Networking

March 25, 2011 By Erik Deckers

Five Ways Coffee Shops Can Earn Entre-Commuters’ Ongoing Business

So I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Orlando right now, thinking I need a military firing range to get some peace and quiet to get some work done. I’m on a working vacation this week and have tried several different local coffee shops and this Starbucks, but I haven’t had great luck.

Compared to even the mediocre coffee shops in Indianapolis, I realized not every coffee shop gives a crap about their customers, let alone the returning ones. If I lived here in Orlando, I can imagine I would be on a months-long quest to find a decent coffee shop where I would want to spend several hours at a time. I thought I had a winner with one — gorgeous decor, nice ambience, and it was quiet — but the wifi was nonexistent (something about Macs not being able to interface properly with their router). I turned to a Starbucks as a last resort, but was bombarded with the same Starbucks experience: too loud, snail-slow wifi, and bitter coffee.

My good friend and fellow entre-commuter, Kelly (r), at my favorite coffee shop, Hubbard & Cravens.

Entre-commuters (telecommuting entrepreneurs) often work from coffee shops for their meeting, turning a small two-top table into a desk for the day. And the good ones pay for the privilege, spending office rent money on coffee instead. For those of us who entre-commute even a few times a week, finding a good coffee shop can mean days, weeks, and months of rabid loyalty, which can turn into hundreds of dollars a month, and a few thousand in a year, from a single customer. Returning and loyal customers are often the lifeblood of many small independent coffee shops.

Here are five ways coffee shops can earn ongoing business from entre-commuters.

Turn down the damn music! Most Starbucks blast their music at concert-level volumes. I’ve got my earbuds on in this one, and it’s still painfully loud. The music should be the backdrop to the coffee shop experience, and not the reason we’re here. It’s not a freaking concert. For entre-commuters who want to have meetings in coffee shops, they don’t want to do it where they have to shout to be heard.
Have wifi system accessible by all operating systems. I occasionally run into coffee shops whose routers can’t handle Macs. “Something about the Mac’s security codes don’t quite line up with the router,” say the baristas. Many of the entre-commuters I see have Macs. While it’s not an even 50/50 split, there are enough freelancers and small business owners who use Macs that you’re alienating a big part of your audience by not giving them access.
Have a wifi system that doesn’t choke when more than three people are on it. Most wifi systems can handle more than a few people, but if your system gets hung up when more than four users are online, you need more bandwidth. Otherwise, you’ll only ever have more than a few users in your store. The wifi system at my favorite coffee shop doesn’t start bogging down until 12 or so people are on it, and even then, it only gets slow. It doesn’t stop.
Have a meeting room or place where people can get a little privacy. The coolest meeting room setup I ever saw was at a Starbucks in Louisville. It was a refurbished community bank, and they kept the two meeting rooms. They set up a program where people could reserve the room for $50. They would then receive a $30 coffee card to share with their guests. Another Indianapolis coffee shop, South Bend Chocolate Company, has a meeting room they just share for free, on a first come, first serve basis. Both places are regular stops for businesspeople who need a casual meeting place.
Have a lot of power plugs for laptops. If people don’t have a place to power up, they won’t hang out. The good coffee shops have a power plug every few feet. The bad ones make 20 people share one plug. With some basic rewiring, or even creative use of some power strips, they can give laptop users a place to plug in and recharge while they get work done. I know a lot of people who avoid certain coffee shops because they don’t have any public plugs.

While some coffee shops may want to avoid the entre-commuter crowd, they aren’t looking at the big picture. A good entre-commuter should spend around $4 every couple hours, dropping $8 – $10 in 4 – 5 hours. These regulars are worth $50 per week, $2500 per year. Having a group of regulars who are each responsible for $2,500 a year should be the goal of the owner of any decent coffee shop.

To be fair, entre-commuters also need to learn to be respectful of the coffee shop owners who need to turn tables in order to turn a profit. Spend enough money to justify your taking up the table for several hours, or go get an office. Practice good entre-commuter etiquette.

February 15, 2011 By Erik Deckers

Social Media is Older Than You Think It Is. Much Older.

Social media is not as new as people think it is.

It’s not even as new as the new date you just thought of after you saw that last sentence.

Social media, or at least its very beginnings, is almost as old as I am. (Give or take 10 years.)

The very first place for people to communicate online was on the bulletin board systems (BBSes), which were created in the late 1970s, and allowed people to dial in on their 300 baud modems. They were usually only for the hobbyists and geeks who wanted to talk about things that interested them, usually computers. Since long-distance charges applied for out-of-town groups, most users were from their particular city. And user gatherings (this was before we called them “meetups”) were a regular event, where people had the chance to meet those they had been chatting with online the night before.

In 1980, the Usenet — a collection of BBS-type discussion groups — was created and used widely in academia. There, people could visit a group, post articles and messages, and other people would reply to them. While Usenet was originally started to be discussion groups for researchers and computer users, people started creating groups for their other interests. Back in 1990, I joined a soccer discussion group on Usenet, and had “friends” from England, Scotland, Australia, Italy, and Germany. We would discuss our favorite soccer teams, and the 1990 World Cup, which had just finished before I joined. There were groups for political viewpoints, philosophical thought, favorite TV shows, and various sports. I connected with people from all around the world, but especially in the US.

"You've got mail!"

Four years later, I took the plunge and joined AOL, downloading the first software in 90 minutes over my wicked fast 14.4K modem. (I had to choose between it, Compuserve, Prodigy, eWorld, and a host of other online communities.) AOL was the first major attempt at offering an online community to people outside the university setting. This was like Usenet on steroids, because there was a more graphical interface to AOL, and it looked nice. There were also more consumer groups, geared toward those non-computer users. I belonged to groups for writers, home brew makers, cooks, and fans of Celtic music. Since AOL had local and long distance access numbers, our friends were from out of town, and meetups were unlikely (and frequently warned against).

A lot of people outgrew AOL, once they learned they could explore outside the walled community with a web browser and an Internet Service Provider. We consumed the web for information, we emailed each other funny websites we found, and we shared graphics by breaking up ASCII files and emailing them, reassembling them in word processor file, and then converting them with a text-to-graphic converter. But we didn’t have community, unless we returned to AOL or joined an email listserv.

It wasn’t until groups like Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook took advantage of the Internet’s increasing speed and the web browsers that did all that assembling and converting for us, making it easier to connect with our friends, and even telling us where they lived. Twitter boiled communication down to its barest essence, letting us share information in text-sized bits. And LinkedIn played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with our professional networks, letting us see who we were connected to, and how far we were from each other.

The point is this: social media is older than Facebook (2004). Way older. To truly understand the history — and age — of social media, you need to talk to the computer geeks who were online in the late 1970s and early 1980s, participating in the different BBSes and Usenet groups that dotted the online landscape.

February 14, 2011 By Erik Deckers

Four Ways to Use Twitter as a Lead Generation Tool

Have you gotten any sales leads from Twitter? Have you ever found any opportunities, whether personally or professionally, from the micro-blogging network?

While some of the social media purists might still gnash their teeth and pound their laptops from the safety of their moms’ basements, anyone who wants to see Twitter (and other social media tools) succeed needs to show their bosses that it can generate business. If you’re in sales or marketing, here are four ways you can use Twitter as a lead generation tool.

1) Connect With People in Your Industry.

Twitter is a great way to easily get connected with people in your industry. Use tools like Twellow (for Twitter Yellow Pages) to find people in your industry, and search.twitter.com to find people talking about your industry keywords. Also try Googling a title and/or company with the words “on Twitter” in the search. So, look for VP of Creative Services on Twitter or Professional Blog Service on Twitter, and see what pops up.

If you’re a TweetDeck user or use Twitter lists, save your industry contacts into their own list, and communicate with them. By keeping them in their own list, you’re more easily able to see what they’re talking about.

2) Build Relationships.

The newbie mistake that many new Twitter marketers use is to treat Twitter like an advertising channel. That is one thing you absolutely cannot do. People don’t want you to sell to them.

Instead, establish relationships. Have conversations with them, retweet them, introduce people, share articles, ask them questions. If they’re local people, or you have a chance to attend industry conferences, connect with them in person. Meet for lunch or coffee, and create that all-important offline relationship. Then, you’re a person, not a handle. You have a face, not an avatar. By creating those relationships, you become someone they’ll trust, especially if they ever need what it is that you do.

But never, ever try to sell anything. Do that in phone calls and meetings, when the time is right, not when they start following you.

3) Establish Your Expertise.

When people have a problem, make sure they know you’re the one to solve it. Answer questions, share information, refer useful articles to them. If you write a blog (you do write a blog, don’t you?), share the useful posts with them. Ask them to comment, and leave thoughtful comments on their blog.

If you’re trying to reach people in your industry, write about topics related to that industry, especially if you can make them useful to the problems your Twitter network is having. For example, if you own a Mac repair shop, and you know a bunch of Mac-owning public speakers, and you know a lot of them are having problems dealing with the new Keynote 09 (which, irritatingly, ruined a bunch of my past slide decks. Thank God for backups), you could write a couple blog posts about how to solve that problem.

Then, forward the article on to them via Twitter or DM. They’ll see that you know your stuff (as well as theirs), and they’re more likely to call you for that problem that can’t be fixed with a few keystrokes, or explosive cursing and an external hard drive.

4) Direct or Facilitate the Conversation.

If you create the subject people are talking about, or steer people to the place where they can find answers, you are helping people figure out they may need your product or service in the first place.

The best example I can give is Apple computers. Before 2001, no one knew they needed a portable MP3 player. No one knew they needed a way to play music on anything besides a portable CD player. No one knew they needed a way to create or listen to podcasts, or that they could even learn through radio shows of random length and scheduling. Once Apple introduced the iPod, people realized they needed this device, and the industry changed.

By directing or facilitating the conversation, you can help people see the pain point they never knew they had, and they will look to you for solutions.

How do you use Twitter as a lead generation tool? Do you even do that, or do you think it’s just wrong and that people shouldn’t do it? Leave a comment, and let us hear from you.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

January 20, 2011 By Erik Deckers

Five Tips to Being Productive While You’re on the Road

I’ve been traveling a lot lately, with speaking gigs and client meetings, and I’m finding it harder to be productive, especially when these are all day trips, and the time I would normally spend in a hotel or a coffee shop is instead spent driving to or from my events. I’m also a regular entre-commuter, carrying my office in my backpack and working wherever I can find a coffee shop with free wifi.

While days like this mean a lot of evening, night, and weekend work (and a lot less sleep), there are some ways I have found I can still be productive while I’m out and about.

Get someone else to drive. When Paul and I drive anywhere, we take turns driving, so the other can get some work done. Get a friend or colleague to drive you to an appointment, or once you’re a big shot making a few thousand bucks for a speech, hire a driver. Do some work while the other person drives, and don’t be afraid to say “I can’t talk right now, I have to get this done.”
Keep projects “in the cloud” on your laptop. When we’re driving, I can tether my mobile phone to my laptop and get some very slow, basic wifi. This means that loading websites, answering emails, and writing blog posts is painful and I just give up. Instead, I write email responses and blog posts on my laptop and upload them when I get to a coffee shop or my destination. Since our writers turn in their submissions via Google Docs, I download them before I ever leave, make the changes, and upload them when we get to our next stop.

Paul's working on our new monthly email newsletter.

Plan for work breaks. I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Columbus, Indiana, on the way back from giving a talk in Lexington, KY, to write this post, because we had some client work to take care of. Yes, we could just keep going, but we’re about to head north into Indianapolis’ rush hour traffic, and by delaying now, we’ll miss the bulk of the 5:00 rush. It also lets us get some work done so we don’t have to deal with it when we get home. Why slog through rush hour traffic only to do some more work when we just want to relax? Normally, we try to plan a 30 minute break in our longer trips so we can stop off and handle any surprise client requests — publishing a blog post, sending a Facebook message, responding to a tweet — that come in while we’re in the car.
Make phone calls instead of emails. My efficiency-expert friends say to stay off the phone and send emails, because I can write a note in two minutes, but a phone call can take 10. But when I’m driving, I’ve got 2 – 3 hours before I get to my location, so why not kill some time on the phone? I get to make that personal touch with people I do business with, and I avoid the 10-email-exchange that we try to do to get a task out of our inbox and into the other person’s. In some cases, a phone call even lets us finish a project completely.
Plug your laptop in whenever possible. I’m watching my laptop slowly drain its battery to below 50%, and I remember that I didn’t plug in earlier when I had the chance. Whenever you stop for a quick break (#3), your time and productivity may be limited by the fact that your battery wasn’t charged previously. This also cuts your productivity in the car — if your battery dies, you and your companion are forced to talk about ~~your feelings~~ any topic that randomly comes to mind. One way to avoid this is to get a DC converter for your car, like the truckers use. Get a decent one at your local hardware store or a truck stop, and plug it into your car’s cigarette lighter, then plug your laptop into it. Some really good ones even have a USB charger so you can charge your mobile phone with your USB cable.

What are your tips? How do you keep productive while you’re in the car? Leave a comment and share your wisdom.

January 17, 2011 By Erik Deckers

Ten Signs You’re NOT a Social Media Expert

10. You updated your blog in December. 2009.

9. You’re convinced that Orkut will be the breakout social network of 2011.

8. You’re feeding your Twitter stream into Facebook.

7. You think Chris Brogan was the star of “Jonah Hex.”

6. You’re still quoting the Malcolm Gladwell “10,000 hour rule,” unaware that you’re quoting someone who quoted someone else who didn’t actually read the book.

5. Your business email address ends with “@aol.com,” but you don’t work for AOL.

4. You work for AOL.

3. You play Farmville so much, Zynga’s revenues plummeted the week you went on vacation.

2. You tell people you had the high score on Technorati when you were in high school.

1. Your social media experience consists of your unpaid college internship at your dad’s accounting firm.