networking gives me tears

Moving from college where one has a pseudo-something to offer to a professional setting where one gains their real value – I have experienced some profound insight. No, nothing new or original – but my tendency to learn by doing and emulating has given me the real reward of what networking truly is – connecting others.

First off – let me say something about the idea of what I call, “power-networking.” While in the short run – power networking is great, you meet all kinds of people, their baggage, and they are as interested in leeching off of you as you are of them. Be it the 3-minute elevator speech or the small talk. I hate small talk. I’ve been to a few “power-networking” events – they left me feeling small and angry. Just like I have never been good at pursuing women at a bar, I am not good at pursuing potential clients in short 3-minute bursts. It takes time to get to know me – and I am proud of that. It’s called being genuine.

I hate small talk

Here’s what I have found – generally speaking, just about every creative I have ever met has been genuine – even to a fault. And no fault of their own – it’s the fault of those who exploit them, the many who are good at brokering the 3-minute deals. I walk in both worlds – I have a business education and I am a descent designer. Seeing creative talent being exploited pissed me off the first time I saw it – it pisses me off now.

There are those of us creatives who are lucky – we meet one or two people who see value in what we do and want to help us out. Many are not so lucky. It’s easy to be cynical and say, “well, I’m not good at networking, so I will never be free from those exploiters.” This was my own stumbling block until I was introduced to a way of networking which had never occurred to me before; connecting people.

Exploiting Creative Talent is Wrong

To re-iterate – my understanding of what networking was came from a few trips to “power-networking” groups – to which I immediately reacted a resounding, “Nope, not for me.” And then through all of my hours spent developing my creative skills, I was connected into a world which I had never seen or imagined. A world that rewarded me for doing good work creatively and also boosted my network – all without sacrificing the one thing which feels right – being myself.

Through being myself and connecting, I have gotten the majority of my client work. What is this sub-sect of networking I am calling “connecting?” It’s the idea of putting people together that you have come to know through real relationships. That’s it.

To power-networkers who do nothing but networking, this is an obvious point. Know as many people as you can so that you can connect them in ways that you see fit. But here’s the one caveat – how well does one really know another when they have only spoken in 3-minute bursts. How does one know if two people would really benefit each other? The truth is, there is no way to tell – you’re just playing a numbers game and your network, while big and strong – may be a house of cards. The real relationships come from being genuine and good to others. One must give selflessly for the relationships gained through networking.

Duh George!

Networking through connecting and being genuine has an insularly benefit as well – I know, because of the people I network with. They connect me with genuine, good people. Whereas with power-networking you get all types, the pleasant and not so pleasant. I like to think, in building my network slowly with solid genuine people, I’ve been able to shield myself from what bugs me most; bad people. Bad people make shitty clients – and if I get a vibe from a client of disrespect or an air of authority, I won’t take the work.

As a creative, one has to expect the road to be bumpy. Networking and relationship building fall a distant second to the craft you love. However, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. If your idea of networking is similar to what mine was, think about the people you know and how they may help each other. It’s a pro-active thought process – once you begin, it becomes difficult to stop. By helping people get what they need, giving selflessly, I guarantee you will be better off for it. The reward rarely comes directly, but the feeling of giving is a reward in itself.

Remember, be yourself, stay genuine, and give – the success will come.

“You have good, cheap, or fast, you get to pick two.”

I have been on my own freelancing (or running my own business) for nearly six months, a few things have occurred to me. Cheap is a relative term – relative to the client paying the money as well as relevant to what you’re making across the board for all projects. Good, when doing business for yourself, isn’t so much an option as it is a requirement. And lastly, fast is the speed at which we do business period – people want everything yesterday. So do clients really ever pick two out of three? Or do they just automatically assume to run the table. After all, the customer is always right.

First off, if you aren’t looking at the project as your project, then you will never be able to manage expectations correctly. We aren’t building and selling widgets here – we have a process, it takes time, and we know how long it will be. People come to us for this expertise, and us getting walked on isn’t part of the deal. Good, cheap, or fast is as much your choice as it is your clients.

If you don’t care so much about the work as you do about getting the business, then cheap, fast, and shoddy may be your ideal option. But always keep in mind, shoddy work doesn’t ever get you more clients. Not everything need be brilliant, but maintaining your own standards, regardless of the client is important to sustainability and longevity. Most importantly, it cements a reputation.

The problem with doing work fast is the risk involved. How often do we take on work where there may be a few “hairy” areas that we haven’t quite done it before. It may be browsers issues, it may be programming functionality, or it just may be a whole lot of work we don’t see. If you agree to do work fast, make sure you are getting paid enough to bring in more people if need be.

Again, cheap is a relative term – almost one that can be thrown out the window. I think the most important thing is to be able to walk away from a project if you don’t feel happy about price tag. Remember, the promise of exposure only applies to 5% of the times it is promised. Don’t work for free. Don’t overcharge.

Avoiding the Big Carrot, or Not

As with any “advice,” all of this stuff is easier said than done. In fact, as I began writing this post – I had a project that had to be good and fast – go awry.

The bigger the carrot the bigger the bite – I committed to something because in theory it could be done (assuming nothing went wrong) and it was a client/project that when added into a portfolio made it considerably beefier and more legitimate. Thankfully when this project did go awry, there was budget to pull in extra people with fresh eyes. You stare at anything long enough and you’re just going to make your problems worse.

“Grandma always said, haste makes waste”

So the lesson learned, for me, is to set realistic goals with fall back plans – a goal isn’t realistic if it involves my team working 16-18 hour days trying to build something complex. When you’re tired, work gets sloppy. The culprit in this case can easily be guessed, IE6, and troubleshooting bugs at the eleventh hour when you should be arriving at a solution is painful. We ended up having to put up a placeholder page to encourage users to download IE7 or Firefox 2 – something I have never had to do. We had a fix within a couple of days, but missed our deadline – the one we agreed to.

Shackleton would shake his head, “Leadership on the Edge,” is stressful – not your little web project.

Hopefully, the character of our little conglomerate was defined in crisis and we can move forward with a fresh set of lessons learn – or maybe we cave and lick our wounds behind desks at an agency, but for some reason I don’t think that will happen. The big eye opener for me with this particular project was the stress – working for yourself is just bigger. Bigger projects, bigger dollars, and bigger stress – handling that is a skill set in its own. My goal is to practice what I preach. Best of luck to me, and to anyone who reads this.

There are many reasons why this is akin to shooting oneself in the foot. First off, if a user has a couple hundred pictures on Photobucket, they’re not going to suddenly upload all of those to MySpace. What they will do is get irritated with MySpace, and remember it.

The second thing this is doing is continuing to build the walls higher, so high not even they can see outside. When MySpace starts asserting that users have to use MySpace’s video, audio, or picture services they’re missing out on the bigger picture. Do they really want to compete with all of the little media startups who do the storing, the sharing, and the community so much better? Has anyone ever uploaded a picture at Photobucket or flickr versus uploading at “Oops we’ve encountered an error” MySpace?

In conclusion, I think the first problem is much scarier. The people I talk to tell of a MySpace that isn’t really fun anymore. It’s ridden with spam, fake friends, and a ton of errors. It’s in making moves like this that MySpace will really begin to sink. Their traffic is already on a downturn. The web2 is built on cooperation first, competition second. Either way, the users are most important, not the product. Social networks are the commodity, not the users.

Get a virb account.

The Obvious Side
Texting or Iming “I am eating pringles” is really useless information. People will see it and read over it, it will get no responses. But it was fun for me to know that Twitter-ers will see my words on their screen, whatever. This has no practical purpose except as a visitor to the site, it’s kind of interesting to watch, probably kind of like watching the Search Terms screen at Google Headquarters. From the outside, there is no draw in getting a Twitter account, just watching what other people are doing.

The Not So Obvious Side
And then I had the “ah-hah” moment where I realized when Twitter is really useful. Organizing events without organizing events. Twitter, to me, feels like del.icio.us did when I initially wrapped my head around the concept. Once again it’s tying in a bunch of different things and offering up the data in an entirely new and interesting way.

For instance, there are a ton of people at SXSW who kind of know eachother. Some of them may know each other well enough to call, or well enough to text. For the most part though, the majority of people who are acquaintances and would really like the opportunity to know eachother better. So instead of me having to text people to find out where they are, I can just subscribe to the data they offer up. Whenever a twitter-er writes a new message, I can get alerts via SMS. I can keep all of my friends, but change my subscriptions to their alerts at any time.

Ultimately Twitter is just another tool to help you communicate with a large number of people effectively. They subscribe to you and what you’re doing. You only give up the information you want.

Seems like a perfect fit. This isn’t something I would use every day (I don’t think) but then again I haven’t had it for more than a day. It’s great for organizing a social life, it’s really an effortless task. I think it will be a little while before John Q. Public catches on, but when they do, it will be big.

Thanks to all the Twitter addicts who turned me on to it.

Currently Virb is in beta mode, which means invite only. Which means it’s the “Who ya know” network. I really want Virb to succeed, so after my initial invite frenzy, I have slowed down a bit and will only give invites to those who really will use the service to pass along to others. People should not be on MySpace, they are trying to build a walled-garden and the whole site feels cheap. Virb is the designer’s MySpace.

Having already skinned my profile page, I have a few feelings on Virb, what’s hot and where they can improve. And let me say this, I really truly love it.

Aesthetics - Right off the bat, anyone who goes to Virb and logs in (assuming they have an account) will notice one strikingly different thing. Virb actually looks really really nice. It’s almost as if they hired a graphic designer versus a programmer to do the design and layout (no offense programmers I truly aspire to be like you). Things are easy to get to and it seems like each page you visit on the managing your profile end, was well thought out. Perhaps this isn’t a big game changer for all those MySpace folks out there, let’s face it, the majority of them have pages that make us designers not be able to sleep at night. But, it is a game changer for us designers, who influence a large part of the internet community, whether it be friends, family, or coworkers. And don’t think for a second we won’t take the time to make our virb profile pages look first rate.

Flexibility - In making our profiles look first rate, we need lots of css hooks built into the html we cannot touch and lot’s of flexibility with the structure of html in the layout. The good folks at Virb did both. Not only can you change any CSS within the body of your profile, you can also change the way the blocks on the page are laid out. In fact, I think it’s possible to make a profile page look anyway you would like WITHOUT hacking together a layout. Hopefully this is something the people who are really into changing their MySpace layouts will be attracted to (Does the Virb community even want that?). I really appreciate the extra things they have done to add to the flexibility of profile layouts.

While someone like myself likes to jump right into the code and get their hands dirty, some people aren’t this way. Fortunately Virb has built a drag and drop Ajax interface to change all of the content to be in either of the two columns. It’s the little things like this that make Virb so brilliant.

The Little Things – Have a flickr account? Want to put it on your Virb page? No problem. No more building stupid slideshows with five pictures. This is the beauty of Virb, they aren’t trying to be the end all be all for any kind of media hosting/uploading. They want to offer you the service, but give you choices. Want to show your Flickr pictures on the profile and not your Virb pictures, no problem. It seems like there is a community of users building hooks into all kinds of other media services as well.

Things I would like to see

1) More Modules – The more the merrier, I would like to see these develop like dashboard widgets where companies are releasing them in an environment friendly to developers. So the development of widgets is a cooperation between Virb and any other party, versus a competition. I am sure as the community grows, tons of people will get in on developing modules.
2) Skins – This is another thing I think will grow as more and more users hop over to Virb. It would be nice if we as developers could export a skin we build, and then other community members could upload and install the skin for their profile. This would get so much love from designers. *Hint Hint*
3) Version Control – Of all of my “feature requests” this one is the most important. I would love to see version controls for changing the appearance of a page. Because there is none, it’s really easy to make a change (read mistake) and save over your old version. Personally I do a fairly decent job of remembering the changes I make, but I am sure the majority of people hacking around in there are doing so based on trial and error. They will only get frusterated.

Conclusion

Virb rocks. There are so many great things about it. There are so many things that initial users log in and say oh wow. I think it’s the real winner of any new social network sites I have seen. MySpace is a sinking ship (imo) and It will be good to see what people will do with their Virb pages.

It takes the idea of a mashup a whole lot further. Essentially, anyone with an idea can go and create a mashup of the different services out there (flickr, craigslist, googlemaps to name a few) and create their own feed based on those services. What I see being really great about it is the fact it will become one of those communities that gets better with time. Why?

First off, Yahoo did something really smart and made it so when one wants the datafeed they created, they have to publish it. Upon publishing it, the feed becomes public domain, as well as the recipe to make it. As this community grows, users will piggy back on each other and build feeds/mashups that keep getting better and better. And when any average internet user can go and see how to build a feed that integrates 3+ services into a mashup, there is nothing to keep them from adding to it or changing it slightly to make it better.

Secondly, it’s useful for anyone searching for those niche datafeeds. I want my celebrity news to be a feed of who’s popular in celebritydom, but instead of the headlines, I want to see the newscasts people upload to youtube. This can be built quite easily. Now I can have a news cast delivered to me daily of who is in the news via Google News via YouTube. This is taking the idea of watching what you want or viewing what you want on the internet one step further.

I’ve never been a big fan of Yahoo, but after seeing this, and then thinking how much I love my flickr account and my del.icio.us account, I gotta say they are doing some really good things.

Now I just have to think up an idea (or rip off someone else).

What follows is a list of Movable Type plugins I find useful in my daily building of blogs.

Enjoy, and if I am missing anything, please let me know. I would like this post to grow over time.

Enhanced Entry Editing – For some reason, Six Apart thinks the average user likes looking at HTML markup. Unfortunately, some clients I have built blogs for think other wise. This plugin has saved me on a few occasions. It adds a WYSIWYG toolbar called tinyMCE into the editing entry window of Movable Type. Very nice.

Ease of Install – Medium
Get it

Filter Categories – When building a blog, I often use the category system to help add content to a certain spot such as news versus blog. Using categories helps me filter out entries. However, I also like to list out the categories of blog entries. Filter Categories allows you to exclude certain categories from a list. In doing so, it allows you to go crazy with category customizations.

Ease of Install – Easy
Get it

Live Preview – This plugin is great. When a person clicks on the normal preview within Movable Type, it turns into a big let down. The normal preview looks nothing like what the text will look like on the web. Enter Live Preview – mixing some Ajax type effects and a pages default archive template, it shows you exactly what it will look like on the page of your site.

Ease of Install – Medium
Get It

Exclude Categories – This plugin is great for filtering posts out of a list of MTEntries. I am using it in a situation where I don’t want the posts with videos to pull through the site RSS feed. Any entry I tag with video stays out of the MTEntries Loop. Good stuff and easy to use.

Ease of Install – Easy
Get It

I’m a Mac user by night and a PC user by day, so I couldn’t use one of the available desktop calendars. Believe me, I was tempted by iCal. We’ll see when the iPhone comes out. Anyhow, I decided to go with Google Calendar and I am very pleased for the most part. It’s extremely easy to use and does a nice job of allowing me to collaborate with others using the Google Calendar service.

Multiple Calendars – This is probably my favorite feature. I have a roster of freelance clients, a full time job, side projects, and a tiny little social life. I am able to break out the calendars by client, by project, and by job. It’s really nice to see it broken down like that and color coded.

Shared Calendars – For group projects I can create a calendar and have ownership of it, or if I am working with a group, it can be setup so they can create and edit events. This really helps at my job when people are scheduling, instead of sending me those ugly outlook invites, they can have my calendar on their google calendar. While it hasn’t quite happened to the level it could, there is huge potential here.

Notifications – One can get notifications for the many events that occur in the calendar. However, it seems at this point one can only subscribe to one of the calendars they create. I could be wrong, but I cannot seem to edit different notification types for different calendars. Hopefully someone comments and lets me know how to do it right. There is also an option to receive the day’s agenda via SMS if that is something you’d like.

More specifically, the cnet article gives out some numbers:

Companies charge as much as $15,000 to get content up on Digg, said Neil Patel, chief technology officer at the Internet marketing firm ACS. If a story becomes popular on Digg and generates links back to a marketer’s Web site, that site may rise in search engine results and will not have to spend money on search advertising, he said.

I would be curious to see how acurate these figures are. It seems strange that somebody could manipulate digg to this effect.

Read the whole article here.

Hopefully those smart folks at Yahoo can muster up some kind of solution. If they can’t, users like me will pack up our bookmarks and go. Or at least we will remove their RSS feeds from our RSS readers. I think del.icio.us was in it’s purest form right before Yahoo acquired them. Now they are in the spotlight, and now they are a target. This sucks, I love del.icio.us.

Now where was that del.icio.us exporter site I saw.

** Update ** 11-6 – 12:42 PM Pacfiic – This still isn’t fixed. My rubyonrails feed is still 90% spam. Could this be some anti-rails sentiment because I am not seeing it on any of the other tags I subscribe to.

*** Update *** 11-6 – 5:15 PM Pacific – All fixed now. No more spam. Keeping my RSS feed.