There is no Pulitzer prize for web content.

I am not talking about an award with the same prestige — web content might be a wee bit too young for that. I am speaking about context. There is no body on the web that celebrates exceptional content, not necessarily journalism but the type of content that moves society forward and changes our perspective on the world.

That’s just not what we do around here.

Think about it.

The value proposition of the web is built around infotainment. We encourage, if not require, our content to be short, punchy and “share-worthy.” Anyone whose taken “How To Make Milli0ns Blo0ging!” down at the airport Hilton knows that. Save your dissertations for your professors because the second your content extends past three thousand words, there’s a pretty good chance no one is going to read it.

People think reading words on a computer screen is hard, and frankly I am no exception. It takes more than a little motivation to read anything over a few hundred words at my screen, let alone a piece of content that is actually trying to say something beyond the daily weather updates we accept as information today.

Also, there isn’t any money in it.

Eyeballs equal dollars for content producers. It doesn’t matter how long those eyeballs stick around, all that matters is that they show up and keep clicking. That’s why the news magazines of the Internet break up their long form content into so many pages, the only reason to write it at all is that separating content over ten pages sure bumps up the pageviews. If they were only paid on the first click, and they knew that by writing a long piece they were reducing their readership hand over fist, what would be the point?

There is a cost to all of this.

Writing and writers are commoditized on the web. We’re all conduits and filters, which is trendy these days but also telling because according to my A/C guy I should be replacing my filter about once a month. Sure, some of us are more clever than others and that bumps up our price per word but the dirty little secret is that most writers on the web are on the content churning treadmill, hoping that one day they will be able to develop a strong enough personal brand to stop taking the pittance they are being paid and move on up the ladder to publisher. The prestige isn’t in making meaty content, it’s in aggregating entertaining stuff.

Unfortunately, few writers have the opportunity to really flex their skills on work time. The format dilutes their work down into 500 word bites, making the type of content that builds careers and changes minds nearly impossible to write.

That’s not going to change anytime soon, nor do I believe anyone really wants it to. Like I said, reading pages and pages on the web makes my head hurt.

But with the way things are it’s not likely you are going to see the Walter Cronkite or Neil Sheehan of the web anytime soon. The talent exists but the economic drivers don’t. Investigative reporting, long-form content is hard, expensive and takes a long time produce. The 40 post a day schedules that the major blogs stick by and the fact that investigative posts wouldn’t bring in extra ad dollars means that they won’t exist. It’s simple supply and demand. People will do it because they want to but right now they can’t do it because it’s economically viable.

With this model intact, the power will always be squarely in the hands of the blog publishers and the writers, poor writers, will always just be great conduits and filters.

Is this an indictment against the web? Not a chance. I love the web and I write tens of thousands of words for it every year. This is a whatif exercise for your Monday morning commute. Has the web turned writing and writers into a commodity and if so, do we really care?

(Images)

“You can’t always get what you want. You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.” -Rolling Stones

How do you effectively price your services?

Charge too much and you will scare potential customers off. Don’t charge enough and you will lose out on revenue and possibly lose customers who believe that cut rate prices mean cut rate service.

In the best of times, this is a sticky problem. These days, with free cash at an all time low, and everyone thinking up any way they can to avoid spending, it can be the problem faced by entrepreneurs trying to monetize their businesses.

What’s the answer? The secret has been deftly concealed in the lyrics at the beginning of this article.

You’re not Wal*Mart.

You should understand this right off the bat. Small business owners and their teams wear too many hats for that. Your cost of customer acquisition will always been higher than a larger company, and the cost for servicing individual customers, even if it’s small, will also be larger. Marketing, advertising and PR all cost time and money, making each person who walks through your door a precious commodity. Competing on volume is a tough gamble.

You’re a lot more like Brookstone.

Brookstone doesn’t compete on price. There are a lot of cheaper places to buy a desk clock, but you go to Brookstone not because you’re trying to get the clearance rack special. You go to Brookstone because you’re looking for design, quality and innovation.

People should come to you because you can offer them something that larger companies cannot give, quality and personalized service. When you understand that this is your primary value proposition, Jagger’s lyrics start to make a little more sense.

Don’t charge what you think your product is worth, that number usually vastly understates your true value. When developing pricing, look at your competitors and be willing to price yourself on the same level.

Not only will you avoid both of the dangers of under-pricing yourself but this will also give you room to discount. It’s always easier to lower prices than it is to raise them, so setting your “real” price a little higher gives you a buffer to work within. You might not be able to get that price all the time, but if you try, you will almost certainly get a higher price than if you built your discount in upfront and tried to compete on volume.

Getting what you need means at least trying to get what you want.

Pricing is complex but don’t make it so complex that you lose track of what people are actually paying for — good service, customer care and a more personalized experience than they could get at the Wal*Mart’s of the world.

(Images)

A few weeks I ago I sat down for an interview with Jun Loayza, one of the founders of Viralogy — a Social Media tracking tool. He’s one clever guy, with an impressive amount of drive so when he pitched me the idea of putting together a group of bloggers to discuss business topics from the perspective of Generation Y, I figured — why not. Enter an experiment that we’re calling, “Viraology Experts.” Instead of trying to explain it myself, I’m going to turn it over to Jun.

We all know the big names in the blogosphere: Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Leo Babauta, just to name a few. They have amazing content, but at times it feels like I can’t relate with them. Though they are in touch with Generation Y, they are not part of it. They’re in a position where they have reached success, and are now teaching us about how we can become successful, which may be the source of the disconnect.

I want to read about people who are in the trenches like me; I want to hear from people who haven’t made it yet, but are doing things the right way and can teach us how they’re doing it every step of the way. I want to hear from the experts in my Generation.

Realizing this, Viralogy decided to create Viralogy Experts - the platform that features Gen Y experts on a specific topic. For our debut, we are featuring four experts in four different categories:

• Adam Baker - Personal Finance
• Cody McKibben - Location Independence
• Steve Spalding - Business and Strategy
• Stuart Foster - Marketing and PR
• Derek Halpern - Psychology In Social Media

These bloggers aren’t just giving advice, they’re actually living their advice so you know everything they teach has been tested first hand. Viralogy Experts is the platform for Gen Y, written by Gen Y. Cut through the clutter on the internet and go straight to the blog that gives you concrete, step-by-step, credible advice from peers that you can trust.

It should be an interesting ride, and I hope you join us for it.

(Images)

We all want to do a little good. Fix something; build something; change something.

We all want to. Some people go out and do.

Today I spoke to Eileen Corrigan (@ecorrigan), whose helping to bring non-profits onto the web, guiding through the often murky process of using the Internet to effectively convey their message. She’s doing this through her new web design firm specifically geared towards non-profit’s needs, Do Good Web.

More impressive than that were Eileen’s deep insights into entrepreneurship, work/life balance and discovering your passions.

Here are a few more key points –

• The art of throwing yourself off of a 15 story building
• Finding your balance
• Your hard versus your soft resume
• Discovering your passions
• The million dollar question
• Nonviolent communication
• Changing the world

In case you didn’t know, there are all sorts of ways to subscribe to the podcast on Talkshoe, or you can just click here. Incredible photo from Flickr.

But you’re an entrepreneur and you realize that focus is finite. Every single day you are trading your time in for the hope that whatever project you are currently working on will be worth the effort. You’re giving up all of the other fantastic ideas swimming around in your skull for a bet — the bet that this project is the one that will make it or at the very least it will lead you to The One.

Morpheus would be proud.

I am an entrepreneur and I live with these kinds of choices everyday. This week Forbes asked me how I deal with them and what time-saving tips I had to give myself more bandwidth.

Let’s start with the first. Deep down inside I wish I could do everything. I have three moleskines filled with interesting, world changing (ahem) ideas that I would love to create. It breaks my heart that so many of them have to wait in line as I work on nurturing my current projects.

What gets me through the day is understanding that just because a project is on the shelf, doesn’t mean that I am not working on it. I am constantly surprised by how many times my current projects spill over into an idea I had months ago, how often the focus I’m devoting to one thing leads to the breakthru I needed for another. It’s important as entrepreneurs to recognize the links between the things that we create, and to be open to the fact that sometimes the best thing you can do for your nascent ideas is to leave them alone for a while, finish off what you are currently working on and come back to them with fresh eyes.

To do this effectively, you need to be able to manage your time. If you are spending a lot of your time running around in circles doing the same things over and over again, not only will it be harder for you to finish your current project but it will be more difficult to capture all of the information that you could use to better your future ones.

Everyone’s organizational style is different, but since I occasionally get asked how I stay organized I wanted to tell you that story and see if it helps.

Everything in my day comes in through Postbox, the only email client I’ve ever used for more than 5 days on a stretch. It’s clean, it’s simple and I love it. I’ve described previously how I deal with email, so I won’t do that again but after it leaves my box it ends up in Chandler — a fantastic opensource scheduling and to-do list. It’s a desktop client, which I need because there is something about keeping my To-Dos in the cloud that makes it impossible for me to give them sufficient weight. Using both of these tools produces a single path between email and action, and has easily cut days of procrastination out of my life.

Ideas are another story, for those I use a combination of Moleskine’s (or Piccadillys which are much cheaper), Notepad++ and Dia. If you haven’t tried Notepad++ and you use Windows, you should. It is a multi-tab, multi-pane notepad replacement that has syntax highlighting for everything from C to Matlab. I always have a few tabs open to take notes on concepts of interest. Once those coalesce into an idea, they go into Dia, the best flowcharting and mindmapping program I’ve ever used (and I’ve used quite a few). It is simple, powerful and makes it easy to visualize concepts and find the holes. Before I got these tools, I’d spend hours tracking down scraps of paper and going through files looking for that clever thing I thought up at 4AM that one night.

There are dozens of other little tricks I use to save time and manage my focus, and the best advice I could give to any entrepreneur is take the time to find the one’s that work for you. It’s almost never the tools themselves, but how they work within your style of business that matter.

Wait, I forgot, didn’t I start off talking about focus?

(Image)

I spend a lot of time with the Internet. I live it, I breathe it, I bet there is an alternate reality where it helps me solve groovy mysteries with the help of an electric van and plucky dog.

But I digress.

I spend a lot of time with the Internet and because of that I hear more than my share of stories about how older paradigms are dying and being replaced by shiny, new web-based ones.

• Print is dying.
• Newspapers are dying.
• The media is dying,
• and yes, PR is dying.

You know, as much as I care about the Internet, I have say that most of those structures aren’t dying, they’re merely shifting.

Since this post was spurred by this article put out by Ragan (which I am quoted in), I’ll use PR as the example.

Let’s begin.

The traditional press release won’t get you very far online.

Bloggers, like journalists, get dozens and dozens of queries everyday and the only way for your product to get above the noise is to make it personal. A good amount of the work I do is research, looking at blogs and building relationships; Taking a pulse of what is happening in the industry and crafting stories that will be of specific interest to the person I am pitching.

The reason I go through all of this work is that I hate pitching. If I am going to blast an email off to anyone, I want to have some idea that whatever I’m selling is something they want to buy or at least something they want to hear about.

With that said, PR isn’t dead.

PR is still an absolutely necessary piece of the marketing mix. There is plenty of good work you can do through advertising and social networks, but it’s these stories, told through PR, that get you real traction. It’s the ability to convince someone that the thing that you care about is worth them caring about it, and giving them the tools to spread that message to others.

The problem is that too many people are still locked in one of two paradigms. They either believe that new media is overhyped and underwhelming, in which case they avoid it entirely or they believe that it is the holy grail of communication — which leads them to avoid courting the more traditional forms of press that can bring your ideas into the mainstream.

To stay relevant, you need to strike a balance between these two ideologies.

PR firms need to continue to embrace Social Media. There needs to be a major shift in thinking where they realize that courting bloggers, and communicating through services like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn is a legitimate tool in their belt. Many of them, Edelman comes to mind, are making big moves in that direction, and smaller, boutique firms, Heavy Bag Media among others, are basing a large portion of their campaigns around the web.

On the other side of the coin, new media types need to take lessons from traditional PR. Learn to craft effective releases, learn how to communicate with newspapers, television networks, radio stations and other forms of media. Learn that effective marketing involves shaping your story to meet the needs of many different kinds of audiences. Don’t lock yourself into the idea that the web is the only way and that anyone who says differently has been spending too much time at their telegraph.

Will PR ever cease to exist?

I don’t see anything on the horizon that can step into replace it. There might, however, be a shift in language as the relationship between companies and the press they are courting becomes more transparent. The playfield may become less top-down, with a corporation “releasing” information to the crowd in hopes that they will disseminate it, and could become more level — where a company releases the information publicly through the social channels they have built up, and allows people to pick it up organically.

Do you think PR is on its deathbed? Weigh in.

(Images)

There is something you might not know about me that’s relevant to this week’s podcast — I used to write really bad fiction. We’re talking really bad, with headless aliens and pink flamingos and magical, flying marmosets sort of stuff. Well because of my illustrious literary career, I have a softspot for writers doing interesting things. Nancy Brauer is one of those writers. She is working with friend Vanessa Brooks on a serialized Sci-Fi novel called Strange Little Band.

What did we talk about?

Without spoiling too much of the fun,

• Being a boring superhero
• Making a living doing something you love.
• Is the creator economy taking over the working world?
• Should you serialize your content?
• Some marketing types that we like (Chris, Havi, Maki).
• Risking that people will dig your tentacles.
• 1000 true fans
• Structured drama on the web (Reservation)
• The importance of feedback

In case you didn’t know, there are all sorts of ways to subscribe to the podcast on Talkshoe, or you can just click here. Incredible photo from Stephen Poff.

I thought I’d share my response to an interesting question raised by Ted Murphy of IZEA. Ted runs an advertising network that deals primarily in “sponsored conversations.” The idea is that they match brands with bloggers who want to write about them. Money is exchanged, which raises the hackles of the blogopshere.

I’ve talked about my thoughts on IZEA. My general impression is that writers owe their readers honesty, and that any bias, whether it’s money, gifts or favors should be disclosed. IZEA enforcers disclosure, good on for them. That being said, it’s not my job nor do I believe it’s the blogosphere’s job to police this.

The question at issue wasn’t the moral ambiguity of sponsored posting. Ted is also a firm believer in disclosure for anyone who accepts payment for their opinion, and he posed the following –

Every post done through SocialSpark has standardized machine readable disclosure and automated disclosure audits. You can’t get paid through SocialSpark without having a disclosure badge.

What if all marketers and bloggers played by these same rules? What if we defined disclosure together and enforced it through an independent third party service run by a trade organization? I believe we can. Standardization of our practices through software automation and validation is the ultimate answer. I hope that one of our trade organizations takes the lead to make this happen.

Where do I stand on the idea of a “universal disclosure” site?

I think we are all playing in a gray zone.

Why gray?

People still don’t seem to have a clear definition of what “compensation” means. With SocialSpark/IZEA it’s pretty cut and dry.

• Company approaches blogger to write about a product/service.
• Blogger accepts/rejects companies offer.
• Blogger writes a post, and discloses his relationship with the company.
• Company pays blogger for his participation.

For a situation like that, it’s obvious that this type of solution would function. However, let’s change things a bit.

Let’s say that a large tech conference wants to get coverage, so they offer a group of bloggers free passes to the event (something that happens all the time). The bloggers aren’t required to cover the conference, but they mostly will.

What type of disclosure should be required here?

They aren’t being “paid” for their voice necessarily, but they are being compensated for it. I can see a lot of people balking at the idea that a free conference pass is the same kind of thing as being paid $100 to review a Flip Mino.

Even though when you scrape away the layers, it is nearly identical (except the conference pass might cost more).

As a blogger, I believe that any time it could be construed that you would have a bias, you should mention the source of that bias. We make a lot of hard decisions around the type of advertising to accept and the only way to give credence to those decisions and your audience for accepting them is to clearly disclose.

I do worry that something like this will primarily serve to “punish” people who do disclose, as those who don’t care will skirt around the system while those who do will be branded. Which is my big problem with any type of “volunteer” system. As long as you leave it up to someone’s discretion, you leave the playing field completely open for people to abuse it.

My 3 1/2 cents.

What do you think?

If there was anything in the world that could make me lose sleep (I haven’t found it yet, late nights means sleep comes pretty easily) it would be beginnings. Beginning projects, beginning businesses, beginning client work — every color and stripe of professional beginnings.

The problem with beginnings is that you don’t know anything. You’re blind, deaf and dumb to the future. When you build a site or take on a client, everything from that point forward is a question mark. Will the project succeed? Will you get paid? Was the proposal representative of the work? Will anyone actually care?

These are unanswerable questions, and for control freaks like us they are terrifying. If you let it play out for too long in your mind, these questions can be crippling.

How do you fight the overwhelming sense that you are no longer in control of your destiny.

Trust yourself and do the work.

Remember that this uneasiness is what you signed up for, and that it’s the only thing that makes success worth it. What you sense is why most people never strike out on their own, and why doing anything great is so hard. What you’re feeling is Risk, and the only thing you can do is smile the reaper down and keep working.

There is a point in every project that you will either succeed or fail. That point is coming whether you like it or not, and no amount of fretting is going to help. The second you can get over the lie that you can worry your way to victory is the second you’ll start working your way to it.

(Images)

At the end of the first episode of RGS, we had a surprise guest — Michael Wright of Nice Fish Films. Michael is a documentary maker and deep thinker, so it seemed only appropriate that we get him on the show. The result, the episode you are just about to listen to featuring both Miguel and Michael.

What did we talk about?

Without spoiling it, here are a few highlights:

• Something about the death of media being grossly exaggerated.
• A few words on how to get the frog out of your throat and find your voice.
• We talked about our feelings for a bit,
• Then the joys of being your own press agent.
• Finally, we tried to decide whether we would rather have big piles of cash, tons of free time or less ADD. The results may surprise you.

In case you didn’t know, there are all sorts of ways to subscribe to the podcast on Talkshoe, or you can just click here.