As a business owner, the last thing you want to do is read more, right? Especially more business-related books. The flood of information you endure is stifling. I have another idea.

Read a novel or a collection of short stories or a memoir or poetry.

I’m serious.

I know what it feels like to be overwhelmed with business advice and case studies and best practices for your chosen industry. Sometimes you want to open your high-rise window (with a rock, no less) and just empty out your in-basket and to be read pile. I feel your pain. My to be read pile is stacked all the time. But I am very careful that most of that not be business-related. I find that my best writing comes when I read other things. For example, I read Emily Dickinson’s poetry when I want to inspire, I read James Patterson when I have writer’s block (if he can write, I can write), and when I want to organize a big project, I pick up a memoir. Memoirs are highly organized and I find just by reading them (e.g., Terri Jentz’s Strange Piece of Paradise or David Grann’s The Lost City of Z) that I am inspired by their structure. I find myself pondering how the writer took all that information and organized it into an interesting read.

I encourage every one of my clients to read more, and to stretch their reading limits to include books and articles that they might not pick up on their own volition. I find that when I come back to the business topics, I feel refreshed and more alert to spot items in those pieces that I can use to make my business a success.

What are you reading right now? Not a business book or article, but fiction or memoir or a short story. Let me hear it.

For me, Twitter is one giant party. It’s like Comic-Con, SXSW, and Media Bistro meetups all rolled into one. Sure, those individual events are worth the time and effort, but for the other 350 days of the year, we’ve got Twitter.

There’s a lot of tools out there to organize and separate out the many groups on your Twitter feed. That’s great. I think in days to come those tools will become more and more nuanced and fine-tuned. Twitter will not die, it will be streamlined.

But for me, each day is like meeting new and interesting people that I would never have met in real life or at conferences. I was at a writing conference over the weekend and most of the names on the program I recognized. We’re friends on Twitter already! There they were in real life. It made me feel like the world isn’t that big after all. It’s not like head-shrinking, it’s more like planet-shrinking.

1. Be interested in meeting new people. You don’t have to actually keep up with them for long, but a quick conversation in passing is really cool.

2. Don’t be quick to ignore folks who feel like pests at first. These folks may be new to Twitter, not sure exactly how things work. Give them plenty of rope, lots of leeway, and remember you were new to this social media thing not too long ago.

3. Don’t try to do everything, but make an effort to interact a bit with every medium that Twitter offers, either through DMs, replies, or Tweets. I have to work to pay attention to my DMs, as I tend to ignore my inbox.

Above all, have fun, interact, and learn. We all have a lot to share. What a great tool!

Small business marketing coach C. J. Hayden has written this book for folks who need to plan marketing funnels (a continual stream of client prospects).

Get Clients Now! is easy to implement. I hand it to clients who are just figuring out their marketing for their business. It’s too much at once to attempt to write a monthly eZine, get a blog, write ebooks or white papers, so for now, I just ask them to do the things in here.

First, they figure out where they are in the funnel. Do they need prospects? Do they need to contact clients? Do they need to close on bids? The client can pick where they are in the marketing process and focus on that. It’s an instant way to get up and running with marketing. I’ve used is successfully for almost fifteen years. I’ve now moved on to Michael Port’s Book Yourself Solid, but Get Clients Now is a great choice when you’re just starting out.

Print is disappearing fast. It’s a hard transition to make for folks used to their newspapers with coffee and their endless stream of monthly magazines while getting their hair done.

Folks, it’s only going to get better!

The web is not going to kill journalism or writing or business ethics. Sure, there will be cases where things don’t go well. If you’ll remember, there have been many cases in print where things did not go well. The learning curve for the web is steep too. We still haven’t figured it out. There is no textbook that can stand the test of more than four months. Things change that quickly.

I’m not sure those who think investigative journalism will die because print is dying have it quite right. Sounds like they have had a few glasses of the print media Koolaid. (These print folks are crying foul because they are scared to death of the web! They have to change, they have to adapt, they have to evolve. Survival of the fittest! If they can’t, too bad. Our own culture doesn’t give a rip. So they have to make up outlandish charges because they are too afraid to learn something new or accept something new.)

If anyone believes this, they are operating from two gross misconceptions. The first misconception is that newspapers have a long tradition of investigative journalism. That’s simply not true. According to statistics reported by the Investigative Reporters and Editors group, investigative journalism is a new concept. Most newspapers actually spend more money on their comics page than on investigative reporting. Investigative reporting is actually the lovechild of new media approaches. It will translate well to the web, and will actually flourish there.

The second misconception is that folks think that news is there solely for the public good. Um, no. News is there to make money. Media is a business. Sure, there are some that report news for the public good, but much of what has come about in print journalism and will simply be passed on to web journalism is the fact that the companies put up news to make money. They have a set amount of content pages supported by a set amount of ad pages. The web won’t be any different, but there will be a lot more room for content. People aren’t looking at newspaper ads, they are clicking on Google ads. This translates to revenue. Once a print pub gets going online, there’s no stopping it. Talk about massive media sites. We haven’t seen nothing yet.

I actually see investigative journalism more and more online than in print. Wikipedia runs tens of thousands of entries. You can’t just put up an entry about something and it sticks. Thousands of people will come by and fix your entry’s errors. That’s peer review to the max. Blogs report news (sure it’s through the blogger’s eyes) and they get comments, often ranging in the hundreds, from people who simply don’t agree with them. If that’s not peer review, I don’t know what is.

Plus, if your company has a bad rep online for providing terrible customer service, you aren’t going to get away with it, no matter how much money you pour into a PR firm’s coffers. Gone are the days of journalists trying to write a true story and their papers shutting them down because “you might upset Company X, who gives us advertising.” I see less and less of that influence coming into play. I see more and more of a very social media-centric reading base who does not just take the media’s word for it. We see it all the time already, on Youtube, on Twitter, on blogs, on Facebook, everywhere you look, web users call reckless media to task. That’s what the print media and media establishment is afraid of. They don’t want to have to be so accountable. They’re afraid. The web scares the <ahem> out of ‘em. I don’t like people who make up stuff because of their fears.

Again, there are folks who do want to be accountable and who are not afraid. It takes all kinds to make it interesting.

If you are one of those who has read articles recently or heard on the news that investigative journalism is dying, you need to go online and hear some of the online folks dismissing that thesis (a whole heck of a lot of ‘em are).

And the print media who accuse the web media of having no ethics needs to go look in the mirror.

Monday: 7:12 am
I’m up, bleary-eyed from staying up until 3 am reading a book, but I’m up. Brush my teeth, put on gym clothes, stumble downstairs to office and turn on lights and email. Review emails, read Internet news, respond to the first of the emails. Surf Facebook.

7:47 am
Turn on BMJ computer, check email, look at my task list, respond to emails.

8 am
Conference call from London begins, goes for around 20 minutes on a good day, about 40 minutes on a really good day. Ha. Can’t hear the jokes, but can hear the laughter.

9 am
London signs off and I begin my work. Crank the music, edit away, CMS freezes and I have to start over, or CMS does well and I am feeling good.

11:45 am
Save work, check emails from U.S. one more time, reply if necessary, surf Facebook. Go to the gym.

1 pm
Back from gym and after lunch and the last ten minutes of a previously started Law & Order, I’m back to work. Recheck U.S. email, respond, answer phone and tell hubby that yes, I’ll watch for UPS. Log back into CMS. Completely forget about UPS.

3 pm
Phone call from client; I ask if I can call them back. Another phone call from client. Then another. They know I’m almost available. I give up and deal with them. Save my work, answer emails, pitch a few blog ideas, send some invoices.

4 pm
Back to the CMS to finish for the day.

5 pm
Log out, and go find an apple to munch on. Put rice on in the rice cooker.

6 to midnight
An assortment of tasks: reading, writing, emails, blogging, book proposals
mixed in with DVR shows, dishes, chats with hubby, phone calls from friends and family, and laundry.

Isn’t not pretty, but it works. Moonlighting fits itself into the spare moments; it has to. And you succeed at moonlighting because you’re willing to fit it into those extra moments. Rather than watching prime-time television, you watch it at your convenience (often during dishes or meals or in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep). Moonlighting will take a bite out of your social life too; ready? It’s not glamorous at all. Moonlighting is hard work.

But the benefit (for me) outweighs all the hardship. I love it!

So, this week, is there space to fit more in? If not, what can you cut?

There’s a sharp uptick in the numbers of social media books coming out (or being written right now) and I’ve nabbed a few for some Love It! attention.

Amazon writes,

If the idea of starting a social media marketing campaign overwhelms you, the author of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day will introduce you to the basics, demonstrate how to manage details and describe how you can track results.  Case studies, step-by-step guides, checklists, quizzes and hands-on tutorials will help you execute a social media marketing campaign in just one hour a day.  In addition, learn how to integrate social media metrics with traditional media measurements and how to leverage blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts, and user-generated content sharing sites like YouTube.

What I think

I’ve used several of these “hour a day” type books and while I skip several sections to get to the good stuff, this is a great model for a lot of business owners. These books force to you to put down actual goals for your social media and then gives you the action steps to accomplish those goals. Plus, I’m a process gal, and this book most definitely provides a nice (and simple) process.

Score: Love It!

Amazon writes,

Get the business leader’s guide to using Twitter to gain competitive advantage.

Since 2006, forward-thinking companies like Apple, JetBlue, Whole Foods, and GM have discovered the instant benefits of leveraging the social media phenomenon known as Twitter to reach consumers directly, build their brand, and increase sales. Twitter is at the leading edge of the social media movement, allowing members to connect with one another in real time via short text messages–called “tweets”–that can be received either via the Twitter site or by e-mail, instant messenger, or cell phone. Many companies have started building entire teams within their organization dedicated solely to responding to tweets from consumers about their brand. And this is just the beginning.

In Twitter Power, Internet marketing and Web innovation expert Joel Comm shows businesses and marketers how to integrate Twitter into their existing marketing strategies to build a loyal following among Twitter members, expand awareness for their product or service, and even handle negative publicity due to angry or disappointed consumers. The book also presents case studies of companies on the forefront of the Twitter movement, to help you develop your own social networking strategies. Twitter Power is the result of extensive testing and participation in the social networking community and is a must-have for any business that wants to keep up with the social media movement. Twitter Power features a foreword by Tony Robbins.

What I think

Joel Comm is a friend of mine and he does know his stuff. This book is a great addition to anyone’s library on Twitter (there are more and more books coming out on the subject). Most of the other books are full of badly organized case studies, and Twitter Power is a neatly organized reference to Twitter tools and strategies. Nicely done, Joel.

Score: Love It!

Amazon writes,

Secrets of Social Media Marketing is a handbook for marketers and business owners to use in deciding how to employ the new social media for online marketing. Social media has quickly moved from the periphery of marketing into the forefront, but this is a new and quickly-evolving field and there are few established formulas for success. Building on the lessons set out in Gillin’s acclaimed and oft-reviewed The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media, this book provides practical advice on strategy, tools, and tactics. It is a hands-on manual that will educate marketers on how to extend their brands, generate leads, and engage customer communities using online tools.

What I think
Paul Gillin’s book is THE resource book for companies on social media. This will become the reference book everyone will be using shortly (at least I think), similar to Chris Pearson’s ProBlogger I highlighted last week. This takes social media and plugs it in to a company’s overall marketing goals and provides a very good structured argument for managers seeking to utilize social media to take back to their higher-ups. Worth a read most definitely.

Score: Love It!

At some point, I will have to point out a few Leave It books. I hate to, because I’m just a glass half-full person, but truth is what I promised on this blog, and truth is what you’re going to get.

Have a great weekend!

I’ve had a lot of folks ask me what blogging books do I like. As you know, I own pretty much all of them. It’s just my nature. I like information, lots of information, so I tend to overwhelm my bookshelves. Let’s face it: I’m keeping the booksellers in business. Seriously.

The first book I will say LOVE IT! Problogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income by Darren Rowse.

If you are buying a book on blogging (whether for your business or your personal blog), this is the one book everyone needs to have on their shelf. Don’t believe me? Check out http://www.problogger.net on the Web. This book is your manual. Reviews say to also buy Blog Schmog by Robert Bly (I have it, but haven’t read it yet. I’ll let you know in a later post!)

Clearing Blogging by Bob Walsh is a nice intro to blogging. A bit outdated if you know what a blog is and why it can help you, but the principles are still there. I recommend everyone (whether looking for a job or project currently) should be blogging (author Penelope Trunk was the one who first said it, or the second who said it, can’t remember). It gives prospective employers and managers a way to find out more about you that you can control. It can also shift your Google resume to the positive side (see this post about that). I say LOVE IT!

Amazon writes,

Clear Blogging sets out to answer in nontechnical terms what blogging has to offer and why and how you should blog. If youve never read a blog, but you keep hearing that term on the news, Clear Blogging will show you why blogging has shaken up mainstream media, and how a blogger can end up on CNN. If youre just starting to read blogs, Clear Blogging is your native guide to the blogosphere, covering how to get the best, most interesting information with the least amount of time and effort. The main course of Clear Blogging shows what you stand to gain from blogging, and how you can go from your first post to being welcomed aboard the blogospheres A-list.

The final book to which I give the LOVE IT designation is Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk With Customers.

Publisher’s Weekly writes,

For the past five years, Microsoft employee Scoble has maintained one of the most popular blogs on the Internet. Mixing personal notes with passionate, often-controversial commentary on technology and business, his blog is “naked”—i.e., not filtered through his employer’s marketing or public relations department—a key part of its appeal. In this breezy book, Scoble and coauthor Israel argue that every business can benefit from smart “naked” blogging, whether the company’s a smalltown plumbing operation or a multinational fashion house. “If you ignore the blogosphere… you won’t know what people are saying about you,” they write. “You can’t learn from them, and they won’t come to see you as a sincere human who cares about your business and its reputation.” To bolster their argument, Scoble and Israel have assembled an enormous amount of information about blogging: from history and theory to comparisons among countries and industries. They also lay out the dos and don’ts of the medium and include extensive statistics, dozens of case studies and several interviews with famous bloggers. They consider the darker aspects of blogging as well—including the possibility of getting fired by an unsympathetic employer. For companies that have already embraced blogging, this book is an essential guide to best practice.

Next time, I’ll hit some books that aren’t worth picking up (LEAVE IT). In the meantime, have a great weekend! May your communication efforts be read and understood!

Someone asked me this the other day and I looked at them like they were crazy. You never lower your rates. Well, okay, just let me explain.

Your rates are not some random number you pull out of the sky, folks. These rates are what you need to make a profit, pay your taxes, pay your bills, and live on. To cut rates just because someone asks, um, that’s not business. Sure, there are times to offer promos or coupons (say when I have a blog client that buys more blog posts from me each month, he gets a better deal, because it’s a bulk deal), but you don’t cut your rates, just because you feel guilty (or because someone makes you feel guilty when you bid your project). If they can’t afford it, you move on. All this is directly related to your business plan, figuring out your rates before you’re out there bidding on projects, and your marketing plans.

For example, a friend of mine does custom eco-friendly heating and cooling systems. He charges good money for them. Some would say his prices are way too high, but if you look closely at what he’s doing, you soon realize, his prices are quite appropriate. It’s a custom job, with custom parts, labor doing custom work (that they don’t replicate often) and you think he should lower his prices? What about his suppliers, his employees? They don’t get paid what they are worth? He doesn’t get any profit at all? He doesn’t get any money to pay his own mortgage? His pricing is something he figures out beforehand. If a customer can’t afford it, is that his problem?

I just don’t get this thinking. If you’re running a professional business (moonlighting or not), you shouldn’t be haggling over pricing. If you’re an amateur and this is a hobby of yours, sure, no one should pay you anything, because you’re having fun, right? It’s your mindset that’s messing you up. If you’re a professional, you price jobs like a professional, and people pay you like a professional. Professionals charge for their expertise and their time. They don’t give out cut rates unless it benefits them AND their customer.

This may sound like me reversing on my contrarian stance. No. If you want to GET customers, you must never think of your goals first. Once they are your customers, you must make money from the work you do for them. Otherwise, they aren’t actually customers, they are baracudas and they will suck you dry.

So:

1. If you’re asked to give them a cut, say sure, but you’ll need the entire amount paid in full upfront. Then take a small percentage off.

2. If you’re asked to give them a good deal, say sure, but they’ll need to buy more from you to get that good deal.

3. If you’re asked to do something for free, say no. Unless it’s for charity and you really do want to do it.

4. If you’re asked to do it for free, remind the person that you are a professional and run a business and you would love to do it for free if it were just your hobby. But it’s not. If they get rude and say you’re no better than just a hobbyist, you don’t want to work with them, do you?

5. If you’re asked to give a discount, say that after you and they have done business for awhile and you get to know each other, maybe, at your discretion. Volume of business is deserving of a discount; a first-time, one-time sale, is not.

And now, back to work everyone! You know it’s the entrepreneurs and businesses that will keep this country running, not bailouts. So let’s work!

Along comes a book by renowned Duarte Design owner, Nancy Duarte, who has put together some of the most important slide presentations in recent business history, which explains the reasoning behind great presentations. Slide:ology is one of those books that you just have to check out from the library (at least I do).

I am fascinated by the process of communication in business, be it social media, corporate communications, or marketing, and this book really nails the principles of presentations for me. I did wish it was less about her exploits and more about how I can make it work for me. Some of the Amazon reviwers were’t impressed and recommended Robin Williams’s Non-Designer’s Design Book, which I do agree with. Robin Williams understands design implicitly. I do wish this book had more of Williams’s helpful commentary and how-to.

Another book I got from the library was Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. Highly recommended by Michael Hyatt and others who have jobs making presentations, I was interested to hear that Garr’s blog on presentation was more helpful than the book itself (thus why I’m checking out from the library first). However, I do think Garr’s ideas are very good. I will now be checking out his blog more often (saved it next to Seth Godin’s on my bookmarks tab).

The thing about business books is that they are more fat than lean meat. There is a lot of fluff out there. One of the things I hope this feature every Friday on this blog will do for my readers is save them some money by finding only the best business books. If I buy it, you can feel safe to buy it.

Have a nice weekend all.

Most businesses I talk to want to know one thing. How do I communicate? They can talk off the cuff (better than I can), but when it comes time to make a presentation, to write a memo, or to keep their business blog going, they feel blocked. Frequently, I come alongside and help produce the blog post, and once they realize they were making it harder than it has to be, they tell me they are able to confidently produce a better memo or a better PowerPoint presentation. It’s all in the approach.

Don’t just sit down and write stuff cold.
The biggest mistake I see business owners making is that they put off the writing until the very last minute. Then when they sit down to write, they feel pressure and frequently don’t know what they need to in order to write
well. I take a three-pronged approach: thinking, researching, writing. And of course each prong has it’s own subsections, but for now, we’ll just focus on the three big divisions.

Think about what you are trying to accomplish
To write well, you must think first, write later. Outline the major points you know you must cover in your piece on a piece of scrap paper. Now just stop, ignore the phone, email, everything around you and just think through these points. Let your brain pick them up as pebbles and let your thoughts turn them over and over for a bit. It may sound stupid, but it works and it calms you down. You’re thinking through all the angles when you do this. It’s not dumb, it’s wise.

Research what you’re not sure about
I often Google dates, spellings, facts, anything I “think” I remember, but would love to confirm. This is what research is. Backing up your previous conclusions. So take time to do it, remembering that if you must source
something, now is the time.

Your first draft is just that: a start
You don’t have to write everything in one draft, remember. Your first attempt can be paper and pen or it can be on a computer, but don’t make this task difficult. Consider it as a progression from your main points. Just
slide those points in and fill in around ‘em. It’s more like a puzzle than a Picasso. Trust me.

Don’t overcomplicate the task of writing.
Writing is not hard, it’s approaching the writing that’s hard. It’s attempting to slow yourself down long enough to actually think about what you’re trying to say. Those things are hard. If you allow yourself to do them, writing
will actually be easier than you expected. You’re just writing a memo, a blog post, not a novel. Lower your expectations.

Persuasion does not mean coming on strong
Persuasion actually is being well-researched and well-thought out. If you must persuade, figure out your angle. Coming on directly might not be the best choice.

Informing about a topic can be done with a simple bulleted structure
A simple bulleted list or A,B,C outline can be the best way to inform people about a new policy or sales technique. Don’t overcomplicate it with other techniques.

Explaining can use a story, but don’t moralize
A lot of corporate communications people understand the power of story. The problem with a lot of story is that they tend to moralize. Folks would prefer to come up with their own morals, so resist the urge.

Don’t assume one bad memo ruined it forever.
Above all, the art of communicating takes time and one bad experience doesn’t get you off the hook. You can get better. Just remember that everyone had to learn it at some point. Better now than never for you.

A good memo can fix whatever a bad memo created
A well-thought out memo can repair anything that broke with the previous memo. Don’t worry. You’re not failing after one bad memo. First time you’ll get a pass. Second time, a look. Third time, someone may have to make a change.

A good idea makes writing a simple extension of your thought process
If you’ve got a good idea (after your thinking session), sometimes the writing just flows. Not sure? Try it.

Sometimes you might need a hand; hire a writer
Nothing wrong with it. It might be temporary or long-term; it depends on your needs as a business.