2011 is swiftly coming to a close and when I saw this MSN Business on Main article “Lessons Learned in 2011“, I was inspired to post a blog to ask YOU to contribute your lessons learned in business in 2011.  So, go ahead, post them in the comments!  On January 1, 2012, I will choose two winners to win a $50 Amazon gift card each!  Your business lesson can be long or short, good or bad and the only rule is that it has to be something that you personally learned in 2011.

This was a huge year for me and I experienced some of my highest highs and my lowest lows but through it all, I’ve learned one really, really big lesson that I will take with me into 2012.  That lesson is: “Say yes to what you love and no to what you don’t.”  It’s a short and sweet lesson and one that we’ve heard often but I really could have used this motto during 2011.  There were many things I said yes to that I should have said no to and sometimes, when I said yes, had to say no to things that in hindsight should have been my yeses.  So, I’m going to try and be more critical in 2012 of the reasons behind my yes and no responses and make sure they sit well in my gut.

There are some really awesome responses over at the Business on Main article that you should check out too!

Remember, leave a comment and tell me YOUR biggest learning lesson in 2011.

This isn’t one of those posts I write with advice embedded into it and this isn’t even going to be a post with much of a beginning, middle and an end.

Nope, this is a post that I am writing on my iPhone while I soak in a glorious, peaceful bubble bath.

I was talking to a client and very dear friend of mine today about business and life and how the two end up affecting each other so much. In my case, my daughter is cutting her first year molars and it’s killing me… Figuratively speaking of course but the late nights, endless suffering she is experiencing and my insane work schedule has created this space where I feel slightly trapped.

You see, business is not an easy journey to choose. Over the past seven years, I have not gone a day (literally not a day – probably not even an hour) where someone has not needed me for something. If you are in business too, you might be able to relate. Regardless of how many hours you put in, regardless of how much support you have around you, someone ALWAYS needs you.

I am fairly certain that this is why I started my business in the first place. I loved feeling needed and like I was making a difference and more importantly, I loved when my clients relied on me to make their life easier. I had a place in the universe – a purpose. However, sometimes I wish that I had a day, or an hour, where I could disappear and not be needed.

You see, with being needed comes a lot of guilt. Guilt when you can’t produce the way you want to, perform the way you want to and be the kind of person you want to be for everyone you know. The guilt then turns into resentment and that isn’t healthy for anyone.

So, I’ve been learning. I’ve been learning that it’s okay to be imperfect, it’s okay to say no to things, it’s okay to choose what or who I give my time to.

I was talking to Steve tonight about our daughter and I was telling him that I want to make her growing up experience memorable and exciting. I don’t want to focus on material things or keeping a perfect house or having her in the best schools (not that I don’t think education is important but I do believe it should be chosen based on the individual needs of the child and not because of the school’s status in the community). I kind of feel that way about my business too. It’s more important to me to get my offerings / talent / skills / whatever out to the world than it is to worry that everything has to be perfect.

I’m also learning that when you balance life and a business so delicately on your shoulders, something somewhere has to give a little and that is okay too.

What are your big learning lessons about business as you make your way through?

I had the honor of speaking yesterday at Ottawa’s Make Art Work! conference put on by OCRI and I spoke on the topic of, “Brand and Message Essentials for Creatives on Social Media.”

The presentation was designed to highlight the ways that creatives and artists could use social media and maintain an authentic expression of selves.

Here is the slide deck from that session:

Now, I also mentioned to the attendees that I had a series of other helpful resources on this topic so I’m going to add a series of links below. Please feel free to peruse the resources at your leisure! Also, register in the sidebar to stay up to date with important announcements as we’ll be announcing a social media based program very soon!

Facebook

How to Get More Facebook Fans (post)
Facebook for Business (slide deck)

Twitter

Twitter for Business – 5 Part Video Series (post)
Twitter Lingo Explained (post)
Twitter Lists Explained (post)
Twitter Best Practices (slide deck)
How to Determine Who to Follow on Twitter (podcast)
Sharing @ Replies – Value vs. Noise (post)
Incorporating Revenue Into Your Twitter Stream (post)
Cleaning Up Your Twitter Account (post)

LinkedIn

How to Share a LinkedIn Event (post)
The Language of LinkedIn (slide deck)

Social Media in General

How to Grow Your Social Media Following (podcast)
Building Business with Social Media (slide deck)
How to Choose a Social Media Platform (post)
Becoming Well Known in Your Industry Using Blogs & Social Media (slide deck)
Outsourcing Your Social Media
(slide deck)
Social Media, I’m On It – Now What? (slide deck)
Social Media for Photographers (slide deck)
Social Media Isn’t MySpace for Tweens (slide deck)

Launch Strategy for a New Blog

Announcing a new blog is an exciting thing for most web-based business owners because you now have this interactive platform for your audience to engage with you from.  If you didn’t have a blog before (and if you were also lacking a social media presence), you may not have any idea who is out there enjoying your work.  Launching a blog opens the doors to get to know your online audience in a more intimate way.

Since you have two groups of people — those who know you now and those who don’t yet know you — the blog strategy needs to incorporate both of these groups.  It is important to personally invite the people who know, like and trust you into the environment but it is equally as important to set up some things that will attract in new prospects as that is the goal of your blog.

Some Pre-Announcement Checklist Items

Before you announce your blog to the world, you’ll want to make sure that the following is set up to ensure that people can hook into your blog and share it easily.  You’ll want to ensure that:

• Feedburner is set up and ready to accept subscriptions – you’ll need to decide if you want people to be able to sign up via e-mail for new blog posts or if they will just add the feed themselves to a feed reader of their choice.  Once you decide that, make sure the technical pieces are set up and ready to go.
• Social sharing is set up - you’ll also want to be sure that your social sharing plug-ins are set up and have been tested.  These will allow people to post your blogs to their social networking accounts and other outlets.  People sharing your content is what helps you to reach new audiences so it is vital that these are in place.
• List building is in place – if you plan on building a list (and you should), you’ll want to make sure that your blog is equipped with an opt-in box in the column and your freebie / giveaway (something to entice sign-ups with) is ready to go.  If you don’t want to focus on traditional list building, use Feedburner’s e-mail subscription option to at least collect some of the information from your readers.
• Your auto-post options are set up – if you want to, you can push new blog posts automatically out to Twitter, Facebook, etc.  This is completely a personal choice as you can also manually share the blog post to these mediums if you wish.  The benefit to these tools is that even if you schedule a blog post in the future, at least it will go out to your social networks without you having to think about it.
• All of your social networks and other profiles are updated - don’t forget to go back to every one of your accounts and profiles and, where possible, add in your blog’s URL.
• You have at least 3-5 blog posts posted - one is not enough.  People are going to want to feel like there is an abundance of relevant and on point material to bookmark it or subscribe via RSS.  Make them feel like there is just too much on your blog to read at once so you get return readers.
• Analytics is installed - this is going to be key in determining which of your content pieces are the most popular, where people are coming from and how long they are staying on the site.  Install it from day one so you can also track your progress and see growth.
• You have a PLAN - what is the long-term vision for your blog?  Do you want it to serve a specific purpose?  Will this be to generate more visitors and in turn, more potential customers/clients or is the goal to monetize the blog itself?  Make sure you have at least some goal for your blog so that you’ll keep up with consistent, quality posts.

Once this checklist has been followed through, it’s time for the big announcement!

Announcing the Blog

The first place to start is in announcing the blog to the world.  This means telling everyone you know that you now have this space and that they can come and interact with it.  To make sure that you hit all of your current network, you should:

• Announce it to your e-mail contacts – these are the contacts that currently sit in your native e-mail application (Gmail, Outlook, etc.).  You should send a personal e-mail to these contacts that gives them the new blog URL and tells them a little bit about the first post and the direction / purpose of the blog.  Encourage them to also provide you with ideas for posts they’d like to see and make sure they know that you are open to any and all feedback.
• Announce it via your social networks – you’ll want to create at least 2 weeks worth of updates and reminders to go out 1-2 times per day.  People will not see every Tweet or every Facebook update so you want to make sure that you get the fact that you have a new blog in front of as many people as possible.
• Announce it to your e-mail marketing list – if you are already doing list building, make sure to send an e-mail out to your list to let them know that you’ve got a new blog.  Since these people already subscribe to your content, they will be great community builders for your new blog.
• Add it to your e-mail signature – now that you have a blog, you want all new contacts (and existing contacts) to be reminded of it all of the time.  Add your blog URL to your e-mail signature immediately.

Indexing the Blog

Since you now have a presence, you want to start getting the roots of your blog buried deep within the Internet soil.  To do this, you’ll want to take some time to:

• Create an account at Technorati – this will get your blog indexed with Technorati, one of the leading blog search engines on the Internet.
• Create an account at Digg – when you post your blogs, you should also have them cross-posting to Digg to get more visibility and traffic.
• Add your blog to blog directories – a few of the places you’ll want to consider include Blogged.com, Bloggapedia.com and Best of the Web.  There are a lot of blog directories out there so look to see which might offer the most strategic alignment for your industry and add it there.

Once this is complete, you will now have a much more expansive reach every time you post a blog entry.

Getting to Know Your Fellow Bloggers

This piece is less “do it for the strategic benefit” and more “do it because it’s just a nice thing to do.”  This piece should also be done because you want to become part of a blogging community and not because you are looking for the sheer benefit of extra traffic alone.  However, here are some tips when getting to know your fellow bloggers:

• Look for blogs that are complimentary to yours – for example, if you are a publicist, you may want to look for other media type blogs.  When you find them, add them to an RSS feed reader and start reading the posts and commenting.  Make sure that the URL you leave in your comment is your blog’s URL.
• Guest posts for other blogs - find relevant and popular blogs and ask if you can author a guest post for their site.  If they agree, you can link back to your own blog in the author byline to see some incoming traffic.  Be sure though that these posts are really high quality because people will only continue on to read more content on your site if they found that article really helpful.

Consider Using Gamification to Attract Visitors

I thought this MSN Business on Main article was particularly relevant to this topic: “Get Your Game On.” The article focuses on using “gamification” to entice website visitors, increase blog interaction and make your business generally more fun.

Here is a short synopsis:

“There are countless ways you can make doing business with your company a game, but the point is to make your site sticky — so that people keep coming back and learning about your products and services. For example, this article by Zichermann describes a game offered by the restaurant chain Taco John’s, in which consumers are rewarded with bonus points for taking a photo of themselves with their breakfast and posting it to Facebook or Flickr.”

Consider ways that you can integrate this idea into your blog and business.

Done and Done

There you have it!  An easy way to launch your blog.  Up next?  A six-month blogging strategy to help you get the most traffic to your blog on an on-going basis.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be featuring interviews with various individuals and companies that have gone through the app development process. The focus of these interviews is specifically on the costs associated with developing and marketing an app.  You can catch the first interview here.

If you have any follow-up questions, please post them as a comment and I will let our interviewees know that they are here.

The Cost of Developing an App – Interview #2

1. Tell us a little bit about your app.

iWatchLife for Android and iOS lets you see what’s happening around your house when you are not there. iWatchLife works with any webcam or two models of Axis wireless IP cameras.

We have developed a better version of motion detection that we call smart event detection. It reduces false alerts by letting alerting you only when something important happens like your child standing up in the crib, your pet doing something it shouldn’t or when a delivery arrives at your front door.

iWatchLife also uses 5 times less bandwidth than anything else streaming full motion video so you won’t use up your bandwidth cap or data plan.

2. Can you describe the initial costs that went into the development of the app?

We’ll discuss this from the viewpoint of most apps being built and our specific experience. Generally for most apps, you can build the app fairly cheaply using the tool kit supplied for the mobile device. A simple app can be prototyped by a developer who is familiar with the tools in a few days to a couple of weeks. Testing for most startups depends on getting enough friends to load the test version of the app and provide feedback.

For mobile apps, it helps keep costs down by keeping your functionality as simple and as useful as possible and to stay with the UI as people expect it to work rather than letting you creativity run wild. Think what people are used to not what you think would be awesome. Get it out the door, working well and build off that. The cost then is the cost of those couple days to two weeks of dev. time. If you have developer skills you would do this yourself. If you aren’t you need to network into the app development community. There are several local networking meetings in any city for people focused on mobile apps, games or startups. You need to get there, talk and network to find developer resources. So you need to set aside money for finding the right resources to build your app.

3. What were the costs like to market the app?

Marketing your app can be really expensive. The first place you need to focus your efforts is to get your app into as many stores and websites as possible. Most stores like the App Store, Android Market, Amazon Market and Getjar are free to list your app on but then you need to spend the time to get our app ranked well as app ranking is an important part of how people download apps. But you can’t just throw your app into an app store and expect it to do well.

You can also pay between $50 to $75 dollars for outside sites to give preferential listing to your app or an app review. I don’t think there is much value in these services as most of your downloads will come from Android Market and/or App Store.

I also think it is important for you to allocate money to communications and PR activities around your app and this can be expensive. Getting visibility for your app in mainstream or popular publications will do a lot to help you get downloads of your app.

The single biggest costs to market your application will come in the form of mobile advertising. Right now, everyone is looking at AdMob for mobile device display ads. I can tell you from experience that clicks cost about 1/3 what they do in PPC but that click rates are also about 1/3 lower. Use your existing PPC budget to work some numbers based on that but people are starting to find that mobile ads lead to poor quality clicks so I would recommending starting small and doing lots of optimization and grow over time.

Recently, I have been looking at doing some cost per lead advertising but it appears to be fairly expensive for leads, in the range of about $1 and these networks are looking for minimum spends above $10,000/month for three months.

4. Are there on-going costs to maintaining the app?

Yes, it is important to be always looking for ways to refine and improve your application to increase conversions. So there will be ongoing costs for the development and testing of the improvements. We recommend that you budget for improvements by taking about 3 or 4 times the initial cost to create the original app.

5. What were the most important details and considerations that were determined before app development began?

You need to understand what your mobile goals are, which operating systems you are going to focus on, what functionality you are going to build and then whether or not you are going build the app yourself or hire somebody else to do it.

You need to spend the time upfront planning what your overall mobile strategy is going to be before you start development. You need to look at how mobile devices fit with the target market you are going after first, so that you can use this to guide the rest of your efforts. In our case, the mobile app needed to function in a way that would let us reach new customers while helping to enrich the customer experience. Our app has a demo and sign up call to actions inside of it and this helps increase the probability of an app download leading to a new customer. Because our app lets customers see live camera views and recorded events from their smartphone or tablet, they can get peace of mind that what they love is safe from anywhere using any 3G, 4G or WiFi connection.

You also need to understand what devices and mobile operating systems make sense for your target market. There is widely circulated research about each of the major mobile operating systems, devices and the people that use them. In our case, we went with iOS and Android first mainly because they have the largest numbers of users in our target market demographic.

You also need to decide how you are going to make money from your app. Are you going to charge for it? Will you have a free version and then a paid version? Are you going to serve ads in the app or make money off in-app purchases? Look at your strategy and decide what is best. In our case, we are looking to make money on IP camera sales and service upgrades so we have made our app free.

When deciding to build the app yourself or hire somebody else, you can use services like Elance (online platform that connects developers and projects) but you need to know what you are doing when you hire freelance developer. In our case, it wasn’t any cheaper to develop the application using outside resources because not everyone has experience streaming live H.264 quality video to mobile devices.

Other questions that often comes up is should I go with a web app (built in HTML5) or a device specific “native” app, or should I use one of the platforms that allow you to quickly create an app in a toolkit that generates an app on multiple platforms. The answer here depends on your needs. If your app stresses the limits of the device, as ours does, you will have to go native. The multi-device platforms like Rhodes are not flexible enough. Now if you want to build a relatively simple app, with not a lot of expected evolution, the build it once for all approach is good. This approach is also appealing when you are not writing the code yourself and would have to pay for a specific app for each platform. Another note on more complex apps like ours, in our app. what you see on your iPad or Smartphone is a window to view video, be alerted when things happen and control your cameras. Behind that apparent simplicity is a complex set of virtualized servers that are managing thousands of cameras and making complex decisions. So for us, we have to think about the interactions and limitations of each device and modify our back end to deal with that. That can be costly. For anyone, who is considering building an enterprise app they need to think of these costs which can be more expensive and difficult to implement than building a game or an app confined to the device.

6. Did the app creation and marketing process exceed your budget or did you come out ahead?

Our budget was exceeded.

If I had one piece of advice for others on planning their marketing expenses for an app it would be to spend the time up front understanding the full nature of what you need to make the app successful and that us included building out a mobile microsite in HTML that would give visitors from mobile devices the best browsing experience.

7. What would you do differently next time in terms of overall app development and marketing cost?

Like most other projects, developing an app takes longer than you plan for and it certainly costs more so I would definitely start the process early and make sure I have a more than adequate budget.

From a development perspective, you have to be certain to pick the right approach on whether you go native app or use a multi-device platform. If it is your first time out, pick the safest path.

8. Where can people learn more about your app / company?

You can learn more about iWatchLife at www.iwatchlife.com and more specifically about iWatchLife mobile at www.iwatchlife.com/mobile-monitoring or www.iwatchlife.com/mobile on your mobile device.

We are on Twitter: @iWatchlife

And on Facebook at www.facebook.com/iwatchlife

Constructive Playthings, an online toy company, has ignited a social media firestorm this week.  A group on Facebook, Play at Home Mom, noticed that the company had a sale on and as a part of this sale, were offering a light table (regularly $300) on sale for $29.  The Play at Home Mom group sent their fan base over to the website, which resulted in 600 orders of the light table.

Unfortunately, the light tables will never be shipped and these customers will not be receiving their purchased product.  Why?  Constructive Playthings made a mistake when lowering the price to $29 — it was never meant to be that inexpensive.  The company cancelled the orders and posted a statement on their Facebook page:

According to the many, many accounts on their Facebook fan page wall and on the Play at Home Mom wall, customers had called to confirm the price and were told by customer service that it was indeed the correct price.  Many feel that this is a “bait and switch” tactic by the company to get people to order more product as they had also offered a “save $10 when you spend $50″ deal, which enticed customers to buy more than just the light table.  Some people have stated that the company should honor their price and send the light tables for the price that the company paid.

According to customer accounts, none of the people who ordered light tables were contacted regarding their cancelled orders – the Facebook update was the only message from the company on the subject.

Now the company is faced with hundreds of disgruntled customers posting feedback on their Facebook fan page and calling their offices at a steady rate.  According to one source the customer service rep that she spoke to sounded, “exhausted.”

So, as a business owner, what would you do in this scenario?  How would you handle the error and what would you do to make it right?  From the customer perspective, if you ordered a light table, what do you feel the company should do to rectify the situation?  Leave a comment!

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be featuring interviews with various individuals and companies that have gone through the app development process. The focus of these interviews is specifically on the costs associated with developing and marketing an app.

If you have any follow-up questions, please post them as a comment and I will let our interviewees know that they are here.

The Cost of Developing an App – Interview #1

1. Tell us a little bit about your app.

We developed sportsfangraph.com, an application that collects fan and follower data from Twitter and Facebook on professional, collegiate and international sports teams. The initial purpose of the application was to create a site that attracted Sports Marketers for Coyle Media, a sports marketing firm. Coyle Media was our client on the app and was looking to expand their footprint internationally. The application has been very successful in achieving this.

2. Can you describe the initial costs that went into the development of the app?

We initially put approximately 100 manhours into developing the base application. We already had hosting available so there were no hard costs to creating the application.

3. What were the costs like to market the app?

Marketing was provided through our partner, Coyle Media. There were no hard costs – Coyle Media is a leader in the Sports Marketing industry with events throughout the world. Once they put the word out, Sports Marketers everywhere began to use it, spread the word, and provide feedback. I think there were some hard costs (less than $1k) to develop the graphics for the application – other than that there was nothing.

4. Are there on-going costs to maintain the app?

The application was improved a little at a time rather than having all development up front, so we still work 1 to 2 days per month on outstanding bugs and optimization.

5. What were the most important details and considerations that were determined before app development began?

We focused on getting the bare minimum of features up immediately so we could get the application to market sooner. That was a smart move that worked and the application got a ton of attention early. It also got a ton of feedback early on that required us to go back and redevelop (on a smaller budget) from the ground up. That’s been our ongoing challenge.

Scalability was a smaller issue – as the popularity grew and the number of accounts grew, we had to develop caching mechanisms to keep the speed up. That’s set us back on some feature development but, again, it was a good move to wait until we had challenges before developing those performance enhancing features.

6. Did the app creation and marketing process exceed your budget or did you come out ahead?

No, it has not exceeded budgets. However, we’ve also not had the budget/resources to aggressively improve the features overall. We have a couple of glaring bugs on the application that need immediate attention – but it could be a month or two before they’re fixed. That’s an uncomfortable position to be in.

The application is still an overall success, though. It has enabled Coyle Media to network with key players in the industry. As well, we now have a third party interested in purchasing and redeveloping the application from the ground up.

7. What would you do differently next time in terms of overall app development and marketing cost?

I believe we would have started the project exactly the same – working to get it quickly to market on a shoestring budget. However, we would have also anticipated a much larger budget and resource pool AFTER taking the application to market to accommodate the necessary changes. If our initial budget was $20k, I would have recommended an immediate infusion of another $20k after launch… then recommended a maintenance budget.

8. Where can people learn more about your app / company?

http://www.sportsfangraph.com/
http://www.coylemedia.com
http://www.dknewmedia.com

It took me a few weeks to finally write this blog post and I held off on blogging about it because I didn’t want it to contain angst or snark.  I wanted it to have a few really great lessons and a-ha moments based on what I experienced.  Some people may just sweep a story like this under the rug and pretend that it never happened (or never happens ever) but the truth of the matter is, people are going to do things and say things that you may not particularly enjoy and it is up to you to decide how you want to handle it.  I hope this story allows you to see that mistakes will happen regardless of how social media proficient you are.

The Backstory

Let me back up a wee bit to one gorgeous, sunny afternoon a few weeks ago.  I was walking down the road, enjoying the warmth and the nature and all of the goodness that was surrounding me, and decided to pull out my iPhone to check my Twitter feed.  I read through the Tweets, laughing in response to some of the replies from friends when suddenly, I was punched in the gut.  Hard.

A colleague of mine, from the same city I live in, retweeted one of my Tweets and added “puke” to the front of my Tweet.  That was it, just a simple “puke” but the idea that my Tweet was vomit inducing was enough to stop me dead in my tracks.  I replied to the person with a bit of humor and the response I received was even more gut punching than the first one.  This person, that I had never met in person, told me that my over the top social media nonsense was what had induced this vomiting fit.

After receiving those Tweets, I was admittedly a bit shocked and sad and embarrassed and all sorts of emotions, as I had just been called out in a room full of my peers (Twitter) for social media douchebaggery.  What made a bad scenario even worse was seeing other colleagues, also based out of the same city I live in, partake in the conversation and poke fun at me.  Those extra Tweets weren’t directed right at me but I’m savvy enough on ye olde Twitter to find the related conversations.

The context of my Tweet had been changed.  The wording was changed, the URL had been removed and the retweet now left me standing there with my pants down (well, not really with my pants down but it was every bit as scary as it would be had I been standing in a crowd with my pants down). However, given some time to reflect on the entire situation, this person was partially justified.  Perhaps it would have been better for that individual to address it privately but either way, it changed my social media course.

Testing Grounds

You see, I’m a HUGE advocate of using social media for your business.  It’s what I do for my clients, it is what I do for myself and I am always talking about it, teaching it or yelling from the rooftops about how important it is.  However, you can’t speak on the subject and teach other people about the subject if you aren’t constantly testing the tool.  So, I test.  A lot.

Some people may argue that using my own Twitter account to test out various social media “tactics” is social media suicide and I suppose it is in a way.  I fully understand that by testing out different tweets, timing of tweets, structure of tweets, etc., I may risk losing a follower or two.  However, that it is the price I am willing to pay to fully understand the tool that I am using and touting.  I can’t perform the service for my clients without having tried the tactics that they are going to ask me to implement for them.

Everything I do in business is an experiment.  I don’t walk the “safe” line but rather push the boundaries a bit.  I see what people enjoy and don’t enjoy and, as you can see in the backstory above, people DO tell me.  Loud and clear.  However, I need to realize that unless people know what it is I am doing, I may cause people to disengage.

I also think that this is the case with many entrepreneurs.  By nature, we are all experimenting with things as there is no giant book of golden rules that we are supposed to follow.  As long as we are standing in a place of being authentic and sharing our message in the best way we know how, we are headed in the right direction and we are bound to make mistakes along the way.

What I Did Wrong on Twitter

At this point in my post, you might be wondering to yourself, “What did you do wrong?” and I will tell you what I think happened.

I don’t write all of my Tweets live.  I know, I know – there are social media purists out there who will fall on the floor after reading that.  However, all of my more personal and in the moment Tweets, my @ replies, my DMs and my retweets are written by me and in the exact moment the message is Tweeted.  However, I do use Hootsuite to preschedule a few Tweets where I am sharing dated / timely information or sending out tips / recommendations that I want to make but don’t want to send them all at once, at 11pm at night.

Before I received the Tweet, the one that punched me in the gut, I had prescheduled some Tweets that pointed back to my old blog content.  It was still relevant information and I figured that since I had received a lot of new followers since that content was written, they might benefit from reading the old material.  None of the URLs I was linking to were salesy or required someone to have to purchase anything — it was just to blog posts that I had written that shared info on different topics.

One of those blog posts that I linked to was a response to a question I received from Scott Annan who asked, “I see you giving so much of yourself online, for free, how do you do it?”  The post explained why I did it and how and explained that I love answering questions and providing people with solutions, yada yada yada… So, my Tweet that day quoted one line from that post.  However, it wasn’t necessarily the best line to use from the post or summarize the context of the post well.

My mistake was assuming that people, including the retweeter of my Tweet, would take the time to read the post.

I realized, in that moment, that a Tweet needed to stand on its own without people needing to click through the link and if the Tweet could be taken out of context, it needed to be edited to suit Twitter’s medium.  Proof that not all content is acceptable for each medium.

What I’ve Changed Since Then

Since that fateful day, I’ve since taken much more time when crafting messages through my prescheduled and in the moment Tweets.  The day that I received that eye-opening Tweet, I went into Hootsuite and deleted everything (hours and hours of work) and decided that from then on, I needed to be clearer with my messages and ensure that the Tweet stood on its own leaving zero room for misinterpretation.  I wanted to ensure that all of my future Tweet context didn’t need to be gathered through the link that I was attaching but was rather obvious, right there in the 140 characters allotted.

The entire situation gave me time to pause and reflect on how I was using the tool and what role it played for me in the bigger picture.  Twitter, much like other social media tools, is just that — a tool.  It is up to us to figure out how we should be individually using it to suit our life / business purpose.  However, we need to be mindful of the messages we are sending and ensure that it is of great value and benefit to those listening to us.

A Note to the Retweeter

If you do get a chance to read this, I want to apologize to you.  There are times in my business, and in my life, where I try something out and it doesn’t go the way I envisioned it to.  There are times when my message on the Internet doesn’t line up with who I am as a human being – regardless of how hard I try to ensure that it does.  140 characters can sometimes be a difficult use of space for spreading messages and sharing free content and as much as I try to please everyone, I do end up failing at times.

I am a natural born experimenter and one of my favorite questions to ask is, “Why?”  I like to know how things work and I like to understand the pros and cons to doing things a certain way.  This means that I am going to naturally try something that doesn’t work and I’m going to do things in a way that isn’t appealing to the masses.  However, I am doing my best.  It’s all that any of us can do — do our best and hope that what we are doing helps someone, resonates with someone and reaches the intended audience.

Thank you for pushing me to take pause and really evaluate my own use of the tool.  I wish it had come in a different format that wasn’t as embarrassing as it was, but at the end of the day, I learned the lesson and that is all that matters.

It is not often that you see the words service and storefront come together. Most professionals sell their services on a very personally-driven platform. Client hires or retains your company, you provide service to the client and an on-going relationship is built. However, in a world that is going online more and more each day, one needs to consider the ability to combine the face-to-face feeling of a service with the ability to reach more people, in less time.

Shopify is a service that provides a shop-style service to online business owners. The service combines an e-commerce platform with a payment gateway of the client’s choice to allow the business owner to sell products and services to their customers online. Most people using Shopify are selling a tangible product but we recently tested the store’s ability to house and sell services. We were so pleased with the results that we wanted to share the tool with you and explain why setting up a storefront for your services could be a lucrative aspect of your business.

Selling Services via a Storefront

Before we jump in to the Shopify tool specifically, let us look at how one could sell services via a storefront. Imagine that one of your clients comes to your website to retain your services. Perhaps the client is someone just like me – a business owner needing an employment contract drawn up or a Twitter background created.  Clients who need these one off services are going to be looking for the fastest, easiest way to work with a company in your industry. A storefront would allow your clients to speed up the process.

Often times, the one thing that holds people back from contacting a service provider is the fear around how much the service is going to cost them. By setting up a storefront, you would be able to provide to those clients the ability to purchase a service with the confidence of knowing (a) what they are getting and (b) how much it is going to cost. Although the client is only purchasing one service and not retaining your services for any length of time, being the most accessible and transparent will keep those clients coming back to you for future services.

When thinking about what to sell via the storefront, think about the services that are quick, easy and take about the same amount of time each time you perform the task. Create a price for these items that is slightly higher than you anticipate to account for anything unexpected. Once you have your list of potential one off services and their prices, create your storefront.

Why Shopify?

One of my favorite tools for e-commerce and storefronts is Shopify. Shopify is simple, easy-to-setup and does not require you to have extensive knowledge of HTML, CSS or any other programming language. In fact, the built-in tutorials will take the confusion out of the setup side so that you can focus simply on selling your services in the best way possible.

If you aren’t sure how the idea of a storefront will fly with your existing customers, Shopify also has a 30-day free trial. If you create your storefront, try it with your client base and don’t see any action with it, you can always cancel your membership without an added business expense. Shopify is also a great option if you do not have an existing website. You can then integrate your page content with the Shopify storefront.

How to Use Shopify to Create Your Storefront

Getting started with Shopify is really simple. Here are the steps you’ll want to take to create your storefront today:

1. Go to Shopify and create your account (you’ll get 30 days free)
2. Follow the steps to setup your first product (any time you see product, think service)
3. Choose and customize your theme
4. Make sure to check the preferences tab under ‘account’ to be sure your options are setup properly (currency, taxes, etc.)
5. Setup all of the communication you want to happen with your potential customers – order receipts, e-mails when people cancel their order, etc.
6. Make sure your preferred payment method is setup
7. Launch your storefront

Share Your Storefront

If you do go down the path of creating a Shopify storefront, please let us know! Post a link to the storefront in the comments below as we would love to see how businesses are knocking down the traditional doors with digital storefronts.

It’s our final day of our Ford Canada test drive of the Ford Fusion Hybrid and I have to say… I am going to miss that car!  We picked up the car on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 after Steve was done work and took the car to Toronto for the Toronto International Film Festival.  Knowing we could travel in a hybrid for the long trek to and from Toronto gave us peace of mind for the trip and the car did not disappoint.

The Eco-Friendly Factor

The car gets nearly 1,000 kilometres per tank of gas, which means we were able to drive to and from Toronto on a single tank of gas.  Since the car is a hybrid, it combines electric battery power with regular fuel power to give you the best of both worlds.  When driving less than 60 km/hr, the car utilizes the battery power and when driving over 60 km/hr, the car reverts to fuel consumption.

The Comfort Factor

My favourite part about driving this car to and from Toronto was the comfort factor.  This car is seriously comfortable!  With power seats that transform your sitting experience into one of pure, custom comfort and dual climate control, it made for a very favourable road trip.  The back seat has a convenient centre console that pulls down and contains two cup holders.

The Family Factor

The car is also spacious and perfect for traveling with a family.  We traveled to and from Toronto with our nine month old daughter, Willow, and we had enough room for two suitcases (one large, one small), her stroller and a plethora of other bags containing laptops, toys, shoes and more.  We did utilize some of the back seat space for luggage and whatnot, but it was still spacious enough and we didn’t have to utilize that space, we just did because it was there and available.

One of the other things I enjoyed about the car was the back seat AC converter.  This allows you to plug in a device like a laptop, a charger, a DVD player or, in my case, a breast pump.  Yes, you heard that right folks, I was able to pump milk as we drove down the highway and then feed it to Willow so we didn’t have to stop at a rest stop.  I am telling you, ultimate convenience!

The Wow Factor

There were a few other features that blew me away.

The Ford Sync, Sirius Satellite Radio and built-in GPS make you feel connected and plugged in.  The Ford Sync connects to your phone via Bluetooth and imports your phone book and recent calls and other pertinent information.  It also handles your incoming calls and text messages so you can keep your eyes on the road and not on your phone.  The satellite radio provides a plethora of channels to listen to and the GPS keeps you going in the right direction.

The car also comes equipped with a rear view camera, which helps drivers like me who can not back up properly… even if my life depended on it.  The camera shows you what is behind you and sets up guides so that you can see exactly how far you are from various things on the road.  The car will even sound off a warning if you do indeed get to close to an object.

Lastly, the car has these built-in side sensors, which help drivers know when another car is in their blind spot.  This little circle, on the side mirror, lights up as a car enters your blind spot and turns off when the car exits.  This lets you know that it is safe for you to switch lanes.

To Summarize

I’m not the most technical as far as cars go but I do know a little about driving cars and this one suits my comfort and feature needs.  The car has everything I would want in a vehicle, is eco-friendly and is amazing on gas.  The price is a little high (the model I was driving was $40K with all of the bells and whistles) but it is a hybrid so the cost savings definitely play a factor.

My husband quite enjoyed all of the “cubby holes” in the car as it takes your clutter out of the car and allows you to hide it, which is awesome when driving far distances (or even when driving your car on a regular basis!)  He also mentioned that he loved how bright the car was.  The huge display, the lights in the cup holders and the lights along the back seats and the front floor mats all create a nice, bright ambiance inside of the car.

We loved it and we just want to say a HUGE thank you to Ford Canada for letting us take the Ford Fusion Hybrid on a test drive!  When we’re ready to purchase our next vehicle, we’ll definitely be keeping this car in mind.

All photos in this post were taken by me and therefore are copyright protected.  If you wish to use any of these photos, please contact me first for permission.