Never ceases to amaze me. While some people feel attending conferences such as Going Solo is smart for delegates as well as for presenters (see below), others say conferences are a waste of time. So how do you decide?  Read about the criteria I use for deciding if I want to attend or prefer staying home instead.

Of course, there are academic conferences (e.g., US Academy of Management) where researchers from academic and other organizations (e.g., research labs) present their latest findings and advancement in science. There are those that present a firm’s work and sales pitches nicely packaged in a conference. Some are not so good and others have managed this quite well such as the Forrester conferences.

So wich conference should you attend?

DominicJones Replied to seventh “presentation request” of the week. Some of the same people over and over. Same answer each time: I don’t travel well.

DominicJones Maybe I should just tell them the truth. Presentations are too much work for too little gain. And I don’t mean money. I mean reach.

In the above tweets, Dominic Jones finds that scalability does not make it worth while, another comment I got is:

InfoSec @commetrics if I present, key criteria is: can I meet people that will make me learn & do more biz, payment alone won’t cut it,never enough

Considering the time it takes to prepare a presentation, travel to and from the venue, while attending the conference itself, attending these things is a high investment. In fact, it seems a bit useless to just go there, present and leave again after having made your presentation.

If you are there already, attend the whole conference and network, meet people and so forth.

So if you set yourself a goal to attend two conferences a year, possibly presenting or not, how is one to decide which one of the many one can choose from? You simply do neither have enough time nor resources to attend more than just a few each year.

During May I attended the Going Solo conference to see what people had to say, network and so forth.

CyTRAP: @ComMetrics delegate at small conference not presenter=learn&network,find people that I want to collaberate/work with=freelancers

thibautthomas @ComMetrics confs are ideas made physical. Its about being in a physical place with inspiring ideas, and continuous learning, people meeting

To assess the reward of such a conference like Going Solo is difficult for me.  As a small business I should consider this comment:

InfoSec @commetrics if I present, key criteria is: can I meet people that will make me learn & do more biz, payment alone won’t cut it,never enough

I think it is very difficult to know before attending a conference if it will bring the rewards one hoped to get. However, the risk can be limited somewhat by following the criteria outlined below.

Conclusion

Here is another tweet:

SMIuk08 @ComMetrics attend/present confs=part of traditional forms of marketing (advertising,lead gen,e-mail) all impacted/disrupted by social media

I think it is safe to say that as a small business, unless things ultimately result in one’s cash register to ring,  the activity should be curtailed. Attending conferences, besides the delegate fees, travel and accommodation expenses and so forth, also represent opportunity costs (you will not be generating income during the days you spend at the conference).

The difficulty today is that if you live in a large metropolitan area, it could happen that there are several ‘relevant’ conferences being held right at your doorstep in any one year. So how do you choose?

All else being equal (ceteris paribus), helping me to decide if I should be attending a conference or not are the answers I get to these questions:

1) can I present – presenting gives me more exposure and is an easy way to gain face recognition in the crowd while, hopefully, being approached by people afterwards (e.g., breaks, lunch, dinner drinks, etc.)?

2) will I learn – things at the conference that help me with my business (depends on type of attendees, quality of presenters, etc.)?

3) will I meet potential clients – what is the likelihood that such an individual is in attendance – will I get an opportunity to talk to this person that might just become my next client?

4) are potential collaborators attending – do I get the chance chance to meet somebody I have never met before except e-mailing with or an individual I want to work together with (e.g., do a project together, submit a tender together, etc.)?

5) what are my costs – what are the delegate fees, travel expenses and time needed to make sure one attends sessions and goes to the social networking events  (e.g., flying Easy Jet is cheap but might take you 5 days away from your family instead of three using another carrier)?

I tend to consider attenting a conference that meets at least 4 out of the 5 possible criteria I have listed above. Regardless of this effort it is still a risk. Hence, you may decide after the conference that it was better or worse than you thought. In fact, you may have hoped that it would meet a criterion listed above but find out after the conference that it did not. Those are the breaks.

All these questions help with is minimizing the likelihood of you wasting time and money, attending a meeting that may just not be for you.

Attending meetings instead of generating revenue can be a very expensive propsition for a start-up. So these questions help you get more out of your next conference.

Succeeding on Twitter means avoiding making some of the most obvious mistakes, such as:

Mistake 1 – let us wait
Mistake 2 – NOT moderating the aggregate Twitter feed,
Mistake 3 – focusing on absolute number of followers

we explained this here: social media – ropes to skip – Twitter – FAQ #1

Mistake 4 – believing everybody’s mother tongue is English
Mistake 5 – forgetting that behaviors speak louder than words:
Mistake 6 – telling me that you are going out with a client to have lunch

we explained this here: social media – ropes to skip – Twitter – FAQ #2

Mistake 7 – biz tweets are the same as those from individuals
Mistake 8 – Europeans tweet as much as North Americans
Mistake 9 – response rate to your tweets asking questions is high

we explained this here: social media – ropes to skip – Twitter – FAQ 3 why should I join and use Twitter?

Today we bring you some more mistakes that you can easily avoid, thereby saving yourself some time and your followers much grief. Go ahead and do us all a favor, please.

J remember too much is too much

We all know that ever more we are getting technology that helps us find the tweets we are interested in. For instance, whenever people use a #GoingSolo or #SMIuk08 tag, their post will come up when searching various tools

Jermiah helping us out, see it in full

But the difficulty remains that whenever you get a tweet from one of the people you follow, you get distracted. Most of us then immediately check what the person wrote.

Unfortunately, if the indvidual or the brand then tells you that he, she or it is getting ready to go on a plane to fly home, do you really need to know this. Maybe this is not information but just noise?

If you cannot see the ComMetrics image to the right, see ComMetrics thanks Abdur see

what people say when they tweet

Just remember, following 150 people and each one of them releases one tweet about the weather each day can help you waste valuable time. Having to scan all these for nothing is a nuisance.

Mistake 10 – believing Twitter is scalable: If you follow more than 150 people you can no longer really read their tweets. Instead you scan and hopefully find the gems. So following fewer people, while choosing them carefully is a good strategy.

K Status updates are for the birds

Every day I can a few of these messages:

- I am getting coffee,

- getting up and doing some gardening work before going shopping, or

- catching a flight to SF, will go out for dinner with @abdul this evening.

Sure, I am glad that person’s x flight finally left LA so he can make it home for supper with wife and kids. Last night while being delayed at Brussels Airport waiting for the plane to take off to Geneva, I wondered should I send everybody a tweet. Then I arrived in Geneva and had four minutes to spare to grab my luggage from the conveyor belt to make the last intercity train to Zurich that evening. I got on the train and the doors closed behind me…. big event for me since it got me to bed earlier but is it for you or my Twitter followers. I don’t think so, just part of my life but of little if any interest to you.

My point is that such tweets represent chit chat for my follower in London or Dallas. It would detract them from whatever else they are doing right now. So I did not send out a tweet. However, I called my wife and told her. Rest assured, she was interested in hearing that I got on the train

Mistake 11 – believing that people focus on real content instead of chatter: Status updates are the 2nd most popular way of using Twitter, so again, be careful whose feed you choose — too many chatter boxes will result in as much clutter on Twitter for you as you might already have in your e-mail in-box thanks to spam.

Please do yourself and your followers a favor, cut the updates to zero, especially if you use Twitter for business or career purposes.

L Special Twitter feed for an event or conference.

So called memes can go on for the event of the day, the TV show or else there is some buzz before the event as well as after.

Memes can evolve during a conference when people use so-called hashtags, such as #SMIuk08. This way they find other people’s post, respond to each other and discuss a presentation that is happening as you see the tweets come in.

Some conferences use hashtags but, as importantly, create special feeds for the conference, such as this:

SMIuk08 – Social Media Influence conference in London – Twitter feed

In other cases, a company may go forward and create a special Twitter account for an upcoming conference that is than being managed by its people and followed by a few individuals interested to see what they have to say.

Creative Cannes conference – feed from the Microsoft advertising team

Nevertheless, whenever creating a dedicated feed, as the above two examples show, maintaining quality throughout the event is a real challenge.

Mistake 12 – establish a Twitter account for your conference or workshop and you will make a mark with your quality tweets -NOT necessarily: Generating quality tweets during a conference and each presentation or symposium is a tough job and requires hard work, concentration and some luck – that is presenters who do a great job, of course.

So remember this before going ahead creating a Twitter account for your next workshop or conference.

Bottom Line

Less is better

Remember, too much jogging is bad for your ankles, too much food means the risk for gaining weight and watching too much news on TV does not mean you are more informed just that you have maybe wasted more of your time?

In short, generally less tends to be better…. focus on quality.

Accordingly, one great tweet each day is the aim. This assures that your followers carefully scan the tweets they get for your gems amongst much low quality tweets.

Tidbit did you know?

This week Creative Lions Cannes 2008 -advertising conf. 2008-06-14 – 21 is happening. Checking Twitter I found:

- CreativeCannes on Twitter is run by the Microsoft advertising team- surprise…

- the organizers forgot to tell everybody that they should use the hashtag #CannesLions when sending out tweets about the conference, in turn, this would enable us to find all the tweets about the conference on Summize, Tweetscan, etc.

I am puzzled about this oversight from the advertising gurus. Was not coming up with an appropriate hashtag an oversight? Ignoring Twitter on purpose or did I miss something. Can you give me the inside story on this? Care to enlighten us? Leave a comment.

You might as well avoid some of the mistakes I made as a blogger. Here are some of the things you should avoid from doing, thereby saving yourself much time and effort

Recently somebody asked me something similar to:

Hi Urs I launched a blog called xyz and I am trying to build it up and get mor readers and traffic. Any guidance let me know please.

At the recent Going Sole conference a person who I met and will hopefully collaborate with soon asked something similar to:

Urs, how can I make sure I do neither waste time with my blog nor upset my clients with posts that are not relevant to them?

Well, learning from my mistakes will help you save time and succeed faster. Below I share some of the lessons I learned during the last four years or so.

1 – I know my target group

Nice but sometimes you just do not because things may change. Of course, defining the target group one intends to write for before starting to blog is a smart move. An example might be:

Academic: this reader may be interested to hear about the latest research results and teaching cases, methods, etc. in the discipline you have chosen (e.g., HRM or a sub-discipline such as recruiting and selection?).

Micro business: this reader might be your customers or those that you are trying to convince purchasing your product and services – so writing about the industry or matters that relate to your product without pushing the latter could be the way to go.

Whatever you do, read here about how to figure out the objectives you should set for yourself before embarking on a blogging venture:

Sensible Metrics Make a Difference or Why Less Traffic is Better

I had defined my target group – current and potential clients. To my surprise, however, people I never expected to read my social media blog began subscribing and sending me feedback or leaving comments.

So here I was two months into the ComMetrics venture. I was forced to re-analyze what I did and as a result thereof, I began re-focusing my content somewhat to satisfy this slightly more diverse readership I had. Not easy to do and I am still having a hard time.

My advice: Define your focus group but keep a careful watch. 3 months after launch, you should re-assess. Are your subscribers the people you targeted for originally, or are people with slightly different interests also part of your readership? Therefore, are some adjustments warranted?

2 – long haul – it is all about serving a need

Like all projects including doing great research or building a successful business, being a successful blogger does not happen over night.

What one can do right from the start is to decide what kind of blog one wants to launch and maintain. For instance, should it address professional things or else do you want to write about your hobbies or going on a hike with your family.

What is easiest for you? I prefer deciding what focus, subject, topics my blog will cover before I start a new blog. Most important is that I choose a subject, discipline or issue that I can be sure of I will still care very much about in 24 months. For instance, I launched EU-IST in fall 2000. It began covering information security and regulatory matters as far as they pertained to InfoSec, such as privacy or data security breach. With time, I learned from my readers that covering regulatory issues made some hard-core security geeks unhappy.

Finally I caved in and went ahead and launched EU-Regustand.

People read blogs for different purposes and our understanding is still limited how the social media domain works as explained here:

Social media – defining a concept

My advice: Time means change. Make sure that in a few months time your readership still consists of those people you wanted when you launched the blog. Changes might be required. Think about it as changing your product or releasing a software update with new or slightly different features. Nothing wrong with that if you are sure it serves a need.

Many of the EU-IST readers also subscribe to EU-Regustand, while some prefer subscribing to one of the two only. It does not matter to me; important is only that the readers get what they want.

3 – long or short-haul – it is all about branding

To succeed in the long term you have to start with something that gets your fancy. Hence, the subject you write about should still be of interest to you in a year’s time. This is why I find requiring students to write a blog for a course a bit of a waste of time. One tries to cope with the teacher’s demand to write a blog in order to get a decent grade. Unfortunately, rarely if ever does one get the feeling that the student’s heart is into it.

As well, at the beginning you may want to save yourself a few bucks or euros. One way to do this might be to have your blog hosted on such a service as Blogspot. This seems silly because the time you spend writing for your blog is surely valuable to you and your family. In fact, you could do something else than spending several hours on this project each week. So why not spend a few euros or dollars more and have your blog on your own domain?

To illustrate, our blog runs on:

http://ComMetrics.com but it could also be on:

http://blog.ComMetices.com or http://ComMetrics.com/blog

It is all about branding so you want to get the backlinks to your own domain and not somebody’ else’s. Accordingly, decide carefully and remember that free is usually not free as this story outlines below:

Before You Start a Corporate Blog, Tie Your Shoe Laces Properly

My advice: Do not mix hobby and profession unless they are the same. Focus on one and do it well. Second, host your blog on a domain that you own – branding is important.

4 – usability is the key – keep it simple stupid (KISS)

So hear you are, you know who your target group is, what you want to blog about and have found a domain name on which you want to host your blog. What about when people come to your blog. How convenient is it for them to find what they need to find?

Somewhere else, I wrote about the fact that you should offer your people to get your content via e-mail and/or RSS feed.

marketing 101 – what have high heels, cobblestone pavements & WordPress in common?

As well, people may visit your blog from around the globe. Accordingly, many may not have English as their first language. In addition, their Internet connection may not be as fast as yours may be. As well, using Java Script may slow down loading of your pages and having pictures load and change at random on your web page may not make the surf experience faster either. We explained this in more detail here:

social media – ropes to skip – Twitter – FAQ #2

Finally, the background you use is also important. Dark background might make it more difficult for readers to read your content. So why not make it easier on your visitors and use a lighter background?

My advice: Focus groups are not needed but using common sense when deciding about what you will offer and how you will do it does help a lot. If in doubt, just ask some of your readers for feedback. Keep it simple stupid – KISS.

5 – post whenever you want

At the beginning, I posted whenever I had time, felt like posting or had something interesting to say. Unfortunately, things do not work this way. Depending upon where your readers are, the weekend may not be used to surf or read blog posts in some countries.

Since I regularly study our server statistics, I discovered that, for instance, in Europe most traffic on our websites happens on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Hence, making sure that you post on those days does help.

As well, posting once every week throughout the year is far better than releasing four posts in one week for the month of June. We address this in more detail here:

4 Critical Steps Toward Better Serving Your Market Niche

Some highly successful bloggers urge us all to post each day to get ever more traffic. Unfortunately, running a business and writing thoughtful or at least helpful posts like this one takes time. Often I spend 2.5 – 3.5 hours to write and research for one post including finding the links I need to better illustrate matters.

I do not know about you, your family situation and your social life. You might have more time. Nevertheless, for me 3 posts are all I can handle and the result takes time away from other activities such as watching TV – which I can justify I think .

My advice: Post regularly one or two posts each week during Tue – Thursday. Striving for quality means posting once is better than two times rubbish.

Nevertheless, this post went out on a Saturday. During weekends sometimes an interesting post can attract traffic from quarters you might rarely ever get any. One reason could be that fewer news stories are being released on weekends. We will see if I succeeded with this one – I keep you posted.

Bottom Line

If you can address the above four points and find a solution that fits your needs, you will save yourself unnecessary work and plenty of time. Stay tuned, we have a follow-up story on this issue within a week. I will again discuss some more practical issues that we should discuss.

My Promise – Readers’ Pay Back Time

Mention my blog in your post using this link/code:

launching a blog – ropes to skip #1 – start right

The code looks like

<a href=”http://commetrics.com/?p=119″ title=”getting your blog tipped by ComMetrics” target=”_blank”>launching a blog – ropes to skip #1 – start right </a>

Drop me a line in the comments of this post with a link to your post that has the above code – link.

My promise: I will spend a couple minutes reviewing your layout, usability, SEO, and your latest posts to find something that will help tweak your website or blog.

I will make an effort to make the tip unique to every blog or website.

Most importantly, I will enter your blog into our database to track and benchmark your blog. This will give you the chance to get access to charts showing the trend of your blog’s performance in a few weeks time, free, of course.

Tidbit

You Tube video – Jaap Stronks and Urs E. Gattiker – commenting on Going Solo

Going Solo Live – during the Going Solo conference, some interesting thoughts and issues were shared about Twitter. In the meantime I was trying to convince the editors of HRM the Journal that had just launched a social network to open HRM the Journal on Twitter.
I asked my Twitter network and new Going Solo friends for some advice on this issue why one might be able to benefit from using Twitter. Here are their responses and my interpretations and FAQs #GoingSolo

We have already posted some FAQs about Twitter here:

ComMetrics – social media – ropes to skip – Twitter – FAQs

So based on some presentations at the Going Solo conference I thought I would pose a question to my Twitter followers:

ComMetrics Non Twitter user ask:what makes Twitter different from having a social network just send me e-mails-how can I answer, suggestion?LinksThanks

Africa and Europe (2008-05-18 – early evening)

derekabdinor @ComMetrics you see thought-leaders canvass and formulate on Twitter before they even blog it. Like you are doing now
thibautthomas @ComMetrics Twitter is about conversation ecosystem, not so much about hardcore networking. Its faster, simpler like IM vs Email.

North America(2008-05-18 – noon-evening North American time)

Pistachio @commetrics friend asks “what makes Twitter different from having a social network just send me e-mails?” @ reply him your answers?
goldiekatsu @commetrics Twitter allows you to expand your connections in ways that an email doesn’t. And you can chose who to listen to.
Pistachio @commetrics look at the web link on my twitter page. That web page includes links to my blog posts about twitter that should help answer
kathrynjones @ComMetrics twitter is far more dynamic, immediate and conversational than an email from a social network
pprlisa @ComMetrics Twitter is like being able to hear every convo in a crowded restaurant an being able 2 join in whichever sounds most interesting
jtyost2 @commetrics emails take time to process, feel like you have to answer
tomguarriello @ComMetrics twitter lets you peek at people who’d never email you and see what they’re interested in. Letting someone follow is low risk.
RobinMaiden @commetrics it is very different. it accesabl. it is now. it is short and sweet.

Europe / North America (2008-05-19 – early morning)
HRMtheJournal @ComMetrics sending a question out via Twitter: great responses within a very short time (e.g., 6 hours or less) from experts all over.

Europe (2008-05-19 – early morning)
BoscoGurin @ComMetrics depends on how careful followers read your tweets=resp. rate could be.5% from 2,000 followers= 10 high qual answers=GREAT help
InfoSec @ComMetrics if zero-exploit of softw. vulerabilit happens now, Twitter = immediate feedback from fellow experts around the globe, great tool
CASEScontact @ComMetrics for our info sec portal for micro biz and home-usersTwitter->support subscribers fast,URLs where they get more info about
SMIuk08 @ComMetrics ? use Twitter-responses you got ceteris paribus: women & North Americans more personal AND some countries &biz tweets > reserved
CyTRAP @ComMetrics think Twitter great to follow knowledgeable others and learn from them while sharing by giving URLs to white papers,great posts

What does it mean – based on these and some other responses we got?

Looking at the responses, I discovered the following without putting it in any order of importance.

1) Looking at the responses, North American Twitter users tweet more extensively on weekends than Europeans.

2) People use Twitter for different purposes. Some for getting expert input, others prefer lurking (i.e. observing what is happening) in the background – or quietly follow ‘important’ people.

3) Business (e.g., conference organizers) provides followers with more focused tweets than individuals. The latter may send out a lot of love and chatter to their friends using @… or letting everybody know that they are getting coffee or feeding the cat.

4) Thought-leaders and experts can canvass or inform followers about important issues (e.g., security alerts, why and how do you do X, etc.) and if need be can get a few quick responses (web-, mobile-, browser-interface for responding using Twitter).

5) The response rate will be very low anywhere from <.2 to .3% or so. However, if 3000 people follow you, better to get six thoughtful and helpful responses than be flooded with garbage. Most important, what one gets shows the person responding has insights that help you get a better handle on the issue(s) (i.e. quality is much better than quantity).

6) From Going Solo delegates and looking at their responses (some via e-mail) it seems as if freelancers watch Twitter during the workday. However, they choose not to get active if possible until after working hours (i.e. when getting out of bed – checking Twitter first, going to bed – checking again) or during weekends. This allows freelancers in keeping focused on the task they are working on right now, thereby not getting distracted by Twitter.

7) Learning curve and Twitter use – most accounts do not narrowly focus their tweets on the unique needs of their target group(s) (e.g., friends vs. business associates vs. clients). Naturally, there are some very notable exceptions:

DominicJones InfoSec

Old media has learned this a while back; different readers or viewers need different fare. The result has been an ever-increasing number of TV channels, newspapers, etc.

Many Twitter users serve you 10 or more tweets each day including weekends. In between these mini-posts, you will find some gems. Unfortunately, the rest is chaff. This can result in the situation where because of the trees you can no longer see the forest or vice versa. The result is the same, more confusion than order, more data instead of better information…

Conclusion

While much seems to change, even more stays the same. A while back, TV stations and newspaper barons decided to offer us more specialized channels and print publications to serve our needs better. This has allowed advertisers to spend money for media that supposedly reaches a desirable target audience.

When will those Twitter users with the largest following (e.g., 5,000 and more) start offering specialized feeds from different Twitter accounts? In turn, it might be easier to follow more than 150 people that send out three tweets or less per day. This is especially true if these tweets are focusing on what one’s followers are truly interested in.

Twitter users still seem to be grappling with this concept – Fact is that if you try to follow more than 150 users, there is no way you can check each tweet carefully and, therefore, follow the conversation. Of course, the choice is yours. Cut down on TV, limit contact with your family and kids even more to tweet more or else cut down Twitter use. Whatever you do, please choose wisely by doing the following:

A) reduce the number of people you follow to 150, ANDB) make your tweets highly relevant to your target audience (have you identified your target audience – better do it now you might be surprised).

Nevertheless, the benefits of using Twitter can be manifold and range from such things as:

- Meeting interesting folks online, while running into them finally somewhere at some event – what a pleasure that can be – nothing beats a face-to-face meeting ;

- getting interesting URLs and information from knowledgeable others you might otherwise never come across;

- getting support and advice using d …. (direct message others cannot see) from people whose ideas, opinions and knowledge you trust; as well as

- a business, conference or journal you can keep its readers, editorial board, conference reviewers informed about what is happening ==>

(e.g., goingsolo, SMIuk08, HRMtheJournal).

Some caveats

The sample we used is NOT a representative one. The conclusions drawn are not based on what I call science but just interpretations. Nonetheless, take them and make your choices wisely to avoid spending too much unproductive time on Twitter and other micro-blogging services.

Great posts about these issues you also find here:

Stowe Boyd – The Growing Backlash against PR Spam, And the Rationale for MicroPR – Twitter

Laura Fitton – How I Got My Start in Social Media- Twitter

Laura Fitton – Twitter Makes Us More

Suw Charman – Going Solo: Stephanie Booth; Laura Fitton – you only get what you give – Twitter

Kevin Anderson – future of news: attention, distraction and information glut – see Twitter

Call for Assistance

I am convinced that I have forgotten many important reasons and pointers why somebody should join Twitter. As well, what one can contribute to and gain from participating we have not covered well.

Hence, my plea to you is to please add your insights below by writing a comment (problems, just click on title of this post, go to bottom of post, voila – window for adding comment). This will make it that much more easy for others to decide to either join or stay away from micro-blogging, such as Twitter.

We made a start with some links to interesting posts addressing this issue in more depth above, care to share any links you have? Then please put them in a comment below:

Going Solo Live, follow some guidelines regarding how you run your business and how you relate to your clients – Stowe Boyd shared his thoughts, philosophy and experience with us. I keep blogging about this #GoingSolo, @StoweBoyd. Wrap-up comes tomorrow

We have already posted these stories about Going Solo Live here:

Going Solo – it started

Going Solo – @Pistachio – how to use Twitter smartly NOT

Going Solo – Dennis Howlett – tax and finance

Going Solo – where do you start when you set a fee for your services?

Going Solo – Suw Charman – balancing working and life

Going Solo – Martin Roell – tools and methods to get things done

Going Solo – panel – solo in a networked world

Stowe Boyd gave a talk entitled From the Far Side to the Dark Side (a crash course in business realities for soloists). What he shared with us was:

- three skills – moving from the far side to the dark side

1) Performing the work – are you able to do it and do you enjoy it – getting the operational stuff finished – project management – do you have the expertise?

2) Can you go out and network – get to know people?

3) Can you sell yourself – can you get the bill out and get the money?

- 10 day rule

Stow Boyd follows the principle that he is able to bill 10 days a month. All the other things must be done during the rest of the month, including taking time off. Mostly such time is used for marketing and doing public relation work including continuous education. For each person the number of days one is able to bill is different and it can range from eight to 14 days Nevertheless, it all might average out to 10 days over the year.

- The No Assholes Rule

When the client treats you badly the first time, you should make a decision. Mine is usually to never ever work with them again.

- Expenses

If I am travelling on your behalf, I will eat dinner in a nice restaurant. Unless you ask me for receipts beforehand, I will not hand in expenses for what I spent on food – per diem or daily allowance might work. However, fix this in advance.

- Strategic Involvement

Try to get involved for the whole time of the project 10 months is a good start… longer might be more enjoyable and rewarding – money and work wise.

- Combos as a Soloist

Sometimes this means bringing in other people to help with the project or support the start-up. It is similar to bringing together musicians and produces an album. Once the project is finished, they all leave again and go their own way.

- Advisory Capital

With start-ups, you provide them with human capital or as Stowe Boyd calls it advisory capital.

Bottom Line

Most freelancers are not freelancers forever. Being a freelancer is not for everybody. As well, if you are a successful freelancer you may eventually change and become an employee again. Another outcome could be that you start hiring staff and become a micro enterprise.

Most people do not have the total skill set (see the 1-3 skill set above). Therefore, if you are the innovator or designer, getting the contract signed may not be your thing. So get a partner, outsource the accounting or get another freelancer to do the project managing if you feel you cannot do it.

check Summize for all the tweets about GoingSolo

Keep you posted. Stay tuned, I bring the wrap-up sometime this weekend

Going Solo Live, learn to manage your work day, get into a routine and avoid making some mistakes the make you less effective. I keep blogging about this #GoingSolo, @Pistachio, @Stephtara

We have already posted these stories about Going Solo Live here:

Going Solo – it started

Going Solo – @Pistachio – how to use Twitter smartly NOT

Going Solo – Dennis Howlett – tax and finance

Going Solo – where do you start when you set a fee for your services?

Going Solo – Suw Charman – balancing working and life

Going Solo – Martin Roell – tools and methods to get things done

Stephanie Booth moderated a session entitled solo in a networked world with Laura Fitton, Linda Broughton, and Stephanie Troeth. What they shared with us was:

- for some people being part of a co-working arrangement is the solution = is a physical space similar to an office as well as printing facilities, meeting rooms, etc.;

- how does one get the most out of a co-working space – go there regularly, make contact with people, use the meeting space, get energized by meeting others, nevertheless it is not for everyone – it is about sharing, if this does not fit your working style, co-working space will not work for you;

- what are the specific problems when managing freelancers

1) who works on more than one project is the first and probably the biggest challenge;

2) managing deadlines, assign tasks every week for every week;

3) check every day if the progress allows the team to reach the next milestone, otherwise flag the delay and take action; things generally take longer than you think they do;

- making estimates for a project is possible if you know how much time the various people have available;

- thinking about how freelancers might make it difficult for the client(s) – having a different flow meaning that their time slots may be different then yours and whilst you could make time available a corporate or government client may be on a mission (travelling abroad attending meetings) so re-scheduling is needed;

- co-working arrangements might help a freelancer to pass on some work to another qualified person if he or she does not have time enough for completing a particular project on time;

- how does one make the offline and online work if one works in a satellite office with a nine hour difference – daily calls or weekly meetings – makes it easier for the people in two offices to stay connected and share what happens in each office offline,

a) meetings held offline must be well structured,

b) decisions made offline must be brought to the conference call and shared with the ‘other’ group

c) get them to read your e-mail early in the morning (if they are in the U.S.) and answer before you go home

Bottom Line

One has to find the working arrangement that one works best in. This might be achieved by having a co-working arrangement whereby one has a desk and can meet other small business owners and other freelancers that or workers to collaborate with.

A big challenge is to find people that are able and skilled in doing project management for a team of freelancers, whereby tasks and timelines are being kept in order to meet deadlines and COMPLETE the project. All this must be accomplished within budget – time and money.

check Summize for all the tweets about GoingSolo

Keep you posted.

Going Solo Live, learn to manage your work day, get into a routine and avoid making some mistakes the make you less effective. I keep blogging about this #GoingSolo, #Martinroell

We have already posted these stories about Going Solo Live here:

Going Solo – it started

Going Solo – @Pistachio – how to use Twitter smartly NOT

Going Solo – Dennis Howlett – tax and finance

Going Solo – where do you start when you set a fee for your services?

Martin Roell gave us a presentation entitled Self-Organisation for Effectiveness (tools and methods to get things done):

1) collect all stuff; write it down
2) dump all stuff in inbox
3) convert stuff into actions
4) put actions into lists

Things software might help you in organising your tasks according to projects. However, there are many more out there. Whatever you choose do:

organize your tasks by context (office, home, telephone, offline, etc.)
throw out as much as possible – you are not going to do it or YANGTDI for short

Basic principles, for getting things done you need to focus on one thing at a time. It is not just sitting down on the computer, instead, what will you do first answering e-mails and then write a post for the blog.

Best is to choose something from your list and not just start with a task at random such as answering e-mails.

What do you consider to be a to do item – look at first e-mail in your in-box and decide what you intend to do about it – phrase to do – items correctly

- what is the next action?
- action must be a doable action

Bottom Line

Martin showed us that organizing things in life could help quite a bit. Get things done one at the time. Break projects down to the first small step and then start. Also, begin the day by doing one important thing. Naturally, you have to distinguish between work and non-work activities. So take time off.

Thanks to Martin for helping us getting more effective in what we do. Working hard is fine but, most important is to work effectively, smartly …

Martin Roell – the slides as a pdf file

Going Solo Live, learn to manage your work day, get into a routine and avoid making some mistakes the make you less effective. I keep blogging about this #GoingSolo, @Suw

We have already posted these stories about Going Solo Live here:

Going Solo – it started

Going Solo – @Pistachio – how to use Twitter smartly NOT

Going Solo – Dennis Howlett – tax and finance

Going Solo – where do you start when you set a fee for your services?

Suw Charman gave us a presentation entitled When Passion Becomes Profession (balancing work and life):

1) Decide on your working day

Do not make it too long but be consistent build your day with rituals… start your day with whatever but do it every day. For instance, I have breakfast and then bring my son to day-care (or he stays home) at 8:00 o’clock, I start my workday.

Sometimes I take a break or go and shop for milk or bred around 15:00 hours… and so on.

Your end of day ritual is most important. Therefore, I sometimes do work in front of the TV and this might not be a good habit. I have to focus more on my family and take time out playing with my kid and talk to me wife after our son is in bed.

In addition, make sure that you go to bed at the same time each night, help your sleep and makes sure you wake up next day being ready to go.

2) Take time off

Friday evening mails do not have to be answered before Monday morning. Do not project your own expectations upon others; clients do not expect you to answer your e-mails over the weekend or during your holidays

Re-charge your batteries – you need to take time off. Even from Twitter.

Stop work at least 2 hours before going to bed to calm down – helps you go to sleep.

3) Get a hobby AND a peer group

Find something to do besides working. Do something different; hang out with some of your friends.

The peer group you need to sound off your ideas – I thank my stars that I am able to discuss ideas with partner in crime Freydun M. Badri.

Do exercises – go for brisk walk, jogging, do weights at home.

Again all these things help you to be more effective during your work day

4) Managing Procrastinating (putting things off)

There is no cure as such since not all procrastination is bad. Too much is unhealthy.

Give yourself time to do a task and then stop. Do certain tasks when you know that you are productive. Therefore, phone calls should be scheduled and done during times of the day when you know you are less productive such as later in the afternoon. Writing a submission for a tender in the morning when you are more productive is a good strategy. You have to decide what works best for you.

Bottom Line

Break the bad habits and restart the new or better habit. If you do it, long enough you will change your habit. Start with defining which habits are most critical and need changing. Then start with one and achieve a permanent change. Thereafter proceed with the next one and so on.

Incidentally, the habits you have fallen into might not make you more effective, such as working until four in the morning and trying to get up at eight. It is all about being effective.

Thanks to Suw for reminding us that we have to get our house in order. Working hard is fine, unfortunately, taking time off is important as well.

Going Solo Live, Having a session on billing, how do you get projects paid for – billing – hourly or per project or comingation, find out and read on. I keep blogging about this #GoingSolo, @Suw @dahowlett, @StowBoyd

We have already posted these stories about Going Solo Live here:

Going Solo – @Pistachio – how to use Twitter smartly NOT

Going Solo – it started

Suw Charmann moderated a session entitled Setting Rates and Negotiating with clients Martin Roell, Stowe Boyd, Dennis Howlett. What they shared with us was:

- set your rates according to type of client, type of project, different risks, different pay-offs, etc.;

- often it depends on what you are doing – people compare your rates to other people’s rates;

- what is the job worth to your client;

Whatever you do it will depend upon:

- type of project

- size of corporation – Fortune 500 companies are used to paying certain rates

- people may not be interested in your credentials but check them out before you even come to the meeting – in Europe more often than you think (make sure the info is on your blog – see about Urs)

Bottom Line

Very much about billing is based on comparing your price – while this might imply your services are commoditized – it is reality.

Utlimately one becomes selective with whom one works or what clients one tries to get jobs/assignments from.

Please consider

- dealing with a government or an agency you deal with certain rates and policies that cannot be changed (e.g., European Commission has certain rates – up to Euro 4500 a project

- if it is higher it must go through an open bidding process – going above Euro 850 per day with your rate causes problems);

- make a contract – take an agreement or saying may coming to the office starting the first day of work or paying the first installment means that you (client) means agreeing with this contract – else use an electronic signature – echosign.com

- if a venture fund needs an assessment yesterday – based on the investment at risk, the rate may be a secondary issue;

- getting part of the payment upfront is a good idea, it helps to build trust ==> 30 – 50% pre-payment helps your clients to focus and weeds out those that are difficult payers;

- finally, it depends on a freelancer or the small firm – find a way on how you can sell your rates

Keep you posted.

Going Solo Live, Dennis Howlett – chartered accountant explaining the business of paying taxes or why Italians might have three sets of accounts. I keep blogging about this.

We have already posted these stories about Going Solo Live here
Going Solo – @Pistachio – how to use Twitter smartly NOT

Going Solo – it started

What Dennis Howlett shared with us – where you run your business is really important

Whereever you live depends on your live style. However, remember taxes are made up of income, sales/VAT, social taxes, etc. Get the best local advice you can get. So this is the reasons why we opened a Holding in one part of Switzerland and the operating firm in another part (see here:

about us – commercial register

Accounting software is such as:

Blinksale
Freshbooks
FreeAgent
Banana – we use great stuff for all of Europe (all languages)

Remember

- Allow for taxes 40-50%
- Claim everythign you are allowed to claim
- keep the accounts simple (don’t bend things too far – dog food is not a deductable expense
- get the best advice you can
- keep 10% just to be able to pay if you have to

Bottom Line

Thanks Dnnis for your advice.

Keep it simple stupid (KISS) but getting advice is important. If you start off on the wrong foot when it comes to accounting and/or your taxes and incorporation of your firm, you may pay dearly afterwards.

Thank god we got advice from Rewisco and did these things correctly.

Going Solo Live, Laura Fitton, @Pistachio, Dennis Howlette has started^. I keep blogging about this.

What Laura shared with us You Only Get What You Give (Marketing and taking care of one’s social capital):

Your ideas is not what you are hired for it is your unique execution, the way you manage process, the way you engage, how easy it is to relate to you.going to lunch is one thing but this giving away kind of service may provide you with less exposure than giving a free speech at a conference with people that might be interested in paying for your service.When you approach your blog is how can you connect getting to know peopleSpending time on Twitter means spending less time watching TV.Clients

Whatever technology you use you need to reach your clients where they are at. If your clients are not engaged with Twitter, get them to read your blog or subscribe to your distributed posts via e-mail.

Screwing up in social media, such as Twitter, is very important, if you make a mistake and admit that you did your star will shoot up. Being willing to admit a mistake is very American but it does sometimes help, especially with teenagers.

Thank you Laura

Remember when you want to get people onto Twitter, make sure they try first from home and not work. Their employer may not allow it or else restrict access. There are also legal concerns that your corporation must consider when allowing employees to Twitter see here:
EU-ReguStand trend spotting – Twitter – e-discovery requires managing your risk exposure smartly

Bottom Line

Laura made the point that going out and networking is what is needed in business, something she pointed out we have known for ages. However, remember you must do it with compassion. Give people the sense that you want the community to be better. People will respond. However this also means that you have to give up control, learn to relax, surrendering the control just enjoy the ride.

How can will you apply Laura’s work?

I feel this talk illustrates that Twitter has to be monitored by corporations regarding what is happening in their space.

- who talks about your brand or corporation;- what are people talking about (your product sucks, works well, features needed, warranty service, etc.);- is there a conversation happening that your corporation should be part of; and

- search for blogs with the keywords (your brand, product, name) and on Twitter, sixgroup, etc. and build a Wiki (listening to the audience) than blog about it

PS. Laura Fitton’s presentation showed once again that humor fails to work when she used Surrender Dorothy (an inside joke – The Wizard of Oz – 1939 – movie – if you don’t know you could feel left out – see here: social media – ropes to skip – Twitter – FAQ #2 )

So stay tuned.

Update:

get the slides from and watch the video of this presentation

Going Solo Live has started, and it started with Stephanie Booth opening the conference and no @Pistachio is online. I keep blogging about this.

We have written quite a bit about this conference, such as:

social media – ropes to skip – Twitter – FAQ #2

social media metrics – trust is earned, so building up the RIGHT readership takes time

unified communications – what it means with Twitter, Friendfeed, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us

SocioTwitting – developing metrics for Twitter volume vs. Twitter influence

Twitter – means getting a better conference experience #GoingSolo

Going Solo – Ropes to Skip

So I will keep you posted about what happens in this space:

• watch the talks on DailyMotion
• goingsolo tag on Technorati

So stay tuned.

Using metrics for assessing your social media efforts can be a disaster. Worst is when making some unnecesary mistakes, thereby wasting your and your customer’s time. These errors could even upset some important people.

Social Media is made up of an easy to use toolset that allows people and small companies to communicate using different means, such as:

blogs (EU-IST), podcasts, social networks (e.g., Xing, Linkedin), micro-blogs (e.g., Twitter) and yet to be developed publishing tools.

Succeeding on Twitter means avoiding making some of the most obvious mistakes, such as:

Mistake 1 – let us wait
Mistake 2 – NOT moderating the aggregate Twitter feed,
Mistake 3 – focusing on absolute number of followers

as we explained here:

social media – ropes to skip – Twitter – FAQ #1

Today we focus on mistakes D through F. Avoiding making these will once again save you time and much grief.

D Is there a language factor I should consider.

Much of the communicating on Twitter happens in English. Some data suggest that over a week about 60% of tweets are written in English.

However, as we have pointed out, non-native English speakers outnumber native speakers 3:1 in this world:

trend spotting – Twitter – checklist for building trust with your global social media audience

Therefore, even if you do all your tweets in English, a significant percentage of those following you will be non-native speakers. The same applies for other languages more or less. For instance, doing a French tweet does not mean that most people reading it are native speakers.

Mistake 4 – believing everybody’s mother tongues is English (French, Japanese, etc): While 60% or so of all the tweets are in English we would estimate that no more than 25% of these people or 15% of all tweets on Twitter are written by native speakers.

So avoid using slang, abbreviations (e.g., rcvd means received) and humour.

E Could culture be an important variable?

Conceptions of culture as a shared meaning system suggest that a person can make meaningful and relatively accurate judgments about one’s own culture (e.g., Wan, Chiu, Tam, Lee, Lau and Peng, 2007 – Perceived cultural importance and actual self-importance of values in cultural identification. J of Personality and Social Psychology, pp. 337-354).

Predictors of personality traits (e.g., behavioral measures of ‘pace of life‘ – walking speed, postal workers’ speed, and the accuracy of clocks in public banks – Levin and Norenzayan, 1999 – The pace of life in 31 countries. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, pp. 178-205) correlate highly with how people see their own culture (working in a world were clocks are on time and people work effectively leads people to adopt conscientious habits – latter help shape and focus surrounding culture) (Heine, Buchtel & Norenzayan, 2008 – What do cross-national comparisons of personality traits tell us? The case of conscientiousness. Psychological Science, pp. 309-313).

What does this mean when using Twitter? The above suggests that in some cultures, we may be more willing to share and talk about our more personal things using a tweet to say something like this:

Happy Mother’s day, what are you doing for today?

In other cultures, we are more reserved and maybe even critical about getting these things via Twitter.

Mistake 5 – behaviors speak louder than words: If we claim to be responsive to cultural diversity, then we need to accept this and behave accordingly. Hence, are your tweets reflective of the fact that you may have people following you from different cultures?

Do not believe that the American way is how it goes… if you care about your clients, please respect their cultural peculiarities and characteristics. Less chaff may be worth more = fewer tweets per day may make their day!

F Should we have different Twitter feeds for different events or target audiences?

Jeremiah whom I respect very much wrote on Twitter: “BTW I use twitter as my link feed, I point to whatever I find interesting, work related or personal.” Urs’ answer to Jeremiah

Two reasons why the above strategy fails with my clients in Europe:

1) If we refer to points D and E above, this works great if your followers all come from the same part of the woods or geographical region. More likely is that your followers come from different cultures and not all are native-English speakers. Hence, they may not understand some of your personal stuff relating to going to a particular restaurant in town or having a great or not so great experience last night (= how ‘relevant’ is your private info to me?).

2) I follow 7 people so far, if all of them write about 20 tweets a day interwoven with personal, hobby and work-related stuff, it takes too much time. If you follow 50 people and each one of them sends you 10 tweets a day, what a waste of time to delete/ignore those not related to work or those not related to your hobbies.

3) Imagine coming back from a long weekend (e.g., Pentecost – in Europe many of us get Monday off) – you will be beaten to death with all the tweets you have to read from all those people tweeting away over the weekend …. please make sure your customers do not suffer from such a ‘Twitter spam attack.’

Mistake 6 – if you want to serve your clients, focus on work and do not tell me that you are going out with a client to have lunch, who gives, instead provide your clients with beef/content

A good example is the Twitter feed for a conference or a customer appreciation day you might have sometime in the future. Examples are:

Going Solo (see to the right) or the

Social Media Influence Conference

Both the above are of interest to people attending these events and keep them posted about things they might want to know before going to the conference.

Other examples are our own Twitter feeds. We have several and each one focuses on different matters. Such as our

- Twitter feed for the benchmarking software,

- Twitter account informing our InfoSec experts,

- CASEScontact security portal Twitter micro-blog for home-users and SMEs.

follow us on Twitter see the difference of these Twitter feeds from us

All of these have very low frequency, whereby ComMetrics may have less than 3 tweets a day and the other two less than 1 per day.

If you want to know about our hobby or when we go out with our kid to play in the sandbox (who would want to know is my question)… you have to be invited to our personal feed, that simple.

Bottom Line

Remember your e-mail strategy is to effectively manage the volume of e-mail and, unfortunately, spam you get. Similar with Twitter, have different accounts for different things (private vs. business). Reduce the chaff, send your clients tweets but,

1) make sure that it is relevant and of interest to them – if you are in doubt, do not tweed about this item – less is better since time is money;

2) some of your followers may not be native-English speakers (or non-native compared to whatever language you use), therefore, avoid using slang, buzz words and abbreviations – your non-native speakers will be thankful and more likely understand what you are trying to get across;

3) cultural differences – meaning humour fails more often than not and while one person finds it funny the other could be easily offended as the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad demonstrate – stay away from using humour when tweeting.

For some it is traffic for others it is getting their friends to read what they write on their blogs.

For me it is being able to grasp what the company’s products are about and how we can maintain our competitive edge.Writing a blog does help with this challenge. Accordingly, getting more traffic is a nice side-effect but not vital for us but talking to customers and having them read the content we provide is the key.

Below I explain a bit more about our strategy with examples from the blogosphere to illustrate things better.

For some people traffic is critical to secure the revenues and click through rates to rake in the commissions from their sales affiliate program(s). If you write for your friends you may have a different motive and if you run a consulting office….

Hence, whenever I read about getting more traffic to a blog or increasing the number of links I start to wonder. If we all increase the numbers, will anybody care and read it. To illustrate, recently I had one person send out a link referring his followers on Twitter to one of my posts – one that has been getting more than the usual amount of traffic for sure.

If you cannot see the image to the left, Twitter – do any of YOUR followers care about what you broadcast? NOT

This post SocioTwitting – developing metrics for Twitter volume vs. Twitter influence got more traffic much faster than any other story so far since we started in mid-January with this domain and blog. Hence, this ‘referral’ on Twitter by somebody and others got me curious about traffic.

Four clicks in about 12 hours the above referral got me. Therefore, I went, checked, and discovered that Damon offers interesting fare including URLs that provide more in-depth material worth reading and much more. However, even getting a kind of ‘endorsement’ from a person of Dacort’s caliber (he mini-blogged about this story as well)or Damon’s for that matter is no guarantee that one of their followers will click on a URL either one of them mini-blogged about on Twitter.

Why should one talk about traffic?

What triggered all this? Well in a recent post Louis Gray (in-midst him getting the house ready for the twins that will arrive soon – naturally, by birth I mean) pointed out that we should be far more open about our traffic statistics than we tend to be (check out his post, very interesting).

Therefore, we thought we share our data with you. Just to give you some baseline information, we started posting on this blog (Commetrics.com) around 2008-01-16 this year.

Until late April, Google had not even given us a PageRank. Then Google assigned us a PageRank of four. The server statistics we collected are shown below.

Trouble seeing the above, click here:

2008-01-17 – 2008-04-30 – ComMetrics traffic statistics at a glanceYou have to look at the above keeping in mind, some expert suggest that a mid-size blog has about 30,000 unique visitors each month. Naturally, some may have such kind of traffic each day.

So I thought it somewhat amusing when I had the opportunity to read a series of posts on ProBlogger regarding building traffic and not getting an inferiority complex in the process.

A Remedy for Blogger Inferiority Complex

No, we do not have such a complex even if our traffic is very small compared to ProBlogger, of course. Have a look at the post from ProBlogger, it is worth reading indeed.

Twitter, Facebook and your blog – if it is not traffic, what is it?

For many sites, ad revenues are important. Others have associate programs or are part of one, such as offered by Amazon. These sites or blogs may make a substantial part of their revenue by having many visitors click on their ads or use their affiliate program to make a purchase online.

In contrast, most micro enterprises or small businesses are not trying to get create revenue from advertising or affiliate sales. Instead, for my company it is all about creating trust and getting clients to read the content I write.

Our experience with traffic and social media as described above is one case that shows that Twitter, Friendfeed and other social media may not be the only answer to growing your traffic. Naturally, posting interesting fare does help quite a bit.

Google, Digg.com and Twitter: Why such Drive-By Traffic is of Little Value

In addition, Paris was not built in one day either, neither will your blog have thousands of readers including subscribers to your e-mail and/or RSS feed in one month or so.

Bottom LineBlogs can be a good way to show others that whilst one might be Going Solo, one can offer tremendous value for money as Kami Huyse a public relations expert shows us so well:

2008-05-01 – Kami Huyse – The Three Principles of Change to Live By: Learn, Mentor, Give

Kami always writes about her business, experience with clients and things she is discovering on her journey. While not being a client of hers, I have learned a few things from reading her blog for sure. Thank you Kami.

Others impress me with their Google PageRank of seven. For instance, David Bradley gets much traffic as an independent journalist and public relations expert including some geeky stuff. All that traffic can be attributed to material he posts that is closely linked to his work:

Hot science news by David Bradley

Find out what is important to you. Is it traffic, advertising revenue, referrals, participation and/or building trust with your clients.

It all means that you must take the time to secure the readership you need to stay ahead of your competition. Talk to your customers – other traffic is just icing on the cake.

Tidbits

I discovered as well that during weekends most blog posts get traffic from outside Europe only. Hence, Europeans and my customers in particular tend to take off from the Internet and social media during weekends. Good for them, I hope they have time to read this tomorrow

What is your experience with your blog or social media strategy; please share your thoughts with a comment below.

Unified communications – for Microsoft and Nokia this term likely implies the integration of different communication technologies (e.g., software, hardware and vendor head aches) and streams of communication (e.g., e-mail, SMS, voice over IP and video).

Unified communications – strategy - deciding what and how social media such as Twitter or Friendfeed can be used to achieve marketing results with little or ZERO budget.

Unified communications analyst >- must be either a software/hardware specialist or the strategically focused person designing the enterprise’s approach to social media.

So why should the term unified communications matter?

Well that is an important question to ask but extremely difficult to answer because it all depends on whom you ask (see above). As well, while this might be an issue for a global company, for me running a micro enterprise or a small business I do not worry about such issues. Instead, I am proud of having met my payroll for April 2008 (an accomplishment of some sorts).

In addition, while the more technical interpretation of the term is important, we are focusing on the strategic interpretation here. This is of great concern to a micro enterprise. As such, my resources including human capital and cash are extremely limited. Accordingly, making a mistake could break the camel’s back very quickly.

Why does an entrepreneur need to have a unified communication strategy for social media?

We have defined the term social media. However, to limit the risk for wasting our scarce resources we approached this as outlined below.

1 my.ComMetrics.com

For your product my.ComMetrics.com we needed a blog to sharpen our own thoughts, keep abreast new developments and, as importantly, figure out practical and easy to use solutions to some tough problems.

We have been running a successful newsboard with e-mailed postings and a newsletter since 2000 that we switched over using blogging software during 2006. However, the audience is very different between our IT security and privacy expert’s crowd and our social media experts visiting our blog on ComMetrics.com.

In addition, we also needed a place to allow people to find the information needed to fine-tune their my.ComMetrics.com subscription. Hence, we installed, HowTo.ComMetrics.com

All this started in mid-January with 104 unique visitors for that month. Now we are up to 1550 unique visitors for April (not much). Besides our alpha testers subscribing to our e-mail or RSS feed, beta testers are also following us. As importantly, our current customers and potential ones read and write comments on our blog. Therefore, we got the conversation started and the target audience is slowly but surely getting involved.

Naturally, this works as long as we keep our posts focused on our target audience (what is it what they need, which tools help them ….).

2 Twitter feed

The micro-blogging has become a bit more popular in recent months than it was previously so we have also established an account.

a) ComMetrics on Twitter

This feed keeps you posted about blog posts, interesting URLs we find regarding benchmarking software and social media activities including measurement and metrics.

Again, we keep the number of tweets limited to about three every day max. This helps us and our followers save time and, instead, focus on making money. We are not always succeeding with our Twitter feeds.

By the way, if your employees use Twitter, you have some legal matters to take care off or else be sorry:

EU-ReguStand trend spotting – Twitter – e-discovery requires managing your risk exposure smartly

b) Product

One can always install a feed just for a product. We have chosen not to do this for reasons that go beyond this post.

Nevertheless, upcoming conferences are a good example on how one can use something like Twitter to keep delegates abreast developments. The feed can start a few months before the conference happens and continue a bit thereafter. Naturally, these must be low volume and very relevant to the people who are coming to the conference.

Learning from Going Solo on how to do it right – thanks Stephanie

Therefore, we signed up for Going Solo, a conference that we are attending 2008-05-17 in Lausanne and launched a feed for another conference:

Twitter feed for Social Media Influence Conference – June 4 – 2008 – London

3 Friendfeed

To make it easy for people to find all our social bookmarks and other things in one place, I opened an account with Friendfeed

However, only time will tell if this succeeds.

4) Digg-alikes

We have addressed this before and said:

Why Digg-alike traffic may not do you much good

Therefore, we are not trying to focus too much on this kind of traffic.

CONCLUSION or what is the bottom line

Neither have we a unified communications analyst, nor do we have money for advertising. However, what we have learnt leads us to recommend to you two things:

A – Do not spend money on advertising

Instead, focus on public relations using social media as a possible channel. If you try hard enough, any new product or service can get some coverage. Public Relations or PR is cheaper and, more importantly, editorial atttention also has more impact.

B – best unified communication strategy for social media = don’t spread yourself too thin

As a micro enterprise, your limited resources require that you channel your efforts effectively. You have to grasp the particular social media’s usefulness for your business in order to use it properly.

As well, to sustain your competitive edge it is necessary to limit the social media tools you use – using a blog and Twitter well is better than doing Facebook, MySpace, blogging, and Twitter – it just fritters away your time.

As importantly, those social media tools or services that you decide to have a presence in or with, you must give a sign of life regularly. Sending tweets every other week might not be so helpful. Posting every other month an entry on the enterprise’s blog does not do much good either.

Do the little things but do them well. Moreover, the number of unique visitors may mean little. In turn, 10 customers reading your blog and developing more trust in your expertise may be critical.

TIDBIT

Recently internet-based video has been used for reaching small, influential audiences such as institutional investors or analysts. Unfortunately, the medium’s main drawback is that it is slow. Accordingly, a webclip casting a couple of minutes may contain about 200 spoken words.

To compare, your analyst can read 1,000 words of text in the same time. The online video can show you what sort of person a CEO is, nonetheless, for assessing what he or she has done, you need the full report and accounts, plus the press cuttings.

Nonetheless, videos can be a real success, especially, if you own a global brand:

The YouTube Top 10 Brands Part II

Addendum 2008-05-06

Because of Going Solo and its organizer Stephanie Booth quoting this story in one of her own posts, I had to write a comment on her blog:

using the social media channels that reach those people you need to reach

Meaning, I had to expand upon my reasoning provided in the above post. In short, as a small company you have to channel the few resources you have carefully to get the biggest bank for the buck when using social media. However, you may have to use a few more channels when trying to get people to pay for and attend a conference. Whatever you do, make sure that your customers (delegates) or potential ones use the social media channels you chose for getting your message out.
And yes, check out Going Solo’s program (2008-05-16 – Lausanne), great case study for illustrating what difference you can make if you know how to use social media most effectively to spread the word.

One can get lost in the conversation metrics for Twitter, so I began mapping a few measurements of my own to see if they made sense.

It might be of interest to understand how one could measure the reach, influence, reputation management through through micro-blogging using some conversation metrics that tell the whole story. I take a stab at the problem here.

I have talked about the micro-blogging phenomenon Twitter here:

Twitter – means getting a better conference experience

I have also pointed out that Twitter does not really allow one to have a conversation in the classical sense of the word:

Twitter: wake up and smell the coffee – have a conversation instead

Twitter is one of these social media tools we can use to talk with others and it enables each one of us to show presence in the virtual space.

Ever more people are using Twitter for all kinds of purposes and I got intrigued about how to measure what is going on – conversational metrics.

When we visit Twitter and a particular person’s ‘micro-blog’ such as ComMetrics on Twitter, you can see the following data:

- the number of people following us on Twitter (Twitter labels this indicator with Followers – you can see the number but cannot see the list of people with pictures – only individual person that owns the Twitter account can see this),

- the number of people the person is following on Twitter (Twitter labels this group Following some like Twitterholic call them friends – a term whose use I believe is inappropriate in this context – this info can be viewed on the person’s Twitter profile page on the web), AND

- Updates – some people update the account 20 or more times each day, others 3-6 times a day and less on weekends (U.S. more frequent, Europe silent on weekends – not attempting to stereotype or generalize but my experience so far).You can get the above data points also by looking at this:

Twitterholic takes some of these public data points from Twitter about ComMetrics

Getting data about Twitter

There are several ways to get information from Twitter. One is to use the person’s RSS feed that lists the last 30 posts or so:

ComMetrics – RSS feed via Twitter

Another approach is collecting data from the people one follows. Such data enables one to obtain certain metrics as illustrated here:

Twitter spewage amongst my contacts. 2008-04-28 Dave Winer

Alternatively, one may put it in a spreadsheet as was done here:

What’s Your Twitter Noise Ratio? 2008-04-25 – Louise Gray

What metrics can be used for benchmarking?

Regardless of which approach we use, we have to address some methodological issues, such as:

1 number of tweets posted during period - some people post a lot, others very little, so how is the impact in comparison to the number of tweets a person posts – who gets the biggest bang for the buck.

Looking at the amount of tweets (see also below) it might be interesting to compare people who tweet every few hours compared to those that post more than one tweet every hour of the day! Can you still find the gems amongst all the chaff?

2 number of tweets ‘addressed’ to a person / total number of tweets in time period – addressed tweets are those starting with the @ sign such as : @ComMetrics

domjones @ComMetrics Yes, I do sleep if people leave me alone In reality there are clones of me dotted across the time zones, inlcuding on ships.

Nevertheless, this statistic by itself may, again, be meaningless because it may just indicate who wants to influence Pistachio. She seems to ‘tweet’ to tons of people as these usage statistics suggest.

3 – beef ratio, number of tweets with URL / total number of tweets posted. Tweets with URL are those giving a link to a blog post or white paper:

jowyang @davewiner has a better calculation of “Twitter Volume” Assuming everyone grew their followers at the same rate http://tinyurl.com/5dnma7

Jowyang, besides some chatter (e.g., telling us he is going offline to hanging out at the pool), tries to provide his followers with nice links adding much beef to his tweets and keeping the conversation going.

4 Followers / Following ratio - in practice, if you follow 5,000 people and you have 6,000 following your tweets (followers) – it takes time to keep track of it all. In turn, some people revert to drastic measures, such as:

Stowe Boyd wants you (trying to get him interested in your product or service) to pitch him on Twitter using this approach only

The above helps Stowe Boyd keep track of things. This way he knows which vendor wants to pitch what product to him. Of course, why would I want to tell the world that I need to influence Stowe Boyd. I prefer talking to him without everybody knowing if I wish to influence hime or anybody else for that matter.

The problem of not spending too much time reading these tweets while not loosing those one needs is real one for people who have a huge following. Just imagine, 10% if those following you (600 out of 6,000) send you a personalized message or reply using @ every other day or so. Maybe if one scans these messages only, one spends about 10 seconds at most on average. Nevertheless, it could add up to 1 hour each day. That is a lot of time if not too much.

Nonetheless, what does it mean if your ratio is something like 5 to 6, whereby 5 times as many people follow you as you follow yourself?

By itself, it may not mean that much. However, with some more indicators it may show a trend that people care and want to hear what you have to say.

5 Influence is hard to track. For instance, Tweeterboard tracks who replies publicly to a given user with the @ symbol and their user name. An example would be an answer, such as @Stephtara or @GoingSolo. Tweeterboard also keeps track about the persons one replies to using Twitter. This means those messages one sends out with @ sign and user name at the beginning of the message.

It then claims to apply a secret algorithm [boy, everybody in the U.S. seems to use algorithms ... they all must be wizards at the numbers game ] to assign a number of points to a user. Similar to Google, value is conferred to a user through links from people who have had high value conferred to them by links from others, and so on.

Therefore, what Tweeterboard does has little to do with influence but much with what we call crowd scoring instead. In short, the more @ComMetrics messages I get from others, the more influence I seem to have. Not a very logical or helpful measure, is it?

What Tweeterboard shows about ComMetrics

Bottom Line

If you follow 500 people and they each tweet about 10 x a day, you are spending very much time with Twitter if not wasting valuable work time – remember you need to make money. In turn, maybe think about this statement:

Number following means: “It serves to enhance a user’s appearance, and is not a declaration of either interest (level or kind) or attention (listeners are not always listening).” Reputation, Conversational Index, Twitter, and Tweeterboard – 2008-04-16 – Adrian Chan

Accordingly, what is needed is a set of statistical indicators that give us a better approximation of reality than what we might get by using one indicator.

It is obvious that the indicators 1-4 presented above can play in important part in figuring out reputation and influence-related issues in regards to Twitter participation.

Stay tuned, we will bring you these indicators and other metrics for measuring your ‘influence’ on Twitter soon right here.

Addendum

Check out: trend spotting – TWITTER – checklist for building trust with your global social media audience

Are you trying to assess a social media monitoring service?
Are you sure that your social media efforts have an impact?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of your social media campaign?

READ ON…

Recently we told you about an interesting conference – Going Solo – Ropes to Skip. Today we point out another one that has come up on our social media radar.

Social media is en vogue these days and many vendors and consultants are trying to offer us new tools and gadgets that should help us find our way through the maze of offerings. Some of the issues that make measuring and benchmarking social media efforts we have addressed here:

- Twitter – means getting a better conference experience

- Social media – Intel shows how e-proxy can be done effectively

- Google, Digg.com and Twitter: Why such Drive-By Traffic is of Little Value

However, many more issues remain. For instance, we have pointed out that social media monitoring can be a challenge. Social media monitoring also means checking if who listens to you makes a difference to your bottom line.

Unless your sales improve or your important stakeholders care, your social media efforts do not have an impact.

Recently, I came a across the social media influence conference that intends to discuss:

“How social media is shaping corporate reputation management, marketing and communications”

Of course, this important issue interests most of us that have to work with social media.

The one-day conference offers you some interesting sessions. Check out the program here:

Speakers at the social media influence 1-day conference June 4 in London – UK

I will be trying to sit in the first row with my laptop to report live, using Twitter – so read our tweets. Please leave a comment, tell me what you think about the conference but also about live tweeting the event and if you will be there as well.

If you are new to this area and you want to know more about what is out there by way of social media monitoring and measurement services – stay tuned we report regularly about the latest developments with this blog.

Join the conversation! The conference offers a Twitter feed and experts will use Twitter during the conference on June 4, 2008 SIGN up now and be informed about the latest conference developments and trends:

Twitter feed – Social Media Influence Conference – June 4 – 2008 – London

So post-it notes and notebooks is what Twitter is to blogs – a sort of micro-blogging that is becoming ever more popular with users.
Some have argued that all this microblogging is helping us to become less effective

Some people have compared post-it notes and notebooks to what Twitter is to blogs. However, Twitter is another social network that makes our living in a glass bowl as far as privacy is concerned ever more a reality:

Kids have difficulties using this technology safely:

Safer Internet Day 2008 – CyTRAP Labs quicktip – facebook versus privacy

So are corporations who must deal with the security issues. I am pretty certain that Forrester Research failed to address and reflect on two issues namely:

a) EU-ReguStand trend spotting – Twitter – e-discovery requires managing your risk exposure smartly

b) Twitter – why this technology causes corporations some serious headaches

We have pointed out before that Twitter can help you wasting quite a bit of work time.

On one of our recent posts, Adam Cohen made an important point in saying:

While some of the “tweets” were not always on topic, I would suggest we are all still learning about Twitter and it’s usefulness in these situations.

However, for Hugh McLeod it was all clear that Twitter had failed him to bring order and help manage the e-mail overload better so his decision was:

2008-04-10 – declaring Twitter bankruptcy

He felt that the Twitter strategy had failed for him. Nonetheless, with some cyber mobbing from his friends he decided to get back onto Twitter. Still we are uncertain if it will do him any good and help being more productive. Therefore, we sent him a set of 12 tools that might help in cutting down the time wasted with Twitter.

CyTRAP Labs tip – 12 best Twitter tools

MichelleBB will most likely appreciate getting these tools or knows them already because she commented:

“I think we all see this year’s Forum as an opportunity to learn how to better leverage tools like Twitter to enhance the value of conferences for attendees and watchers alike.”

Nevertheless, as I pointed out in my previous post Twitter: wake up and smell the coffee – have a conversation instead raising the question:

- do these technologies improve the level,

- depth or accuracy

of our conversations. Put differently, do the add quality or quantity?

MichelleBB’s comment above lets me conclude that it does not have to be this way if one uses Twitter somewhat effectively – that goes for conference delegates as well as freelancers working from home while being logged into Twitter during the workday.

Eric Weaver started the discussions by stating:

First, those of us there tweeting were doing so for different reasons. Some were using Twitter as a note-taking mechanism, some to share gems with followers. Some were using it to connect with others at the conference, and some with colleagues who couldn’t attend. The great thing about Twitter is that interested parties can sift through these tweets to find good stuff. But I would encourage people to link back to tweeters’ blogs for the real “meat”. It’s hard to continually craft gems in 140 characters or less.

CONCLUSION

Twitter is a wonderful tool if used correctly, as Warren Sukernek put so nicely in his comment:

“Twitter at conferences has numerous benefits:

- Makes the conference more collaborative via usage of the backchannel, so that it becomes a we event.

- enables the twitterer to take notes and stay more focused/engaged

- Provides those not at the conference with live on-going updates.”

Amy Worley puts it quite similar by saying:

“There are a lot of conversations going on right now related to how many people a person can feasibly follow on twitter before it becomes unproductive. Right now I think we’re each finding our own way to get the most out of it.”

Accordingly, working with Twitter can add value in many ways whilst listening to a keynote speaker at a conference. To make it feasible for attendees to network all it needs is a tag agreed beforehand as happened with the Forrester Marketing 2008 conference that used the #forrmarketing08 tag. In turn, Twitter adds a real-time chat feature for interacting with other delegates or those like me watching the video stream from afar. However, we have to use Twitter and other similar tools in such a way that they add value to our work and possibly professional lives beyond the conference itself.

Based on the feedback I received from people participating using Twitter at the Forrester Marketing 2008 conference (an expensive event, wished I could attend ), the majority sending a tweet to me or commenting on blog felt positive about it.

In addition, blog comments indicate that delegates agree one way or the other that there is room for improvement, before we can take even better advantage of Twitter than most of us are able to do today.

My personal viewpoint is influenced by having experienced a conference this week where we did neither have wireless nor stationary access to the Internet. This was an unusual experience for me. Certainly, not having been able to share what went on during the conference with some of my buddies on Twitter that were not attending has been a new

experience for me (or taking a step back in time).

So I am looking forward to attending Going Solo where we will make great use of this technology to create even better synergies amongst attendees and and those trying to join the conversation from afar

PS. 1

Even Wired seems to overestimate the effect Twitter might have on our lives or survival when it comes to natural disasters – see this story:

2007-10-24 – Wired – In Disasters, Everyone, Not Just Bloggers, Should Use Twitter

Twitter may be great if your mobile phone is charged and you were able to take it with you, when running out of the house to escape a wild fire (e.g., Southern California). In such geographically contained cases of emergencies, SMS messages or Twitter can be great to keep people posted about where to go for being safe or to get shelter. Naturally, this assumes that the mobile network is working.

PS. 2

T-Mobile is the only carrier in the U.S. that blocks both, Facebook Mobile and Twitter on its network.

Does live tweeting add value to your conference experience or is it just another distraction?
Will tomorrow’s conference require us to check in the gun – pardon mobile devices to assure that the audience stays focused?
Some have argued that all this microblogging is helping us to become less effective

In the past we believed that having coffee (tea if you prefer) together may help collaboration, networking, and cross-fertilization. These days many of us spend enormous time online with such tools as Twitter. In fact, your boss might be wondering right now, why you did not join the conversation around the coffee machine. Of course, reason was that you tried to stay connected reading various tweets during your break instead of talking to your colleagues.

Incidentally, Twitter is a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time. Some experts also describe it as kind of a micro blogging platform that allows you to publish short messages. For us in Europe, the 140 characters limit it imposes on your writing is similar to writing an SMS on our mobile phones. However, the difference is that one can use Twitter through the web, instant messaging or one’s mobile phone. As well, depending on how many follow you, your message could reach thousands of people in an instant.

Conference delegates using Twitter

Recently, ever more conferences offer delegates the opportunity to use an instant messaging system, such as Twitter whilst listening to presentations.

One of the people I follow on Twitter is Jeremiah Owyang. In fact, he is one of my “favourites” because in some of his tweets he shares links to some interesting material I appreciate getting to look at. Recently his employer, a US consulting firm, had a two-day conference entitled:

2008-04-09 – Forrester Marketing Conference Day 2: Understanding Your Customers through Engagement

I got curious, when Jeremiah sent this tweet:
jowyang Who else is live tweeting the event? @nickhuhn @Rumford and watch the aggregation here http://tinyurl.com/6cd27o

Therefore, I analyzed the tweets from the 2-day conference. Particularly, I tried to figure what was happening whilst watching the online feed offered during this conference.

For starters, I felt many people took advantage of the opportunity to tweet about the conference. Interestingly enough, some tweets had little or nothing to do with the presentation that was happening right at the time in the room they sat in.

Twitter gave people following the conference through the video feed the opportunity to participate. For instance, one could ask a question. In turn, somebody in the audience might pick it up and subsequently ask the presenter. That I thought was a great way to use Twitter.

Nevertheless, I dared to put up a post about the aggregate tweets I found from the conference here:

ComMetrics Searched Tweet Scan for: forrmarketing08 http://tinyurl.com/5jpxvg I am just not sure if this chatter adds any beef

I have gotten some interesting feedback from people about how they felt having everybody using Twitter while a presentation was going on. Most of the feedback raised the issue that people felt it was not easy to keep focusing on the presentation. In particular, they felt the technology distracted them from focusing on what was happening in the room itself.

Nonetheless, last night I went again through all the tweets from the conference. I found some real gems, such as:
Weave : The unspoken issue with engagemt is affinity. The idea is not to engage w/everyone, just folks with affinity 4 ur brand. #forrmarketing08

or

MichelleBB : How do you adjust for fact that delivery service buyer (price sensitive ) is very different from user (service oriented). #forrmarketing08

However, one had to look to find a few gems amongst many. Not all material was much on the topic. Not all posts contained special insights the writer was willing to share with us via Twitter.

Other messages were somewhat private. In turn, they did not improve ones comprehension of what was happening on the floor or what the presenter was trying to convey to the audience. One case illustrating this was this tweet:

adamcohen : downscope for the flight home to Boston, enjoy rest of Forrester conference Thank you @forrester @jowyang for hosting #forrmarketing08

Does Twitter improve your conference experience?

If you got 200 or more people in a room with wireless connectivity and an aggregate feed from a tool like Twitter, people will tweet away for sure.

The difficulty for both, delegates in the room and those watching the video stream from afar, is how to stay focused in-midst of all these attempts to stay ‘connected.’ For instance, personal messages go back and forth addressing such earth shaking issues as why somebody was happy or disappointed when getting his coffee at Starbuck’s upstairs (i.e. in the conference venue). I am not sure that we cared much sitting over here at night in front of our computers watching .

During these two days, tweets came in fast and furious. They did distract me from focusing on what the presenter was saying and what came in through the video stream.

I believe what delegates might have forgotten when they used Twitter to chat is that the ‘whole’ world was reading their messages or tweets. In short, yes, Twitter adds some value but one has to work hard to find the gems in-midst of all the chatter.

If you have a different opinion or a suggestion on how we can use Twitter more effectively at the next conference? Let us know, inquiring minds want to know. Until then I will continue to use Twitter only in instances where I have something to contribute to the conversation.

PS.Apart from the fact that Twitter raises some serious InfoSec and privacy concerns (we will talk about these later), there are also some regulatory and compliance issues one should not forget when using Twitter (stay tuned – I will talk about them).

Google can definitely steer some traffic your way. Unfortunately, search engine traffic is quite often low quality traffic that will not stay around.

Accordingly, search engine traffic gets what it wants from your website, thereafter, it moves on to another site on the net. The same applies to traffic coming from social bookmarking sites such as Digg.com

My recommendation for benchmarking your traffic: focus on your readers and not too much on your web statistics.

During a recent meeting with one of our customers, she provided us with two interesting bits of information:

1) she learned from her webmaster that about 50% her firm’s web page traffic came from search engines, however,
2) a friend told her that such traffic was not very useful in helping her efforts to grow the business.

Therefore, the question she put to us was:

What is your reading on this, do you agree with my friend that search traffic is useless or…?

Below we will try to shed some light on this issue and we want to hear from you what you think, so please leave a comment and tell us about your experience and opinion on this matter.

1) Relying on traffic coming from search engines means getting low quality traffic

It is unreliable traffic. It is web surfers killing time. The best traffic is the traffic that comes to your site directly through bookmarks, RSS or clicking on a link when reading your e-mailed news digest. These are people that know abut you and the valuable content you offer. They know where to find you. Incidentally, we at ComMetrics.com predict that by 2009 advertisers will begin paying more for sites that get their traffic direct and not through search engines and news aggregators.

My advice: Do not commoditize your content.

2) Social bookmark traffic (e.g., Furl, del.icio.us) is temporary, whereby users grab the content and surf on to the next item

Most of the social bookmark traffic is temporary, whereby very few visitors will:

- spend much time on your site
- venture into your site
- sign-up to your newsletter or RSS feed

My advice: Take the traffic you get through social bookmarks. Best could be that you get one or two of these visitors to subscribe to your RSS or e-mail feed. Other than that, do not spend too much time on getting such type of traffic.

3) Twitter brings a spike but…

Twitter is a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time. The placement of links within profiles and conversations can direct visitors to a specific website.

However, Twitter users tend to be quite webbing savvy, making it difficult to target a specific subset. Depending on how many might follow you and see when you send a link, they might distribute it on their network.

For instance, recently Going Solo referred to our past post about their conference and other matters on Twitter like this:

Great article about Going Solo (and going solo) by Urs: http://commetrics.com/?p=93 (must read)

Naturally, most Going Solo followers (at that time 93) were clicking on the link to read the post.

However, how many of these visitors looked around our web site and became subscribers to our RSS or e-mail feed? We don’t think more than 1 [we know, of course, that three of the Going Solo Twitter feed are subscribers of the ComMetrics blog already ]

In addition, did you know that just about 100 digg.com users account for more than 50% of the stories that make it to the front page of Digg?

Finally, are those additional readers from social bookmarking services your potential clients (e.g., for your investment services, tax advice, child care, IT outsourcing)?

My advice: Optimize for your customers who should be your primary target group as readers.

Do not worry about those dropping by thanks to a tweed on Twitter or a digg on Digg.com

Nevertheless, make it easy for those drive-by visitors to sign up to your feeds. Surprise, a few of them always will and, most importantly, they could end up being one of your clients.

Bottom LineMany news sites rely on search engine traffic for as much as 60 per cent of their traffic, often more. They invest heavily in making their content discoverable through keywords, tagging, metadata, URL structure, and a dozen more parameters.This is a big burden and it does nothing to improve the quality of content, only the quality of discoverability.

When I look at my server logs I see that about 70 – 85 per cent of my traffic (i.e. depends on which web site) comes to my site thanks to bookmarks or RSS (e-mail) subscribers. 10 – 30 per cent of our visitors come via referrer links. Only 5 to 20 per cent of our visitors end up with us due to a social bookmark or being sent over by served search results.

Getting a hundred people that read your posts carefully is satisfying. Some of these readers might even be influenced by your writing and feel the urge to post an insightful comment on one of your stories every other week or so.

That beats a thousand digg.com readers that barely stay to read the complete abstract any day. A spike in traffic is nice; nonetheless, focus on your target audience (i.e. customers and potential customers). Get the target audience to subscribe to your RSS and/or e-mail feed. It is those individuals that help your business grow.

When posting a story, focus on your customers’ needs, pay attention.

So what did we advice our customer regarding traffic?

Benchmarking is easy, just make sure your current clients and potential ones find your blog’s content helps them with their work. Even better is if they leave a few comments about your posts during 2008.

Leaving comments is another good indicator to get a feel if they care and are willing to spend the time to give feedback.

As importantly, discuss content with them when you meet next time (e.g., over a cup of coffee). The blog can help your efforts for establishing yourself as an expert. In turn, this will increase trust and help your sales efforts.

One of our readers has read about Going Solo – an upcoming conference in Lausanne (see logo below) and wanted to know if he should attend AND what he might get out of it.

I tried to assess this issue from my perspective. Please keep in mind that I have registered myself, paid the fee and look forward to attend Going Solo. Hence, my response may be somewhat biased, nonetheless….

As an entrepreneur or freelancer some of the things we point out below may sound very familiar to you, remember those days? How about a smile? For those of you working on a new venture, please keep these Ropes to Skip in mind. You could just save yourself some grief.

Going Solo is a conference for freelancers and entrepreneurs. I am sure many of you will be interested. Stephanie Booth (the organizer) had a chat about the focus of the conference with Stowe Boyd, one of the speakers. What they discussed you can read about in more detail here:

Going Solo: The Three Skills of Soloing

I agree with everything the say, particularly that somebody going solo needs to consider

a few things to make sure to increase their likelihood of success. These are:

1) Doing the work,

2) Marketing and networking, and

3) Prospecting, contracts and cash flow

I would probably put prospecting under point 2 but that is just a small detail. Nonetheless, my limited experience in this field has taught me a few more things that I would like to share with you here. These I see as the Ropes to Skip on the journey to becoming a successful freelancer or entrepreneur.

A) Where will your business be located? In some countries, doing freelancing is much easier than in others. The reason might be culture, regulation and possibly the people as well. Hence, when I launched a business in California during my university studies that was easy (i.e. got a licence, used one room in our condominium and voila, we were open for business). Doing it again in Canada (Alberta) was very much the same. Have the idea, get a license and start selling.

When I came to Denmark and wanted to try it there, it took a bit more paperwork and effort to get going. Same rules apply for Switzerland when I started last year. Therefore, whenever we think about going freelance, how things work in San Francisco is different from how they work in Aalborg (Denmark). In some countries, it takes more time and effort to get it right the first time.

To illustrate, in Switzerland I discovered that blue chip clients are reluctant to give work to a freelancer. Things can improve if you offer unique skills, work in a niche and have incorporated your business (hence, you have some capital invested besides just sweat equity). Being able to show that several people work for your micro enterprise does also help.

My advice: Keep cultural differences in mind and set things up properly before quitting your daytime job.

B) So you are hanging out a shingle – why should clients come to you? Others might put it even simpler: You can quit your current job after you have secured and successfully brought to completion two contracts. It will be tough to do these contracts while holding down a full-time job. However, it is the best way to get a taste of what it takes to work on your own. It is especially helpful to discover how tough it can be to succeed in the marketplace, without having all the resources of a large employer at your disposal (expertise, infrastructure, contacts, brand, etc.).

Deciding to quit your current job is the easy part. Securing a revenue stream that is large enough to pay your bills and rent is a much greater challenge.

In some countries, without the right social network and people who know and trust your skills and capabilities, it might take you months until you get some jobs that pay serious money.

Remember, costs add up from day one. Will you be able to survive the first three months without any serious income?

So do not go out renting a nice office or spend money on fancy equipment, unless you have a client who signed on the dotted line giving you the work that will pay for all this. Do not forget, you need to pay yourself a salary for the next three months.

My advice: Do not spend anything unless you have the cash to pay for it. Cash is king.

C) Do you think we need another consultant or product / software / gadget? The advantage of an older person deciding to launch her business is that you might have worked in the industry for a while. Not only have you gained experience but also, more importantly, you have probably established a network of contacts in the industry.

To illustrate the above, UK statistics suggest that starting as a freelancer or entrepreneur at a somewhat older age helps. The likelihood of a business still thriving after five years is greatest for freelancers or entrepreneurs who are around 50 years of age when starting out. Apparently, those folks know the industry, have the necessary contacts and are able to identify and exploit a market niche that helps their venture succeed.

My advice: Unless you can pass the elevator test (ground floor to first floor is all it takes to explain who is purchasing your product and why), it will be a tough uphill battle on the road to success.

D) Does your service, software or tool satisfy a need? A marketing ace just recently asked me about our ComMetrics software for benchmarking webpages, blogs and social media efforts and said:

What is the product’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP)?

I explained it as follows:

‘If you are in the situation where you run a social media program at a corporation (webpage, blog, online advertising) and you need to measure your success against your competitors, ComMetrics is for you. More importantly, the tool helps one to show to the bosses that this ‘new media’ program is worth its weight. The ComMetrics Social Media Health Check empowers you to demonstrate the value of your social media program as well as indicating where your program can be improved over the next Quarter.’

In simple terms, customers want products and services that serve a need and a desire. Therefore, unless your consulting service or your software tool does that, it will be an extremely hard sell. Accordingly, there is a reason why women wear black high heels when going on a date and not sneakers:

Why women buy black high heels – the guide for everything

Nonetheless, even designing and making black high heels does not mean that women will flock to your store to purchase these things. We should address that issue in another post.

My advice: Check if you can identify the need your service or product will satisfy and, most importantly, your chances for successfully exploiting that market niche.

Bottom Line

In some countries, things are a bit more formal than in others. Hence, having some experience in the industry and knowing the key players personally does help your efforts when starting out as a freelancer or entrepreneur.

In addition, large companies or blue chip outfits may not be willing to do business with a self-employed designer or software guru. Our experience has been that Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) offer us the best opportunity for securing new contracts. For starters, the owner may understand very well what it takes to start out. Moreover, he or she can make a decision about your contract without having to secure support from many parties. This is often required in a large corporation. In fact, your counterpart may not want to take any risks by giving you the job and, instead, prefer to hire a blue-chip consulting firm.

The greatest challenge is to secure a regular revenue stream. Once you have a few regular clients that provide you with monthly revenues, things get a bit easier. You can plan and invest in new ventures or equipment, while being sure that the money is coming in to pay for these expenses.

Going Solo and Benchmarking Yourself

So what about Going Solo. Well if you are going solo or thinking about it, check this out:

Who is Going Solo For?

The above points we put up can be seen as important markers that you need to address before going solo. Success is the result of hard work and your family, friends or children may not always appreciate the time commitments you must make to help your venture grow.

Whatever you decide to do, going to an event such as as Going Solo gives you a chance to hear from other freelancers, learn the ropes, add a few more tricks to your toolbox. etc. And let us not forget that besides networking you will have a good time, I am sure.