’t become successful by picking berries. They build success by having a vision of what lies through the forest to the meadow at the end. There may be “stuff” in the way in the form of emails that need to be answered or dogs that need to be vaccinated but the smart, successful types don’t waste their time writing those tasks down, giving them labels and filing them in special folders. They trust in their ability to achieve success, make an investment — and pay someone else to do it for them.

That’s perhaps the biggest difference between people who focus on getting things done and those who manage to achieve great things. David Allen might be the guru for the type of geek who wants an uncluttered life but a more appropriate guru for a geekpreneur who wants to turn their commercial vision into a functioning business might well be Tim Ferriss. His book The 4-Hour Workweek might have had a misleading title, and outsourcing your dating life to Indian underlings is taking things a little too far, but his approach of only doing the most important and valuable tasks yourself and leaving everything else to paid helpers is a system followed by more successful types than those who use GTD. In fact, it’s a system followed by just about every successful type who has ever turned a one-man concept into a thriving company. The system – if outsourcing can be called a system – requires an investment of time in the form of training, and money in the form of payments to freelancers, but if it means you don’t have to waste time on “stuff” or on organizing “stuff” then it’s more likely to free up the time to not just get things done but to actually do things. And that, after all, should be the result any productivity system.

Describing iOS 4 at the WorldWide Developers Conference 2010, Steve Jobs kept one of the most interesting of the system’s upgrades until point seven. But the launch of iAds, the iPhone’s new advertising platform, may well be its most influential feature. While multitasking and folders will all be very useful, the incorporation of a native advertising program designed specifically with iPhone apps in mind could well have a huge effect on the 200,000-plus apps already in the App Store, and the thousands of others still to come.

The ads, demonstrated through the use of samples created for Nike, Target and Toy Story 3, aim to bridge the gap between the interactivity of digital ads and the emotional engagement of television advertising, Jobs explained. Initially, they look similar to ads currently distributed by Google’s AdMob service, appearing as a small banner at the bottom of the screen. When users click that banner though, they’re given a whole different experience. They’re no longer whipped out of the app as they would be when clicking on a Google ad. Instead, the app is frozen and the user is taken into what looks like a new app that may contain a number of different features, from mini-games and animated timelines to videos and wallpaper downloads. The features may be as inviting and enjoyable as the app itself, providing a reward for a user who clicks on them. And with the original app frozen rather than closed, there’s no penalty for clicking, pleasing the advertiser.

Apple’s Takes a Bite from Both Ends

But it’s in the benefits for the developer that things start to get really interesting. According to Advertising Age, an industry magazine, AdMobs currently charges between $10 and $15 on a CPM basis. Advertisers who want to buy CPC campaigns can expect to pay 15-30 cents a click. iAds however is expected to charge $10 CPM and $2 for a click, passing 60 percent of the revenue to the app developer.

That’s a big leap in the price of mobile advertising (and in practice, advertisers looking to catch the first wave of ads will have to pay even more: with the iAds Developer Kit still to be released, ads can only be developed by Apple, a service for which the company is charging $50,000 -$100,000 for advertisers spending less than $1 million.) But it’s also a big leap in revenues for app developers.

One of the first challenges developers faced when the App Store opened was whether they should give their programs away for free and live off the advertising or charge the buck or two that seemed to be the standard rate for the iPhone. It was a puzzle that was solved pretty quickly: AdMob and other mobile advertising systems just couldn’t generate enough revenue for developers to make it worthwhile to give their products away for nothing. It always made financial sense to charge something — even just 99 cents — than to look to the ads to make cash.

If iAds can make free pay more than 99 cents, then the effect on the App Store, on mobile advertising and even on mobile computing would be enormous. For one, there will be a lot more free programs available. According to Greg Yardley of PinchMedia, a firm that supplies analytics software for iPhone apps, free apps are downloaded on average 7.5 times more frequently than paid apps, although they’re also used less.

But not only would more apps become free, those apps would also need to change to maximize revenues.

Free but Slow

Apple has estimated that the average iPhone user spends about half an hour every day inside apps. Steve Jobs has talked about showing one ad every three minutes, exposing iPhone users to an average of ten ads a day.  The more time a developer can keep a user on his or her app, and the longer they can make that app last before it’s removed to make way for something better, the more ads they can show and the more they can earn on both a CPM and a CPC basis.

Some apps are going to find that easier to do than others. Although all apps now pause when a user clicks an ad, users will still be more likely to click when their eyes are free to wander to the bottom of the screen, something that happens more often while playing strategy games without a timer than action-packed first-person shooters. Similarly, users are more likely to keep the game on their iPhone and return to it — even once the game has been completed — if the developer continues to release regular updates that extend its life.

Three immediate results of a functional iAds system then may be an increase in free apps, an emphasis on apps that exercise brains rather than the speed of fingers, and a greater reliability on frequent updates — all good news for dedicated Sudoku fans looking for a regular free fix.

But developers will also want to extend each play session in order to have time to show more ads. That may mean longer cut scenes between levels or more time in which little happens, moving characters from one place to another. The games may be freer and longer, but they may also turn out to be less exciting.

All of this though depends on iAds living up to its promise. In practice, it may not. Greg Yardley says that he used to be a fan of the potential of advertising on iPhone apps until he crunched a few figures and found that apps needed to show a CPM of around $8.75 in order to be successful. That’s a much smaller amount than the $30 CPM that advertisers can expect to pay for an iAds campaign (according to Advertising Age’s) figures, but much higher than the current 50 cents-$2 CPM that developers have seen from AdMob. iAds then could have a radical effect on the nature of mobile phone apps, creating apps optimized for advertising or  it might just make a few bucks from lite versions of paid apps — which could be why it was only point number seven in Steve Jobs’ presentation.

Photography: suesviews

It might be hard to believe now but when Facebook began, the settings were so restrictive that unless you were a university student you couldn’t even join the site. You could see the names of the elite who could join the site. You might be able to look at their avatars if they’d posted them, but even for other members, almost everything else was kept private. Private was the default setting. Members of the network could see where friends were studying, where they’d worked and what they liked to do, but everyone else was locked out.

Those were the days.

As Facebook has grown so has its troubles with privacy issues. The site now has over 400 million active users, a community that’s about a third larger than the population of the United States. Those people interact with more 25 billion pieces of content, from Web links and news stories to notes and photo albums. They post status updates that keep friends and family informed about what they’re doing, upload pictures and videos that reveal private aspects of their lives, and they use over half a million Facebook apps that often draw on the information they’ve posted.

Fundamental Privacy Mistakes

It’s a huge amount of material that’s both essential to Facebook’s value to advertisers and a giant headache to Mark Zuckerberg, its 26-year-old CEO. You can almost forgive him for making the mistake of offering privacy settings that assumed users wanted everything open but which were also too complex to be changed easily.

Almost, but not quite. Facebook’s mistakes were fundamental, an example of what to do to get privacy completely wrong. The only consolation that Steve Zuckerberg can draw from his failure is that Google made exactly the same mistakes when it launched Buzz. The search company attempted to start with critical mass by attaching itself to users’ Gmail accounts, exposing the email addresses of account holder’s contacts in the process.

Facebook, at least, didn’t do that kind of damage but both companies made the same error. They both assumed that because no one ever reads the privacy policies at the bottom of Web pages, no one ever looks at the EULAs on downloaded programs before they agree to them, and few people in practice ever say anything that could land them in serious trouble with a third party app developer, no one would mind if the default setting was maximum exposure. After all whoever was accessing the information — whether it was an old friend, a new retailer or an exciting app — was only acting in a way that would benefit the user. Privacy is a flexible thing these days and besides, those people who really are paranoid fussy cautious about what happens with their private information could always head to the settings page and change them.

On Facebook that meant playing with a host of different “granular” settings relating to a range of the site’s different functions. For Buzz it looked like it meant clicking a link to turn the system off, but it turned out that just meant you couldn’t see it. To get rid of Buzz altogether, users initially had to leap through one digital hoop after another, hoops they weren’t even aware existed.

Ask First, Share Later

The problem with those mistakes wasn’t that they actually revealed vast amounts of personal data that individuals needed to keep private (although a few unlucky individuals were affected). It made the public aware that they had personal information, and worse, that big companies were interested in it. Website users don’t read privacy policies because they don’t care about their privacy; they just don’t believe that their private concerns are of any interest to anyone else. Until a company comes along and helps itself to their personal data.

So what can companies hoping to amass vast amounts of user data learn from the mistakes of other corporate giants? How can they balance their need to please advertisers and app developers with the concerns of their members?

The simplest strategy is to ask first.

Email marketers aren’t fond of double-opt in requirements because it means they can’t be accused of spamming. They like them because so few people object when they’re asked. For much personal data the response is likely to be similar although much depends on the kind of information being requested (anonymous demographic is unlikely to raise many objections; private purchases might do.) It’s when companies take information without asking that users object and become suspicious.

It’s also important to make the privacy settings simple. As Mark Zuckerberg himself put it in his blog:

The number one thing we’ve heard is that there just needs to be a simpler way to control your information. We’ve always offered a lot of controls, but if you find them too hard to use then you won’t feel like you have control. Unless you feel in control, then you won’t be comfortable sharing and our service will be less useful for you. We agree we need to improve this.

But the most important thing you can do with privacy is to understand users’ concerns. When Google changed the way it offered Buzz, it went a long way towards showing that it understood those concerns. Leaving it in Gmail however, a place that users think of as a personal space, suggested that the company still isn’t standing with its users. Similarly, Facebook’s simpler privacy settings hand more control to its users, but its recommendation

that you share basic info like status updates and posts with everyone, content like photos and videos of you with friends of your friends, and sensitive items like contact information with only your real friends.

also suggests that it’s still not quite getting it. Many users would consider status updates to be as personal as their pictures.

Facebook got privacy right the first time when it assumed that users wanted to talk only with their friends. The way its mishandled privacy may well end up prompting users to choose to bring those old days back.

Photography: askpang

If there was a prize available for dedication to the job and the ability to do it in the most trying of conditions then Lee Unkrich would surely have won it. Earlier this year, the Pixar director pasted a photo of himself on Twitter editing Toy Story 3 while sitting on a flight at 36,000 feet. Of course, he cheated. Judging by the snazzy seat back, it looks like Lee wasn’t typing with his knees behind his ears in Cattle Class. He also broke the rules. Not the rules that prevent you from grabbing your bag as the plane touches down and standing by the exit or spending the entire flight in the bathroom, a private cabin where there’s room to stretch your legs, but just about all of the unspoken rules that dictate the right and wrong ways to work on a plane.

The rules are new. They’ve only developed over the last few years as long haul flights have added electricity sockets that make it possible to work without keeping an eye on a computer’s battery level and as some have added Internet access. Now that it’s possible to take an entire office with you in your carry-on baggage and plug it into a plane’s infrastructure, today’s digital, high-flying nomads need to know what they can and can’t do when they’re working in the clouds.

The first thing you can’t do is expect privacy. Take your laptop to a café and you can try to pick a seat with the back to the wall so that nobody is reading over your shoulder. You can certainly expect a table of your own so that no one is sharing your eye-space. Mostly though, you can rely on the fact that the other café customers are too busy with their own lives to show more than a passing interest in yours.

On a plane, passengers have no lives. Their entertainment choices are limited by whatever happens to be on the screen in front of them and their diversions are restricted to the media material they’ve brought with them. With hours to kill, it doesn’t matter whether your job involves creating a new battle strategy for Afghanistan or counting dots on a screen, it’s going to look more interesting than the back of the next seat.

What Happens on the Plane, Stays on the Plane

That limits the kind of work you can do. Putting on the screen anything even remotely confidential is out of bounds — such as a new battle strategy for Afghanistan or the unedited rushes of a brand-new Disney movie. And you can’t write anything about your fellow travelers either. Lee Unkrich went on to tweet that how his neighbor showed little interest in what he was doing, a hint that she was missing a giant opportunity. That was probably just as well. She might have been less than happy to see herself being discussed with tens of thousands of people thousands of miles away. It’s not a good idea to irritate someone you’re stuck next to for seven hours.

If the first rule of working on a plane then is not to work on anything confidential, the second is that what other people are doing on the plane stays on the plane — especially if they’re doing it in the next seat.

The third rule is not to bother anyone, another rule that restricts the kind of work you can do. Making a fitness video using your computer’s web cam is obviously out but so is anything that involves lots of speaker noise, shouts of frustration or pacing around. In fact, if you know you’re going to be working on the plane, it’s not a rule but it is a good idea to book a window seat. Your own ability to take microbreaks will be limited but you won’t be forcing other people to ask you to remove your headphones and lift your computer every time they need to stroll the aisle. That would bother them too. Some working travelers have even been known to take their own thermos flasks of coffee, a choice that means they don’t have to take frequent trips to the galley to load up on fresh beans — an essential lubricant for some when it comes to keeping their main work-muscle greased. (On the other hand, if that coffee means lots of running to the bathroom, then it’s probably best to work without it).

Don’t Do It Unless You Have To

The second most important rule though is to choose the right kind of work for you to do on the plane.

No one, not even the most Donald Trump of bosses, expects an employee to put in the hours while wedged into an Economy Class seat. A flight then is one time when you don’t have to work if you don’t want to, and you don’t have to feel guilty about your choice. You are free to relax with a DVD and to use the seat’s electricity socket to play computer games for seven hours if that makes the journey less painful. If you do think about work, choose something important, that isn’t more irritating than waiting for the flight to end and that needs to be done right away. Adding the final touches to a talk or presentation, for example, makes a good choice. That’s information that’s going to be shared anyway, so it’s unlikely to break any confidentiality rules. It’s likely to be something you’ll need shortly after you arrive so it’s suitably urgent. And it’s not something that requires a huge amount of focus and brain power so it shouldn’t hurt too much. A bit of light-hearted blogging should also work but reading and research make for some of the best uses of flying time.

But the most important rule to follow when working on a plane is not to do it unless you really have to — and unless you don’t mind the rest of the plane thinking that you’re a workaholic who’s too disorganized to take a few hours off. When other passengers see someone working on a plane, as a rule, that’s what they think.

It’s the biggest sporting event in the world. Thirty-two countries, billions of dollars, a television audience that stretches from South Africa to North Korea, and 90 minutes of 22 men kicking a ball in a sport that Americans tend to dismiss as a girls’ game. The FIFA World Cup, an event that takes place once every four years and captures the imagination of (almost) the entire globe, is now under way in Africa for the first time. Like any event with an audience that runs into the hundreds of millions, it’s also a huge business. According to accountancy firm Grant Thorton, the games could add as much as 0.5 percent to host nation South Africa’s GDP this year, an injection of some $12.4 billion. Much of that will have come from the effects of tourism. About 373,000 foreigners are expected to visit the country during the month-long sporting jamboree, spending about $4,000 each. Most of the money though will have come from government coffers to pay for new stadiums, renovated roads and security. The biggest beneficiary is likely to be not the country, but FIFA itself. The organization’s profits from the last World Cup, held in Germany, were a cool $1.8 billion.

But the international sporting body isn’t the only one making money out of the World Cup. Sellers of vuvuzelas, the plastic trumpets that sound like angry bees and infuriate commentators, and which South Africans insist are traditional musical instruments, are clearly doing well. Earplugs that promise to block the sound are reported to be selling equally fast. Pubs and bars with big screens and expensive beer will do fine too, despite Fifa’s attempts to stop them. Makers of novelty items will struggle a little but websites that discuss the World Cup, optimize their AdSense units or offer decent affiliate products can expect to earn a little income too. Anyone can do that, although they’ll struggle to do well on search rankings when FIFA itself, big broadcasters and media giants are dominating the rankings.

The World Cup on Social Media

The best hope to make some money out of the World Cup then (other than scalping tickets) looks like social media. While Facebook and Twitter might not have done much to influence the UK election (depending on who you ask and how you measure the results), this World Cup does seem to have taken social media to its heart.

The biggest World Cup social media success has been Nike’s “Write The Future” ad. At three minutes, the full length version is too long to be played on television but on YouTube, it’s been viewed more than 15 million times. To reach that sort of audience during a television show would have involved a deep dip into the advertising budget, and even then the company would be lucky to get more than 30 seconds. Nike has managed to persuade an enormous audience to choose to watch an ad that’s three minutes long without having to spend a dime on placement.

It did however have to spend a lot of money on star sponsorships as well on the film itself, which is creative and as professionally-made as you might expect from a multinational footwear giant.

Outside the Xbox

YouTube isn’t the only social media tool that companies are using to spread their name during the World Cup though. Electronic Arts famously launched a soccer management game produced by Playfish, the social media game company it bought at the end of last year. The game, which can only be played across Facebook, may generate a small amount of cash but the real World Cup money for the video game company will come from its console games. 2010 FIFA World Cup sells for around $60 and moved more than 1.7 million copies in Europe in its first week alone, making it the most successful launch ever for a sports simulation.  If you’re really looking to make money out of the World Cup, the best approach it seems is to get yourself an official license.

But it can also pay to be think outside the Xbox. Korean company Hyundai has taken a broad approach to World Cup marketing. Describing its marketing activities during the event, the carmaker relegates television advertising almost to the bottom of the list. Perimeter boards are at the top, suggesting a high spend, but much of the focus is on the fans and on activities in which they have to play an active part. “Fan fests” consisting of screens and events around the world will put the brand in front of large audiences, a “fan of the match” will help to whip up enthusiasm, and an online program makes the interaction online too. The aim, the company says, is to “improve the quality of the interactive experience with the brand.”

The broad coverage is not without its risks however. After British broadcaster ITV cut away from England’s opening game in the fourth minute of the match to show a Hyundai ad, viewers were returned to the game to see captain Steven Gerrard celebrating the team’s only goal. ITV took the brunt of the blame for that faux pas but forcing fans to look at you instead of a goal is not going to lead your market to cheer your name.

So if earning from the World Cup has been dominated by companies with the biggest marketing budgets, is there anything left for small firms with deep enthusiasm but shallow pockets? Websites that already have plenty of traffic can certainly match their content to the event. Travel firm Bootsnall, for example, launched the WorldCupBlog, a site that’s managed to reach the first page of search results on Google for the keyword phrase “world cup” and is filled with affiliate ads, banners, and of course, ticket offers. Other sites will have to be a little more subtle with the odd promotion. Nor is it worth working investing too much in World Cup revenues. Unless you can repeat the formula for the Olympics in two years’ time, you’ll only have a month to cash in on your effort. If you’re Fifa, Hyundai, a pub with a big screen TV, or a stall-holder with a pile of plastic trumpets your best bet for making decent money from the World might well be Spain at 9/2.

Last summer, Alex Brownstein decided to advance his career. He had a job as a copywriter at ad firm Publicis, but he really wanted to work at “a really creative shop for really creative [creative directors].” Rather than follow the usual route of updating his resume, sending it to the human resources departments of other ad firms and hoping that they had an opening, Alex took a route that gave him direct access to the people he most wanted to speak to.

In a move that also showed off his creativity, Alex identified the creative directors he wanted to work for and bought AdWords ads for their names. When the creative directors Googled themselves, the top result was an ad that said: “Hey, [creative director's name]: Goooogling yourself is a lot of fun. Hiring me is fun, too.” The ad linked to his website, alecbrownstein.com.

Brownstein targeted a total of five creative directors, received interviews from four and job offers from two. He now works as a senior copywriter for Ian Reichenthal at Young & Rubicam’s office. The entire search cost a total of $6. Had he mailed in his resume, he would probably have spent more on postage.

Caught in the Act of Googling Themselves

Brownstein’s approach had several advantages. He was able to put his name and his skills directly in front of the people he most wanted to target. By addressing those people by name, he showed that he knew the industry and was familiar with their work. By using an original strategy, he demonstrated the very creativity that he was selling. And by intruding at a time when the creative directors were Googling themselves, he was also showing that he understood human behavior and how to use it for effect — an important feature for an advertising copywriter.

As a model for other career-minded types to copy though, it has its challenges. Not everyone knows the names of the people who are most likely to employ them, and not all industries are as public with the identities of their key personnel as the advertising industry is. Nor are those personnel likely to Google themselves as often as advertising people might. Brownstein got the idea for the approach after Googling himself, something he told Mashable that he does with “embarrassing” frequency. Marketing manager Karl Sakas estimates that it took Brownstein about six months to land his job. Hopefuls seeking employment in industries staffed with more modest types might have to wait even longer.

But it worked, it cost little and for jobseekers looking for specific positions but who aren’t desperate for immediate change, there’s no reason it won’t work again.

Who Wants to Work for Microsoft?

Google isn’t the only place that creative jobseekers have been advertising their skills though. Even before Brownstein was interrupting the private browsing moments of some of New York’s top ad people, a man called “Eric” was promoting himself on Facebook. He took out an ad that included his picture, a headline that stated “I want to be at [company]”, and text that read “Hi, My name is Eric and my dream is to work for [company]. I’m an MBA/MFA with a strong media background. Can you help me? Please click!” The companies he targeted were Microsoft, YouTube, Netflix, Apple and IDEO.

Despite the difficulty of believing that anyone actually dreams of working for Microsoft, Eric did receive plenty of offers of help from Redmond employees offering LinkedIn connections, the addresses of recruiters, and the job descriptions of specific roles in their division to apply for.

Eric chose Facebook, he says, “because it was unconventional, cheap, highly targeted and offered solid performance metrics.” He was able to limit the ads so that they were seen by people employed at the companies he was targeting, and the keywording would have made sure that a manager at Microsoft didn’t see that he was also dreaming of working for YouTube. The whole process took about half an hour, cost less than $50 and resulted in more than 50,000 impressions and more than 500 clicks. It’s not clear though whether the leads produced a job offer.

This is a very different approach to that used by Alex Brownstein. Brownstein was hoping to land one of a number of specific positions that could only be offered by one of a number of specific individuals. Eric’s approach was broader. He was looking for “help” rather than a job, something that more people can provide, even though it won’t lead directly to the end goal.

The best approach of all then might be to combine the two: use Facebook ads to generate information about individual employers; then use that information to offer Google ads that put your online resume in front of them… eventually.

There is a third method that you can use though. When Web marketer Larry Dinsmore found himself out of work, he went for a scattergun approach that should put even Eric to shame. At one point, he simply opened the Yellow Pages, started at A and worked his way through the listings, emailing his resume to every business with a website. He even thought of printing a stack of resumes and handing them out like flyers. Fortunately, he had a better idea. He printed the words “Damn, I need a job!” on the front of a t-shirt, and placed a short cover letter on the back.

“Put something about yourself on your shirt and not only will they read it they will strain to see it,” he writes on his site damnineedajob.com. “They will position themselves for a better look. Stand in line at a fast food joint and at any given moment someone will be checking it out. I’m telling you people can’t help it.”

There’s no indication that Larry’s approach worked any better than Eric’s but the efficacy of turning yourself into a human billboard will depend on where you choose to stand. It’s the kind of strategy that’s more likely to work at a convention than in line at a fast food joint — unless your dream job is to flip burgers.

Whatever kind of job you’re looking for, creativity is going to be an important part of staying ahead of the pack. That applies to the way you search as much as the contents of your resumé.

Much has been said about Twitter’s ability to build brands, spread messages and create interaction. But Facebook’s business pages have been around much longer, are a lot more flexible and are part of a much larger platform too. Coca Cola’s tweets, made up of slightly creepy greetings to followers and public Coke drinkers, for example, are read by fewer than 30,000 people. The company’s Facebook page, which is filled with videos, active discussions, ad campaigns and all sorts of other goodies, has been liked by more than 5.7 million people.

Creating that kind of following though takes more than a well-known brand and about ten spoonfuls of sugar in every can. It also takes a smart use of the functions available to marketers looking to build their market with Facebook. Here are five brands that are getting it right:

Electronic Arts

One of the most valuable strengths of social media marketing is that companies aren’t just broadcasting their messages to their market. They’re letting their market talk about them among themselves. That’s something that EA Sports 2010 World Cup Edition uses to the full. The company, which is known for its computer sports simulations, was expected to bring out its new management game on consoles. Instead, it chose to use Facebook as a platform, providing a way for the site’s users to face off against each other.

Users can buy “packs” of players for about $1.50-$3 each but the revenue is unlikely to be the main reason that EA have opted for Facebook instead of Nintendo. Console games are more likely sell for around $50 each and points earned during the game can be used to pay for more team members. Rather than looking at cash for this simple game, the company is using Facebook’s horizontal networking — and its $300m purchase of app developer Playfish — to keep people talking about the company and maintain its awareness during the soccer World Cup.

The Facebook page for its main product is pretty effective too.

Dunkin Donuts

Electronic Arts’ new game is powered by a smart app, something that requires plenty of time and money to create. But businesses don’t need to go to that expense to create an effective Facebook presence. Dunkin Donuts doesn’t offer anything on its Facebook page that isn’t available to any other business wanting to make use of social media. Its wall though contains plenty of posts by keen fans, the admin staff have bothered to fill in the details on the info page — something not done by every business (we’re looking at you, Benetton) — and its events widget lists all sorts of local happenings that might interest customers.

Where Dunkin Donuts really excels though is in the steps it takes to reach out to its fans. Users are offered a “perk” for enrolling in the company’s app. Maurice, a talking coffee bean, offers a measure of fun. And most importantly, submitting a picture to the page’s wall puts users in the running to be chosen as a “fan of the week.” It’s a simple way to make customers feel that the Facebook page is about them, and not about the company.

Bushells Tea

A challenge for companies considering using social media to push their brands is the site’s demographic. Facebook started at a college and it still looks like a poor choice for firms looking to target markets whose members are middle-aged or older.

When Australian marketing firm Soap Creative was hired by multinational company Unilever to promote its local tea brand Bushells however, it chose to focus much of its digital strategy on Facebook. Without spending a dime on promotions, the page has quickly built up a following almost 20,000 at a rate of almost 1,000 new fans every month.

The company attempts to get around the reluctance of older Facebook users to engage actively on the site by promoting its presence as part of the conversation that comes with a cup of tea. According to Ross Raeburn, one of the people responsible for the campaign, Soap Creative has seen the self-moderation, community ownership and brand participation that they’ve come to expect from Facebook. The wall is active, the company is learning information about its customers missed by annual focus groups, and Bushells has succeeded in deepening the sense of brand loyalty held by its customers.

CM Photographics

Not all the most effective commercial pages on Facebook are pushing big brands or run  by professional marketers. Chris Meyer is a professional photographer who advises other photographers about the benefits of Facebook marketing. The site itself has used him as a case study for the rewards its ads can bring after a $600 spend generated over $40,000 in bookings. But it’s not just his paid ads that are bringing results. His studio’s business page also has  a surprisingly large following and an interactive wall filled with comments from customers and friends.

There are no secret tricks here. Chris Meyer doesn’t use an interactive app or even post videos. He just makes regular posts that are upbeat, human and which engage with his followers. It’s a strategy that might not work for companies so large that they struggle to present a human face, but for very small businesses, Chris Meyer’s friendly contact is a good model to follow.

Amnesty International

And finally, it’s also possible to make good use of Facebook’s pages without attempting to earn a dime. Amnesty International uses its Causes tab to publicize its fundraising efforts, the results of its recruiting, the level of its “karma” — a way of thanking supporters — and to list the causes it supports. Its YouTube plug-in makes sharing videos with friends as simple as sending an invitation and a Twitter feed helps to add instant news. Mostly though the page shows how Facebook can sometimes work as a broadcast system and the first step in a viral campaign. Amnesty adds the clips and offers its opinions on human rights issues, and its followers then share them with friends.

If there is a problem with Amnesty’s use of Facebook though, it’s the address. Facebook.com/amnestyinternational leads to the Belgian branch of the organization, a page which isn’t publicly available and which has posted little content. If you want to make the most of Facebook, it does pay to be open — and get your name right.

Facebook’s business pages then can be hugely valuable but the way they’re used does depend on the type of product or service you’re offering, the demographic of your market and the kinds of tools best used to engage and interact with them. There’s no one strategy that can bring results; only a number of tools, and a willingness to press some virtual flesh.

Image: zengame

Being first to market always bring advantages You get to set the standard, establish your brand, create demand, and associate your product with the market. When there are no competitors, you’ll have 100 percent of the market share and the loyalty of satisfied customers. And when competitors do arrive, they’ll have to battle hard to push you off the top. But being second has its advantages too. You get to build on the mistakes made by the pioneer and enjoy a market that’s already been told the benefits of the product. With the right planning, the creators of a “me-too” product can quickly find themselves overtaking a tired front runner and moving from second — and even last — to first.

Stealing that position though will mean some smart preparations and creating a product that doesn’t just copy what’s already out there but which improves on it, exploiting the weaknesses of the current market standard and filling gaps so that your product can compete.

The best way to do that is to offer better quality. When industrial designer James Dyson created a new model of vacuum cleaner, he was entering a market dominated by large companies and in which “hoover” had become a byword for the act of sucking up household dust. By redesigning the product so that suction rates improved by 45 percent, Dyson was able to offer a vacuum cleaner that went on to become the market leader by value in the United States and the fastest-selling cleaner manufactured in the UK. And he was able to do it even though his me-too product is about eight times more expensive than that of his competitors.

When you compete on quality — and offer a significant improvement over competitors — it can be possible not just to steal market share but to change the pricing of the market too.

Be Nicer to Customers

Unlike manufacturers, retailers don’t have the option of offering higher quality products: the items on their shelves will be the same as the items on their competitors’ shelves. But they can beat the pioneers by looking for flaws in their customer service, and filling the gap.

That’s what Zappos did after founder Tony Hsieh had reviewed Amazon’s online bookstore and copied the model to sell shoes and clothing. After making almost no sales in 1999, the company was grossing over $1 billion ten years later. That growth came as a result of a focus on customer service that included return shipping assistance, a 365-day return policy and a call center that was always open and always helpful. So effective was the attempt to help customers that Amazon, which had enjoyed a five-year head start, bought the company last year for $1.2 billion.

Competing on customer service works best for me-too retailers because service is their main product. When customers can buy the same items in a range of different stores, both online and on the high street, the choice of seller will come down to convenience, trust and ease. When your me-too product is identical to something that already exists, then just offering to treat the customer better can be enough to pull ahead — at least until your bigger competitor pulls you in.

Apple is Always Second

Improved customer service usually concerns the relationship between the seller and the buyer. But when you can improve the relationship between the product and the buyer, then a me-too product can really steal the market.

Apple is the master of this technique. The company is never the first to bring a product idea to the market. It wasn’t the first to create an MP3 player, nor the first to use a touch screen nor even first company to offer a tablet computer, which have been around since the early 1980s. It did however improve the quality of products that already existed, but no less importantly, it made them easier to use.

iPods took off when music lovers realized they no longer had to click a button multiple times to find the songs they needed; the clickwheel meant that they could just roll their finger. And the sliding pages and large screen on the iPhone finally made changing functions and surfing the Web — something that other phones had been offering for years — convenient and easy. Although Apple had come in for criticism when it announced it was entering a crowded mobile phone market, its focus on ergonomics and user interaction meant that it was quickly able to dominate the field with a product whose core functions — communications, picture-taking, music playing and Web surfing — were the same as those of established competitors.

Of course, much of Apple’s success is also down to hype and marketing, but that’s another important way for a new product to beat a similar competitor with a first mover advantage. Users of Tivo, for example, may take the company’s dominance in its market for granted but the development stage was characterized by stiff competition from Mountain View pioneer ReplayTV. While Replay picked up the praise from critics and users at tech shows across the country, Tivo’s more business savvy executives were busy showing their player to broadcasting companies, making deals, and assuring them that their advertising revenue wouldn’t be affected. As Replay struggled to sell its player to customers, Tivo already had deals in place with retailers and broadcasters.

According to one survey, me-too products that differentiate themselves with unique customer benefits and superior value enjoy on average, five times the success rate, four times the market share and four times the profitability of the competitors that lack that key ingredient.

Whether you’re planning to mark yourself out with a better quality product, a superior customer service, revolutionary usability or some smart marketing, there’s no reason that being second to market means that you can’t conquer that market. Creating a successful business always means doing better than your competitors. That’s always easier to do when you know what your competitors have been doing — and what they’ve been doing wrong.

With more than two billion videos served every day — almost double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined — standing out on YouTube so that your clips win attention, go viral and perhaps even graduate to a meme is never going to be easy. There are a few ingredients though that every YouTube clip needs to have if it’s to beat out the music videos and the lolcats to win views and build an audience.

The most important, of course, is interesting content. That might appear obvious but it’s actually rarer and more difficult to create than it sounds. More than 24 hours of video content is added to YouTube every minute, so information that’s entertaining enough to be worth watching and original enough that audiences haven’t seen it before is actually relatively rare. When it does appear on the site, it quickly snowballs, building up large numbers of views.

Like the secret ingredient of a Hollywood blockbuster, there’s no failsafe formula that makes up good video content. On some clips, it might be a free practical instruction (such as this video demonstrating how to draw a skull); on others, it might be an original use of graphics in post-production (such as in this clip by a professional director which has generated almost half a million views). The good news though is that the quality of content can override production values. Although many of the most popular channels on YouTube are run by professionals — such as Popstar Magazine’s channel, with its exclusive interviews with teenage heartthrobs — YouTube is famous for the home-made appearance of its videos. That means that Geriatric1927, an 82-year-old widower from England, has been able to build up more than 53,000 subscribers and an incredible total of almost 8.4 million views just by sitting in front of a camera and reminiscing about his past. There’s no fancy editing, no graphics and no attempt to bring in friends to shoot the breeze or play with props. It’s simply the ability of unusual information and good stories to attract an audience.

Everyone Loves the Underdog

Part of the appeal of Geriatric1927 is that he’s not supposed to win, any more than Susan Boyle was supposed to have a nice voice. YouTube’s homemade quality has made it the place where the underdog can make an appearance and win the mass support necessary to battle against the big boys. When the production looks enthusiastic rather than professional and the talent genuine rather than manufactured, audiences can feel that they can put one over on industry by pushing forward their own champion. When the champion succeeds, they get to feel that they spotted them first. Their champion’s success is their success too.

The biggest recent beneficiary of the desire of YouTube’s audiences to discover and promote a potential winner is Justin Bieber. After being discovered on the site by music marketer Scooter Braun, Bieber was brought to Atlanta, Georgia to record demo tapes. At that point, the music company would have traditionally taken over the promotion process. But Braun kept Bieber on YouTube, continuing to upload videos.

“I wanted to build him up more on YouTube first,” he told The New York Times. “We supplied more content. I said: ‘Justin, sing like there’s no one in the room. But let’s not use expensive cameras.’ We’ll give it to kids, let them do the work, so that they feel like it’s theirs.”

That was a bit of smart marketing that combined the professional quality content of Bieber’s teen appeal with the underdog championing that’s unique to YouTube.

Show Don’t Tell

YouTube-manufactured Justin Biebers are relatively unusual, and not everyone can or wants to be a teenage sensation. For businesses, YouTube is more likely to be used as another way of distributing useful information that supplements the content on a blog. That content is often didactic. It teaches viewers something that they didn’t know previously, paying them for their attention with valuable knowledge.

When broadcasters do that on YouTube, the principle for success is the same as that in most storytelling: to show, not tell. TigerDirect, for example, is an electronics store which attempts to build a customer base by teaching audiences about the benefits and features of the products they sell. Its TigerDirectTV channel on YouTube contains a series of videos that discusses cameras, gadgets and computer equipment. Most of the clips are shot in a studio, with the presenter at a desk holding the item he’s discussing. But the channel isn’t afraid to get out of the room and take the camera to the great outdoors. In a clip discussing the difference between G and N wireless routers, for example, three presenters set up two routers on a long empty road and continued driving until the signal from each faded. The presenters could have said that G routers are good for 20 yards, N routers for much further but by demonstrating the difference physically, they created much better — and more memorable — content.

Although success on YouTube can come from an amateur appearance, professionalism can work too.

It would be great to say then that you can either go for shaky camera work and win the support of the underdog or bring in a crew and create a professional-looking show. As long as the content is interesting and entertaining enough, you’ll be a success. But it’s not that easy because there’s another element that’s vital for success on YouTube whatever your approach.

You have to do the marketing.

Put up a video on YouTube and you’re not going to get views unless people know you’re there. That means adding comments – intelligent, helpful comments – at the bottom of related clips. It means talking about the clip on your own website. And it means continuing to add new content on a regular basis so that you maintain your audience and don’t lose viewers just as your popularity starts to build. All of that takes time and effort — which is why it’s so much easier to film your cat getting stuck at the top of the curtains.