When I was invited by a friend to go to the Bushmills Whiskey party in Boston the first thing I asked was:

“are they going to have anything besides whiskey drinks?”  I’m not a huge fan of whiskey (until last night).  My friend said “no, it’s a whiskey party, what’s wrong with you?”

Since I hadn’t seen this friend in a while, I went.  I assumed it would be another branded event where I’d be handed informational pamphlets, had the sellers bug me about how whiskey is made, why I should buy it, cram in a room with 600 people, blah blah blah.

This wasn’t like that.

1) Bushmills knew who they wanted and they wanted tastemakers so that’s who they invited.  They didn’t need to pack the place to the gills until it was uncomfortable so they could report numbers back to corporate.  It was an event that you could wander around in or even find a seat if you wanted.  wonderful.

2) They recorded and branded content for themselves and their partygoers.  A ton of it.  It was genius.  Since they had all the right tastemakers at their party they launched a small army of photographers into the room to take photos of everyone enjoying their product.  Good lord they probably have a zillion videos and photos of happy, real people enjoying Bushmills.  They also had a cool photo group set up in one corner to take fun photos with your friends and some hipsterish props (think antlers and mustaches).  They had iPads there so you could immediately upload your photos to your Facebook page, Twitter, and whatever other channel you wanted to upload to.  Here’s mine:

Since they were inviting kind of a hip crowd they made sure that the photos, the props, the food, etc. were all in a certain style so that this crowd would want to upload it.  Can you imagine if they had some bright splashy frame around this photo?  Not nearly as many people would have wanted to upload them.

They also printed some of the photos out so that I had hard copies to take home.  The rest I can get off of their Facebook page.

This is genius because in one night they got a non whiskey drinker to:

try their product, have photos taken with it, upload a lightly branded photo to my Facebook page, visit their Facebook page to check out the rest of the photos I was in, and also have hard copy Bushmills branded photos on my refrigerator.  All because I happened to like the style everything was created in.

3) They knew what else their audience would like from an event.  Some of the tastemakers they invited were foodies, so their appetizer offerings ranged from bacon brownies to gourmet baby back rib bites, to cupcakes.  Branded cupcakes of course.  This gave people additional options to capture the event the way that they wanted to.  I saw people all over the place snapping iPhone pictures of the food.

Overall Lesson:

When you want to do some type of event that has branding to it, go all the way.

Think about your audience and the style they will like, not your style.

Create content at events and also, think of ways to help people at your event create their own content.

There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there.

~ Indira Ghandi

When it comes to competition, I know a lot of people might say ‘don’t worry about what other people are doing’.  My mom would say that.  My grade school teachers would say that.  I might even be tempted to say that if it weren’t so helpful in strategy building to know exactly what other people are doing.

I had a client recently that came to me very worried about the Facebook pages of its nearest competitors, we’ll say that this client had a diet product.  They wanted to know how each of their competitors were communicating with an audience that wanted to lose weight online so that they could build a better website and Facebook page.  They listed out each weight loss product that sold something similar to them and I took a look at their strategies – none of them were very good.

But knowing your competition isn’t just about knowing who makes the same product or offers the same service as you.  The wonderful world of the internet has made it possible to click from your site to your competitor’s to a shoe site to a site for baby pandas in about 30 seconds.

After I was finished with their strategy the competition landscape had changed completely.  The top groups talking about weight loss weren’t my client and their competitors.  It was yoga studios, The Food Network, and Special K cereal.  They had no idea that they weren’t just in the ring with competitors they knew about, they were going to have to participate with anyone having a similar conversation with their target audience.

1) Find Out Who They Are:

Who else is talking to the audience I’m targeting about the same type of ideas?

You can do a number of searches to figure this out.  Search Twitter, Search on Google, set up an alert for the topics you talk about and see who else is weighing in and how, look through Facebook, etc.  This is a better view of your landscape and will help you construct a better strategy because you will have a better idea of the conversation and who is participating.

2) Where Are They Succeeding?  Where Are They Dropping The Ball?

Sometimes, these are obvious.  Let’s take my weight loss product client again.  While most of their competitors were on Facebook and Twitter having great conversations, there were lots and lots of individuals uploading photos of their healthy meals for weight loss on Flickr, and no one was responding to these.  This is how we started to determine where there were opportunities online for my client to take the lead.

3) If You Can’t Beat Them…..

Sometimes the brands having robust conversation online won’t be competitive enough that you can’t work together.  LOTS of brands co-write blog posts, host contests, and come out with online deals together because they can better have a conversation with this audience if they do it together.

Strategy Thought: Building your strategy shouldn’t be just about keeping up with the Jones’s Facebook Page.  Determine where there is unique opportunity by finding mediums or platforms that aren’t as heavily used (Tumblr is doing VERY well with audiences but most brands haven’t jumped in here yet) but will still resonate with the audience.

“Forget safety, live where you fear to live”  ~Rumi

I started telling people a week or so ago that Ryan and I were moving to Boston.  We collected boxes, started packing the kitchen stuff and talked a lot about the move.  We discussed how this might work, how my business would do, how I would meet people.  The more I talked with the people in my life about moving the more I found myself using  the same analogy to describe it:

“I’m jumping off the diving board and hoping there’s water in the pool” ~ me

I thought it was kind of a funny/true way to describe it and was feeling rather brave and bold by the idea.  But as this became my moving mantra a little pinhole of worry crept into the statement.   At the end of this week I had something of a lightning bolt hit me – I am actually afraid there’s going to be no water in the pool.

Then the flood came over the weekend:

what if I don’t meet people?  What if people in Boston only want to work with people from Boston?  Who do I think I am moving a whole business? What if people think my logo is stupid?  What if people think my ideas are stupid? What if I have a bad day and want to go to a movie with a friend but can’t because I haven’t met anyone who likes me enough to hang out with me on a bad day yet?

I realize reading those last statements that if someone told me that they were afraid of that above list that I would tell them that they were being ridicuous.   Yet there they are, first thing this morning I’m thinking ‘what if I forget to forward all of my business payment addresses and I NEVER get a check in the mail again and I am homeless and shoeless under a bridge?” – yes, it’s that dramatic.

I think it has a lot to do with the fact that this big change is a huge opportunity for me but to get to the opportunity part I have to let go of some old things that I don’t want to have in my life anymore and I have to basically let go of my entire comfort zone.

The rational thinking side of me knows that leaving your comfort zone can be a really great thing.  I’ve read loads of posts about it:  here’s a good one from Business Insider,  here’s one from Tiny Buddha,  here’s an article about why moving is good for you.

This week none of those posts worked on me, it’s still really scary.

Confession over.

Anyone else moved to a completely new place and felt the fear?

So, big news for Real Bullets Branding!
I’ve decided to move the whole show to Boston after long hours of trying to figure out if Madison was the right city (for a while it was), or if the winters were going to be warmer than Wisconsin (they aren’t really), and if I could learn to root for a team that’s not the Brewers (no way).

Truthfully, a smaller city like Madison is awesome for starting a company.  Living expenses are reasonable and there aren’t as many crazy fun things to distract you from doing something like working insane hours on a business.  Even the New York Times says you have to be a little bit cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs to be an entrepreneur so its best if you can make the ‘where you live’ part really easy.

At first, this was great – I had a nice reasonable rent and I didn’t have to make all that much money to survive.  Then after a while I started getting clients in other states that wanted me to come see them.  I started having to fly to conferences because the big ones are almost never near Madison and it’s altogether possible that I am personally supporting Kayak.com and Starwood Hotels.  When I added it all up, I could be living in a more accessible city for the same amount.

Actually, you should just read Penelope Trunk’s post about where to start a company: Starting a company in Silicon Valley is Stupid.  I asked her one time where she thought I should move the company and she told me Detroit since it’s rebuilding AND low cost.

So with the move now in full swing I became obsessed with all of the great sites and apps devoted to helping you figure out where you should live like:

Walkscore.com – you put in an address, a neighborhood, a street, and it tells you how walkable it is.  It’s like a gift from above.

Eat St. - app that tells you where all the food trucks are in the area.

Aroundme - Great app that tells you quite literally, what’s around you – this is perfect for a person like me that finds themselves in a strange city or neighborhood and wants to walk to coffee, nail salon, vodka bar business meeting.

I’m going to do my best to document the process of moving a company across the country so if any of you would like to hear about any specific part of the process – let me know!

I’ve been working from Boston this week so I’ve had the great fortune to hang out with some internet friends I haven’t seen in a while as well as meet some new people.  One of the things I love about conferences, parties, and seeing old friends is that you usually end up having loads of good conversation.  One in particular really stood out because we went around and around with this for hours.

Is being an entrepreneur the same as being a business owner?  Are the terms interchangeable?

It seems like being an entrepreneur is such a popular title these days and it’s being applied to every possible job title from franchise owners to the unemployed.  I should add that all of the people talking about this subject were in fact business owners.  Yet, we couldn’t agree at all on the answer.

The actual definition of an entrepreneur is this: A person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on financial risk to do so.

My take: Not interchangeable

I always felt that ‘entrepreneur’ was more of a characteristic than a vocation.  That a person who was an administrative assistant or a construction worker could be ‘entrepreneurial’, much like being creative.  Perhaps once you start labeling yourself as an entrepreneur you should have created some sort of business that is different or that aims to further an industry.  So, a franchise owner wouldn’t necessarily qualify under my definition just having bought a franchise.

Another sides:

A few people considered the term ‘entrepreneur’ to be completely interchangeable with ‘business owner’.  It was vocation based only and some even said that you had to have reached some level of success with the business before you really qualified to call yourself an entrepreneur (we couldn’t even remotely come to an agreement on what that level of success might be).

Some thought that to be an entrepreneur you had to have employees – this would exclude consultants and bloggers from being entrepreneurs.

It became such a hot topic that we eventually decided that it would be a great question to pose to others over the next few weeks while I’m here and return to the subject later.

So what do you think?  Who can be an entrepreneur?

I wasn’t supposed to go to Coachella (which, if you are over 30 you might not know is a music festival of about 100,000 people in the desert outside of LA showcasing a huge lineup of bands, mostly indie) but ended up there because of some good luck (thanks Christina and Asos.com!), in 97 degree heat, with a lot of sweaty people.

So, the first thing I did was of course, look up the sponsors and see who was doing what.  100,000 music fans are a good group to be able to get in front of for 3 days straight.  The demo here is an under 30, style forward, “I was listening to that band way before they were cool”, kind of group.  In other words – the cool kids.

Who Did It Right

H&M:  H&M got it spot on with their tent because they understood that being out here for 3 days (some of these brave souls camping) this group would have needs.  A lot of them.  So their tent wasn’t about jean shorts, paisley tank tops, or hoop earrings.  They had a tent full of something more valuable than gold here – deodorant.  By supplying basic items like deodorant, smelly sprays, sunblock, etc. they became so much more relevant to this audience.  Case in point: the line 50 people deep at some points during the weekend. H&M did provide several other things as part of their sponsorship,  this part was just the most creative.

Who Was OK:

5Gum. They made a nice dark tent that was somewhat air conditioned for people to take a break in, which was absolutely necessary for the heat that weekend.  Still, with the sensory coolness they are showing in their commercials they could have done something more interesting – piping in scents?  More tactile experiences using textured walls?

Then The Trouble Started:

Coachella is held in Palm Springs, Ca where there are maybe 50 cab drivers that work there regularly.  At 3AM, there are 100,000 people trying to get somewhere.  I managed to make friends with a driver right away and convince him to pick me up every night at the same time and place but from my window view I saw hundreds of kids trying to get to a hotel, or anywhere.  I asked my driver why there weren’t any cabs coming. “There aren’t enough.  Some of these kids will have to sleep here tonight”  They were hitchhiking, jumping in front of cars, seriously – desperate for a ride. I was thinking:

“wait a minute…..  isn’t Hyundai a sponsor of this thing?”

For the rest of the weekend, getting a ride was a common complaint at Coachella.  People waiting 2-3 hours to go somewhere.  As a sponsor, Hyundai could have saved the day by sending cars, golf carts, cabs – even if they just took VIP guests they could have come off as a hero here.  I honestly kept waiting for them to step it up but night 3 was as bad (if not worse) than the first night.

The Brand That Didn’t Sponsor But Was The Most Visible:

When Kanye West came onstage, people began to cheer and a funny thing happened that everyone in the crowd felt.  Everyone raised their iPhones to the sky – videotaping Kanye’s entrance.  The Jumbotron to the side of the stage captured and showed to the crowd tens of thousands of iPhones in the sky.  Even the occasional iPad could be seen taping the show.  People noticed.  A girl next to me said:

“this is like a religious thing, everyone praising the Apple gods”. I wondered who would actually use the recording of the show, which sites it would end up on, or who’s Facebook page the next day.  Didn’t matter, that Apple icon was on the Jumbotron hundreds of times.

So with all these people bringing recording technology into this festival, sponsors could have really gotten some great press here.  Just sayin’.

Trends From Coachella:

Boho chic, boho chic, and more boho chic.  We took dozens of photos of feather earrings and fringe bags. ( I bought this one right away when I got home). There were feathers in hair (from tasteful to outlandish), feathers on bags, and feathers on shoes.

Bright sunglasses and unique sunglasses. The huge oversize sunglasses trend seems to be out in favor of rocking your own style.

Waiting for a ride.

I did it.  I launched a new company.   It’s called Real Bullets Branding – here’s the site.

I’d love to say it was because I was hit by a lightening bolt idea and had to make it real, but it didn’t happen that way.  What happened was, I was developing strategies for lots of different brands.  First small-ish ones, then bigger, and then eventually I was on calls with 10 people in New York and California telling them about how I help my parents on their farm over the weekend (people on the coasts love my farm stories) and how to find their ‘people’ online.

Then they would ask me if I could handle big projects because I was only one person and I would say “yes, I can handle big projects because I have a lot of friends in this industry and if we need a bigger team I’ll get one”.  But I ran into this question over and over again.  I needed to change my perception.  I also got so busy that I outsourced my paychecks, accounting, and got a virtual assistant.  Like, you know, a bigger company and not a consultant. 

Another thing that changed was that I stopped updating Twitter feeds  and Facebook pages for people.  I don’t think social media is about that.  In fact, I don’t think social media is necessarily even online all the time anymore.  It’s about creating kinship with the people that love your brand or would love your brand if they knew about it.

Once you get to the point where you are talking to ‘everyone’ – like maybe Pepsi you’re just mass advertising which isn’t even working for Pepsi.   Brand advocates are the ones that are passionate about an industry, an idea, or even…. a brand or product and what I realized is that over the last year I’ve been fantastic at finding those people.  So that’s what my new company does.

Thanks for your patience during my extreme hiatus while I wrote what seems like a novel in copy for the new site!

3 years ago I fell in love with a painting I saw in a gallery in Santa Fe.  I stood there for nearly 2 hours looking at it.  From every angle.  First one way and then walking by it, and then going into another room before coming back.  Then  trying to decide if I could justify spending more than 2 months rent on this.  I took the card of the gallery telling myself that I could always have it shipped.

Over the next 3 years, I thought about this painting often.  It literally was haunting me.   Also in this time period, I lost the gallery card and forgot the artist’s name.

Last week I went back to Santa Fe, found the gallery and ran from room to room looking for the painting.  Or something from the artist.  The gallery owner came up and asked me what I was looking for and I described the painting to her.  She told me that the artist had beautiful work but was ‘difficult to motivate’.  That she often painted entire paintings only to sand them down and start over, often completing only 1 work in long periods of time.   She had even told the artist that she could sell her work easily if she would just stop ruining it before it made it to the gallery.

“she’s feeling like she’s this tortured artist, but… it’s a business and she could make a good living”.

She then told me that she hoped I had learned a lesson about things you love at first site.  “You take them, you don’t miss out on things you’re going to think about for years.”  She told me how she wanted to go over to the artist’s house and grab the paintings before she could paint over them and bring them into the gallery.

So I’ve been thinking about this artist that ruins her own paintings.  It’s not so uncommon, there are Buddhist poets that burn their poems once they write them and even Picasso was known to paint right over his work with a new work. Less romantically, there are also a lot of entrepreneurs that do the exact same thing.

Bloggers that excessively edit their posts and never publish them.  Business ideas that are never opened because the owner has a bad day and decides it’s a stupid idea.  People that get a few bad reviews and discard their great idea.  Even social media and marketing plans that never see the light of day because the creator is too afraid to speak up at the brainstorming meeting.

I’ve ruined plenty of perfectly good ideas, most notably in my first business.  I had done this artsy (really cool in retrospect) event that got a lashing in a local publication the next day.  I let that review become my gallery owner, I started editing out the creative parts of every event until they were stale, boring, and eventually not fun to create anymore.

So here’s what I propose:  When you are having one of those ideas that you want to shoot down imagine this gallery owner over your shoulder grabbing your idea and taking it to market for you.  Envision your gallery owner taking an objective look before you cover it up with something else.  It may not turn out to be the most excellent idea ever but I think having a moment where you allow an outside perspective (even if it’s yourself thinking about it from a different angle – like the gallery owner looking at it through a seller’s eyes) can get you out of your own way.  It just doesn’t make sense to kill an idea, business, or half finished project with a jury of one.

Have you ever tossed an idea you wish you hadn’t?

pic of artist is Matte Stephens, here’s an interview with him.

I’m writing this from the airport in Austin Texas, because I’m stuck here.  Stuck because it’s apparently raining ice sideways in the Midwest, stuck because all the flights are way overbooked, and stuck because some sort of higher power may possibly have it in for me this week.  I’ve been wearing the same clothes for well over 35 hours and I’ve heard a lot of promises in those hours.  I ended up at a hotel that wasn’t on the bedbug registry (are you guys checking your hotels on this site?  I’m obsessed)  but probably isn’t far off.    All the while I’ve been fuming over the way that airport employees, well…..   lie.  They promised me my flight would be here to take me to Chicago and it wasn’t.  They promised that the next one was going to go for sure.  Nope.  They are still telling me “the next one for sure” until I found myself saying to one exasperated employee -

“you’ll say anything to get me to just walk away from this podium for a while won’t you?”

It then dawned on me that social media is kind of like the airport of marketing.  I hear crazycakes promises that prospective clients are now wondering if I will be offering and have to explain to them that no, I can’t make your TV commercial get 4 million views by Friday on YouTube.

Of course the old “moon and stars” promise is nothing new.  People have been doing this for as long as there are things to sell however, it’s rampant with social.  Why?  Because there are tons of articles out there about companies making it big in a day or so with their campaign (I was going to link to some but there are literally hundreds of marketers offering it, hard to pick on just one)  and companies all want that for themselves.  And a lot of marketers that need business just can’t say that expectations like that are, in fact, unrealistic.  So they say things like ‘guaranteed engagement’ ’500 new likes on Facebook’ and ‘for sure passalong’ and the ever cringe-worthy ‘we’ll make that go viral’.

I have actually lost a project in which I refused to guarantee Facebook ‘Likes’ before even hearing what the brand wanted to talk about on Facebook.

I often think about what that project would have been like had I just taken it, probably not fun.

Aside from not being able to deliver the goods (even if you’re the type that can talk their way around a failed project) this REALLY hurts your business.  The people that are left to execute the project (like the people working at the flight gates) probably have a good idea that they can’t deliver on the promise.  It stresses them out and productivity starts to drop.  I have worked at and been on the receiving end of projects that begin with an unrealistic promise so many times that it was one of the big reasons I started my own business.

So, while this trip was filled to the absolute brim with empty promises, has made me late, made me mad, and made me probably not smell my best, it has at the very least reminded me why your promises at the beginning of a project are so incredibly important.

Time and Tide wait for no man, but time always stands still for a woman of thirty.

~Robert Frost

I’m turning 30 this week.  I have been composing this post in my head for about a month.  First it was going to be all about how fabulous it is to be 30 and how much better life is and all this really positive stuff about how age doesn’t matter and at least I have more money than when I turned 20.

But then I started thinking about how my mother told me that I should start thinking about another career because advertising is a “young industry” (pearls of wisdom, I know).  And how some companies will hire a 20 year old ‘social media expert’ because they can open a Facebook page.  And how all these old school writers used to say that you are your smartest in your early 20′s and after that you pretty much better forget about saying anything intelligent anymore.

In fact, there are sites I can’t be a part of  (20 Something Bloggers, goodbye….) and audiences that I understand less and less every day (MTV shows, I just don’t get you anymore…)  but on the flip side, I am discovering magazines and sites daily that are delicious and wonderful that I would have thought were pretty pointless at 20 (like The New Yorker)

But should I leave the social internets to the college kids?  In a way I kind of have.  I’ve moved away from the game I used to play of “bet I’ve heard of more sites and social platforms than you have” and into a “let’s see what’s right for your business and apply some of the social lessons and tools I’ve learned in the last 5 years” frame of mind.

If you are brand new to social media then it does seem like a lot. It seems like you have to know every site launch and new thing but when it’s not your first rodeo you can look at a client’s idea and tell them based on the way it’s been moving how you think it will turn out.  So in short, 30 is making me happy that I am old enough to trust my instincts (and have some instincts to trust), it makes me sad that I no longer am in the MTV audience and can’t stay out 2 consecutive nights in a row, and some things (like my love for Sour Patch Kids) just never change at all.

P.S. – I am not without some vanities about turning 30 – For my birthday I’m buying myself all new face creams to keep away the wrinkles (I decided against botox because I’m too scared and didn’t see enough wrinkles to deal with the pain yet)