Scott Allen's Blog, page 2

The Joys of a Home-Based Business

Keep Calm and Hold Long

The stock market is a panic this morning, but you don’t have to be. There are two simple truths you need to keep in mind:

1. Contrary to popular opinion and a few magazine pundits, deflation is NOT bad and doesn’t stifle economic growth. It is, as prominent Austrian school economist Philipp Bagus put it, “a fast, smooth, direct, and ethical way to a sound financial system.” This is the free market doing its job to correct the inflationary interventionism of governments around the world. It may be painful, but even if so, it is the lesser of two evils. If we don’t go ahead and pop the bubble, it will eventually explode — hyperinflation, and that is far worse. Let the market do its job and just ride it out.

2. Time in the market is much more important than timing the market. If you’re in it for the long haul, i.e., retirement or wealth creation, not a quick buck, then riding it out is the best tactic. Think about it — where else are you going to put your money? What other investment isn’t going to feel the ripple effect of the stock market plunge? It’s kind of like changing lanes on the freeway — you’re really probably better off just staying in your lane. Even if occasionally that may not turn out best, the thing is — you have no way of knowing it. You have to stick with the odds, and the odds are, you’re better off holding long. Historically, the people who have sold off in a crash are the ones who lose their money long-term.

So do whatever it takes today to calm yourself down, chill out, and go invest in yourself — that’s something that always pays great dividends.

What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

For the past week, my house has been a construction zone — our A/C overflowed the drain pan and flooded our master bedroom closet, our fence gate fell off, we had our trees trimmed because they were knockining shingles off the roof, and worst of all, there’s apparently a leak in the plumbing under the slab that flooded our living room, ruined the carpet, and now most of the downstairs needs to be re-floored (we’re doing tile!).

Now some of this stuff is just normal wear and tear, or a fluke, but the leak really got me thinking…

Consider the fact that one sloppy soldering job connecting two pieces of pipe 12 years ago is now causing thousands of dollars worth of damage.  One case of someone not checking carefully enough on something that was going to be permantently buried under concrete.

What are the equivalents of that in your life and work?

Sure, a single typo probably isn’t going to cause thousands of dollars of damage, and even this isn’t the life-and-death matter of, say, working on the space shuttle or packing a parachute. But what is the worst-case scenario that could play out if you cut corners and do less than your very best work?  Even if the risk is very low, sometimes the consequences are so high that you simply have to take the time to do the job right.

So while I’m generally all for keeping a positive outlook and expecting the best, sometimes you really have to ask, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Have you had an experience in your business or personal life where one small mistake had huge consequences? Please share it in the comments.

Just Write

It seems like forever since I blogged, and I simply don’t have a good excuse. “I’m busy” just seems lame. I have thoughts in my head (as do you) that need to be expressed and shared — I simply have to make the time, develop the habit (as do you).

It doesn’t have to be long. Seth Godin’s post from yesterday was 49 words.

It doesn’t have to be every day. Some say it’s awesome, others say it’s silly. But I am going to set that as a goal, at least for a while.

For me, and perhaps for you, there will be two keys to making this happen:

Schedule the time. Personally, I recommend planning on it earlier in the day, rather than later. First of all, your mind is fresher (I wake up with ideas that would make great blog posts, don’t you?). Secondly, if you miss it, you can still make it up at multiple opportunities later in the day — lunch, after work, after dinner, before bed, etc.
Make it easy.  Make your “Add New Post” page the first bookmark on your bookmarks bar.  Have your content ideas and curation sources at your fingertips, ready to go. Learn the tools that make the process easier.

Until tomorrow…

 

Top 12 Ways to Build and Protect Your Name Online

Top 12 Ways to Build and Protect Your Name Online

“It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.”

Benjamin Franklin

Whether you’re Joe Blow, freelancer, or owner of The Joe Blow Company, or simply Joe Blow, CEO of Something Else, LLC, your ability to do business is inextricably bound to your personal name. Even if you have focused on building the business brand over your own personal brand, web-savvy (and who isn’t these days?) potential customers, business partners and employees are going to do their homework, which includes finding out what they can about you personally.  And in today’s world, Benjamin Franklin’s words are perhaps even truer than when he wrote them two centuries ago.

Consider this:  every individual who has a social media account now has an online presence. That’s about 75% of Americans and only slightly lower worldwide. So unless your name is something like Zbgniew Dbrvsky, you’re competing with everyone in the world who shares your name.

On the flip side, unless you’re moderately famous (and no, slightly isn’t enough) or have been proactively building and protecting your name online, all it takes is one Ripoff Report or bad Yelp review that calls you out by name, and your name is virtual mud. If they’re really pissed, they can throw a Fiverr SEO gig at it, and it will take you months, or even years to slog your way out of it.

With that in mind, here are the top 10 action steps you can take to protect your personal name online. Some of the first ones may seem obvious, but they’re here for completeness. Keep reading and you may be surprised.

1. Google yourself. Sure, you’ve probably done it before anyway. This time, make a note of the results — namely, what are the top 20 positive or neutral results out there that are about you. You can note the negative ones, too, but we’re mainly interested at this point in finding out what you have to work with.

2. Update your bio. You want the information that’s out there about you to be current and consistent. If you’ve been online for a while, odds are that there are many different versions of your bio floating around out there. Create a short (under 160 characters), medium (one long paragraph) and long (3 paragraphs) version.  You may also want to have a version in first-person and another in third-person.

3. Join BrandYourself.com. This is an absolutely essential tool for personal branding, and yes, there’s a free version. It will a) provide an additional URL that’s likely to rank high for your name, b) help you promote your other positive URLs with a high-quality, relevant link, and c) track your progress. While there are other steps that may have more impact, the tracking capability is why you want to do this one sooner rather than later. The free version will let you track and promote three links. If you’re serious about this, it’s well worth the $100/yr. premium plan. Submit your highest-ranking links from step 1.

3. Audit and update your current social media profiles. Make a list of all your existing accounts in a spreadsheet.  Make sure everything is up-to-date and that any links are going where you want them to go.  Also, if any of your accounts don’t have your personal name as part of your username, you may want to consider changing that. It’s not a huge factor, but the Twitter profile for @JoeBlowCEO is going to rank better for “Joe Blow” than @ThatCEODude.

4. Claim additional social media accounts. It really doesn’t matter if you’re never going to use them — go ahead and claim your name (or your variation on it) on as many social platforms as you possibly can. Use your updated bio and set up whatever links you can to your main sites and social channels. KnowEm will do it for you, for a fee. If you want to do it on your own, use to check availability. If you want to be completely thorough, you can use Wikipedia’s lists of social networking sites, Q&A sites (Quora is a biggie), and social bookmarking sites. Best recommendation: hire a freelancer on Odesk for $2/hr. or less to do it for you.

5. Set up social media aggregation & promotion tools. Now that you have all your social media channels up-to-date, let’s promote them. Must-have tools include Empire Avenue, RebelMouse, XeeMe, About.me and Flavors.me. The key to these is that they are fairly automated — every time you put out a piece of content, it gets linked everywhere. Set it and forget it.

6. Set up Google authorship. If you want Google to know what content is actually created by you, you can now simply tell it on your Google profile. This has been around for a couple of years, and heavily utilized by those “in the know”. Now, Google has finally made it much easier for everyone to set this up with their step-by-step guide. Link to all of your new and newly updated social profiles.

7. Become quotable. Have you ever come up with a particularly pithy or memorable way of expressing a thought? If not, it’s time to start, and if so, it’s time to share it. Whenever you think of a nice, concise way of expressing something, put it out on your blog, social media, and quotation sites. While many of them require quotes to be “well sourced”, there are some popular ones that accept user submissions, such as SearchQuotes and QuotesDaddy. If you’re a published author, you can also submit your quotes on GoodReads and if your quote appears in an article just about anywhere, you can try submitting it at ThinkExist.

8. Be a content machine. You have now created the infrastructure to maximize your online exposure. Now you need to give it fuel. There’s no hard and fast rule about how often you should post, or what mix you should have of original content vs. curated content vs. simply sharing content from others. But whatever works for you, do it consistently across multiple platforms.

9. Publish content “off-site”.  Supposedly, guest blogging for SEO purposes is dead. While that may be true for SEOs trying to do it on a large scale for the sake of backlinks, it’s certainly not true when it comes to building your personal reputation. You don’t have to do a lot of it, but having your articles published on high-traffic sites will do wonders for your online reputation. It may rank for your name on its own, but it can also gives quality backlinks to some of your top sites. It’s also a great credibility builder in your bio.

10. Give interviews. Because of the concern about guest blogging and SEO, many blogs are steering away from guest posts. But they love interviews! It doesn’t matter whether it’s audio, video, or just written. And — even better than with guest blogging — your name is going to be in the title of the post, not just the tagline, and the search engines love that.

11. Fund a movie. For anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand, you can become a film producer. “So what,” you ask. IMDB. You’ll automatically get a profile page on IMDB, and that data gets syndicated to hundreds of other sites. Look for films that match your interest and budget on Kickstarter, Indiegogo and other crowdfunding sites. Be sure that it specifies that you’ll get IMDB credit, else the only benefit will be feeling good about supporting an up-and-coming filmmaker.

12. Make a plan to keep all of this information up-to-date. Start by going back and updating your BrandYourself and Google profiles with all these new profiles you’ve created.  Plan on checking everything at least a couple of times a year to make sure nothing’s broken. Make sure you have all of the information in one place so that if you have a major update to your bio or links, you know where to go and what to do.

Finally, keep in mind that all of these things are just outward signs — your reputation starts with your character.  Treat people right, speak well of others, create value wherever you go, and you won’t have to work nearly as hard at building and protecting your reputation.

Scott Allen is one of the true pioneers of social media, helping individuals and businesses turn virtual relationships into real business since 2002. He’s coauthor of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online and The Emergence of The Relationship Economy, and a contributor to over a dozen books on entrepreneurship, marketing, social media and other business topics. He is currently Director of Client Solutions for Momentum Factor, a digital marketing agency exclusively serving the direct selling industry. For fun, he enjoys spending time with family, making music, coaching entrepreneurs, pug snuggling, and bending Google to his will.

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Company: MomoFactor.com

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On Cynicism

 

Cynicism is so 2000-late. Get over it. It’s not hip or cool or intellectual. It’s only occasionally funny, and then best reserved for the appropriate context, which is not everyday conersation.

Ayn Rand was even more detailed in her indictment of cynicism:

There is nothing so naive as cynicism. A cynic is one who believes that men are innately depraved, that irrationality and cowardice are their basic characteristics, that fear is the most potent of human incentives—and, therefore, that the most practical method of dealing with men is to count on their stupidity, appeal to their knavery, and keep them in constant terror.

In private life, this belief creates a criminal; in politics, it creates a statist. But, contrary to the cynic’s belief, crime and statism do not pay.

A criminal might thrive on human vices, but is reduced to impotence when he comes up against the fact that “you can’t cheat an honest man.” A statist might ride to power by dispensing promises, threats and handouts to the seekers of the unearned—but he finds himself impotent in a national emergency, because the language, methods and policies which were successful with parasites, do not work when the country needs producers.

Ayn Rand Letter, III, 26, 3

Online Reputation Management presents unique challenges for direct sellers

“Reputation is only a candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit.” ~ James Russell Lowell

Online reputation management is a hot topic these days.  While it affects individuals of every profession and companies of all sizes and industries, direct selling companies and distributors face some unique challenges, as I describe in my latest article for Networking Times, Keep It Clean: Twelve Steps to Protect Your Reputation Online.

For one thing, the problem is universal in the direct selling industry. 88% of the DSA Global 100 have negative results on page one of Google for a search for their company name.  Over 75% have one or more negative words (“scam”, “pyramid scheme”, “lawsuit”, “complaints”, etc.) in Google’s instant search suggestions:

Now, it’s not that other companies and other industries don’t have that negative content out there — Google any telecommunication or utility company plus “complaint” and you’ll be stunned.  Look at just the Pissed Consumer page for Verizon:

It’s not that the negative isn’t there for them — it’s just not showing up on the first page of Google.

So what’s the difference?  It’s simple: a) these companies put out massive amounts of content, and b) mainstream media tends to ignore the direct selling industry except when there’s a huge (and probably negative) story.

Another challenge direct selling companies face is what we call “brandjackers” — professional internet marketers who create content targeting company names for SEO, often in conjunction with “scam”. They promise an independent review, and sometimes they’re even positive, but their ulterior motive is to sell something of their own:  leads, marketing tools, their educational product, or perhaps a competing opportunity.

Finally, you have to deal with the fact that the field is competing with the company. It’s certainly preferable to have distributors ranking ahead of competitors or negative sites, but it can be very frustrating when a distributor has their (probably unauthorized) version of your opportunity video ranking ahead of the official one, both on Google and on YouTube.

Are you or your company experiencing these yourself?  Want to know what to do about it?

Check out 12 Steps to Protect Your Reputation Online for an overview of the process.
Subscribe to my blog. Over the next couple of months, I’ll be expanding on each of those 12 steps as individual blog posts, including specific tips and resources.
If you need help now, check out Momentum Factor’s Online Reputation Management services and let’s see what we can do. You can also contact me directly and I’ll be happy to help.

Sentiment Analysis for Online Reputation Management

I’ve been seeing a lot of talk recently about sentiment analysis as a tool for tracking online reputation. I’ve been a bit skeptical, but there is a certain appeal to the idea of being able to distinguish between positive and negative messages so they can be handled appropriately, as well as getting an overall idea of the brand’s reputation. So I’ve been doing some testing, and I’ve found that my skepticism was well-founded. Simply put, these tools just aren’t very accurate at determining negative sentiment, for a variety of reasons. Mainly, though, it’s that they’re still basically looking at the words used, and not fully understanding the context. For some examples, I used Sentiment140.com to do a Twitter sentiment analysis on Herbalife. Herbalife is not a client – I chose them because they’ve been in the news a lot lately. The report analyzed 88 tweets, and found 60 positive, 15 negative and 13 neutral, for a total rating of 80% positive vs. 20% negative.

But the reality is quite different. Going through it, I found:

12 positives misclassified as neutral
11 positives misclassified as negative
1 negative misclassified as neutral
1 neutral misclassified as negative

So the real results are actually 94% positive vs. the reported 80% positive. Let’s look at some examples: twitter.com/heidymoreno_/status/354253678519140352 Reported as neutral, but clearly positive — the tool just doesn’t recognize that in this context, “start” is a positive term. twitter.com/Zuhaairaah/status/354250694380879872 Stress, gastric pain and vomiting. Negative? No, because Herbalife “relived” (maybe the typo affected it, but I doubt it) it. twitter.com/LeahShelll/status/354243859343081472 Reported as negative, but clearly not. This one simply requires human interpretation. twitter.com/leonkaindikioko/status/354226635081383938 “No” and “not even” signal negative, but in this context, they’re a good thing. Maybe at some point in the future, these tools will be accurate enough to be useful, but at this point, the overall analysis is way too far off to be meaningful, and even the matter of sifting them for processing is questionable.  If you’re only trying to look at the negative messages, it might be somewhat useful, because they do seem to err on the side of interpreting sentiment as negative, but why would you want to do that?  You really should be responding to positive messages as well as negative anyway. And if a human being still has to make the interpretation, how is the sentiment analysis tool helping? If you’ve had a different experience with sentiment analysis, or think you know of a tool that’s more accurate, please leave a comment below and let me know.

On Modesty

I’ve been accused — more than once or twice — of being arrogant…or at least immodest.

I find this rather bizarre, because I think of myself as quite modest…maybe not “humble”, but certainly modest.

I think we have a kind of screwed up idea of what modesty really is.

See, much of what passes for modesty is actually false modesty. Downplaying or denial of ones own capabilities or achievements is not modesty.

True modesty is the acknowledgment that what you achieved, you did not achieve entirely alone through sheer force of personal will, combined with the recognition that on any given day, under the right circumstances, there’s someone else who could probably do what you did.

Whether it’s your parents, a teacher or mentor who inspired you, the team or friends that supported you, the giants on whose shoulders you stood, or whatever your idea of a higher power is — you didn’t do it alone. Share the credit.

And even if you won first place — guess what?  A very slight change in circumstances, and the contest could have gone the other way.  Even if you set a world’s record — records will always be broken.  Guinness adds about 2,000 new world records every year (out of around 50,000 submissions!). Simply acknowledge the capabilities of others, and put your own achievements in perspective — you’re not a better dancer/singer/runner/driver/etc. — you simply performed better on that day than everyone else who was there that day.

Be proud of your achievements, but never at the expense of others. That’s true modesty.

“If you done it, it ain’t bragging.”

Variously attributed to Bear Bryant, Will Rogers or Walt Whitman

If you want people to share your content, at least get your headline right!

I curate and share a lot of content.  I use some semi-automated social sharing tools, such as Triberr, JustRetweet, Pluggio, etc. I also use an RSS reader (currently on Google Reader — still trying to decide what I’m going to do when it shuts down). And I confess that I sometimes share content without reading it (anyone who uses these tools and says they completely read everything that they share is either lying or has way too much time on their hands). And I only do that when it’s coming from a highly reliable source that I know and trust.

But I always – always — pay attention to the headline, and if it’s grammatically incorrect, I don’t share it. Period.

Now, I’m really not a grammar nazi, but if you can’t even take the time — or don’t know how — to get your headline grammatically correct, I’m not about to subject myself to 500 to 1,000 more poorly written words.

Maybe that’s not fair. But in a world moving at internet speed, you have to make some snap judgments. And I know I’m certainly not the only one who feels this way.

So if you want people to share your content, at least get your headline right!