Microbusiness Mentor

I like Klout for their “style” assignments, but this runs into a danger of limiting people into a “box” the way you’re forever branded by the Myers Briggs temperament indicators. Then people start to take these labels and limit you. I’ll admit, recently when my Klout style briefly veered into the “specialist” category, I was dismayed, because I wanted to stay in the “thought leader” category!

I’m fine with being on EmpireAvenue, Klout, PeerIndex, (venerable) Twitter and Facebook, Quora etc… but anything that asks for my commitment beyond the usual “push scoring” (Klout, PeerIndex) is going to have to deliver some hard ROIs for me to continue, for example:

• - leads to clients
• - prospect conversions to customers
• - contacts to projects

For me, ultimately it’s all about ROI whether it’s business investment or social media investment – and certain when it comes to any time investments of any kind for business owners.

Otherwise anyone of these will fall by the wayside of Plurk, that hot little number formerly labeled “Twitter on a Time line”, and is now confined to dominant popularity in Taiwan. Unless you live in Taiwan and have 80% of your target market there, you’d be using Plurk for entertainment and probably not much else.

[By the way, the social network that has delivered value$ for me thus far has been LinkedIn. The social network that has delivered the best thought / insight value for me has been Quora.]

“Free” is the reason why many of us have burned out.

Those of us who started doing what we LOVE and feel so passionate about what we do that we’d jump out of bed the morning and look forward to Mondays (oh who am I kidding, most of us don’t care about weekends we just work right through)… after a while we feel that energy and passion sucked right out from our hearts because of a few rogue energy vampires who lure us into giving free consulting in the name of doing what we love.

So unless there is a very clear benefit in this time-for-energy tradeoff, or when I know the risks I am taking – I would never ever do free again.

EmpireAvenue describes itself as “the Social Media Exchange, where you can invest in any social media profile by buying their shares, meet new people, unlock Achievement badges, and earn boatloads of virtual cash by being active and social online! Buy shares in your friends, your followers, people with similar interests, brands you love, celebrities – anyone! All using a virtual currency and all for free!”

[Note how it said "buy shares in" friends, followers, people... so this is not where you get to buy your friends and followers ;]

Like all social media start-ups, an important question for small business owners and solopreneurs is, “Is the value of EmpireAvenue worth me spending time on?”

I think the answer is always going to be “depends on what value you need, and whether EmpireAvenue (or other social media service) delivers it.”

I’ve signed up with EA on May 4 and within these few weeks, my Klout score shot up from 40 to 51. Does that matter? I suppose if I really, really care about my Klout score, then the answer is “yes, EmpireAvenue delivered!”

My twitter followers increased as well, but I haven’t quite seen a correlation in the nature of quality of the conversations I have. That’s because I am still following a core group of people, although this also opens doors to new conversations I’ve otherwise not known about.

But I do credit playing on EmpireAvenue with the following:

1) becoming more disciplined about blogging

2) actually using my Flickr account

3) looking more closely to see whether YouTube makes sense for me to tap into to share my work (I haven’t quite decided, however)

4) spending less time on Quora… it’s not necessarily a bad thing, more of a way of positioning how I use Quora versus EmpireAvenue

That said… I do feel a certain amount of “pressure” keeping up the dividends, because investors can be fickle. It takes a bit of that laid-back attitude I used to have about social media and made it a bit higher pressure for me.

I don’t know if this type of pressure’s a good thing or a bad thing. Jury’s still out on that.