Postcards from the Funny Farm

Owners do “walk-throughs” starting at the storefront. Then, they adjust and repair things accordingly. I have always seen a parallel in a storefront to the self.

When you enter a store, hopefully there is an owner who thinks about you, the customer. If you need something, he’ll guide you to that place. If you have a complaint, or if someone treats you unfairly, he’ll step in to make it right by you. Owners accept everything.

When I was an area coach for Pizza Hut, I used to love to see my managers out in front of the store picking up slips of trash and sweeping. It showed ownership. We as ordinary people seeking self-improvement need to step back and check our own storefront, which is “the self.”

Here are some points you might find on that sort of checklist:

Appearance: A big one. How do I look? The way we present ourselves to the world affects the way we are received. Success isn’t all luck as many failures would have us believe.

Friendliness: Do I look people in the eye? Do I show concern for their needs? Am I interested? Being friendly with the world outside the storefront develops our reputation person by person and often brings in to us better opportunities. Owners commit themselves to listening then finding solutions.

Service: Was I able to help people around me today? Did I steer people in the right direction? Did I engage in conversation that was helpful?

Relevance: Was I relevant? Have I striven to become effective in relevant areas of my work, my friends, my family?

If I am a storefront then how do I look? If I am the store, how am I inside and more importantly, how would others rate me? Ultimately we should mostly strive to pass our own rating since the crowd can be fickle. Still, let us never forget that every person’s view of us is, at varying levels, important.

Now, step back and look at yourself: If only for this day, own the storefront, the world will notice.

When service is bad, where do you draw the line and ask for a refund? I’ve usually been one to suck it up and just not use the service again but recently I found myself turning over a new leaf. Sarah and I went out on a date Friday night for one of those fancy pizzas that costs more than lobster. That was great, I enjoyed the service and the food. After dinner we wanted to go see a movie. I told her I wanted to see “Iron Man” because I like Robert Downey Jr. and because I read several reviews saying it was a great flick. Though it wasn’t her top choice (Sex and the City of course was her request) she acquiesced since it is my birthday Monday and we went to see Iron Man. It might be safe to say it looks like a guy’s movie.

Okay, I lied. We never got to see it. We were quickly told it was cash only since the credit card machines were down. I went across the street to the atm at a liquor store and it cost me $3.50 in fees. The theater was packed and gang thug types were all over the place. A few of them were actually starting to rap out loud. That was annoying and rude, but when we got to our seats and realized there was no air conditioning (it was about 100 degrees) I had my fill at that point. I approached the 20-something manager and he started giving me a hard time because I wanted my cash back. Not that I have anything against 20-somethings, I have some respected friends and colleagues in ther twenties. This guy, I do not respect. He kept offering me credits. I’m telling you, I will never go back to that theater again. The manager had a pin on that said “Philly Rocks.” Well, maybe he should go check out some Philadelphia jobs. Anyway we are lucky there are two theaters up here in the high desert so we have a choice. We listened to some great music on the HiFi on the way home and the night ended up okay. Have you had a time when you drew the line and asked for a refund?

This article is Part II of my series “Finest Hour of Social Networks” where I examine social networks and their effectiveness in raising real traffic (low bounce rate/readers who stay more than the duration of two clicks!) This goal is important for monetization and for building a following to your blog. If these ideas are something you’re interested in, this series will help you achieve those goals.

In this article I review and offer some tips on using: Facebook and Fuel My Blog. Here at the second article, I have found I am learning a lot about what a social network is and can be for me as a blogger. I am looking forward to looking at more of the leading social networks for bloggers and sharing my findings with you in future articles. Stay tuned!

Facebook started buzzing around the sphere about 2-3 years ago as I recall. It looked like a vanilla MySpace. For that reason, I never bothered with it much back then. I have a myspace music account that I barely update, how could another “buddy” system get any of my attention? Eventually about a year ago, I joined the service and found it visually slick looking, less cluttered than Myspace. But Facebook is really pointless unless you have “friends” there.   I emailed everyone in my Yahoo! address book and found that out of 30-something people, only three signed up to make me their friends. Then after a long tome of not logging in, I began to get requests from old friends from high school. Some people I only vaguely even remembered. Since gettingonlne now with friends I have found all the addon applications to be really fun. You can waste hours playing around on Facebook.  But, alas, killing time is not one of my 2008 goals, so I limit my time there to about once a week. The good news is though, the service emails you where there are new notices or emails from your friends. You don’t have to hang out there all the time.

In conclusion, I think making a FaceBook account and pimping it as much as you can will help your blog’s traffic. I’ve had at least two comments this past month from people who say they surfed in through Facebook. I recommend it! If you do decide to register, feel free to make me your first friend: I am rileycentral on Facbook.

Thumbs up for Facebook! Now, what about this other mysterious service they call “Fuel My Blog?” Let me tell you what I have found:

Fuel My Blog is a quasi social network where you can “fuel” blogs you like thereby bringing them closer to the top of the list in their category. Sort of like trying to scale Google, this process can make you feel powerless over your own success. Once you join, you can put a widget in your blog that shows your favorite blogs on the service. People can “fuel” the blogs there through a three-click process that is fairly easy. My hope is that their great idea of boosting blogs through clicks will develop further. Three clicks away is too much clicking when I am trying to make merss reading rounds. It’s also discouraging when you know that your clicks probably won’t do much to boost the blog anyway. Fuel My Blog is very new and has a small number of blogs in their system. You can’t be part of this unless you are registered with them and you have their widget. I’ve been good about fueling my 7 a day, but is time consuming. In the end with Fuel My Blog you have a great name with a marginaludea that looks like all the other social schmoozing sites. It would be fine to have it if it offered something new, but as of yet they haven’t. I’m getting a little tired of clicking 10-20 times a day just to boost sites I have only just met through the service. When I find someone I know , I get excited and fuel them immediately just because I know them but that is not the best motive for promoting a blog, it should be spectacular right? Finding blogs to fuel is very cumbersome and the blog must be a registered member of Fuel my Blog for your to fuel them. This lags in much the same way Alexa lags in requiring it’s toolbar to build rank for a site.

My final word on Fuel My Blog is a “sideways thumb”: a little up and a little down. They seem like very nice people (they asked me to guesblog as a regular contributor and I have done 2 blogs for them) and the company looks good on the screen with nice bright graphics. Because of reasons I listed, however, I haven’t found their service to produce the best blogs. Then again, neither does DIGG, SU, or any of the other netwrks I use. I’m alwasy on the lookout for that company who can create and innovate a social system that really gets the good stuff to the forefront. I think much has to evolve for Fuel My Blog to be something the masses will spend their precious online minutes on.

Coming next in the series:

Part III

Twitter - What can that little light blue “t” do for ya! In addition to writing on Twitter next, some may recall I was going to write on 9Rules. I changed my mind and and instead, I’ll be writing something about IZEA and Social Spark. Stay tuned!

Now it’s your turn!

What do you think of using Facebook and Fuel My Blog to build traffic?