Up and Running:

I just caught Ann Handley’s latest post on Marketing Profs Daily Fix, in which she gives us several good links and a short video interview on Twitter as “An Enormous Opportunity.” This is important.

Among other things, Stephen Berlin Johnson–who did last week’s Time Magazine cover story on Twitter, says:

“We’re getting to invent what this new platform can do.”

What’s happening with Twitter, including the easy-to-poke-fun-at aspect of Twitter as trivial boring updates–an idea we get when the late-night comics take it on–is that it’s caught on with the early adapters and opinion leaders, whom Seth Godin calls the sneezers, people who tend to be communicators.

Although it’s a lesser example, it does remind me of what I saw (and lived through) about 25 years ago with the personal computer revolution; and again, about 15 years ago, when the business world caught onto the web.

It’s not as big as either of those, because there’s no fundamental change in technology. But the phenomenon of bandwagon is there, and in that sense it’s similar.

Why do you care? It’s not that you have to be at the bleeding edge to be an entrepreneur; you don’t have to. But it helps.

And believe me, it’s not just what people had for breakfast: It’s what they’re reading, watching and thinking.

My suggestion, concretely, is that if you’re reading this blog and you aren’t already on Twitter, go to twitter.com and join. Follow me and everybody else on Anita Campbell’s The Ultimate Small Business Twitter List, and just see how the ideas flow.

I’ve been joining the #sbbuzz chat on Twitter lately, Tuesday evenings. I’m finding it a nice way to get in touch with a lot of people at once with an interest in technology in small business. I guess Twitter is controversial in some circles, but I like it and use it a lot.

For example, click here for the transcript of a recent chat on business planning and funding for new businesses.

And you can click here for instructions on how to participate in the sbbuzz Twitter chat on Tuesdays.

And from last week, the group produced this list of good small business blogs.

What a great story in The New York Times weekender edition. A struggling young couple, two kids; he’s a programmer worried about losing his job in recession, so he turns to iPhone programming:

For six weeks, he worked “morning, noon and night”–by day at his job on the Java development team at Sun, and after hours on his side project. In the evenings he would relieve his wife by caring for their two sons, sometimes coding feverishly at his computer with one hand, while the other rocked baby Gavin to sleep or held his toddler, Spencer, on his lap.

Apple approved his shoot-em-up iPhone game last October, and soon after, he made $2,000 on downloads in a single day. But it gets better later on:

In January, he released a free version of the game with fewer features, hoping to spark sales of the paid version. It worked: iShoot Lite has been downloaded more than 2 million times, and many people have upgraded to the paid version, which now costs $2.99. On its peak day–Jan. 11–iShoot sold nearly 17,000 copies, which meant a $35,000 day’s take for Mr. Nicholas.

It reminds me of the (sort of) “good ol’ days” of the personal computer boom, back in the early 1980s, when individual people were making money with early PC software.

Here’s where you get the whole story: Hoping to Make iPhone Toys as a Full-Time Job

(Note: I’m traveling today. I posted this on Huffington Post last week. I’ve been meaning to re-post it here. Tim.)

Coincidence? Last night I wrote an e-mail to a nice woman roughly my baby boomer age answering her “should I put my business on Facebook?” question with a polite “probably not.” This morning I see Michael Gray’s post Web 2.0 Weenies and Bulls**t Social Media Economics. I think it’s more synchronicity than coincidence. (Side note: Give Michael credit for that plain-talking title, and me the blame for putting asterisks into it.)

My e-mail exchange was a response to a column I wrote about social media for business. I went to this woman’s website and liked it; a kind of quirky, cotton-related store, a slightly old-fashioned look and feel to it, but it also told a story of how she’d come to get into selling cotton goods, and the whole thing worked pretty well. Here’s what I told her:

Having a Facebook page isn’t hard to do. That alone, however, won’t make much difference at all. You have to use that to make people know, like and trust you. And that takes a lot of time and effort, and not just by the web developers, but by the personality at the core, namely, from what I read on your website, you. You have the makings of it. You clearly understand how to tell a story about your business and to put yourself into it. But is this what you want to do every day, for several hours a day?

Michael’s post (the Weenies and Bulls**t link above) gets to the point quicker. And he’s straighter about it.

Social media is filled with false gods and idols, who try to sell you their own “secret sauce” in get-rich-quick schemes, and hundreds are duped by the lure of easy money. The truth is if you approach social media with a cookie cutter plan from one of these gurus, it won’t work for you. I can’t tell you the secret of making money; I can only tell you what works for me. And chances are since you don’t think and approach problems the way I do, they won’t work for you. The best I can do is give a you some basic pointers and tell you where the cliffs are so you don’t walk off. After that you’ll have to get off your butt, work at it and fail more than once, if you want to make some money.

Sad but true; Michael’s very cynical view is also spot on. And you see it over and over again. The real booming business in Web 2.0 and social media is the boom in people writing, speaking, blogging about Web 2.0 and social media for business.

It’s sort of like signing up for a toll-free telephone number and discovering, soon after, that it doesn’t ring. Nobody calls without the whole time and effort involved in making them call.

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing does a great speech that boils marketing down to “getting people to know, like and trust you.” A Facebook page, a Twitter account or a blog can’t do anything more than give you a forum. You have to have something to say–and more than just once–to make that matter. It takes time and effort.

And, no, I’m not selling expertise. I am in fact blogging, tweeting, and struggling with Facebook and LinkedIn, and enjoying it thoroughly, but I’m not sure there’s a business payoff. I do it because I like doing it.

Sure, you’re probably saying to yourself that entrepreneurs aren’t supposed to be fearful–there’s the image of the daring entrepreneur jumping off the cliff. Me, looking back, I jumped off some cliffs and was pushed off others. I went off on my own, leaving a good job when I didn’t have to, and I got through the worst of it, that dark year in my business that about every business faces, because I damned well didn’t have any other choice (meaning, I was pushed).

Somebody asked me about it once (or challenged me on it, I should say, because there was some contention at that moment): “Aren’t you too fearful to run a business?”

“It’s obvious that you’ve never run your own business,” I answered. That didn’t solve the argument — heated it up, actually, I’m sorry to say–but I did offer, a few minutes later, that being fearful is part of what you’re supposed to do. They pay us for that.

With that as background, I’d suggest you take five minutes and watch Pamela Slim’s five-minute piece The Upside of Fear from a recent Ignite Phoenix event. You’ll notice I borrowed her cliffs metaphor, but that she works that one, among others, beautifully. And by the way, this is also a great example of how slides ought to work in presentations. Part of the format in the Ignite events is a five-minute limit, slides that advance automatically and show for 15 seconds apiece. That makes for great presentations, as Pam shows us.

And more important, she’s right. Take five minutes and watch this.

If for any reason you can’t see the video here, you can click this link to see the original on BlipTV.

If you’re not familiar with Pam’s Escape From Cubicle Nation blog, you probably should be. She’s an excellent writer, and her blog is about going on your own.

Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software, posted Is the Tech Recession Over? yesterday on his Joel on Software blog. He wrote:

OK, it’s just one data point. All I know is sales of FogBugz and Copilot. But what I’m seeing is this: October-December 2008 were terrible—sales were 20% lower than usual—but starting January 5th, we saw a significant bounce back to the same level of sales as we had before this recession started, and it’s continued to this day.

As my favorite programmer-sage Mike Trigoboff would say: “from your lips to God’s ears.”

In his post Joel links over to comments on his companion site Business of Software, which are also very interesting. And somewhat hopeful too. Several software people added comments on their own sales, and most of those comments are encouraging.

Joel’s blog is always a good read, and good to follow if you’re living and working or even thinking of living and working in the software industry. He’s not just a software entrepreneur, he’s also a blogger, an industry leader, and a good writer.

I think it’s important to understand the world of Internet search as defined by Google. In The Elephant in the Room on his blog, Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood lays it out clearly.

Yes, I like Google. Yes, Google works great and has been my homepage for about eight years now. Google nailed search, and they deserve the leadership position they’ve earned. But where’s the healthy competition? Where’s the incentive for Google to improve? All I see is a large and growing monoculture that acts as the start page for the Internet.

I’m a little surprised all the people who were so up in arms about the Microsoft “monopoly” ten years ago aren’t out in the streets today lighting torches and sharpening their pitchforks to go after Google. Does the fact that Google’s products are mostly free and ad-supported somehow exempt it from the same scrutiny? Isn’t anyone else concerned that Google, even with the best of “don’t be evil” intentions, has become more master than servant?

Calling the current state of search engine competition a horse race is an insult to horse races. No, what we have here is a one horse race where all the other horses were shipped off to glue factories years ago. Forget “search conference”, you should be throwing a “Google conference”, because there’s no difference.

By the way, if you’re involved in actual software development, Jeff’s Coding Horror is a great read. Well written, knowledgeable, and, often, fun.

Amazon announced a new Kindle today. I have a Kindle, I use it and like it and recommend it. The new one doesn’t have enough sizzle to tempt me to dump the one I have and buy new. But if you haven’t bought one, this new one is better and slightly cheaper than the one I have. It has more memory, more battery power, and an improved physical design. Amazon will start shipping it later this month.

I was hoping for a Kindle at half the price, about $200. For that price I think it would be a must-buy for anybody who reads books. At $369, it’s kind of expensive, a nice luxury. I want to buy one for a voracious-reader daughter, and at $200 the difference between the Kindle price and regular price would pay for itself quickly. At more than $350, it’s not so obvious.

I think the Kindle is important because it validates books. Reading and writing books. Both are important to mankind. Both have suffered changing times, the flood of video, smaller-attention-span media, television, and so on. But I hope books remain important to the foundation of education and knowledge and humanity.

Cheesy? Sorry.

So the Kindle validates books in the future. Without paper. Less resource intensive. For that matter, so does the Sony ebook reader, and the ebook reader software on Palm Pilots and Pocket PCs and laptops and netbooks.

Which reminds me, here’s a very nice analysis of the future of eBooks, and the future of the businesses around the ebooks:

The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age – Ars Technica

I caught this piece called Evolution of the Household from Womansday.com, with thanks to several people in Twitter, and Digg before that, who caught it first.

I posted it here because of the food for thought elements.

So this was obvious but worth noting because it’s what you and I expected, and it shows that the right kind of business is going to go on. Toyota has announced plans to build an electric town car. Let’s see a show of hands now: Who’s surprised?

So everybody is pretty much set on what’s getting the most investor interest, market interest and new efforts to start new business. And it’s what we’re now calling clean tech. And green business.

(photo credit: Toyota)

Honestly, I wasn’t paying much attention to these ADP reports until the downturn really went sour last September. I posted on them a couple of times when small business employment grew, slightly, in the midst of bad news almost everywhere else. And now it seems like cheating if I don’t keep up with it, as the bad news rolls in.

Small businesses lost 281,000 jobs in December. That was 80,000 in manufacturing and 201,000 in services. By the way, ADP defines small business as having fewer than 50 employees. That works for me.

The source document is at www.ADPemploymentreport.com.

I downloaded some statistics as an Excel file available from that site. It turns out that goods-producing small businesses have lost more than half a million jobs since the high point of January of 2007, when they employed 8.1 million people. Service sector small businesses have lost more than half a million jobs since their high point of just last April 2008, when they employed 43 million people.

What’s surprising to me, also, is that this new data isn’t surprising. I’m not sure I’m going to continue to post these monthly results. I don’t want to be predictable.

It’s hardly surprising, given the obvious need, that investors are ready and willing to put money into green clean technology. That’s not a hard prediction to make. Still, given the down economy and the generally down numbers and poor outlook on investing, how about this:

During 2008, green-tech venture investments jumped to $8.4 billion, a 38 percent increase, according to preliminary figures released Tuesday by the Cleantech Group.

Cleantech Group’s senior research director, Brian Fan, said in a statement:

2008 saw solar take a 40 percent share of clean-technology venture investment dollars, led by mega investment rounds in thin-film solar, concentrated solar thermal and solar-service provider companies.

Investors also continued to migrate from first-generation ethanol and biodiesel technologies to next-generation biofuels technologies, led by algae and synthetic biology companies. Other sectors with healthy investor interest included smart-grid companies, small-scale wind turbines, plastics recycling, green buildings and agriculture technologies.

So that’s good news to me, on two levels. First, it’s hard evidence that some business is doing fine, still growing; second, I think it gives us hope that there might eventually be real solutions to some of the global problems that plague us all.