Bad Entrepreneur

When I presented at the AD:Dynamo seminar earlier in the year I did a small exercise which I thought might be useful for aspirant bloggers.

One of the big complaints that most bloggers have is that people don’t post comments on their blogs and they never really become an interactive “hub” or meeting place where people exchange thoughts and ideas.

The blogger throws the post out to the blogosphere and sits and waits expecting people to contribute and then becomes disappointed and disillusioned when they dont. Some become a little bit desperate and start looking to buy these solutions that will supposedly send stacks of traffic to their site.

My issue is that many of these aspirant bloggers are desperate for this thing called “traffic” – because hopefully it will monetise their blog and make it more interactive – that they forget what “traffic” actually is.

What I did during my presentation was to get everybody in the room to stand up and go and introduce themselves to three different members of the audience. They had to exchange cards, tell one another about what it is they do and why they might be interested in them.

This is what traffic is and if you’re not getting any responses to your posts, then maybe you need to be putting yourself out there a bit more and interacting with other people.

Bloggers tend to look at their traffic stats and talk and view their visitors as numbers/leads/sales. The traffic you want (even if you are planning to monetise your site) are real people. They are not just a nameless, faceless number. 

Instead of this grandiose idea of thousands of visitors and impressions being generated by your “traffic”, maybe start approaching it as one value adding contributor to your community at a time. From there let the value of adding to the blog and exchanging ideas be the catalyst for new visitors and community members.

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I swore to myself that I wasn’t going to publish this rant, but after seeing that “Ricky Gervais quits ‘pointless’ Twitter” is considered news for the Mail & Guardian I’m going to go hell for leather.

Yesterday one of South Africa’s more high profile social bloggers posted a rant slamming Sandwich Baron for failing to deliver her sandwich on time. “I’ve tweeted three times, DM’ed them and called them once” she writes on her blog. FFS (!) you don’t Tweet somebody after they’ve failed to deliver – you unleash absolute hellfire and brimstone on the first hapless person who picks up the phone and you repeat process until you get somebody senior enough to make your problem go away.

Since the start of the year I’ve come across six “social media experts / gurus” between the ages of 21 and 24 who have given me the story about how they could revolutionise a business using their knowledge of technology. For crying in a bucket you don’t look like you would be comfortable talking to a real living, breathing woman and yet you want to tell me about SOCIAL media?!

I’m sure there are many other social media experts in South Africa with the right credentials but I know of only one person who I would trust to run a “social media” campaign and that’s Melissa Attree.

Melissa has worked in an agency with real people, real clients and seen PR / marketing / media relations / communications from various different angles.  In your early 20’s you have not done that so go and get yourself a little experience and some contacts and a portfolio and then take it from there.

Don’t get me wrong – Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare,blogging etc – they’re all great tools and many have the capacity to be very handy business tools. They’re a big part of my business. But unless you are out there meeting real people and constantly talking to the industry in which you operate, how are you possibly going to understand what the major problems are?

I was reading a post the other day from one of these young guys and he was berating the way that companies “expect” employees to work from 9-5 when technology empowers them to be far more productive in that time. My response was that I’m in the process of looking for somebody for our business to fulfil a sales and marketing type role. I can tell you now that I’m probably not going to rush to give that person a PC with access to the internet… and I run an internet publishing business.

I would far rather that person be out meeting industry people with a higher profile and talking about some of the things we are doing and letting THEM build the social media hype around it.

If you are not comfortable with people, then force yourself to go out and interact with them. If necessary go extreme and go to a strip club and let the dancers hit on you all night and when you can finally walk away having had a conversation with them without emptying your wallet then you know you’re probably equipped to start talking about social media.

Said it before and I will say it again – one of the biggest mistakes I made when I started out in my small business is that I tried to conduct my business from behind a computer screen. I convinced myself I was “networking” or “building our profile”. The single biggest project we ever got came because my wife and her assistant bought tickets to go to listen to some speaker at a health conference. Over the tea and biscuits they were having at the interval she got chatting to one of the organisers and 24 hours later she was asked to put together a proposal that would prove to keep us in business for six months.

Makes you think doesn’t it….

… so endeth this rant.