More on “Branding.” (Ouch!)

A few weeks ago, I attended the Digital Entrepreneurs 2.0 event at Fordham University. It was a panel of entrepreneurs moderated by Fordham prof Bill Baker. On the panel were: entertainment attorney Steve Gordon (who’s written about the music industry and new technologies, entrepreneurship, etc.), Ladies Who Launch director Stella Grizont, Trillist Co-Founder Adam Rich, and Huffington Post and BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti.

There was a point raised by the panel’s speakers that must have been somewhat interesting because it’s still in my memory now. Plus, it relates directly to something I blogged about yesterday. So I’ll share it with you. (Whoever you one person who’s reading this might be.)

Yesterday, I mentioned the thing that I hate the most: the idea of “branding.” Speakers on this panel had pretty divergent views when it came to branding. Stella Grizont of Ladies Who Launch said she thought it was the most important way to get your name out there. She thought it was necessary not just for marketing yourself but also for developing an identity in your work. On the other side of this was Adam Rich of Thrillist. He hinted that Thrillist has no interest in working with writers (not sure if he meant freelancers or staffers or both) whose “brands” are extremely well-defined. He said individuals’ “brands” get in the way of Thrillist’s brand. Once again, the tension for freelancers between developing your identity and morphing that identity to fit the client’s wants.

This can be tough because getting your name out there is the only thing that can rake in business. But maybe being loud and proud can drive away business as well. And, in this job market, none of us are in a position to be too pick-and-choosey about what kind of clients we want to take on. Or, at least I’m not. (I’ll take anything I can get as long as it isn’t soul-selling, a conflict of interest, or anything that could raise an ethical dilemma for me as a journalist.)

So what to do? To “brand” or not to “brand”? Anyone want to share their experiences? Has “branding” helped or harmed you in your career?

How did you…?

Whenever I talk to entrepreneurs, I always ask them how they attracted users or customers when they first launched. So, I’m going to pose that same question to you. For entrepreneurs: How did you first attract users? For freelancers and/or consultants: How do you attract clients?

And as a follow-up: How do you get good feedback from your customers or clients?

I know no one is actually reading this, but this is my lame attempt at crowd-sourcing anyway.

Knowing Your Customer

I was thinking the other day about how Laurel Touby’s advice could apply to freelancers, who may not be starting their own companies, but whose lifestyles are very entrepreneurial. Especially her advice about knowing your customer and bending to fit the customer’s needs. For freelancers, the client is the customer. One major challenge can be selling yourself in your work while being at all times aware of what the customer wants. If you’re a seasoned writer, for example, it can be frustrating to have to change your writing style to meet the needs of the client. As another example, many photographers who do editorial work or commercial work also do art photography in their “real lives.” It can be damn near impossible to remove artistic inclinations, even when you’re just shooting a product for an ad. But, often times the client doesn’t want creative. So separating yourself (and your pride) out from a job can be hard.

It’s really important to strike a balance. On the one hand, freelancers have their “brand” (god, I hate that word) to develop. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been told, “You need to brand yourself.” (My response is always of course the corny “No! That sounds painful!”) Instead of brand, let’s say identity. That sounds way less horrible. Freelancers have an identity to uphold and to sell. You want to be chosen because your work is unique to you. You want to be chosen because your work is special. But sometimes you have to make your work unspecial to make the client happy.

So yeah, it’s hard. But good advice to always remember.

More Advice from Laurel Touby

During my conversation with Laurel Touby, she talked a lot about the significance of growing at the same pace as your audience. Both in terms of size and in terms of content.

One great example: When I asked Touby if there’s anything Mediabistro has been behind the times on, she answered, “no more behind the times than our audience.” She then explained that when your audience is media professionals, you actually don’t want to be too ahead of the curve. When it comes to digital journalism, she said, “media people in general are not exactly the most quick adopters.” Most media people are still “old media” people. So, many of Mediabistro’s users are playing catch-up. And they look to Mediabistro to provide them with the tools to do that.

It speaks to the importance of knowing your audience as well as possible. I would have thought, for example, that an online media company like Mediabistro would have to stay current and savvy in every way possible. But if that company’s audience doesn’t want or need that, what would be the point?

Conversation with Mediabistro Founder Laurel Touby

Mediabistro began as a cocktail party. Back in 1994, founder Laurel Touby was a freelance writer. She and a friend, fellow writer Russ Baker, decided to throw mixers for media professionals. Their thinking was, writers could meet editors, editors could meet writers. There would be alcohol. It would be fun. And maybe it could even get a couple people jobs by the end of the night.

The parties were a hit. Guests began telling Touby she should turn the venture into a website. So, after two years of martinis and positive feedback, Mediabistro.com was born. (Well, actually, HireMinds.com was born. But, a headhunting company trademarked the name “HireMinds” before Touby got around to doing so, leading to a messy and unfortunate legal dispute. But then, after that, Mediabistro.com was born.)

Now Mediabistro is one of the leading sites for media job listings, resources, and news on the web.

Touby, who sold her company to Jupitermedia for $23 million in 2007, has been on sabbatical the last few months. Right now, she’s traveling all over Africa. She took time out of her busy schedule to chat with me over Skype from South Africa this week. She spoke about how to gain and maintain success online and how the game has changed since she first launched her site.

Me: When you first launched Mediabistro, [then called HireMinds,] how did you get the word out about the site?

Laurel Touby: Through the cocktail parties and through word of mouth.

Me: Did you already have a base of online users because of the cocktail parties?

Laurel: No. Because, you can go to millions of cocktail parties, but how do you get those people to a website? You can try really hard, but I mean, have you ever sent around a message to all your friends saying, “Go to this website” or “Check out my piece on this website,” and nobody goes? So, it’s really freakin’ hard. I think you really have to pay attention to what will turn them on. And one of the big things that turns people on is job opportunities.

Me: Is it easier to get the word out today, with social media?

Laurel: In some ways it’s easier, and in some ways it’s harder. There’s a lot more noise now, and there’s a lot more spam. When I was starting, there wasn’t spam. People actually read every email they got because it was all from somebody they knew. So when I sent an email saying, “Hey, my website has a new job from Glamor, check it out,” people actually went there. ‘Cause they knew me. Now, you know, they could delete my emails ’cause they’ll be like, “Ugh, I get so much stuff to look at. I can’t deal.” So, it’s really much harder now to kind of get above the fray. But, back then, it was hard because not everybody had email. Not everybody used email. So, you were limiting yourself to just the people who were the most savvy. Now, you have Facebook where you can post events. And yet, I ignore almost 90 percent of all events I get sent on Facebook. (Because I have way too many friends, but maybe not everybody has so many friends.)

Me: How do you get feedback from your users?

Laurel: We do it in many ways. Through the cocktail parties themselves. Through surveys now. Through just talking to people. Through just emails that I get from people. People make suggestions all the time. Every touch-point that I have between the user and Mediabistro is an excuse to get feedback from them.

Me: Over the years, how have the wants and needs of media professionals changed?

Laurel: The big change is that now they’re freaking out about their jobs. A lot of people have been writing me lately saying, “Do you know how I can get digital skills? Do you know of any jobs? I’m worried.”…These are senior level people. We’re talking the cream of the crop — people who’ve been in the business 30 or 40 years.

Me: Are they worried because newcomers are willing to do more for less pay?

Laurel: I don’t think they feel threatened by younger people…They feel threatened by seeing their colleagues get fired, seeing magazines fold, seeing newspapers fold, seeing consolidation going on in the industry. And seeing the writing on the wall that print is no longer a sexy place to be. The sexy place to be now is digital — where in years past, no one wanted to be in digital; digital was for losers!

Me: How do you gauge where your audience is when it comes to digital literacy, interest, etc., and then match products to their level?

Laurel: Well, we throw stuff out to the world…We’ve done this with classes. We’ll put up a seminar and if it fills up then we know we should offer a class. And after that, we know we should offer an online video or online class. Seminars are an easy, quick, dirty way to find out if the audience is there.

So, if we find out that nobody wants to go to a seminar for mobile strategies for marketing — which we did, like, years ago — then we know, people don’t even know what mobile is yet! <laughs> And they have no clue how to market and they don’t care ’cause it’s not important to them! So then we pull back. And we don’t do a mobile conference eight years ago!

Me: Was it difficult to scale the company as Mediabistro’s audience grew?

Laurel: We have a scale that we can never kind of go beyond — and that is the size of the media market. There are only so many millions of media people that are our market.

I think the more important question is about focus. Any business that’s successful has to focus. And that’s something that I’ve found to be challenging since Day One: coming up with the three things that I thought Mediabistro should do and do well — rather than [doing] 12 things poorly. I think we’ve branched out beyond those three things and we’re doing a lot of things really well. But at a certain point, you just can’t go any further without risking losing your brand or making people unhappy because you’re lowering your quality…

And I think you should think about the longevity of [Mediabistro]. What has made it so long-lived? It’s been around since 1996. What other Internet company has been around that long? Not many. And making money, you know what I’m saying. Not like some places that I won’t mention that have been around for years and have never made any money.

Me: How have you achieved such longevity?

Laurel: I think it is because we consider it a living breathing organism and not just some brand…We’re not rigid. We’re moving with the audience…Adding new blogs in areas that are growing, like mobile and social media. Adding social media skills training to our roster. Hiring people on staff who are social media oriented and not just, like, sticks-in-the-mud.

Me: Did the idea to launch blogs on Mediabistro come from the community or from the staff?

Laurel: It was one of our staff members who woke us up to. We had this guy who was a friend of mine come in who was ranting about blogs and he was saying, “Blogs are the next big thing, you guys should do it!” and we were like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah whatever.” And then, like a year later, we woke up and said, okay, we need to do this. So that’s when we bought the first blog…which was TVNewser. That’s still one of our most successful blogs. But then, amazingly, we’ve launched blogs out of thin air and they’ve worked. Like AgencySpy, which I came up with, and it’s worked. I hired somebody who was an absolute no-name. She wasn’t even a writer. She just had attitude. And [we] turned her into a blogger, and she started it, and it did really well…It says a lot to start something from scratch like that.

Me: Even though you try and focus on just a few products, Mediabistro as a website has grown tremendously. Now that you have a large staff of specialized people, is it easier to manage the site? Or is it hard not being involved at every step in the process like you were in the early days?

Laurel: It’s harder in the sense that I can’t be “The Decider,” as Bush used to say. <laughs>…I can’t say, “We have to do this, I don’t care what you say! Get on it, work on it.” I can’t push people around anymore. I have to step back and let them and let my boss decide what direction we’re taking what we’re doing. Of course, if i totally disagree, I’ll say it to them. Then again, I don’t have to worry anymore as much as I used to worry. I used to be so scared and worried all the time.

Me: Any last words of advice for new entrepreneurs?

Laurel: I would say, test the concept like I did for a while and gain users and figure out ways to gain users before you try to get money and launch something that’s bigger. Work on your concept with your users. Focus group them. Take them for a coffee, take them for pizza, whatever. Find your users offline and bring them together online. And just listen to what they have to say and keep listening and do it for a while before you try and get big. Because once you get money…there are huge stakes, and it’s scarier and it’s realer, and you can make big mistakes that way and lose everything. Whereas, if you do it as a side business, moonlighting while you’re making money some other way, that’s really to me the best way to start a solid, long-term business.

…And don’t worry about making money from it in the beginning at all. Just worry about growing your audience and getting knowledge and becoming as useful as possible. Because once it’s useful, everyone talks about it. Everyone shares something that’s useful.