a bee in my bonnet

Storytelling: fundamental for businesses

Add this to your must-read business books: Accidental Branding. 

It's not that the content is revolutionary, or that it communicates the one elusive secret to business success.  Rather, it is an inspirational book filled with great stories of entrepreneurs and what makes them tick, and the accidents and choices that made their businesses great.

The premise is simple. Author David Vinjamuri, a business school prof and former large company brand manager, went looking for successful companies that were not born in a corporate board room, or in the brain of a B-school grad. These are stories of ordinary people who thought "I can do that better," or "why is no one selling this," and then they set about to do just that.  The eight seven companies profiled had the typical hiccups and struggles along the way, but they persisted and built great brands.

The stories are of companies built around consumer brands -- Burt's Bees, J. Peterman, Clif Bar, for instance -- but I found things that ring true for me as a business-to-business marketer. 

Vinjamuri begins the book with a chapter on the "rules" of these successful enterprises, the practices they appear to have in common (besides beating the odds).  My favorite observation? "Rule # 5: Build a Myth."

I cannot overemphasize the importance of your founding myth to the success of your brand. Remember that consumers look for expertise, authenticity, and consistency in brands.... The trick in building your founding myth is selecting the facts that you want to tell, and deciding best how to share them.... You may not have a romantic founding story, but if you're an entrepreneur solving your own problem, you do have a story.... You will know your myth is a good one if it comes back to you from your consumers.

Wow.

I have instinctively known this for years.  The "story" is what has attracted me to so many entrepreneurial ventures, and I have opined on the need to articulate the "story" to many entrepreneurs trying to raise funding and reach customers.

Your story is what differentiates you. A good story is what allows a small venture to disrupt an established market and to win customers away from bigger players. The story allows inventors to effectively create a new category of product or service.

Of course, to be successful, the story has to be true, and consistent with the customers' experiences with the product and their interactions with the company. It has to "inform" and shape the brand.

The other rules (Be your own customer, Be unnaturally persistent, Do sweat the small stuff, and more) are also worth discussion and thought. Still the need to tell a story resonated with me.

The subsequent chapters, one on each company, recount the founding myths, and make it clear how these stories helped shape the brands.

It's an optimistic, engaging book.  In spite of the gloomy economic backdrop, I closed the book energized and excited about what entrepreneurs I might be lucky enough to cross paths with tomorrow. I can hardly wait to hear their stories!

Follow me, I will follow you (or not)

Something has recently changed in my Twitter account.  I used to get a few new followers a week, now I can get a dozen in a day. (The growth in twitter, and my own expanding -- though still relatively puny -- Twitter footprint may be at play.)

So, confronted with more choice, who do I follow back? I think I am not that different from most twitterers (except those who auto-follow everyone, and those who follow almost no one). There is no hard-and-fast rule, but there are contributing factors. 

Why I follow back:

• The first thing I do, when alerted to a new follower, is visit his or her profile.  At the profile page, I can see recent tweets, a bio, a weblink, and even the following to follower ratio. If this seems like a real person, and there are obvious shared interests, I follow back. (I also follow anyone I know personally, offline, too. In fact, I track them, using TweetDeck, in my friends and family group because I don't want to miss what they tweet.)

• Even when it is not clear to me that I have something in common with a new follower, based on his bio or weblink, the tweet stream may tell me all I need to know. I appreciate when people are active in replying and retweeting, a sign they are using twitter to engage in conversations instead of one-way broadcasting.

• The exceptions to the above are some news or announcement feeds (like @skydiver, @profnet, @GlobeTechnology) and entertaining feeds (like the micro-fiction from @arjunbasu).

Who I don't follow:

• If the profile is empty and there is no tweet history, I have no indication as to why this person followed me, and I am unlikely to follow back. (I may do so later, see below.)

• The kiss of death is if this person is clearly just using twitter to market some get-rich-quick scheme, or to post links to their own products and services. Unless I am a huge fan of the product in question, I won't follow this person back.

• I also won't follow people posting comments I find offensive. I am not easy to offend, but it's been known to happen.

Why I change my mind:

• Sometimes, I have (rashly?) decided that it was not obvious why I should follow a new follower.  The next thing I know, they are replying to my tweets, retweeting, and engaging me in conversation. A new friendship is born! This was the case for me with @askaroundottawa and @FoodlandOnt.

• Finally - I have been less selective as I get use twitter more. I still don't auto-follow, but I am less concerned with seeing everything that all the people I follow are posting. (For those I feel I want to track more closely, I use TweetDeck to organize into groups, so that I am less likely to miss their important posts.) In general, I am increasingly comfortable wading into a faster flowing the twitter stream from time to time to see what is going on.

So, who will you follow and why? 

(Image from www.twitter.com.)

Lawyers All A-Twitter

Today I managed to get downtown for the OCRI 45th Circuit session "All aTwitter About Facebook." 45th Circuit is an Ottawa forum for lawyers to get together and discuss topical legal issues affecting their clients and other companies. The topic of this installment was the legal issues for companies whose employees engage in social networking activities for personal or professional reasons.

If you are with a company that has yet to introduce a policy for social networking for employees, don't feel bad. Such policies are far from the norm, but, the panellists agreed, they are coming.

The moderator, Thomas Prowse from Gowlings, was particularly thoughtful on how complicated the issues are, and how, in particular, the lines between personal and professional are increasingly fuzzy.

Some interesting points:

1. Companies should consider limiting or controlling their online searching with respect to prospective employees.

None of the information that is considered protected at the "application" phase (including the candidate's age, plans to have children, religious views) should be gathered or even reviewed. If it is, potential employees that are screened out of the process may have a claim that they were discriminated against on these grounds.

Ideally, the panellists noted that it would be better to bifurcate the hiring process.  Companies should consider engaging an independent agency to source candidates, knowledgeable about what details are relevant and allowable to disclose, and then ensure that this party turns over only the relevant and allowable information to the people doing the screening (ideally inside the company).  They felt that this was going to be an increasingly valuable service to provide. (Having come from the recruiting side, this was, in essence, a significant side benefit to the service my former employer offers its customers.)

If companies are doing searches on candidates, this activity should be kept for later on in the process, akin to checking references, and again ideally limiting the scope of the information you are looking for or reviewing. Again, all acknowledged that this is VERY hard in practice.

One of the best quotes, from Melanie Polowin at Gowlings, with respect to screening employees based on what they post on their Facebook or LinkedIn pages: "stupidity is not protected" information, under employment law. 

2. The other key topic of the panel was the kinds of policies companies should put in place to guide employees engaging in social networking -- whether or not this activity takes place using company infrastructure and on company time.

Another great analogy, to paraphrase Polowin -- just as in teen sex, you may be tempted to encourage abstinence, but you have to plan (and educate) as if employees will engage in the activity. 

Using a specific case, Cindy McCann (Halogen) pointed out the need to have defined, as the starting point for any policy, what it is you want to achieve.  What is the objective? Rather than starting with the rules (i.e. no personal use) you need to think about what it is you are trying to achieve (that work gets done, that employees are as productive as possible) and draft your policy accordingly.

Policies should be built on the notion that of the "duty of good faith" that employees owe their employer. In other words, people should filter what they are doing online with the understanding that they not cause harm to their employers. If their activities are harmful to the business prospects of the employer, they can (and should be) disciplined. Beyond that, personal activities that involve bullying or harassment of co-workers, or that demonstrate human rights violations, should also be disciplined.

Finally, all company policies should be communicated, communicated and communicated (multiple times and ways), and they should be refreshed, reinforced, revisited on a regular basis.

Again, all very interesting, and the landscape is clearly changing. From my communicator's background, I am much more likely to see the benefits of having employees engage actively in social networking, but the legal questions of liability and exposure are real, and, like everyone in attendance, I learned a thing or two I hope to apply down the road.

(© Photographer: Ladykassie | Agency: Dreamstime.com)

The purpose of [This Blog]

[UPDATE - I renamed this blog "a bee in my bonnet" (from, "Personal, not Private") after publishing this post.

I am starting this blog as a companion site to The Drumming. That site is aimed at helping me document and promote my work on my mother's remarkable memoir. 

In creating that blog, I found that there was lots I wanted to comment on and post, but it didn't really belong on that site. So, I decided to create this site, as my own personal blog. 

It will cover my other passions and pursuits. (Hmmm - Lot's of aliteration today.) Like my current job search, the business issues that interest me, good books I am reading, how I use twitter and whatever else shapes me personally and professionally. 

Thanks for reading!  I look forward to any and all feedback!