Melissa Averinos and I have cooked up something really fun and, we hope, truly helpful to those in need this holiday season:

I’ll have more on this in the coming days and weeks, but for now here’s the official word:

This holiday season, Melissa Averinos and Beth Dunn invite you to create hand-knit items for donation to local women and children in need. Handmade for the Holidays, in partnership with Harwichport-based nonprofit We Can, will collect hand-knit hats, scarves, mittens, blankets, and quilts for delivery to Cape Cod residents who are going through difficult economic and emotional times. Handmade for the Holidays is also accepting donations of yarn, needles, and other knitting and crafting supplies to be used by local volunteer crafters.

The staff of WE CAN will ensure that the items go directly to needy women and families in time for the holiday season. All participants — and the general public — are invited to celebrate the conclusion of the project at a public open house at Yummy Goods on Friday, December 4, from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm.

Handmade for the Holidays especially requests the following items in adult AND child sizes:

• Scarves
• Hats
• Gloves
• Mittens
• Socks
• Blankets
• Quilts
• Softies (handmade stuffed animals)

Get together with other participants and create your items in a relaxed group setting at one of two gatherings at Yummy Goods in November:

• Wednesday, November 11, 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm
• Friday, November 20, 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm

Beginners are welcome, and registrants will be notified about what type of materials to bring along if you need guidance. (Feel free to bring your own projects if not a beginner.) Relaxed and inclusive instruction will be provided.

Click here to register for any aspect of Handmade for the Holidays, whether as a crafter/creator, a donor of materials, or to attend the grand finale — the public open house at Yummy Goods on Friday, December 4 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. We’d love to have you!

It’s a good day for author J.C. Hutchins. You? You get a pretty sweet free download, if you want it.  J.C. becomes an “officially” published author. A good day!

Today, St. Martin’s Press releases the first book in J.C.’s new technothriller trilogy, 7th Son: Descent.

Today, J.C is celebrating by offering a free download of the first TEN chapters of his book. You want it? Scroll down to the cover image and click away.

Doing things differently

So here’s what J.C. did:

1. He wrote a book.
2. He was unable to sell his book to a literary agent or publishing house.
3. He shifted gears.
4. He produced and published his books as free, online audio books. People listened. They liked. They loved.
5. He worked his tail off for four years, and built his community, slowly and surely, using the power of free podcasts, free downloads, word of mouth, events in the virtual world Second Life, blogs, and oh, lots more.
6. His books attracted a nifty international fanbase. (Who then created a pretty nifty online fan community.)
7. He eventually attracted the attention of a major publishing house, which is now pleased to release the first book in the trilogy.

What’s it about? Here’s a snippet from J.C.’s website:

The president of the United States is dead. He was murdered in the morning sunlight by a four-year-old boy…

As America reels from the bizarre presidential assassination committed by a child, seven men are abducted from their normal lives and delivered to a secret government facility. Each man has his own career, his own specialty. All are identical in appearance. The seven strangers were not born, but grown — unwitting human clones — as part of a project called 7th Son.

The government now wants something from these “John Michael Smiths.” They share the flesh as well as the implanted memories of the psychopath responsible for the president’s murder. The killer has bigger plans, and only these seven have the unique qualifications to track and stop him. But when their progenitor makes the battle personal, it becomes clear John Alpha may know the seven better than they know themselves…

Image by purpleslog

I got to spend some time today with Paige Arnof-Fenn, CEO and founder of Mavens & Moguls, a global strategic marketing consulting firm based here in the Boston area. She gave me an awful lot to chew on, but the part that I want to share with you now is what she had to say about how things are changing — have already changed, in fact — in the way business gets done today.

New ways of working

One of the things she talked about was how flat organizations like hers, which largely offer project-based work that draws on a diverse network of highly qualified, niche contract workers, can offer flexibility and responsiveness that the more traditional structures can’t.

It’s a lot like what I talked about back in January, about how the smartest traditional companies are exploring how opt-in, project-based work can help cut costs and offer valued employees flexibility and autonomy, while keeping them in your company’s quiver, as it were. (This was based on an excellent post from the always thoughtful Rachel Happe of The Community Roundtable. Still very much worth a read.)

While (some) consultants have worked like this for a long time, the model is starting to emerge in the HR practices and policies of larger, forward-thinking companies. More and more, people are looking for a different model of work, one that includes (1) greater variety in both projects and team composition, (2) more flexibility to work more or less as circumstances change, and (3) more opportunity for virtual work and asynchronous collaboration. Of course, ideally we all want at least a little security, and to belong to some sort of loose cadre of colleagues with whom we can build trust and rapport over multiple projects and time.

This model offers significant advantages to the organization as well. More virtual work means less overhead. More contract workers means more efficient compensation structures. All this adds up to increased agility and responsiveness for the organization that can successfully pull it off.

New ways of thinking

I believe that this trend was already taking hold in some corners before the economic meltdown of last fall, but that crisis has forced people to truly rethink how business gets done. As Arnof-Fenn pointed out, if you’re waiting for business to “return to normal” after what happened last fall, you’re going to be left behind. The train just doesn’t stop at that station any more.

So my question to you is, what new patterns are you seeing? And what are you doing to stay alert to the new pathways that are emerging in this incredibly fluid time in business and technology? Are you looking for the old patterns, or are you training your eyes to see the newer, less familiar ones?

What do you see?

(If you haven’t seen the image above before, try looking at it close up. Then get up and walk about 8-10 feet away and look at it again. What do you see?)

Just in time for Halloween, Melissa Averinos and I present:

Unicorn Stories Episode 4: Halloween Dream

(Music by Ken Tucker and James Swafford.)

(If you’re new to Unicorn Stories, and wonder what this is doing on an otherwise respectable blog about business, brands, and social media, you might want to read this.)

And if you’re new here, don’t forget to watch the first three episodes too!

Episode 1: Seaweed

Episode 2: To The Moon

Episode 3: Shell Game

Unicorn Stories, by Melissa Averinos and Beth Dunn (Yummygirls). A series of short, cute films about a unicorn, for no particular reason at all.

Image by svanes

I’ve been working out for two hours every morning with a friend these last few weeks. It feels great.

It also takes a whole two hours every day. So why do I do it? I’m a busy woman!

OK, you probably know why I work out.

But it’s made me think about the time commitment that scares off a lot of people from getting their businesses going online.

It’s a lot like starting a new exercise program. How you justify it has a lot to do with how much you plan to get out of it.

Practice makes better

If you do something every day, it gets a whole lot easier to do that thing. When I first got back on the treadmill a few weeks ago, it was harder than I wanted it to be. I was (am) pretty out of shape. Let’s be honest.

But I never for a second thought that it would always feel that way, not if I stuck to the plan and dutifully showed up at the gym every day and did my thing. It gets better! Right? You know that.

Same thing with blogging — actually, with writing in general — and with anything else you do online. Practice — regular, consistent, diligent practice — makes you better at that thing. It gets much, much easier, lots more fun, and a whole lot more effective.

Focus on the rewards

What do you think about when you’re on the treadmill, on your bike, on the jogging path? Sure, I spend some of my time thinking about stuff I have to do that day, and about how I’m feeling at that moment (sweaty, sore, strong, powerful, superhero-esque, etc.), but for the most part, I try to think about how great the results are going to be. I think about short-term and long-term results.

Short-term results include how much better I’ll feel that day — sharper wits and faster reflexes and all that — while long-term results are more about the ever-so-slightly-show-offy clothes I’ll be able to wear in six months, the public speaking events at which I’ll feel less self-conscious about my suit size, etc.

Can you think about the short-term and long-term results that you are driving towards with your online efforts? If you don’t know what your short- and long-term goals are for all this, STOP RIGHT NOW and figure them out.

Learn to enjoy the costs

The other side of the ROI equation is, of course, the investment. And while I’m thinking about my expected returns on my exercise investment, I am also trying to learn to enjoy the investment itself. When I’m really deep into a long-term exercise and fitness regimen, like months deep into it, I love it purely for the experience. The sensation of feeling my muscles work in fluid symmetry, my lungs filling deeply with oxygen and powering my limbs with energy, my skin efficiently cooling me down with a salty sheen of sweat…

I dig all of that. And I don’t have to think about the reward all the time, because the experience is the reward.

But you don’t get there without the practice. Without the diligence. Without the repetition.

Like with everything else in life, more than half the battle is simply suiting up and showing up, every day, without fail.

It pays you back a hundredfold. Now. And later.

Olivier Blanchard (@thebrandbuilder on Twitter) recently wrote a very well-reasoned and delightfully detailed post on how companies can and should manage their various Twitter accounts.

It’s a great post, with an insane amount of useful information and advice packed into it. Here it is again.

My Take

My concerns with companies on Twitter are twofold:

1. I want to know you are authorized to represent your company
2. I want to know who I’m talking to at all times

It’s a hard thing, trying to balance the transparency and human touch that Twitter demands with the formality and structure that most businesses require.

But: You are not a logo.  You are a person tweeting on behalf of an organization.  All you really need to do is be clear about who the organization is and who the person is, and represent both entities — yourself and your company — with complete integrity.

Account Names

Olivier argues for the use of organizational titles in most of a company’s Twitter account names, as in (in the case of company ABC) @ABC_HR for the company’s HR department, @ABC_IT for the IT department, etc.

I like how Zappos handles the account-name dilemma.  Most employees of the company use the company name (Zappos), followed by an underscore, then the employee’s first name, or a variation on their own name that is unique within the company.  The result is Twitter account names like @zappos_alfred and @zappos_fred.  In some cases, the account name is simply the name of the department, such as  @zappos_service.

This is basically what Olivier is recommending, I think.  Use department names in Twitter handles for ease of customer service, to make it very easy for customers to find the people who can answer your question. At the same time, allow employees to create a company-based Twitter account, to put a human face on the organization, and use the account-name protocol of @company-name-person-name for these accounts.  I like it.

The only thing that I would add is that I still want to know the name of the person tweeting, even — especially — if that person is just working a shift at the customer service desk.  Southwest Air does a good job with this, by having each person who staffs the impersonally named @southwestair account introduce themselves by first name at the beginning of the shift.

I really always want a name to go along with the account.  If the account is maintained by a number of different people, I want to see those people’s names on the Twitter background of the account page.  Again, Southwest Air does an excellent job of this. On their Twitter homepage, you’ll find both the names of those who tweet under that account and the personal Twitter accounts of those people, so you can follow them as individuals as well.

Avatars

I also like what Olivier recommends for avatars.  He suggests a decent compromise between the logo/person dilemma, by suggesting that companies design a simple branded frame for company Twitter accounts, and then incorporate the person’s headshot into that frame.

If you must use your company logo alone as your Twitter avatar, you should at least customize it in some way for Twitter, and balance the impersonality of that by putting your picture on the account’s homepage, as well as your name.

Balance is Key

As I said at the beginning, it’s all about balancing the personal and the corporate.  I know you’re there to fulfill a business function, and that you’re representing your company in a formal way. But you’re a person.  The whole reason why I go on Twitter to seek assistance instead of calling a 1-800 number is to make a more direct, more human form of contact with somebody at that faceless organization of yours.  That is why I use Twitter.

If you’re not willing to let your employees be human on Twitter, you should probably just stick with the 1-800 number and be done with it.

On the other hand, you do need to protect your brand, your reputation, and your investment in social media. And you need to make it easy for us to find you by your corporate name. So by all means, use your corporate name in your account handles, and use your logo in your avatars and your landing pages.  But if your avatar and/or handle consists of only a logo or company name, please compensate for that by giving us more human information on the landing page.

All I’m looking for is a first name.   A photo would be nice, too.

How does that sound to you?

Whale, by Melissa Averinos

What is it that you can do that others can’t?  What do you think is like falling off a log, it’s so damn easy?

Why aren’t you selling that?

No, really. Why not?

It seems like the simplest advice in the world:

1. Figure out what you’re good at and enjoy
2. Make sure it is something that others need or want
3. Sell it to them

But you’d be surprised at how often you (yes, you) ignore this basic truth.

Here are some of the things you like to tell yourself instead:

• It’s so easy to do, it’s not worth anything
• Nobody really needs this
• It’s so easy to do, people could teach themselves
• Nobody really wants this
• It’s wrong to make money off of something that is so easy to do

It’s this last one that I think lies at the heart of most creative people’s problems with making a living by doing what they do best: you think that “work” should be “hard.”

We have a hard time wrapping our heads around the idea that work — work that you get paid for and everything! — can be fun, can come naturally, can be truly enjoyable, day in and day out.

Or we get caught up in “filling in the gaps” — working like mad to balance our “soft” skills with “hard” ones.

(How come we always think the things we can do are “soft,” but the things that we can’t are “hard?” Let’s stop doing that.)

Sure, you’re a good painter, but you should really get better at accounting, so you can do your own bookkeeping.

Sure, you’re a great writer, but you should really learn how to code websites, so that you have a “marketable skill.”

Nonsense.

Do what comes easy.  Do what you love. Find the people who need that thing.  Sell it to them.

It’s really, truly OK to make a living doing what comes naturally. I promise.

I’m reading a book right now called Everyday Negotiation: Navigating the Hidden Agendas in Bargaining, by Deborah Kolb and Judith Williams.

It’s making me think about how negotiations are like marketing, how both might be changing because of social media, and how this is really good news for small businesses on the web.  I’d like to hear your take on it, too.

Negotiating as a zero-sum game

Traditionally, most people think about negotiating in terms of buying a car, or haggling for products and services in a confrontational, win-lose scenario.  Some people thrive on this sort of bargaining, while others fear it.

But is this really how negotiating still works?

Negotiating as connection and collaboration

One central concept in Everyday Negotiation is that many, many of our daily interactions are negotiations — not just sales and bargaining.  Another central concept is that recognizing this doesn’t have to make every interaction fraught with tension.  Quite the opposite, in fact.

Kolb and Williams suggest that connection and collaboration are the true keys to successful negotiations:

“People come together to settle differences, but how they feel about themselves and how they are treated determine how willing they are to work through these difficulties…{w}hen they feel undermined or unappreciated…communication chills and choices are cut off.  You prevent this reaction from taking hold by building a relationship with your counterpart and deliberately looking for connections between your interests and his or her needs.”

Negotiation = marketing

Let’s agree on that much, at least.  That marketing itself is a form of negotiating. Fair?

The way that marketing happens now on the web — the way it happens when it is done right – is changing the dynamic of distrust and positional tactics that used to govern the way we dealt with each other.  Companies are learning that openness, honesty, and human-shaped interactions are actually the surest way of “protecting their positions” (to use the old, zero-sum terminology).

Zappos.com comes to mind.  They changed the game of online shoes and clothes shopping, by closing the distance between what customers want and what they can give.

Comcast comes to mind, too.  They changed how hundreds if not thousands of people feel about them just through the human-scaled customer service they provide as @comcastcares on Twitter.  (I have personally been helped out of a power failure thanks to Frank Eliason, the guy at the other end of the Twitter account.)

(For an excellent discussion of the @comcastcares story, read pp. 105-107 of Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.  They call it the “One of Us” effect.)

Now, how much does the One of Us effect sound like the old style of negotiating? Of marketing?

How do you connect & collaborate?

I work with lots of different types of small businesses that pride themselves on the human touch — artists and gallery owners, writers and small press publishers, musicians and local recording studios. They already know how to be human, how to do the one-on-one, how to be One of Us.

The difficulty usually lies in how to make that translate on the social web.  With so many trumpets blaring at you, telling you to BUY 10,000 TWITTER FOLLOWERS  or TRICK GOOGLE INTO RANKING YOUR SITE #1 it can be hard to hear the soft music playing in the cafe down the street.

And newcomers to this social media thing often think that they have to change how they do things, become more slick and salesy, if they are going to start making things happen online.

Not so.

My point is that you already know how to be human-shaped. You already know how to do the one-on-one. You are already One of Us. That’s exactly how you came to have (or want to have) a small, thriving business. You don’t have to change that aspect of yourself to make things happen online.

You have to amplify it.

“Deliberately narrow the distance between you and the other person, opening the lines of communication, and you increase the odds of becoming partners in a joint endeavor rather than contestants in a competitive enterprise.”

What do you think?

Quotes from:

Kolb, Deborah M. & Williams, Judith, 2003. Everyday Negotiation: Navigating the hidden agendas in bargaining. Wiley: San Franscico, CA

Mermaid, by Kate Beaton

This week people of all ages are returning to school, which means that lots of folks are thinking harder than usual about what they want to be when they grow up, and how they might reasonably try to get there.

I thought it would be a good time to talk to someone who seems to me to be doing it right, in terms of making a living as a creative person, on her own terms and in her own way.  People like this inspire me, and I think it’s good to keep their stories in mind as we forge our own creative paths.

What follows are excerpts from an interview I did recently via email of the author of my very favorite webcomic, Hark! A Vagrant!

Kate Beaton and Hark! A Vagrant!

Kate Beaton lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and she writes one of the funniest and, yes, most erudite webcomics out there, Hark! A Vagrant!

She is clearly fascinated by history, especially of the Canadian, American, and European variety, and her comics present a quirky, often hilarious take on the many topics in this rich vein of content.

Her interests include the American Revolution (click on the images to enlarge*):

Naploeon’s fateful campaign on Russia:

Robespierre and the French Revolution:

And, of course, Jane Austen:

Kate earned her undergraduate degree in History and Anthropology at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada. She began drawing comics for the university newspaper during her 3rd and 4th years at school, but then stopped after graduation.  She picked it up again after about two years, when she started what would eventually become Hark! A Vagrant!

After showing her growing catalog of new comics to her closest friends, she was eventually persuaded to start posting them online. Now she lives in Halifax, where she earns her living primarily from her webcomic, its related merchandise, and other artistic projects.

I asked her how the process of posting her art online and making it public had changed the style and content of what she did:

Well, the style has changed because I’ve been drawing consistently since I began the comic.  It’s improving, I’m happy with that.  As for content, I used to do more personal things, journal comics and inside jokes because it was just myself and my friends reading the comics.  That mostly went away with a bigger audience, no one wants to read a comic about pointless inside jokes.

One of the striking things about the world of webcomics is the tightly-knit support network they have formed.  There is a tremendous amount of cross-promotion and publicity that goes on among the emerging crop of webcomics artists, and they seemed to embrace Kate’s endeavors right away:

When I started, I got a lot of encouragement, and that was a big boost.  Online comics artists are often friends in the same way that any peer group would be, they do the same things, have similar interests and experiences, and are usually fans of other creators too.  There were a lot of people helping me who I became friends with – Emily Horne, Joey Comeau, John Campbell, Ryan North, Richard Stevens, Meredith Gran, John Allison, Jeff Rowland – a lot.

What do you do during a typical day, now that you are back living in Halifax and making your living from your art?

I’ve yet to settle in to a typical day here in Halifax, it’s been such a busy summer and I’ve hardly even been around.  But days vary widely, sometimes it’s all reading one day, sometimes it’s making comics and failing, sometimes it’s making comics and getting it right, sometimes it’s making comics for other things, sometimes it’s answering mail.  Sometimes it’s all of those things!

I noticed that on some of your earlier strips, you wrote in a line at the bottom that says something along the lines of “this is so dumb.” I think it’s a common thing for creative people to do, metaphorically or otherwise, to hang self-deprecating disclaimers on their work.  This practice, as you know, has a number of drawbacks. What advice would you give to other creative people who do this?

Don’t do that.  I’ve done it once or twice under something that is especially ridiculous, but I still put it up, it’s funny because it’s so bad, people enjoy it.  But you see a lot of people putting stuff up and saying about it “this is my shitty comic” or making excuses like “oh I only did this in 10 minutes so that’s why it’s so bad.”  They’re scared people will make fun of what they are doing, but you have to put it out there, you have to let people judge for themselves.  If it’s bad, it’ll get better in time, that’s the way it always is.

Where did you get such a sinister view of mermaids?

Mermaids were always sinister, they drowned sailors!

Who do you think really killed the princes in the tower?

Henry Tudor, baby

Why I like Kate’s story

The lessons I take from my interview with Kate are the usual reminders of how to live a creative, satisfying life:

• Do what makes you giggle, gives you joy, or however else you describe happiness
• Trust that it will resonate with other, similarly-minded people
• Find your support network and become a part of that community

In short, share your actual, authentic self with the world, and don’t worry about the traditional or approved way of going about things.  Find other people who share your take on things, and support them.  Follow it where it goes.

What do you think? Who inspires you?

*All images reproduced with permission from the author. All images are copyright of Kate Beaton.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been fiddling around with a number of fun side projects this summer.  One of them has been a series of animated shorts called Unicorn Stories.

A collaboration with my good friend Melissa Averinos, a very talented artist and fabric designer here on Cape Cod, these films have been a welcome change from the usual — a very fun and engaging new creative direction. I hope you enjoy our latest:

Melissa Averinos and Beth Dunn present the end-of-summer serenade to love lost and found… and the friends you meet along the way:

The music is  Mother’s Mandolin by Up Stairs.

And don’t forget to watch Episode One: Seaweed

and Episode Two: To The Moon, if you haven’t already.

Happy Labor Day Weekend!