Answer Guy Central

Clients (and others) ask me all the time: how do I find something new to write about five times each week? My answer is simple: I’m passionate about what I write about, and the people who come here like it, get value from it, and call The Computer Answer Guy, or Answer Guy Central, or PC-VIP when they need our help.

I write this, then, because there are reasons for me to do so. So why are you using Twitter, Facebook, or any of the many other social networking tools that have taken hold of us, our businesses, and our lives?

The answer, of course, is that you must; as business evolves and business change keeps happening all around us it’s becoming more clear every day that failing to engage means you’ll become disengaged. But you still need to have a message.

I recently came across this post from David Risley. David is a young Australian fellow running a successful Internet business selling nothing more than words of wisdom on how to run a successful Internet business . . . which makes him by most measurements not all that fascinating. But in that post David presents a very simple, easily followed road map for answering the question “why am I doing social networking?”.

Remember, I had to look a client in the eye recently when he asked me, after much thought and research, if the world has too many blogs. Similarly there are some very real questions to deal with when you think about whether it’s simply too late to start blogging. And hey, it’s even been suggested that Facebook and Twitter themselves are doomed.

But at the end of it all, social networking, whether by blog, Facebook, Twitter, or some other tool, and Search Engine Optimization are now critical to your business’ future.

The questions aren’t really about if, but about how and what. And you need to answer them. We’ll help, if you think you need that. But get started, and keep going.

If you’re one of those “The Internet and Information Should Be Free” people, you probably don’t much care for the Wall Street Journal. The House that Rupert Murdoch Re-Built is one of the few places on the Internet where content has been pay-only since day one and has managed to thrive that way.

I admire Mr. Murdoch’s resolve, and his ability to make money where most others have failed, even if I believe he’s way off the mark in the way he goes about things.

But I more admire the management of The New York Times, who have signaled that when they start charging for access to their content sometime next year that they’ll not be roping off articles from their newspaper against bloggers and other outside links.

Personally, I’m relieved. There are quite a few links on the Answer Guy Central web site that point to articles from the New York Times, and I was worried that we’d have to either live with a lot of bad information here or go back and re-do lots of our content. Neither was looking like fun, and knowing that our existing content will be safe is a load off my mind.

And I’m happy to see that in Mr. Murdoch’s world the idea that “news is news” has trumped competitive silliness; the link I gave you above explaining the decision that The Times has made is to a story from the Wall Street Journal . . . or at least a blog by one of its reporters.

But the questions about information being “free” and what that means in the Internet era remain unanswered. Information IS free; what isn’t free is the way information gets arranged. So for example, when you hear that disclaimer about “unauthorized use of the pictures, descriptions and accounts of this game without the express written consent of . . .” on just about any broadcast sporting event, you’re perfectly safe describing what you saw. What’s protected is the actual broadcast, not the events being broadcast.

The only possible justification for wanting to lock down your information-based web site comes from a belief that what you provide is so unique that it deserves to be paid for. The New York Times is being very smart; their stories aren’t unique and so linking to them should be allowed. What’s unique—if anything—is the arrangement as the New York Times.

Sometimes business change is knowing what not to change. Good job, New York Times.

This morning I got to work, and found a comment in my in-box. One of our subscribers to this blog had taken exception to something that happens here at Answer Guy Central.

Here’s the way things work: each time a new visitor comes here, we point out as they leave that we’re happy to stay in touch. We make that happen by having a small window pop up on their screen and offering a chance to  receive a monthly newsletter from us.

As you can see from the response I left to that comment, we view this as a business process. Writing this stuff takes time, and we want to make sure that you remember us and stay in touch. Ask anyone who writes, is a journalist, does blogging, or whatever you want to call it; we all like attention!

This post isn’t about that, though; it’s about Customer Service.

When someone visits Answer Guy Central, we treat them like a customer. That means we care what they think, and if they offer a suggestion, criticism, some comments, or give any reason at all for us to engage in customer service communications, we respond.

And when people are unhappy, giving that response isn’t always fun. OK, It never is.

At the same time, it’s important, and we learn. Believe me when I tell you that customer service is the most important activity your company engages in. And all you need to do to be good at customer service is listen, and care.

I’ve commented before that a few of the better known folks in social networking don’t actually seem to understand this. Let me give props to someone who does: Dani Shapiro, an author of books that I personally find impossible to read, answers every single person who writes to her. Ringo Starr (yes, that Ringo Starr) says that he answered all his Beatles-related fan mail until about a year ago. LOTS of it.

Is that kind of customer service hard? Is customer-service-for-all a time consuming and expensive business expense? You bet. And in today’s business environment, it’s important to growth and business success.

Treat your customers the way you want to be treated. Customer Service doesn’t have to mean giving in; bit it does mean giving.

Over the years since this Internet thing started taking hold, there’s been a lot of debate over an important question: Are Bloggers Journalists?

Of course, the question seems more important to former journalists who are unable to find work than it does to most other people. Well, I know a few of those and the one point that I’ve heard a few times and sticks is that journalists are held to a set of professional standards that separates their work from what bloggers do by virtue of imposing external or reporting and editing chain of command accountability for the accuracy of what they write.

Merriam Webster is of no real help. They define journalist as one who reports “for a news medium” (this defends the old-school position), but also simply as “one who keeps a journal”, which does not, and one who “aims for a mass audience”, which can be argued either way. Dictionary.com helps a little more, suggesting that a journalist is one who is in the profession of journalism.

OK, so . . . aren’t bloggers who get paid to write journals or whose work as writers of journals gain them money even indirectly (cripes, like me?!) therefore journalists? I have no answer. And that’s the nature of business change; as formerly-clear issues evolve there’s going to be disagreement over what that evolution means.

This weekend, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt addressed the American Society of News Editors and told them that he thinks bloggers aren’t journalists. Yesterday, Curt Hopkins, a writer at ReadWriteWeb, reacted angrily. Mr. Hopkins, a guy with a long pedigree as a “real” journalist, overstepped and in doing so perhaps undermined his own point; Mr. Schmidt never stated that people without print distribution channels were by definition not journalists. But the CEO of the world’s largest media company did some evil, and after Google’s decision a few days ago to start making size matter in search rankings I find myself wondering whether the only business change Google thinks is good is the one that doesn’t happen.

In other words, when the little guy becomes the big guy, does his perspective automatically change?

I guess the question ultimately really is about where you make your money. When Google was just a search engine and still looking for alliances with big established companies they would never have tried to define journalism narrowly. Now that Google is the big guy the rules have changed.

And that’s what business change is all about: you see the rules change, and you change your business to take advantage of it.

By the way: I don’t consider myself a journalist, but I reserve the right to change my mind.

It made the New York Times, so it must be true: women are blogging, and they’re passionate about it. So much so that they’re dropping everything that used to be important to them to spend more and more time in their hot new pursuit. Friends, I give you the MILB™.

By the Way, I hereby claim trademark in the MILB acronym. I’ve poked around, and nobody else has used it. I invented the term. It’s mine.

With due homage to the too-incredible-to-believe-except-it’s-true point that women are now getting together to blog in groups and that blogging has become the modern-day kaffeeklatsch, the story here is about the Internet and just how deeply it’s reached into our lives. While many if not most of the women that this story talks about will never build out the kind of brands they’re hoping to become, the fact that they spend so much time blogging, talking about blogging, and therefore being ever-more-real Internet presences says everything you need to know about the Internet’s importance to your business.

Business Change isn’t always about you and your business. In fact, it rarely is. Meaningful Business Change happens when you look at what’s happening around you and adapt. Find a way to reach groups of influence, and start today. And don’t turn up your nose at seemingly small niches like MILBs. They’re what the long tail is all about.

Who wants a MILF when you can have a MILB ? Or a few dozen?

Recently a client for whom Virtual VIP does marketing consulting asked me: Are There Too Many Blogs? My answer to him was a quick and decisive who knows?

In trying to answer his question, I started by saying that there are way too many for most of them to be terribly meaningful. But that’s a non-answer, right? Thousands of people consistently read these pearls of wisdom, but it’s a far cry from the number who hung on my every word back in the day, when The Computer Answer Guy was an internationally broadcast radio and internet program, and when I did television for CBS News.

So to answer the client’s question, I altered it to this:  “Are There Too Many Businesses?”

Sounds silly? My point was that the landscape is crowded, and the best way to stand out is to MAKE yourself stand out. And that’s what blogs are for.

If you think thousands of people are likely to care about your words of brilliance, well, it’s likely that you’re deluding yourself. On the other hand, blogging isn’t really about that any more; if you don’t establish a meaningful beachhead you will consign yourself to being UNmeaningful. Blogging is the best way to do that, assuming you do it correctly.

At this point the question becomes more real: is dumping your thoughts onto a web page good enough to get you noticed? And the answer is probably not. Blogging and SEO go hand in hand; you need to tell the world your story, show what you’re good at, and . . . make sure people find you. SEO, an acronym that gets thrown about so much I actually heard it at a Bat Mitzvah this weekend, is about yet another obtuse idea: that of long-tail marketing.

Oy Vey, as my people say. Sometimes, business change is about seeing change, even when it looks like the same old thing. Contact The Answer Guy if you want to hear more . . .

A few days ago, and with no notice at all, Google deleted a handful of blogs. <POOF!> Gone. Just like that.

Most of the attention to this has focused on what those blogs did; they were repositories for music, and while there were reviews attached (for example) to legitimize the blogs’ purpose, they were in fact making copyrighted materials available without the permission of the copyright holders.

And that, as you know, is generally not legal.

There’s a very small piece of me that finds the debate and protest against Google’s action fascinating. And it’s a huge protest; search Twitter for #Musicblogocide2K10 to see (Or Google itself once Twitter’s history expires). I’ve covered various aspects of music and movie piracy a few times (see here and here)  and how studios are taking more successful steps to get us to pay for Movies and Television on the Internet.

But ultimately Google did what they had to do; faced with a take-down notice from the RIAA and not wanting to fight a legal battle that they’d eventually lose and wouldn’t benefit from either way, they capitulated.

The issue is what protection the blog writers have from Google acting this way. The thin complaint that’s being offered is that Google deleted those blogs without notice or giving the people who wrote them a chance to respond to the RIAA take-down requests.

And now the Internet gets interesting: Who Owns Your Web Site?

Not being an attorney, I don’t have an opinion that means enough to offer. I’ve been in the media business and other businesses for quite a while and understand a lot about things like copyrights and trademarks, and I’m a firm believer that common sense, applied carefully, will often obviate the need for an attorney. But as President Bill Clinton proved when he uttered that famous phrase “it depends on what you think ‘is‘ is”, a word like “ownership” is not as simple as it seems.

There’s no question that the things the bloggers write belong to them. And while it’s more difficult to answer clearly, a question about the “look and feel” of their web sites would also be answered with “that’s theirs”. Similarly, the “work product” you create belongs to you.

But the music being hosted belonged to someone else. Someone with deep pockets and a demonstrated propensity to sue anyone who uses their product without permission. And Google’s position? THEY WERE GIVING AWAY THE SPACE THOSE BLOGS WERE HOSTED ON.

Simple concept, friends: when you do business with someone, make sure you are actually doing business with them. Free almost always means “they have no obligation to do anything for you, and you have no real recourse”.

Are you storing documents on your free Google Docs account? You can believe that Google will protect the things you keep on their servers, but other than Google having said they plan to keep doing so you have no leverage if they stop providing the service or start charging for it. And you’re sure not gonna sue Google if they change their minds.

For goodness sake—more important, for your sake and to gain some protection against a very ugly business change—don’t host your web site for free. There are many inexpensive places we can place your Internet presence, and I mean truly inexpensive.

It’s your business, and if you want your business web site to stay yours, we know some very simple ways to insure that.

So it turns out that young people have stopped blogging.

Really? When were they?

It was only a few months ago that kids thought Twitter was stupid, and unsafe. Now, young people are embracing the world’s hottest social networking site in droves. But the impetus for this change isn’t that Twitter has become any better; the deal here is that regular blogging takes too long, while just spewing your thoughts 140 characters at a time is easy!

When I told you a few months ago that Miley Cyrus had stopped using Twitter, my commentary ran toward how bad a business decision that was. My recent comments about Kim Kardashian and her $10,000 Titter posts have been about business change in the advertising world and how things that look unimportant can be huge.

Then, there are my own recent thoughts that blogging, as important as it (or something like it) is to your future business success, might be “over” if only because there are so many blogs being written, often about the same thing. Clients ask me about that idea all the time. Is it too late to blog?

All of this ponits, ultimately, in the same direction: the amount of business change we’re going through at this moment in time might be unprecedented, and unique or not is a lot to manage. But manage it we must.

“Young people have moved from blogging to Twitter“? Then if you want to do business with them you’d better be there too, and understand how it works. Or, just do nothing; your competitors would love that.

I’ve been known to pick on Michael Arrrington. I think he’s a whiny self-important blowhard whose words are often not worth reading. Also, I’ve said as recently as last week that blogging may be in trouble. Today, I wish to compliment Mike, and give you an example of when blogging is the most useful tool anywhere.

A few days ago, Harman Bajwa was quite unpleasantly surprised when he found that Facebook had taken away his page. Why did Facebook do that? Because Harman’s given name matches the name of a big company, and they had claimed that he was violating their trademark.

Umm . . . no.

If I wanted to claim /pepsi as my Facebook page, or if I registered pepsi.com as an Internet address, then Pepsico would have a valid reason to grab their property from me. Even if I was a fan and saying only nice things about them, disclaiming any official links between us, and not making money, Pepsi would have every right to say I was using “their” name.

Unless, of course, my name was Pepsi.

Back to where I started, now: Facebook has given Harman back his page, and two interesting things crop up: Mike Arrington helped make it happen, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now friended to Harman.

Facebook did the right thing, and quickly. Since most newsworthy stories seem to be bad this is now a non-story, right? Yes, unless you simply want to point out that Facebook is a good citizen (this time). And no lawsuits were filed! Are you listening, Facebook PR Department?

Or unless you need a lesson in the way social networking works, and why you need to be on top of the techniques and issues that drive it.

If a sentence falls on your computer screen and you don’t read it, did it make a sound?

In order to do my job, I listen a lot. I talk a lot, too, but if I don’t pay attention to what’s going on around me I really can’t be the kind of coach and mentor my clients need.

So I read. All the time. That’s great, because I really enjoy keeping up on what’s happening in the business and technology communities. Having it be a big part of my job makes everything even better!

It isn’t always easy, and the way I approach the task of keeping up on all that reading varies (as it should). Some things get mailed to me. Some show up in my e-mail or browser. And others come to me through an RSS feed (you can receive this feed by subscribing here) and land in my Droid SmartPhone.

Lately, there’s too much.

I don’t mean there’s too much for me to keep up with. What I’m saying is that there’s too much repetitive noise. On my Droid, I receive 300-400 articles each day, and a similar number of tweets from the people I follow on Twitter. It sounds like a lot, but I drink my own Kool-Aid and just as I put business management systems in place for others I have an information management system in place for myself that lets me get through that without missing much.

But I’m noticing that the 800 or so items each day are actually about twenty items worth reading re-issued over and over again, plus another dozen or so pithy remarks that catch my attention. I like the pithy remarks. But seeing the same story come across my plain of vision thirty times just tells me that there are too many people whose job it is TO TRY AND GET MY ATTENTION, instead of actually having something to say.

Yesterday, The New York Times announced that sometime next year they will start charging for access to their web site. They aren’t talking about what that will look like, other than to say that it will probably involve giving everyone a limited amount of free access, after which they will have to pay if they want to read any more that day/week/month.  They also aren’t saying how much it will cost.

The question now is this: will The Times and the rest of the “serious journalism world”  get us to pay, and will that spell the end of the amateur or underpaid blogging world, or will the opposite occur and we’ll be thrust into a world where more and more repetitive but mostly useless information is what we look at?

I hope paid content wins. You know that old line about “you get what you pay for?”. The words of bloggers are feeling more and more like they’re worth what we pay for them. And while I’m sad saying it, that’s a business change we all need to root for.

I’ve written about Coopetition a few times. It’s one of my favorite topics when business change is on the table, and depending on how you view it, coopetition is either very easy or almost impossible to understand.

In a nutshell, the idea is that you don’t really have competitors any more. Now, coopetition has created a business environment where you find a way to work with others who formerly looked like competitors, but are now viewed as collaborators—even if there’s a zero-sum game for your shared potential customers.

Coopetition isn’t all that new an idea, but it’s the Internet and our new incredibly short attention spans that’s finally brought it to an easily explained place. I mentioned last week that CNet Managing Editor Jon Skillings had actually asked me to read their material and take the extra time needed to comment, but not to identify myself. Ridiculous. In adding (invited!) opinion to a post you add value to it both by expanding the readers’ minds and by keeping the readers on the post’s web site longer.

So here’s the next step: there’s a piece of code that can be added to Internet content that tells Google and other search engines that they should ignore links. That code is called NoFollow, and I can’t think of a good reason to use it.

OK, I can, but it doesn’t work when business change and coopetition are brought into play. NoFollow doesn’t stop a link from working, so if you comment on something you find on the Internet and include a link to back up your opinion that link will still do what you expect. But it does enable the site adding NoFollow to links to make your opinion “not count”.

And of course the reason to do that is to maintain a position of superior influence. In cases where you’re trying to cut down on SPAM, NoFollow could have a place, but there are other tools to handle that and I promise you every big web site uses them. And they work better than NoFollow

I’m all for winning. But NoFollow isn’t creating a long-term win, and as people come to understand that and call its users on the fact that they are saying “we want your opinion here to make us look important, but it doesn’t count” it’s going to backfire.

NoFollow: Don’t use it. And don’t stand still for other who short-circuit business change by doing so.

Heads Up: I’m about to tell you more about business and this web site than you wanted to know. Please pay attention, because your business survival in the 2010′s depends on it. Your next business change could be “no more business”.

On Christmas, I received a gift that I’m going to share with you. It’s this blog post. Read it, right now. I’m serious.

Here’s why that post is so important: it shows what’s about to happen on the internet, and if you aren’t committed to enacting real business change, you’re about to get lost.

Have you ever wondered why this web site is arranged the way it is? We gets lots of compliments from writers, graphic designers, and business types, and thank goodness, because as business change consultants we’d better look good to lots of different types of people. Go a step further: we don’t only do business coaching and change management, we also do technology and computer support, hire out virtual assistants to do pretty much whatever your business needs done, and even produce some media. And Our Virtual C.O.O. Services will run your entire business for you.

It’s a tall order, and we need to appeal to lots of people and come off as the experts we are in several seemingly disparate fields. And while the exact talents needed differ, the things we do are tied together by our clients need for a way to get real help simply in an ever-more-complicated world.

So now look again at that post I mentioned above. By all means think about how good it looks. Or if you’re like me, react instead by noticing that it’s highly stylized—maybe too much so. It’s like . . . a magazine. On paper, remember those?

We’ve all spent the last few years trying to figure out how to do things differently, and that post . . . that one darned post . . . says something else. We need to be doing exactly what we did for years, and it has a lot to do with the way we present ourselves.

Think about the other web sites you visit, and how much alike they all look and feel. How can someone who doesn’t know the difference tell one from another? The great content or writing? Hopefully, but there are literally millions of those “me too” sites out there, so you need to have something else.

Something tangible, but not easy to describe.

“Feel”.

For the third time, I’m telling you: look at this post. Look different. Sound different. Be different. Because all the big companies who can afford to do things the way this article suggests are doing so, and you need to figure out how to survive in a world where the big guys are communicating like little guys.

OK, so that hasn’t happened yet. But it should.

Kim Kardashian, one of those famous-for-being-famous celebutantes we just can’t get away from, has a new income stream. Tweeting. And get this: Ms. Kardashian’s rate is $10,000 per.

It shouldn’t surprise you that Kardashian gets paid to tweet, any more than it would if you found out that any message to 2.7 million people (her following as of December 20 2009) was compensated.

Now do the math: a television ad during the Super Bowl goes for about $3.5 million, and reaches about 400 million people. Paying Kim Kardashian $10,000 to put a message in front of her followers, who wish to hear what she has to say, is a bargain. The Super Bowl ad reaches 148 times more people, but cost 350 times as much. And a bunch of the potential viewers walk away from their TVs to get snacks while the ad is running!

Still think social networking doesn’t matter to the way you manage business change?

Point #2:  a couple of months ago the FTC made it illegal to blog for pay without disclosing that you were being paid. And let’s be clear; both by function and frequently being referred to as a micro-blogging service, posting on Twitter is blogging. So when we see this . . . :

. . . where’s the disclosure?

It’s coming, and soon. To be fair, Kardashian claims that when she posted that Tweet she hadn’t yet signed as a spokesperson for Carl’s Jr., so maybe there’s a loophole to wriggle through. For you though, the message, again, is clear: ignore social networking at your own peril.

Oh, and by the way: The fine is $11,000. This tweet could actually cost Ms. Kardashian money.

Do you Blog? Do you believe everything you read in blogs? For that matter, do you believe what you read in newspapers and magazines, or see on television?

Or do you decide for yourself what is fact, and what is opinion, and go from there?

If you write a blog, the folks at the Federal Trade Commission have made your life a bit more interesting. In this ruling, the FTC has mandated that when you are paid to write something you have to disclose the payment.

I want to like this idea. Really, I do. But it’s just about the most ridiculous rule I’ve ever seen. Nobody paid me to write that. And I don’t think it will represent a business change for me or for you, because it isn’t enforceable.

Through a chunk of the 1990′s I was a technology journalist. I wrote for PCWorld Magazine, in addition to turning out a very popular newsletter called IYM Software Review, doing television for CBS News, and of course performing as The Computer Answer Guy. And I had rules for what I said and how, most of which I made myself because I was in charge of such things. And because it matters.

While President of the Computer Press Association I had an opportunity to call out InfoWorld publicly when they buried an advertisement for Microsoft Access in the middle of a round-up of database software products . . . and declared Access to be the best.

I believe that people need to disclose conflicts of interest, and better yet, avoid them. But these things are self-policing; the FCC is not equipped to make rules on matters like this, and nobody can enforce them meaningfully. Most “traditional” press outlets have stringent rules about what’s allowed, and it’s for this very reason that bloggers are generally not even seen as “press”.

By the way: If you send me $11,000.01, I’ll happily write something positive about you. And if you like I won’t disclose that you paid me.

Did you hear the one about the blogger who lost his job because not enough people were reading his words?

It’s not actually a new idea. The companies that aggregate blogs figured out quickly that if nobody was reading what one of their bloggers had to say that they were paying for nothing of value. The Gawker Medias of the world have been ruthless toward their mostly-underpaid staffers for years.

Now, The Washington Post is in on the act.

Is this bad business, or just another example of necessary business change? More of the latter, I’m afraid, but imagine you were writing a column for a big newspaper, were asked to do the extra work of writing a blog, had that blog promoted via means you weren’t told about, didn’t understand, and had no control over, and as a result of not enough traffic finding its way to your blog entries lost the job you had been doing for years. Ouch.

Now here’s a funny extension to things:

A couple of months ago, David Pogue, the New York Times’ lead technology journalist and the 935th most popular blogger in the world, suddenly became a non-force. His ranking dropped to zero. Why? Because somehow, the forces that make the Internet work got confused and though THIS blog was his. Yes, the problem has been fixed.

Which explains how I know that David is only the 935th most popular blogger. And raise the question: if David Pogue ranks 935, what chance do lesser lights have when their bosses start measuring them?

And firing them.

Watch the way you business goes, and the way you manage business change. Watch very carefully.