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One of the cool things about having a phone that can get on-line is going to sites like Yelp.  For those that have never used Yelp on your phone, let me quickly explain.  Go to Yelp, put in your location, put in what you are looking for (i.e. tacos) and up will pop locations that have tacos sorted by their ratings!  Very cool.  If you use Yelp on your computer you can rate, review and talk about the good and “not so good” in your area.   It is a powerful tool that creates amazing word of mouth marketing at the most organic level, the end user.  If you are a business owner, you should be aware of Yelp and keep an eye on the site to see what people think about you.  And unless you have amazing business practices, from time to time reviews will be negative.

That is exactly what happened as  one Yelp reviewer said something negative about a local chiropractor.  Here is the quote:

“I don’t think good business means charging people whatever you feel like hoping they’ll pay without a fuss. Especially considering that I found a much better, honest chiropractor.”

The chiropractor did not like what he read and sued the reviewer Christopher Norberg over the comment.

Now, not being one to judge what is the law and not the law, and whether the reviewer was right or wrong, I can tell you this; the internet community is watching very carefully what happens in this case.  Norberg’s attorney, Michael Blacksburg went on to say  “This strikes at the heart of Yelp’s business model and other Web sites that provide a bulletin board for people to state what they think of businesses in their community. This is clearly Christopher Norberg’s version of conversations with the doctor relating to a billing dispute and his opinion of how the doctor was behaving. This is clear opinion that falls squarely within constitutionally protected speech.”

So I guess what Mom always told us was good advice, “if you have nothing good to say about someone don’t say anything at all.”  Or at least in cyberspace, be very careful how you say it.  Opinion is protected by libel law but just because you declare a statement as opinion it does not necessarily make it one.  If you are a blogger, tweeter, Yelp reviewer or just a commenter on forums and boards you should probably take a peek at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s guidelines for blogger’s and web user’s  regarding Online Defamation Law.

Just like you, I see negative posts all the time.  Are they opinion or a statement of fact?  Sometimes it is hard to tell.   Just remember, count to ten before you post that flaming review/comment and keep yourself out of court.

I ate Chinese food yesterday and at the end, I had a fortune cookie.  Inside the fortune cookie, I found this.

Failure is the mother of success.  What is this cookie trying to tell me?  Is it telling me to never stop trying?  Is it telling me to get up after getting knocked down?  Is it telling me that persistence yields reward?

Seth Godin says:   Persistence isn’t using the same tactics over and over. That’s just annoying.  Persistence is having the same goal over and over.

It seems everyone has an idea as to what determination, persistence, stick-to-it-ness,  insistence or perseverance is:

Dale Carnegie: Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.

Frank Lloyd Wright: know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.

Franklin D. Roosevelt: When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.

Harriet Beecher Stowe: When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (from The Ladder of Saint Augustine): The heights by great men reached and kept / Were not attained by sudden flight, / But they, while their companions slept, / Were toiling upward in the night.

John Quincy Adams: Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.

Louis Pasteur: Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal: my strength lies solely in my tenacity.

Mary Kay Ash: erodynamically the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn’t know that so it goes on flying anyway.

Robert Frost: The best way out is always through.

Stephen Covey: Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

Thomas Alva Edison: Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Winston Churchill: If you’re going through hell, keep going.

It seems allot of successful and famous people have it figured out.  The way to success is to never give up. Maybe as we head towards a New Year, a good resolution we all should have is to “do our best, and when our best is not enough, keep doing our best.”  In the end, we will probably get farther than most, do more than most, have more fun than most and learn more than most.  All from our attempts.

I guess my fortune cookie was right.  Failure is the mother of success.

Great video on Inbound Marketing from the gang at HubSpot.  Gets right to the heart on the use of technology and social media to build your business.  Kudo’s to  Rebecca Corliss of HubSpot for the great work they do.

Today one of our Governors was arrested.  One of the allegations was trying to sell the Senate seat of president-elect Obama for personal gain.  When I first heard the news this morning I was at first amazed and then a bit saddened for all the people that put their trust in this man, supported him, voted for him and got him elected Governor.

In their e-book “Trust Economies: Investigation into the New ROI of the Web“, the authors Chris Brogan and Julien Smith talk about how valuable the relationships we build are and how we need to vigorously protect these relationships (If you have not read this e-book, I would suggest you do.)  This is especially true about our web relationships.  But how easy are they to break?  In a virtual world where people seldom meet in real life, is that even possible.  Yes, it is.

At a recent conference I spoke about how important it is as a New Media Producer (which in today’s world can mean blogger, podcaster, videocaster, micro-blogger and more) to build relationships on-line and to be a part of a like minded community.  David Meerman Scott, author of “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” warns that it is easy to fall in love with you and your work on-line and even easier to fall out of love with you on-line.  The key thing that Brogan & Smith and Scott are trying to point out is the importance of trust.

It seems trust is hard to come by these days.  We are all a bit suspicious, cynical and wary.  We are often slow to “buy in” to new idea, plans and ways of doing things.  And on days like today, we tend to be a little less trustful than before.  But having said that, if we trust you, we almost rush to buy in.  So what are the building blocks of building trust and being someone that can be trusted?

Remember, mutual trust is a shared belief that you can depend on each other to achieve a common purpose. So how do you create mutual trust?  A trust that is sustainable?

• Tell the truth.  Be someone who’s word can be trusted.
• You cannot build mutual trust is you cannot listen.  A conversation is a relationship.
• Share the credit and when in doubt, share the credit.
• You cannot build mutual trust if you do not participate in the community.  Provide real value with your participation.
• Ask for feedback, be willing to be wrong.
• You cannot build mutual trust overnight.  Being trusted takes time to build, seconds to break.
• When you say you will do something, do it.
• You cannot build mutual trust without empathy.  Understanding others builds the bonds of trust.
• Be transparent, let people get to know you.
• Building trust takes personal time.  Nothing replaces the time you spend one on one with someone.
• Building trust takes ethics.  Doing the right thing even when it is not popular.

Building trust and being trusted takes time, effort and commitment.  It is easy to say one thing yet do another.  It is easy to take shortcuts.  It is easy to use others for your personal gain.  But in the end, it is really a short sighted approach or as an old boss of mine used to say, “you are dead but just have not fallen over yet.”

On a day when one of our own Governors is arrested and a lengthy criminal complaint filed against him, isn’t this a perfect time to reflect on trust and ethics?

A new service is creating allot of buzz in the Twitter world.  The service is called Magpie and the purpose of the service is inject ads into your “tweet stream” that in turn, go into the stream of your followers.  The hope of the service for the advertiser is to target your audience based on your posts and keywords and to send ads to those in your community that best match.  You can get all the details on how this works at http://be-a-magpie.com/how-it-works .  Take a look at the following pic to get an idea what this would look like in the Twitter stream.

#1 shows how Magpie randomly inserts ads promoting the service into your stream, and #2 shows what an actual ad looks like.  This pic was screenshot from someone I follow and as you can see, the self promotion and the actual ad occured only two “tweets” apart.

The idea of monetizing your work and leveraging your social network is not new, but this new service raises some interesting points of conversation and discussion;

• Is monetizing your followers, a violation of the community aspect of Twitter?
• Will followers be “turned off” by ad inserts? Will they care?
• Can real money be made using this type of service?
• Will use of this type of service cause followers to “unfollow”?

Twitter is the clearly the “micro-blog” of choice at this time.  It may not have the features of other services available but its has simplicity, elegance and a myriad of tools to make it work on phones and other devices.  Twitter is everything from a business communication outlet, a personal update space, a promotional tool, an instant news resource to a discovery of new things platform.  It is also a community where people converse, have bursts of dialog and share information.  So will a service such as Magpie cause an interruption of the conversation?  It seems the so far, the tweet stream is saying it will.

So lets say you are willing to risk followers in order to make some money on your Twitter stream.  What kind of money can you make?  According to Magpie, this is what my Twitter stream could be worth.

According to the site, I could collect up to 330.66 Euros per month (Euros x .7699 <current spot trade USD> = $254.58USD).  So my potential earnings on Magpie would be about $250 a month.  So the question now becomes; Is it worth it?

There are allot of reasons in today’s economy to try to make some money.  Many are out of work, many have taken pay cuts or benefit cost increases.  Others just need more money to pay the bills.  If that is the reason you choose an ad insertion service such as Magpie for your Twitter stream, then more power to you.  I cannot blame anyone for doing what it takes to put food on the table.  But for those who are not in that situation, consider carefully the possible effects, long and short term of using any ad insertion service into your social network before you do so.

In my case, Magpie just does not seem right for me.  The value of my followers is too precious to risk and the pressing need to generate the income is not there.  I would be anxious to hear what some of you have to say regarding this service and others like it and how it works or does not work for you?

I know you “tweet” but do you “magpie?”

I have been following a unique tool provided by HubSpot called Twitter Grader.  If you are on Twitter and have some interest as to how HubSpot’s formula grades you on Twitter it is a fun tool to check out.  I first went to Twitter Grader about six weeks ago and was facinated by the way this company measured Twitter effectiveness.  For some reason, my grade was a bit higher.

It seems my most recent score went down (don’t worry, I am over it.)  But does a good score really mean anything?  Does a good score make you a New Media Superstar, A-List Blogger, or Social Media Personality?  Absolutely not.  All a good score means is you are effective in using Twitter as a communication tool.  HubSpot says the following are factors: