BP’s apology for spilling 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico came with a giant penalty. In addition to serving itself an enormous slice of humble pie, the company also agreed to set aside $20 billion to compensate those affected. That apology was then followed by a second apology, this time for the apology itself. Announcing the compensation, the company’s chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg had tried to stress that his firm really wasn’t like other oil giants:

“I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are greedy companies who don’t care, but that is not the case in BP,” Svanberg said. “We care about the small people.”

Saying sorry never feels pleasant, and you might be forgiven for not thinking the most generous thoughts about the people you’re apologizing to, but it’s never a good idea to fold an additional insult into your regrets.

But even company chiefs whose mother-tongue is English can still struggle to say the words “I’m sorry” in a way that placates the masses. And it is necessary. Companies will make mistakes, some more serious than others, and if there’s one thing that PR pros can agree on it’s that when there’s a cock-up, firms should ignore the legal team and apologize fast.

Even Apple Isn’t Perfect

That’s not what Apple did, of course. When word began to spread that the iPhone 4 lost reception when held in a certain way, Steve Jobs could have responded by saying “Sorry to hear that. We’ll look into it.” Telling complainants to hold the phone differently — a way of saying it’s your fault if our phone doesn’t work — was hardly likely to make them feel better. Even when the company did get around to admitting that something might not be entirely right, its letter didn’t address the main issue. It took a snowball of media articles and an on-stage mea culpa from Steve Jobs himself to point out that even Apple isn’t perfect — and to hand out free bumpers.

And even then, Apple’s boss was keen to point out that everyone else was having the same problem and that his firm had gone to great lengths to test the phone’s reception. All of that might have been true but expectations of Apple are higher than those of its competitors so while they didn’t have to apologize, Apple did — and not doing it right away meant that the company had to wheel out the CEO and effectively say sorry for its response as well as for the error.

It might not be fair, but the expectations of an apology do differ from company to company. While small firms can get away with a small “Sorry, we’ll fix it,” big companies, whose mistakes affect larger numbers of people, have to move faster and speak louder.

Much though does depend on the nature of the mistake. That wasn’t the first time that Apple has had to squeeze out an apology. It has said sorry in the past for failing to meet delivery deadlines, regrets that rarely do the company any harm. On the contrary, apologizing that your products are so popular that you can’t make them fast enough is a bit like an interview subject admitting that his biggest weakness is his workaholism.

I’m Sorry We’re So Clever

But it only works well if the fault isn’t yours. Apple doesn’t manufacture its products; it only designs them then outsources the soldering to firms around the world, particularly in China. In effect then, while an apology for failing to meet demand is an admission of faulty planning, it also shifts the blame onto manufacturers while keeping the shoulder pats for your own smart thinking.

When the company is doing the heavy lifting as well as the smart thinking though, then an apology for delivery delays looks a lot worse. That’s just something that HTC, manufacturers of the Hero mobile phone will have to accept. The iPhone competitor is still running Android 1.5 even as competitors have moved on to 2.1 despite repeated promises of an upgrade. The apology might have been honest and welcome, but it does suggest  there’s a problem with the company that hasn’t been fixed.

As painful as that apology might have been to make it was still better delivered than the reaction to complaints on Facebook about AT&T’s lack of information regarding forthcoming Android releases. Challenged to reveal what was coming, one bright wag at the phone company decided that rather than apologize for the lack of information or even to offer an explanation, he would post a picture of the next great phone the company would offer. Not everyone found the response funny and the poster did eventually have to explain why AT&T was being so coy about its plans.

Good apologies then are direct and to the point. They’re also fast, as Google’s apology for launching Buzz in a way that revealed users’ contacts list was. And the very best are followed by quick action to remedy the error, another strategy followed by Google, which moved swiftly to close the privacy gaps and start again. Facebook was both slower and clumsier when it ran into its own privacy issues.

And compensation can be nice too but it’s not always necessary and it may not help to silence the critics. Ubisoft’s offer a free download to players of Assassin’s Creed 2 was generous, but until the server error that locked gamers out is fixed, users are going to remain angry. Unless of course, the company is willing to set aside $20 billion for them.

The best strategies when it comes to saying sorry then is to check so carefully before launch that you have to do it as rarely as possible. If the complaints do come in then make the apology fast and unambiguous (and without additional insults), and work to make things better even faster. However painful an apology might be to make, it’s a lot less painful than writing compensation checks.

Photography: kurzonis

When Lenovo bought IBM’s PC unit for $1.75 billion in 2005, it felt as though the world really had changed. Here was a Chinese company that few people in America had heard of buying up an American icon of the twentieth century, a company that for many of the previous decades had epitomized the United States’ technological advantage. Now it would become part of a business whose biggest shareholder was the Chinese government. IBM would be working for the Chinese. Today, Lenovo is the largest seller of PCs in China with more than 28 percent of the market. Its sales for fiscal year 2008/2009 were almost $15 billion, and it’s the fourth largest seller of personal computers in the world. The sight of IBM notepads carrying the Lenovo brand name no longer seems unusual. And yet, when it comes to high tech, other Chinese manufacturers are largely invisible outside Asia. They’re also different, big and coming this way.

The high tech gap between China and the West may best be seen in gaming. European and American gamers have long been used to firing up their Japanese-made game consoles but the most popular games have tended to come from Western manufacturers. Activision, with its $1 billion Call of Duty franchise, started building games for Atari but it’s an American company majority-owned by French company Vivendi. Electronic Arts, founded by Trip Hawkins and based in Redwood City, is as American as John Madden’s favorite sport. Overall, the gaming industry in the US posted sales of over $19.7 billion in 2009.

American Gamers Don’t Like Cheats

China though is surprisingly close behind. According to a report by accountancy firm KPMG, already in 2006, its online gaming industry was worth $970 million, a sizable amount for a country whose GDP per capita is about one-ninth of America’s. But the kind of games that Chinese players like to play tend to be different to those bought in the West. Few gamers in Shanghai, Beijing and Urumqi are signing up to battle bad guys across Call of Duty’s online servers. Instead, they’re more likely to be playing Westward Journey, a game based on the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West.

And the form of playing is different too. As ChinaGeeks, a China-related blog, points out, few Chinese gamers own dedicated game consoles and even PCs are still relatively rare — at least outside the larger cities. Playing then takes place in long sessions at Internet cafes (which don’t serve coffee), with progress saved on the game’s servers. And while American gamers are reasonably happy to pay monthly subscriptions, they balk at playing free games alongside other players who have paid for magic items, the revenue model popular in China.

Just as gaming forms in China and the West are worlds apart, commercial operating systems are different as well. Chinese computer users do use Windows, Leopard and Linux but outside China, you’ll be hard pressed to spot a user of Kylin, an operating system developed at China’s National University of Defense Technology and based on Mach and FreeBSD. A report for the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission suggested that the program’s main purpose might be related to cyberwarfare.

Chinese users even search the Web differently. Google’s decision to stop abiding by the Chinese government’s censorship rules following cyber attacks on the email accounts of human rights activists might have looked like a supreme act of moral self-sacrifice but with a market share of around 35 percent in comparison to local search engine Baidu’s 58 percent, the company wasn’t giving up a leading position.

Chinese Online Shoppers Go for the Tea

And even as online retailing has grown in China so the way of buying and selling on the Web has evolved in a  unique direction. One of the most common items bought online is tea, located on sites like Alibaba’s TaoBao, paid for through AliPay and delivered by scooter. Ebay and Paypal barely get a look in.

It may seem then that the Chinese hi tech world is a unique ecosystem as distinct from the West’s way of using the Internet as the Galapagos Islands is different to Iceland. But there are similarities and there are overlaps. World of Warcraft is as loved by Chinese gamers as it is by Western hack-and-slashers. Farmville, Facebook’s social media game, is a copy of the Chinese game Happy Farm. Kingsoft, creators of a suite of productivity software, as well as some of China’s most popular games, has recently announced that next year, it will launch its Lost Temple and JX3 Online games into the European and North American markets. Despite the Chinese cultural associations of those games, the company seems to feel that if the story is good and the gameplay enjoyable, then people anywhere will want to play. They may well be right.

Perhaps the most intriguing development though is in mobile technology. The phone in your pocket may be running the iPhone’s OS, Android or Symbian but few mobiles have the capacity to boot up more than one operating system. (Nokia’s N95 managed to do it with a little developer trickery). The Chinese Sunno S880, however, packs a 3.6 inch WVGA display, WiFi, GPS, an 8 megapixel camera with lens cover, 256MB of memory and an 806 MHz CPU. And it can run both Android and Windows Mobile. If they can get Kylian on it too, they might just have something.

It’s no surprise that technology in China has developed in a different direction to the way it’s grown in the West. Regulations have made it difficult for some companies, such as Paypal, to operate. Cheap transport costs that allow cross-city deliveries to be made within the hour for as little as 73 cents mean that it’s worth ordering some forgotten grocery on the Web in a manner that doesn’t pay in the West. The question though is what will happen in those areas where those two worlds converge. IBM won’t be the last company to find it’s working for China.

Photography: raneko

Designers like to say that there’s only one truly intuitive user interface: the nipple. Everything else has to be learned. Anyone who’s ever had to teach a confused newborn how to eat however, knows even that isn’t true. The challenge for any designer then is to produce buttons, knobs, menus and signs that allow users to apply functions with the minimum of fuss. Some, like MySpace, got it horribly wrong with ugly modules and confusing functionality, a trick that Facebook tries to copy with every redesign. Occasionally though, a company gets it exactly right, not only allowing users to get what they want (almost) instinctively but also setting a new standard for others to follow. Here are five of the best:

Google

After a period in which Yahoo! ruled the Internet with a directory made up of categories, odd sub-categories and long descriptions that never seemed to have anything to do with the content you were looking for, Google’s search field and submit button was always going to be a winner. It couldn’t have been simpler (except perhaps for the “I feel lucky button” — really, does anyone ever use that?), allowing users to enter their search term and see a targeted list immediately. There were no checkboxes, no radio buttons and if you wanted to go Boolean, you could enter the symbols without hitting the advanced search page. Even the results were helpful.

Since then, things have got a little more complex with links to images, video, maps and other Google tools cluttering the page but even these have been shoved away to make the text field prominent. For text input, one field and one (not two) buttons is now the standard.

iPhone

Apple didn’t invent the mobile phone. It didn’t even invent touchscreens. But, as always, it took existing technologies and combined them in a way that created an entirely new experience.

Before the launch of the iPhone in June 2007, much had been said about the increasing complexity of mobile phones — and much too had been said about how difficult those additional functions, from Web surfing to games playing, were to reach and use. Apple’s use of icons to open applications, an onscreen keyboard, and touchscreen Web navigation created a new future for smartphones. Nokia and other manufacturers might have to battle the giant in the room but without Apple’s revolution in UI, the fight would have been limited to executives flashing their RIMs.

Delicious Library

If setting a standard for others to follow is one sign of an effective user interface, then Delicious Library’s wooden bookshelves have to qualify as a great design. Like other great designs, the library is simple, intuitive and familiar. Instead of displaying content as a list of menu items, the e-books the program contains are placed on a graphic background designed to resemble wooden bookshelves. Users get to enjoy book covers in the same way they do in a bookstore, and the books themselves are accessible with just a click.

The design of the shareware became such a standard that other digital book apps asked designer Wil Shipley if they could use it on their apps too. One company, however, used it without asking. When Steve Jobs showed off iBooks on the iPad in January 2010, the program’s design looked remarkably familiar. Perhaps that shouldn’t have been a surprise though. Many of Delicious Library’s staff now work for Apple.

Word 2007

A good rule for designers — and others — to live by is “if it ain’t bust, don’t fix it.” So when Microsoft launched Word 2007 with a completely revamped user interface, the reaction was generally negative. Gone were the static buttons and drop-down menus, replaced by scrolling ribbons located under newly titled tabs. For users familiar with the traditional design the new Word meant having to learn almost from scratch a program which they were used to using without a second thought.

The idea behind the redesign, said Microsoft, was to make visible features that users requested but which were already present in the program. The company, said Microsoft, was constantly receiving emails asking why a particular function wasn’t available in Word when in fact it was buried several menu items deep.

The biggest challenge for the design was familiarity with the old way of doing things. Once users got used to the ribbons though , and discovered where to find the features they needed, it became clear that Word 2007 was a much better design than Word’s previous versions. It would have been better though if it had been Word’s original design as well.

The Mouse

If simplicity is a sure sign of great design then the computer mouse has to be in the running too. A ball that registered movement and a couple of buttons for selection and feature access made using a computer as simple as moving a hand and lowering a finger. The addition of a trackwheel, a third button and side buttons for gamers hasn’t altered the ultimate simplicity and usability of the mouse. Even Apple’s own line of mice, with its distinctive single button (later replaced by a scroll ball and four programmable buttons), failed to show up the inherent benefits of a design that was already familiar and simple to use.

The rise of laptops however, has gone some way towards killing off mice but even their replacement — the touchpad — is modeled on the same principle, and shows that good user interface principles remain even as the technology changes.

Good UI design is always a challenge. What developers find natural and intuitive can often be the result of familiarity with their field and a ready understanding of how to use their own equipment. It’s not until the products hit the market — and users start tripping over their thumbs — that the effectiveness of a design is really tested. These five designs passed the test and often made it a bunch of later products easier to use too.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page owe a lot to the education system. Stanford University wasn’t just the place where they met, it was also the place where Google was born. The site started as a research project for their doctoral theses and the search engine’s first address was google.stanford.edu. It’s certainly possible to argue that that debt has been repaid. When Google went public in 2004, the university was holding more than 7,500 Class A shares and over 1.65 million Class B shares, valued then at $179.5 million. A quick sale of some of those shares brought in $15.6 million, further venture capital investments in the company are said to have earned the university an additional $200 million, and Stanford will continue to earn royalties from Google until 2011. That school of learning, at least, has little to complain about.

But Google’s founders haven’t stopped at paying back their alma mater. Since 2006, the company has also been making its suite of apps available to all educational institutions for free. Holding everything on its own servers, Google lets universities and schools use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Sites, Google Docs and Google Video on the school’s own domain.

It’s not entirely pain-free. The Quick Start guide describes a six-week process of goal-setting, implementation and roll-out, but that may have more to do with the size of education institutions rather than the complexity of the apps. And it may also reflect the size of the benefits for those institutions. London’s Westminster University, which began using the system in 2008, for example, has reported savings of £1 million and a reduction in time spent on systems and user support. Google’s apps are simple enough for students to use without having to pick up the phone to find out how to create an email account.

Teachers Are Talking, Students Are Learning

The service’s functionality has been useful too. The university has described how one student used Google Sites’ codeless Web page creation tool to build a site for other students wanting to study medicine at postgraduate level even if they haven’t studied it for their undergraduate degree. Staff too have improved collaboration when gathering feedback about the students they tutor.

“Feedback has been difficult to collate and is not always available in one place meaning we can fail to spot common trends, identified by many different course leaders,” explained Professor Roger James, Director of Information Systems at the university. “Personal tutors want the full 360 feedback.”

Those benefits have been seen lower down the education system too. Before New York City’s Intermediate School 339 started using Google’s education apps, the “School of Communication Technology” was relying on a mixture of computers running various types of vintage software. Since implementing the service, students have begun submitting their homework and receiving feedback from teachers  through Google Docs, memos forgotten in mailboxes have been replaced by real-time chat, and even academic results have improved. Behavior is better, attendance is higher, and suspension levels have fallen.

“We’ve moved from 22 percent of kids being on grade level in math to 47 percent,” said Principal Jason Levy. “Writing volume and quality are both on the rise, and we anticipate seeing improved ELA scores.”

It’s hard to argue with benefits like these and considering that 85 percent of children at NYC IS 339 qualify for free school lunches, it’s perhaps foolish to try. Intel hardly benefited from its spat with the One Laptop Per Child program which accused it of selling its low-priced Classmate PCs below cost in order to block the program’s advance.

But while Google has a non-profit arm, it’s a public company, not a charity. The app suite is free for education institutions (as well as for non-profits with fewer than 3,000 users) but paid elements are never far away. Google Message Security, a system that allows administrators to filter messages based on their source, their destination or their content, is free now but the offer ends after June 2010. Google Message Discovery, a useful extra that archives all domain messages, is available to schools from Postini… for a 66 percent discount. Using the system for alumni only requires enabling ads.

Where’s the Competition?

Those additions though are optional. More worrying is that Google’s free system crowds out competition. It’s little different to Microsoft stuffing Windows with its own free software, restricting the ability of competitors to bring out better programs. Only companies with the clout and pockets of a Google or a Microsoft can afford to create loss-leaders like these and offer them on such a broad basis and to such large clients. There is a danger then that with one system offered for free from one company, the educational programs available in schools may not develop with the kind of dynamism usually seen in the tech field. The Westminster University student who built a Web page about medical studies, for example, could have done the same thing with any one of a number of other programs, many of them better than Google Pages.

But perhaps most worrying of all is Google’s targeting of young people. Google isn’t a sugary, fizzy drink that will make kids obese and send them to the dentist, but putting their products in schools will make children familiar with them. When they leave school, it’s more likely that those former students will continue using Gmail, Google Chat and the other systems they’ve become accustomed to using at school. Google’s Education Apps provide a way for a large company to place its products in the hands of millions of young people, making their products the default choice for life.

It’s certainly possible that Google was motivated by nothing more than a sense of goodwill and a desire to improve the world’s education establishments through better communication and improved collaboration. Those benefits have certainly resulted. But there’s also no question that Google too is benefitting from working with schools and universities — and by pushing aside competitors as it puts its product into the hands of young future users.

Image: David Erickson

Marketing a business always comes down to a simple calculation: how much attention and how many sales will your marketing dollars buy? While it’s always easy to toss out cash on search engine optimization, on AdWords campaigns, and even on traditional print, billboard and television advertising, when you’re really strapped for cash, you want creative ideas that can deliver results for minimal costs. You’re prepared to experiment with new strategies in return for the benefits of a low-cost investment. Fortunately, those experiments can now also be low-risk. The rise of smart, fast communication channels – and even smarter marketers — has created all sorts of effective and creative marketing channels for entrepreneurs.

The most obvious of these is viral marketing. When the audience is passing your marketing message to their friends, you’re not paying for advertising space. You’re also getting your name associated with something cool and fun, and you’re winning an implicit recommendation. If someone thinks that the virus you’ve supplied is interesting enough to pass to a friend, they’re telling their friend that you’re worth looking at.

The problem is that viral marketing campaigns can be complex – and they’re not always cheap. Although viral marketing is usually associated with tiny companies, creative marketers and shoestring budgets, the best examples often come from big corporations, the types that can afford to pay top dollar for the biggest advertising talent. When Warner Brothers wanted to create a buzz for The Dark Knight, for example, it created a traditional teaser page containing the Batman logo. Users who clicked the logo were sent to a fake District Attorney election page for one of the movie’s characters. That page led in turn to a defaced version with which users could interact. In return for their email address, users received a code that revealed a few pixels of a hidden image. In order to reveal the entire picture, lots of visitors had to sign up. It didn’t take long for fans to spread the word, telling their friends to visit the site and uncover the picture.

As a way of bringing thousands of people to a website in a very short time – without spending a fortune on marketing – it couldn’t have been more effective.

Tell a Friend, Win a Date

SinglesMonthly, an online relationships magazine, did something similar in the early days of the Internet. While other sites were experimenting with radio button-based quizzes, the site allowed its users to send an email to a friend, invite them to take the quiz and compare the results to test compatibility. The ploy was so successful at encouraging users to bring in more users that it was quickly copied by Women.com.

But viral marketing doesn’t have to be that complex or require such forward thinking. Hotmail’s decision to place its own Web address at the bottom of every email sent was simple, effective, cheap and has been copied by just about every online entrepreneur since.

One of the most effective creative channels is also one of the most derided. Facebook today might feel a bit like someone’s middle-aged cousin in comparison to cool, new Twitter, and if its valuation $15 billion valuation looked optimistic in 2007, it appears positively dreamy now. But advertising on the site works. According to research firm Borrell Associates, Facebook is expected to generate around $310 million from advertising in 2009. A whopping 74 percent of that revenue though is said to come from local firms trolling for local business.

Facebook Has Built-In Viral Marketing

That makes sense. Facebook allows companies to target leads geographically far more effectively and accurately than Google does. The Web might allow companies to reach people around the world but if you don’t deliver further than 50 miles then a service that allows you to focus on specific towns and zip codes – and throw in personal data, such as marital status, age and even alumnus organization – is always going to be valuable.

And Facebook even has its own in-built viral marketing system too. Wedding photographers are using the site to upload images from their shoots. When they tag the photos with the clients’ names, those shots are then pushed to everyone on the client’s contact list, allowing them to spread their images widely for free and with little effort.

Finally, competitions might be old and traditional but they’re still very effective — and online, they can involve mass participation too. Web company MoonFruit might have attracted a lot of attention earlier this year with its Twitter-based giveaway but its creative contests, in which  people got happy with Flickr, YouTube and lots of other places besides, were judged by the company itself. That was a missed opportunity to engage audiences and put the public to work on behalf of the company. When Similac, makers of baby formula, ran a contest earlier this year to find a “Superdaddy”, it allowed anyone to enter and it let contestants encourage friends and family to cast a vote. That might have turned the competition into a popularity contest rather than a test of fathering skills but it also meant that contestants worked their social media networks to bring everyone they knew to the company’s website. Soon Facebook was filled with requests to contacts to head over the site and click a button, generating plenty of extra exposure for the firm. A strategy like this requires a prize big enough to motivate people to enter and cheerlead, but the returns clearly have great potential.

One of the biggest changes to hit marketing in the Internet age is the ability to target your efforts on the demographics most likely to respond. The old lists sold by junk mail marketing companies now look as outdated and useful as the static ads in the Yellow Pages. But social media has also opened a bunch of creative new channels that cost next to nothing to use and which can generate a huge number of leads, conversions and new clients.

And best of all, they also make marketing – even on a tiny budget – fun.

Asked to promote an officer who had already shown talent, bravery and leadership, Napoleon, it is said, would always ask “Is he lucky?” That might have been a more reasonable question than it sounds. While luck is often seen as fickle and unreliable, the sense that some people are just plain luckier than others (and that some people have the touch of doom) might have solid grounding. It’s certainly possible to find people who appear to fit in one camp or another: how else to explain both Kaka’s $13 million annual salary from soccer club Real Madrid and his boy-band good looks? If luck isn’t evenly spread out then but delivered by the truckload to some people and snatched away from others, what can you do to ensure that as an officer of your business, your efforts are blessed by good fortune?

According to Dr. Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at England’s University of Hertfordshire, and author of The Luck Factor: Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life: The Four Essential Principles, it is possible to take action that improves your chances. After tracking closely the behavior of 400 people who considered themselves either particularly lucky or cursed in everything they do, he produced four principles that characterize lucky types.

Pulp the Lemons

First, lucky people, he says, expect good luck. They’re optimistic and believe that everything will work out in the end. That confidence can help them to push through tough times, and might also mean that they pay less attention to the bad stuff and place a greater emphasis on the positives. It’s not really that they’re exceptionally lucky, they just regard the pot holes as exceptional and pay them little attention.

That sort of attitude also helps with the second principle. Lucky people turn bad luck into good. Instead of moping around and telling people how life’s got in for them, they actually take steps to turn things around. Being told to make lemonade out of life’s lemons might make you want to pulp the person giving you the advice, but “lucky” people, says Dr. Wiseman, actually do it. They recognize that things could have been worse, take control and move forward.

Those two principles though suggest that luck is as much about who you are as what you do. It’s about thinking you’re lucky rather than just being lucky. But Dr. Wiseman’s other two principles for winning luck offer much more practical strategies for business owners. Lucky people, he says, are willing to follow their hunches. They’re prepared to take risks, accept that losing is part of life and consider the consequences inconvenient rather than devastating. Because they’re willing to play more often, they win more often – and lucky types who listen to their gut and lose, rather than act only after long study, will then pull out their lemon juicers and think they’ve won.

To demonstrate that theory, Dr. Wiseman asked volunteers to count the number of pictures in a newspaper. A few pages in, the volunteers reached a half-page advertisement telling them that they could stop counting; the paper had 43 pictures. A few pages later, another ad placed next to a picture informed them that they could tell the examiner that they’ve seen the ad and claim a cash reward. The “unlucky” types missed it and kept counting.

Luck is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity

That shows what is probably the most important characteristic of lucky people: they maximize their opportunities. That’s vital and it suggests that there is a difference between chance and luck. Chance is random, evenly distributed and happens to everyone. Luck determines whether those chances turn out to be helpful or painful. It’s a redefinition of an older idea that luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

That suggests that being lucky isn’t about buying a rabbit’s foot and keeping your fingers crossed. It’s about a combination of attitude and action. Being a lucky entrepreneur means adopting an upbeat, relaxed manner that allows you to see the bright side of any problem and remain calm enough to turn around a crisis.

It means laying the groundwork for action all the time because you never know when opportunity is going to knock. For an entrepreneur, that might involve building networks on Facebook and Twitter, and attending conferences, even when you have nothing to sell and little to promote. You never know who you might meet and what opportunities those networks could churn up.

It means having your elevator pitch ready and on the tip of your tongue because lucky people talk to the people they meet, win the chances to use those pitches and deliver them, while unlucky types ride the elevator quietly while staring at their shoes. Their attitudes increase the number of chances they come across and allow them to make the most of those chances when they turn up.

And also it means taking action instead of wondering what would happen if you did A instead of B while looking for more information about C.

Dr Wiseman describes one example of a single person who goes to a party hoping to find a date. An unlucky person would come away with no phone numbers and no date. A lucky person would come away equally dateless but with a bunch of new friends, some of whom might later develop into business partners, customers or suppliers.

To become a lucky entrepreneur then, you have to be able to see the bright side of life, be happy and outgoing, be prepared to take risks, network constantly and not sweat the small stuff. You have to believe that your venture will be successful and assume that when you take a step back, the next two steps forward will soon follow. With that sort of attitude, they always do. The result might not be a place at the officer’s table next to a short, French dictator but it might just give you a successful business – and friends who think you were just lucky.

Photography: Daniel Y. Go

In an ideal world, the people with the brightest ideas, the most original minds and the most inspired inventions would end their lives with the most amount of money. They might not have been the ones who turned their spark of genius into production lines and mass sales, but they should have been rewarded fairly for the brainwave that defined the products.

Often, it happens. James Dyson, the inventor of the Ballbarrow, a wheelbarrow that used a ball instead of a wheel, lived off his wife’s salary as an art teacher for five years while he developed a prototype for a new kind of vacuum cleaner. He now owns a chateau in France and a personal fortune estimated at around £1 billion ($1.6 billion). Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief designer, might not be in the same economic league but his annual salary was reported at “more than £1 million ($1.6 million)” a year… in 2003. He’s probably earning a bit more than that now and, no doubt,  gets a free iPod too.

But not everyone is so lucky. Here are five creative types whose ideas either haven’t translated into material success yet… or never will, and what the rest of us can learn from their financial failure.

Bust at Sixteen

She’s not the most famous person on our list but Kira Plastinina is certainly the youngest.  In May 2008, the 16-year old Russian fashion designer opened twelve boutiques across the USA with plans to open another 250 stores.

Nine months later, the KP Fashion Co. filed for bankruptcy. The company owed $54.5 million to more than 100 creditors, including Verizon, the Glendale Police Department and Ford Models Inc. According to the bankruptcy filing, it had less than a fifth of that in assets and was involved in a trademark infringement suit brought by Pacific Sunwear.

Kira was helped by having good contacts. Her daddy is Sergei Plastinin, a former chief executive of Russia’s largest dairy and juice producer, who has a personal fortune estimated at more than $600 million. He is said to have put $80 million of his own money into his daughter’s business. But it might have helped more if instead of asking for a handout, she had done a little market research and produced designs that didn’t compete directly with those Paris Hilton, Avril Lavigne and Jessica Simpson.

There’s a reason even creative types have to pay their dues if they want to succeed in the business world. On the other hand, Kira is still big in Kazakhstan.

When Beautiful Designs Go Bad

Kira Plastinina failed because she didn’t have the experience to back her ambitions. That wasn’t the case for John DeLorean. By the time he set up his DeLorean Motor Company, he was in his fifties with a track record that included designing a new gearbox for the Packard Motor Company, taking the credit for creating America’s first muscle car and heading General Motors’ Pontiac division. His new car, a two-seater designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, would feature eye-catching gull-wing doors and a look that would be immortalized in Back to the Future.

Despite a £100 million (now $160 million) investment by the British government, the firm collapsed in February 1982 after operating for little more than a year. DeLorean  himself later faced trial after allegedly agreeing to take part in a drug trafficking operation to help pay off the company’s debts. He was acquitted after claiming entrapment.

It’s tempting to see here a rerun of Kira Plastinina’s failure: when money comes in too easily, it goes out easily too. But it’s probably got more to do with hubris and the belief that if you spend enough money on an attractive enough product, people will buy it. Sometimes you barely get to make it.

Cooking up a Storm

Celebrity chef John Burton Race did get to make it – several times a day. In 2004, together with his wife Kim Burton Race, he opened the New Angel restaurant in Devon, UK. The opening of the restaurant was documented by a British reality show and the venue went on to win Michelin’s coveted stars.

Three years later, while he was in Australia filming a series of the reality show “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me out of Here,” his wife shut down the restaurant. The New Angel was sold to Burton Race’s friend Internet entrepreneur Clive Jacobs, who then re-employed Burton Race as head chef. In May of this year, Burton Race was declared bankrupt.

Opening a restaurant is always a tricky business but Burton Race might not have chosen his partner too wisely. Three years after opening the restaurant together, Burton Race left his wife to live with his mistress and their 2-year old son.

It’s good business to be inventive in the workplace. But a traditional family life tends to provide stability… especially when you’re running a family business.

Building Too Little for the Future

Today, Louis Kahn is remembered as one of the world’s great architects. A professor of architecture at both Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, he was a master of the International Style and known for his attention to “servant” space – areas in a building that served other open areas.

In 1974, his body was discovered in a public toilet at Penn Station in New York. It took the police several days to identify him. He had died of a heart attack and was bankrupt.

It’s certainly possible that, like Burton Race, Kahn’s convoluted personal life had held him back –  he fathered three children by three different women – but the real cause was probably more prosaic. Kahn continually revised his designs, even after construction had begun, prompting his clients to assign him a manager.

Groundbreaking designs are vital for creative types but you also have to keep a close eye on the cash.

Taking Your Chance

There are few more successful creative types than Walt Disney. The company that carries his name now has a string of brand names recognized around the world and annual revenues of $35 billion.

But life wasn’t always so good for Disney. An early company producing Laugh-O-Grams for Newman cinemas in the Kansas City area was unable to generate enough income to cover the animators’ high salaries. It went bankrupt… and Disney went to Hollywood.

And that might be the best lesson to learn from creatives’ bankruptcy: a failure doesn’t have to be the end of the story. In fact, it might just provide the experience needed to create the next big success.

Last year, we released our twitter ebook as an introduction to using Twitter.  We could not have anticipated that our ebook would become one of the most downloaded Twitter ebooks or that Fortune 500 companies would be contacting us to include the ebook in their corporate intranets.  But what we DID anticipate is that Twitter would be a strong and viable business and marketing tool.  And so we assigned our entire writing and research staff to work towards releasing a Twitter business book. The result is 99 Ways To Make Money Using Twitter is now available on Amazon.

All the Most Effective Twitter Money-Making Strategies in One Place

The challenge in writing and researching a Twitter business book is to look at all the strategies, methods, and ways of making money on Twitter, and to bring them together into a book that is current, yet filled with case studies that will not go out of date. The methods range from one extreme to the other. We found authors who were selling their books with Twitter, and writers who were publishing their books on Twitter. We came across plenty of large firms using Twitter to improve their customer service, and one Twitter entrepreneur who was making almost $1500 a month helping CSS programmers in his spare time on Twitter. We found a bunch of different ways of inserting ads into a Twitter page – some more obtrusive than others – and users who were offering Twitter-based translation services, job listings, garage sales, retail outlets, giveaways, affiliate links, contests, directories, craft products and a whole bunch more.

Some of these methods were making money directly through sales, commissions, payments for services and more. Others acted as a branding tool, community builder or viral marketing channel that spread a company’s name and image further – and cheaper — than it could have done otherwise.

Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised to find that people were experimenting with Twitter in such creative ways and in so many different ways. But we wanted to be certain that these methods worked. It’s easy enough to come up with an idea. But implementing that idea and making sure that it’s as good in practice as it seemed in theory is a whole other ball game. As we researched each method then, we looked closely at how people were implementing it and tried to see what sort of results they were having. When we described that strategy in the book, we made sure that the chapter included at least one case study that would allow readers to see the method’s effectiveness for themselves — and copy it easily.

That ease of implementation was a guiding principle, and it governed the structure of the book. Twitter has turned out to be an incredibly flexible marketing tool, one that’s vital to companies the size of Comcast as much as to individual sellers looking to increase their website views or move a few more handmade items. What all of these users have in common though is that none of them wants to waste time trying to figure out how to make a method work, let alone decide whether it’s going to work at all.

From How It’s Done to Where to Begin

In each chapter then, we included an introduction that summarized the strategy we were about to describe. We added a short key that would function as a guide to the method’s difficulty, skill level and revenue potential. We then explained how twitterers were using the method, how anyone can do the same thing, pointed out where to begin, and added some advanced tips to ensure that anyone who used the method could skip from beginner to advanced user — and secure earner — right away. And finally, we made sure that we included a reference to a case study so that readers could look at the example in action for themselves.

Clearly not all of these methods are going to be suitable for every user of twitterer, just as not everyone is going to make money with a blog about gardening or an ebook about collecting porcelain dolls. That’s why it’s so important for people who are serious about using Twitter — and serious about making money online — to understand the breadth of the opportunities available. If you aren’t aware of just what Twitter can do — and what people are doing on the site — then you won’t be able to choose the methods that best suit you.

Among the Twitter documents stolen from the cloud by a French hacker and published recently by Techcrunch was a note with the question “Are we the new Internet?” That’s unlikely. Twitter is just one service which uses the Internet, but it does share the Internet’s flexibility and its earning potential too. Entrepreneurs, businesses, managers and everyone, in fact, needs to understand the range of the opportunity that Twitter offers so that they too can make the most of it – just as they need to understand the Internet if they want to stay in business.

Twitter now is where the Web was in the early years of this decade. The buzz has peaked and the first round of excitement is dying down. Now that the party is over, people are getting to work — and yes, they are starting to make money. In 99 Ways to Make Money Using Twitter, we attempt to reveal the most effective ways that users are making that money, and make it easy for others to do the same thing. You can pick up your copy of 99 Ways to Make Money Using Twitter exclusively at Amazon.

Photography: Matt McGee.

You have an idea for a startup business, but with the world’s economy already in or heading for recession, finding the funds you need is not going to be easy. Still, you can build the funds you need for your initial startup phase using a tried and tested approach known as bootstrapping.

What is Bootstrapping?
Bootstrapping is a classic entrepreneurial approach to self-financing a business. The basic principle is simple: start with whatever funds you have and reinvest all or most of the revenue your business earns. Take a very minimum of revenues for personal use. Do whatever else you have to to pay your personal expenses.

The Pitfalls of Bootstrapping
Bootstrapping is not an easy approach for most entrepreneurs. It does require sacrifices, dedication, and persistence. There’s no guarantee that it will ultimately take you towards business success, which can be frustrating, disheartening and more.

The Benefits of Bootstrapping
With bootstrapping, you’re in control. You don’t owe any one blood (family, friends) or loan (investors) money. You build incredible discipline that will stand you in good stead for your next venture. Today’s entrepreneurs have the added benefit of the Internet and being connected. That means being able to run all or parts of your business while mobile or even traveling. Oh, did we mention all the free software?

Bootstrapping Your Startup Business
Successful bootstrapping does require a certain mindset that is willing to put up with sacrifice and compromise in return for a later reward. In a very real sense, it’s the same as wealth-building mentality.

1. Have a plan. Not just a business plan but also a life plan, since the two WILL be intertwined for some time to come.
2. Change your habits. Minimize your personal expenses by cutting out anything you don’t need. (Told you there’d be sacrifices.) That will build up extra savings that can be put towards your startup.
3. Use free software. Inexpensive and free software for desktop and web browsers abounds online. A lot of free apps are suited business use. These applications can help you manage your business, plans, finances, team, tasks, customers, and more. Take advantage of the free trial periods that many software companies now offer for their applications. Some apps are good for 7-30 day free trial, and are often fully-functioning. Through clever planning of download and installation, you just might be able to coast for several months without spending a cent on software. If your business is entirely online, it’s quite possible to create success out of literally just your time and bootstrapping principles.
4. Minimize your business expenses. In some industries, you need to give the appearance of prosperity. However, buy expensive new furniture, cabinetry, computers and whatever else is not necessary for everyone. For example, don’t go overboard on your office expenses, whether it’s at home or rented somewhere. Do you even need a business office or can you work at home? If you take an office, does it have to be so large? Can you share with another entrepreneur? Are you applying a “green” approach to cut office operating costs? Never mind that “friend” calling you a cheap so and so. This is sometimes what you have to do when you bootstrap: operate lean and green.
5. Decide between wants and needs. This is an extension of the last two rules. You have to decide what you absolutely need right now and be (or learn to be) disciplined enough to defer the “wants” until your business has disposable income. If you want to treat yourself, do it out of your personal income.
6. Get out of debt. If you have personal debt – aside from a mortgage or car loan – consider paying it all off before you launch your startup. Get into the habit of having minimal debt, so that you apply the same mindset to your entrepreneurial endeavors.
7. Increase your personal income. Your startup while slowly take over your life if you let it. If you stand firm and keep some time for yourself each week, use it to build additional personal income.
8. Increase your revenue. It’s inadvisable, but if you would rather put all your free time into your business, then try to come up with ways to increase its revenue now. Try building multiple streams of income on the side to fund the long-term goals of your startup.
9. Think critically. Try new methods to get to where you want to be. Apply advanced problem solving.
10. Apply guerilla marketing. Thinking outside the box isn’t enough. You need to go ahead and implement your plans, and to do so while spending the minimal amount of funds. Leverage the Internet as much as possible. Learn online marketing and bootstrap your own target market. How you do this really depends on what kind of business you are building, but writing targeted articles on your company site is one possibility.

One last bit of advice: the successful bootstrapper embraces challenges with a DIY (do it yourself) attitude. It’s not always a necessity but it doesn’t hurt. That is, why pay for something if you can do it yourself? However, factor in that if your time is worth $X/hour in revenues and you can hire someone to do something for much less, there will come a point where you need to hire and delegate.

Whether you are a freelancer looking for some full- or par-time salaried work, or a salaried employee looking for some side work, there are a number of tools that should be in your toolbox aside from the typical resume/ C.V. and one cover letter per job.

Leveraging Technology in Your Work Search

Here are a some technologies and techniques to employ in your job search.

Social Media and Networks

Regardless of age, many job seekers are recognizing the immense value of online networks. In fact, it seems to be a necessity for many types of work, especially since there’s a global recession at the moment. Jobless rates are rising all over the world, and connecting online makes it easier to broaden the scope of your search. (Even when there’s no recession, job change is a fact of life.)  One good professional networking site is LinkedIn, though people have reportedly found work via Twitter and even Facebook. Consider reading Chris Brogan’s free ebook on using the social web to find work.

(The irony is that even though LinkedIn had its own recent layoffs and management changes, its market is growing rapidly because of the recession – at the rate of about a million new people every two weeks.)

Leverage the connections in your social networks. Do ask both real-life and online friends about opportunities. Just be considerate of their viewpoint in the job referral process. Just because someone says “no” does not mean they have anything against you. Move on and ask someone else.

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis is a tool often used for businesses and business plans. It can also be used to analyze your career planning and job search. (SWOT = Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.)

Online Portfolio

If you do visually creative work (graphic + web design, photography, video), an online portfolio is a must. If you write, publish samples of your writing – if this does not violate client agreements. If necessary, publish similar text. If you code, maybe you can have a running demo of some of your work.

Whatever type of work you do, make an attempt to demonstrate it – and thus your skills – online. At the least, publish your resume/ C.V. online, on a site associated with your name/ brand (as well as on jobseeker sites). If you can, show your client/ employer list.

Maintain a Website or Blog

If you don’t have content suitable to a portfolio, considering keeping a blog with content relevant to the work that you do. Publish articles, reviews, lists, interviews, diagrams, images, podcasts, screencasts and any other suitable content. This demonstrates your communication skills – a requirement that’s must for most types of career jobs, and implicit for freelance/ contract work.

Make sure that your contact info or contact form is easy to find, and that you check your email application’s spam folder – just in case.

One tip: blogging will only take up a lot of time if you let it. Try to achieve flow in your writing.

Use Job Boards

While newspapers might be fine for finding local work, some jobs in many larger cities are only listed online – either on company web sites or on job boards. Of course, it’s far easier to search a job board for work than to search an unending number of company websites. You have your choice of well over a 100 job sites to pick from.

Make sure to utilize as many of the advanced features of a job site as possible. Most let you post a profile, one or more resumes, one or more cover letters, and sometimes a list of skills and the length of time you have used each skill.

Depending on what you are looking for, you’ll either want to search freelance job lists, freelance bidding sites, or salaried job boards. Each requires a different approach.

Consider supplementing your income with freelancing – or at least to tide you over until you find the job you’re looking for.

If you’re consider changing careers, have a plan for the change. Consider whether you’ll need any retraining, as well the tools you’ll need for your career search.

Web Agents + RSS Radars

Of course, job seeking can turn into a full-time job. If you have other obligations and need to limit the amout of time you’re spending looking for work, leverage technology even further.

1. Web feeds. Most job sites offer RSS feeds for new job listings that you can subscribe to from a feed reader such as Google Reader. If your feed reader is sophisticated enough you can filter incoming feed items for just the ones you want, by specifying keywords, job titles, locations and more.
2. RSS Radars. If your feed reader is not sophisticated, or you want to do some complex filtering of job listings, you need an RSS Radar. Radars filter one or more web feeds as per custom filter rules that you can define. The resulting filtered information is then delivered to you either via email or a feed reader, depending on the tools you’re using.
3. Yahoo Pipes. One of the most powerful tools for building RSS Radars is Yahoo Pipes. Pipes has a visual, plug and play interface, so no real programming is required. Once you’ve built a Radar, you can subscribe to its web feed through an RSS reader. Tubetorial has a couple of screencasts on creating RSS Radars with Yahoo Pipes.
4. Maps. If you want to get really sophisticated with Yahoo Pipes, you can utilize the output feature to Yahoo Maps. Use some of the more advanced Pipes filtering (i.e., location filters) to produce a map pinpointing the location of jobs from your RSS Radars. (The example image above shows the output of a Pipe-based Radar searching for New York City apartments.)

Final Thoughts

While there are things to do when you get laid off, what you should not do is wait until you lose your job to start building your network or creating your resume. Do these things while you are employed. And if you do get laid off or are otherwise looking for a new job, update your resume immediately.

Photography: ntr23

It works for Google. But most things work for Google, so perhaps that isn’t saying too much. Log in to the search company’s AdSense blog and you’ll be able to read all about online advertising in twelve different languages, including two different types of written Chinese.

For a company the size of Google, that makes sense. There is a recently-discovered, isolated tribe in the Amazonian rainforest which, they claim, has never heard of the goings-on at the Googleplex… but most people think they’re just putting it on for the tourists. When you’re this well-known (and have that sort of money to pay for translators and foreign writers), it makes sense to have people who can talk in your market’s tongue, even when that tongue is Turkish.

For the rest of us, going international can also sound like a good idea. While English – or rather American – might have become a true international language (a kind of Esperanto with fries), it’s only spoken as a first language by about 17 percent of the world’s population. The remainder would probably prefer to read the Web in a language they really can understand.

Be Big in Japan

Producing different versions of your blog in languages to suit every type of reader then will remove the language barriers and open it up to everyone. Instead of only talking to readers in America, the UK, Australia, South Africa and India, you’d be able to toss in the rest of Europe, South America, Russia and China, potentially increasing your readership by hundreds of millions. If you’re looking to make a splash, that’s always going to be a necessity.

But doing it right is difficult. WordPress offers a bunch of plugins that can create mirrored versions of a blog in a number of different languages. Earnersblog.com, for example, uses Taragana which offers fourteen languages including Arabic and Norwegian. The site itself noted that it saw its traffic double in two weeks after installing the plugin — but it didn’t mention what that traffic did. One bilingual commenter described the Chinese translations as “laughable” and reasonably questioned whether the traffic would convert.

There’s also the question of what the traffic would be worth if it did. Some advertising programs have been known to pay less for users from certain countries and even leading services like Kontera and Chitika limit their ads to English language Web pages, restricting the options for converting users.

And not everyone wants to make a splash. There’s little point in offering a French version of your blog if it promotes a business that can only handle local clients. The sort of publishers who are most likely to benefit from a multilingual blog are those who make use of pay-per-click advertising that also works in different languages (it’s no surprise that Google does that pretty well). Marketers of information products whose ebooks have been translated should, in theory, do pretty well too.

But do Japanese Buy?

In practice though, international sellers haven’t always succeeded globally, and that might provide a clue to the limitations of multilingual blogging. Joel Comm, for example, an Internet marketing guru whose book on AdSense has been translated into Spanish, Japanese and French, used to use a program called Translation Gold to provide automatic translations of his blog posts. No longer – probably because neither the posts nor the translations produced significant revenues. But back when Joel was starting out in Internet marketing with his site WorldVillage, he was kept afloat by a Japanese firm that offered his content to its readers. They didn’t just translate the articles though, they also localized them – and that’s an important difference.

Automatic translation software doesn’t just mangle words; it also takes them out of context. Professional translators know what to do with idioms that don’t translate and anecdotes that don’t ring bells. That means offering a multilingual blog is rarely going to be as simple as tossing in a plugin and watching your page count multiply. It will mean having local experts reviewing the results, making sure they’re up to scratch and changing the ideas to make them match the market.

And that sort of thing doesn’t come cheap – or fast. When it comes to translation services, prices are all over the place — elancers can be fairly reasonable but you usually get what you pay for – and there will always be a delay before the translated post is ready to go live, an important consideration for sites that offer news.

The bottom line for bloggers looking for markets beyond those of their own language is to ask first what foreign speakers are really worth to them, which languages they should be aiming at – and how much they’re willing to pay to post translations that work. While it’s nice to speak to people from around the world, if it doesn’t pay, then it’s probably best to say “Hasta lavista” to multilingual blogging.

Photography: wili_hybrid

It’s the real reason we join. We might end up swapping a few emails with someone we haven’t seen since high school (before remembering why we lost touch with them in the first place.) We might sneak peeks at how exes are doing, then beat ourselves up when we discover that they’re now billionaires married to supermodels. And we might spend far too long looking at silly videos on Fun Walls then wonder why we bothered, but when we enter a password on a site like LinkedIn, Facebook or even MySpace, we like to tell ourselves that we’re really networking to advance our careers.

Of course, it might happen. With everyone only six degrees away from everyone else, anyone should be able to follow the dots to find someone who can give them access to their dream job.

But what happens when you’re that someone? What do you do when a friend asks if you know of any jobs going in your company? And should you really offer help when a pal gets a pink slip and starts looking for a bolthole?

It’s always nice to lend a hand but before making the connection, it’s a good idea to know what you’re getting into. Here are the most important rules to follow when helping a friend find a job:

1.    Make sure it really is a good place to work.

Being able to open doors for people can make us feel influential and gratitude is always pleasant. But as much as we’d like to believe that we can land anyone any job anywhere, most of us have pretty limited networking powers. That means there’s a temptation to use any influence we have… even when the job sucks and the workplace is even worse. We only think of the fact that we can change someone’s life and land them a job, and forget – for a while at least – that the friend only lands the job once. After that, they have to actually work there.

Before you make the recommendation, ask yourself whether you’d like to do the job, and be realistic when you describe it to them.

2.    Take a realistic view of your powers.

Just as there’s a temptation to look only at the good side of a job opportunity, so there can be a tendency to overrate our powers of influence. You might have a good friend who’s running the marketing division of a major company but it doesn’t matter how many beers you sank during college, he’ll only give the hire if the candidate really is suitable.

Unless the job is yours to hand out – and you’re prepared to risk hiring a no-hoper – understand that the best you can do is recommend one side to the other. You don’t get to make the decision… so you can’t get to enjoy all the credit when your friend aces the interview either.

3.    Only unique connections count.

The statistics for the number of jobs never advertised range all over the place. But one thing you can be sure of is that there’s an awful lot of them. While jobs in the public sector have to be open to all, private employers will always prefer a word-of-mouth recommendation to wading through a pile of resumes after posting an ad on a job site.

It’s those kind of recommendations that count when you’re trying to help a friend. Tell someone that you saw an ad in a newspaper and you won’t be giving them anything they wouldn’t have found eventually for themselves. Tell them that a company you know is looking for a programmer, call the employer to find out where to send the resume, what to put in the cover letter and set up a meeting… and you count that as a favor that can be returned one day – one reason you might want to lend a hand.

4.    It has to work both ways!

Starting a new job is a bit like starting a new relationship. You can expect good times and bad times. You can expect each side to feel the pull of temptation from better-looking partners. And you can expect at least one side to wonder at some point whether they’ve made the right decision. But ultimately, for the relationship to work, both sides have to benefit.

For people playing matchmaker, that’s particularly important: if it all goes belly-up, both sides will blame you.

After all, it was you who made the introduction. It was you who provided the recommendations. And it will be you neither side will want anything to do with ever again if it all goes wrong. That’s why the most important rule is the fifth…

5.    Understand your responsibilities… and the risks.

Even though you won’t be the one making the hiring decision, whenever you make an introduction, it’s going to feel like a recommendation. That’s true even if all you do is tell a friend that you know that a certain company is hiring.

No job information you provide to a friend will ever be completely neutral because your friend will assume that you wouldn’t tell them about a job you don’t think they should do.

Similarly, passing a resume on to your boss will make him feel that he’s getting someone like you. It comes with your trust, whether you intended it to or not.

If the job doesn’t work out, the result could be a lost friendship, a damaged career — or both.

Of course, none of these things means that you should never help a friend in need or lend a hand to company looking to grow. But they do mean that you should know what you’re doing – and play by the rules.

Photography: Trevor Haldenby

Winning a new client sounds like something that can only bring benefits. It’s certainly a reason to feel proud. You’ve beaten off your competitors, proved that you’re the best person for the job, and you’ve increased your income too, of course.

But a new job also brings new risks. Every client is different and even if the job is familiar, the specific demands will be unique, as will the client’s expectations. Providing plenty of examples so that the client will have a good idea of what you’ll produce is always a good idea but you’ll never really know how the job will turn out until it’s completed — and neither will the buyer.

That’s where the problems can begin. If you’ve just spent three months working on a project, you want to be sure you’re going to get paid for that time. The client too wants to be sure that you’ve produced the product he needs, that he won’t have to pay for something he can’t use and that he won’t have to start again with another service provider — and find himself in exactly the same position in another three months’ time.

The best solution is to get regular feedback while the project is ongoing.

It sounds obvious, but in practice it’s neither natural nor always easy to organize.

Breaking it Down
Once you’ve won a project and feel that you understand the requirements, the temptation is often to knuckle down and get on with it. No one likes to be told what to do all the time, and if a client has seen your work and hired you, he’s given you his trust, leaving you to produce results in the way that you see fit — right up until the moment that you discover that your results don’t fit what he needs.

Long projects then should always be broken down into smaller, bite-sized pieces not just so that you’re not dependent on one big payment at the end that might never materialize, but so that you can find out whether you’re on the right track.

The first milestone then should come good and early. For a website design, for example, it could come after the architecture has been planned and a mock-up made of the home page but before the hard work of coding begins.

The key here though is to make sure the feedback you receive is full and detailed. Clients aren’t always skilled at providing information; they’ll often assume that what they have in mind is more than the best way to do the job; they’ll believe it’s the only way to do the job. Instructions to make a design “bolder” or “improve usability” might seem obvious to the person providing them but they tell the contractor nothing helpful.

When you send in the first milestone then, it’s a good idea to include a list of specific questions that demand detailed answers. A bullet-pointed list of features for the client to look at could be helpful as could yes/no questions to choices that have been puzzling you.

While it’s true that forcing clients to answer your queries — and answer them in full — does make demands of them, it also increases the chances that you’ll produce a better product, which is what both of you want, after all.

Keeping the Feedback Flowing After you’ve Been Paid
But the stream of information you receive from the client doesn’t have to end with the job. In fact, some of the most valuable words a client can provide come after the job has been completed satisfactorily — and they aren’t even the words on the check.

The first is a testimonial.

That’s easy enough. When you deliver the last installment of the project, the client should respond by telling you what a great job you’ve done. If the compliment is strong enough, just ask if you can use it in your marketing. Promise to include the name of their business and you’ll also be offering free advertising — a good reason to provide your own testimonials to people who have made you happy.

If all you get is a thank you, be bold. Once you’ve received your payment, ask for a testimonial. If the client was genuinely happy with your work, he won’t refuse; if he wasn’t happy, you won’t see him again anyway, so nothing will have been lost. Again, a reminder that you’ll include a link to the client’s business site can help to seal the deal.

Persuading the client to pass your name on to friends and colleagues is tougher. You could just mention that if he happens to know anyone else who needs the sort of help you provide, you’d love to lend a hand. But that’s likely to give you an agreement without any specific action.

You could also offer an incentive. Mentioning that other clients have provided referrals and that you rewarded them with a free upgrade, for example, or a discount coupon for future work can work, but perhaps the best way — if not the easiest — is to do it naturally. If your conversations with a client can touch on work that other people he knows need then suggesting that the client pass on your name to his friend will feel like you’re offering a favor rather than asking for one.

It’s not easy and it requires building a good relationship with the client during the production. But that’s also another good way of getting valuable feedback while you work.

Photography: shapeshift

It’s not likely to be a question you’ve ever asked yourself. Unless you were thinking of taking on AT&T and had a few spare billion bucks lying around to buy up the licenses, then whether you should start your own mobile network was probably not very high on your agenda.

But what if we told you that you could do it for free? And within a few minutes? And that while you wouldn’t get all of the profits generated by your customers’ calls, you would pick up a cool $50 cash for everyone who joins the program and a cut of up to 8 percent of their phone bill.

You’d probably think what we thought when we heard about Sonopia: “Sounds like an affiliate system to me.”

MVNOs for you and Me…
In fact, sign up to Sonopia, and you’ll become an affiliate of an affiliate. The company is a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO): it sells Verizon’s calling plans, and the company’s members send it customers. But the system isn’t quite as simple as a basic reselling program. For one thing, it’s been set up by Juha Christensen, one of the founders of Symbian and the former president of Macromedia. And for another, in addition to putting your friends, neighbors and anyone else you can persuade onto Verizon’s network, those customers can receive a phone with a unique skin as well as exclusive content created by you and delivered straight to their phone. There are even plans for that content to include widgets created by programmers and targeted towards particular groups of users.

That means you’re not simply off-loading customers onto Verizon; you’re signing them up as members of a club which you run — and profit from.

The idea is to fill a marketing niche too small for companies as large as Verizon to make use of, one which sells phones to selected demographics based on features that appeal directly to them.

An arrangement like this is always going to appeal most to charities. Non-profits can benefit from the passive revenue stream generated as people make their calls. Their members get to show their affiliation every time they pull out their mobile, and they can also reduce the guilt they feel when they see their bill by telling themselves that they’ve just made a big contribution to their favorite cause. The National Wildlife Federation, for example, is just one organization that’s been quick to join the program.

Small businesses could use Sonopia too though, by distributing branded phones to employees. With an eye-catching skin, they’d get free advertising every time one of their workers talked in a bar or a café. Most importantly though, if it’s the sort of company whose workers are always out and about and which pays its employees’ phone bills anyway, it would be getting a discount equal to $50 plus the commission. If that works out cheaper than competitors’ rates, Sonopia could look like a cut-rate way of paying commercial phone bills while making its employees feel like part of the gang.

… but not for VoiP
In practice of course, communication costs are falling faster than a lead dollar anyway and increased use of VoiP, which Sonopia doesn’t support, is still the best way for a business to cut back on its telephone expenses.

As for individual sellers, it’s hard to see what would persuade someone to ditch their current contract for Sonopia’s. Springwise.com, for example, recommends pitching the value of exclusive content but the price of that content is always going to be the difference between the customer’s current plan and Sonopia’s. That could make the occasional piece of news or the odd song very expensive. Loyalty to a band, brand or cause might make someone willing to pay it; the odd article of the sort that they could read for free in their RSS reader is less likely to do the job.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Sonopia isn’t the MVNO model then — this is just one way in which mobile phone companies sell their services — but its social networking feature.

Sign up at Sonopia and the phone-selling will only be a part of what you’re asked to do. You’ll also be expected to create a profile for a Sonopia’s social networking system. This works in a similar way to Facebook — but with far fewer people.

That might suggest that even Sonopia doesn’t want to depend solely on phone sales for its revenue. More importantly though, it shows how it’s possible to fold two completely different services into each other so that when you sell one service to a customer, you also recruit them into the other.

Online sellers have done this for years by capturing email addresses and encouraging customers to opt in to receive ads. Sonopia has taken this model much further — and shown other entrepreneurs how they can do the same.