Seriously, I have no background on this issue..but give me a freaking break!! This guy didn’t do s**t for 7 years and now he wants 84% of Facebook due to a contract in 2003?

I don’t know how people can live with themselves by just trying to make their money from legal loopholes. I guess some people are fine doing absolutely nothing and expecting others to pay their way in life; I’m not one of those people. If I’m not putting in the time and providing value for my time and effort, there’s no reason I should expect to get paid nor do I want your money. It’s a shame to see people try to make a living from the legal system like this.

From: Brooke Babcock
Subject: Up to ten times your targeted traffic

Message Body:
We strongly believe that we have an excellent opportunity to increase the number of visitors to your website through our white-hat SEO services. Please simply reply to this message and we will be delighted to send you further information.

Really? Seriously, SPAMMERS need to get a clue. I can’t believe anyone ever replies to these (but if no one did, I imagine these spammers wouldn’t send them out).

Sorry, just venting from another piece of spam wasting my time — and yes, I know I wasted more of my time by blogging about it, but I’m cool with that.

I’m proud to say that I have never been inside of a Wal-Mart (at least not that I remember, my parents may have taken me when I was an infant)

[Via Home Loans]

At this point in the company’s evolution, I don’t see a huge need for the company to be throwing off a huge amount of profit. What’s the point? If we believe that we can build a lot more value for users, developers, and advertisers by taking any excess money we can make and investing it back in, then we’re just going to grow those communities and markets faster, and we’re going to end up with greater potential in the long run. If you prematurely optimize, you might get a bigger piece of a smaller thing. I feel like we’re really early on in the start of this movement toward everything being social.

Makes total sense to me.

[via Inside Facebook]

If you are an entrepreneur and wanting to figure out a way to be your own boss and earn your own income, take a look at this presentation at the 99% Conference given by my favorite blogger Fred Wilson talking about 10 Ways to Become Your Own Boss.

I’m on my way!

[via Phoenix Real Estate Guy]

Over the course of the last three days, I’ve written three posts on Geek Estate Blog related to the topic of “sphere building” — an important skill in both life and business. If that’s a topic you’re interested in, head on over and check them out:

1. The Importance of Building Your Sphere by Building Trust
2. The Most Important Factor to Building a Large Sphere of Influence
3. How I Go About Building my Sphere of Influence

From: [removed]
Subject: SEO Service

Message Body:
We would like to get your website on first page of Google.

All of our processes use the most ethical “”white hat”" Search Engine Optimization techniques that will not get your website banned or penalized.
Please reply and I would be happy to send you a proposal.

Really? When will these spammers learn this doesn’t work? Who in their right mind would hire an SEO person who doesn’t even list their website? And based on this pitch, I’m betting I know more about SEO than this person.

This morning, I woke up around 3 am from being jet-lagged (just got back from Asia yesterday) and was going through emails and my feedreader when I saw some very cool news from my friend Sloane Berrent — she launched her new marketing and strategy consulting web site, Answer with Action. What is it?

ANSWER WITH ACTION is about taking big ideas and making them happen. Answer With Action is about inspiring you to take your small business, company or nonprofit to the next level. Answer With Action is about combining online tools with offline engagement and creating a robust conversation about you, your brand, your services, your products, and your events.

Answer With Action is a New Orleans-based integrated marketing, digital media and public relations consultancy. Create campaigns and events that have an immediate impact on your business and learn how building relationships online using new strategies and tools can transform the way you communicate with customers, vendors and donors. Answer With Action creates opportunities for you to learn, adopt and implement new media into your existing business. Answer With Action will help you build cause marketing campaigns to broaden your audience and create more depth and sincere story-telling into your current strategy. We provide short and long-term engagements with clients including website reviews, training sessions, webinars, and speaking opportunities to help your business go to the next level by understanding how your content is consumed and make it accessible to your target audience.

You can see the services offered here. The site is well designed, to the point, and speaks well to her brand. Sloane is one of the most passionate people I know, which I sense is probably the reason she’s so good at what she does and why I have no doubt her new consulting venture will be an raging success.

I’m so thrilled for Sloane for seeing this through. I emailed her a quick note early this morning, but thought I might as well go ahead and share the good news with a wider audience. So, CONGRATS!!

I’m in Seoul right now and today when I tried to withdraw cash with my Debit Card this afternoon at a Citi Bank ATM, I got an error that said contact your financial institution. No way to get money in a foreign country. Great.

So I called BofA from Skype on my iPhone (which is an awesome app by the way). The representative I spoke with said their system is down until 5 am and to try back after that so they could help me. Great. I don’t quite get the reasoning that I have to call them back — shouldn’t they just verify my identity, fix my card’s status when the system comes back online, then email me a confirmation when the issue is resolved?

Luckily, I am with two friends and still have a little cash left, so don’t urgently need cash right now this second. But if I were traveling solo and needed the cash urgently, I would be ticked and SERIOUSLY screwed.

Every time I have traveled internationally, I’ve gotten my card shut off and had to call BofA. This seems like a case where BofA has gotten too big for it’s own good and put in place protected measures that are actually counterproductive and cause more problems than they solve. The whole thing is a BofA fail in my book. I’m thinking I need to put money in my Charles Scwaab account and use that debit card overseas from here on out…or just get rid of my Bank of America account entirely.

Update: I talked to BofA customer service again today and they said there is no record of my failed attempts to withdraw cash yesterday. So maybe this was just a case of CitiBank ATM machine failing for my transactions but not my friends. Not really sure. But if writing this post was premature of me, my bad and I’m willing to retract some of my feedback for BofA. It just seems awfully odd that I’ve had so many bad experiences overseas with my BofA debit card.

Update #2: I finally got cash today from the same Citibank ATM that failed yesterday. I have no way to know whether this was an issue with BofA or the Citibank — and I’m guessing I’ll never know.

I got the following submission via my contact form this morning:

From: Donna Gabriel [email address removed]
Subject: SEO

Message Body:
Do you wish you could increase your online leads?

Getting a GUARANTEED 1ST PAGE GOOGLE RANKING is easier and more cost-effective than you might think.
We have helped a lot of businesses thrive in this market and we can help you! Simply hit reply and I’ll share with you the cost and the benefits See you at the top!

Really? Here’s what I would write in response:

No, I don’t care about increasing my online leads. Obviously you didn’t look at my blog or else you would have realized I’m not selling anything here on this blog, and as a result, I really couldn’t care less where I show up in the rankings for anything other than my own name (which I already rank first for). When will you learn — spamming is BAD business.

Here is a great excerpt from Harvard Business Review’s “The Mark of a Great Leader” post from yesterday:

Have you ever worked with a micro-manager? This is someone who thinks he or she needs to be involved in everything that happens within the company. These leaders are closing out the talents of others by not divesting themselves from the day-to-day problem-solving activities of the company. Great leaders let go of the day-to-day, problem-solving activities of the company. Rather, they choose to maximize strategic and relationship-building efforts. These contribute to the forward momentum of the company rather than causing a “bottleneck” at the leader’s desk. No one person should do it all — and if they are self-aware, most people will realize that they really aren’t capable nor knowledgeable enough to do it all.

The bolded portion is something I particularly agree with — great leaders are the ones that give up control of day to day activities as a way to maximize the possibility of keeping their high performing employees around and allows them to focus on the strategic relationships vital to moving their business forward.

I’m moving out of my current house at the end of the month (I’m planning to be a nomad for the next 6 months), and have changed my address in a couple places already. Well, I went home to my parents house today to help them with some remodeling and there was some snail mail SPAM from Clear offering $25 4g internet waiting for me. It’s no secret movers are a lucrative audience to reach for marketers as the chances are very good they are in the market for new services to go along with their home and will open their checkbook for those services. I know the reasoning behind companies selling that information is that it generates additional revenue and that they don’t think people will be able to figure out who sold their information given the range of companies that have access to your personal information. But consumers are not as stupid as you think. Bank of America and Paypal are the only two places I’ve changed my address information thus far, so one of those two companies sold (or “shared”) my personal information to Clear. But here is some news for Clear (and any other companies buying my personal information from these companies) — my parents already have internet and I’m not moving there; please stop sending me SPAM in the mail.

There’s no question those companies have the legal right to sell my data per their terms of use, but this is not about that. It’s about trust. Even though I’m not entirely sure who sold my information, both companies just lost my trust, and I’m seriously considering abandoning both of them. I get that everyone is struggling and companies need to generate revenue…but selling or “sharing” personal information is NOT the way to do it if you want to maintain your long term brand.

#FAIL on them for selling my personal information.

Yesterday evening, I had dinner at Sun Dried Tomato with Jim and Lorraine Marks and their friend Brad (a lawyer). We had just started discussing the impact social media is having on businesses when a man named Bill walked up and introduced himself to Jim, saying “Hi, I’m here because you recommended Sun Dried on Twitter” (here’s the actual Tweet). Bill’s waitress had asked him how he heard about Sun Dried and he mentioned that Jim Marks recommended the place. The waitress replied “Oh that’s funny, Jim is sitting over at table 5″. Talk about timing…

The people engaging with social media are not just “internet people” who never venture out of their homes (some of my friends give me a hard time about my “internet friends”); they are real people and they are making real purchasing decisions based on their social media interactions.

…please read this post by Charlie O’Donnell. It’ll be well worth your time.

It goes without saying Fred Wilson is my favorite blogger and I highly respect the work he’s done in the VC industry. Every entrepreneur should read his blog in my opinion. Anyway, here’s the video from his interview with NYC 3.0 where he’s asked several questions about entrepreneurs and what he’s looking for from a VC’s perspective:

Fred Wilson talks trends, advice for startups from Vadim Lavrusik on Vimeo.

[via A VC]

There aren’t many people I know that like being on camera, let alone are good at it. I’m in that boat; everytime I open my Zillow profile I try to navigate away from it as quickly as I can. It’s not so much that my video is bad — well, maybe it is — but I just don’t like watching myself on video. Why do I bring this up? I recently saw Casey Wilson’s interview on Bloomberg (and if you are reading this Casey – you did an AWESOME AWESOME job). Casey is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wokai, and younger than I am by a year or so, but I thought she nailed that interview. Here’s the clip:

I know for a fact I wouldn’t have been that poised, confident, and clear in my messaging if I was on Bloomberg. Even though reporters and public speakers often make it LOOK easy, the bottom line is that being on camera (and public speaking is general) is NOT easy. Not by a long shot; lots of work goes on behind the scenes to get comfortable in front of the camera. It takes lots of practice and preparation. For all young business folks reading this who want to get a leg up in your career, I’d highly recommend getting as much public speaking experience as possible as early as possible in your career. You’ll be so glad you did down the road when you are in a more senior role and find yourself having to speak in front of large audiences on a regular basis.

I wanted to bookmark another link (sent to me by Kayla Villnow) for myself so I can easily find it later on — What it takes to be great, an article on CNNMoney published in 2006. At a high level, the message was that research shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work.

Twitter creator Jack Dorsey’s newest start up — Square– is now in private BETA. It allows vendors to accept credit card payments with a tiny device that connects to iPhone/iTouch (other mobile devices are in the works).

I think this will change the credit card game for small business owners. For instance, in some shops down where my dad lives (Ocean Park, WA) they still don’t accept credit cards due to the transaction fees that go with them. I don’t know the specifics of what it will cost to get set up with Square, but I can only imagine it will be a better deal for small business owners than VISA/Mastercard. Imagine if this device seamlessly hooked up to an accounting and invoicing system with a Salesforce-like business model. Now that would be cool (and I’m guessing it will happen eventually).

Over the past few years, I’ve had a number of different roles at Zillow.com, but I spend most of my time now doing business development forming online partnerships. I’m by no means an expert (far far from it), but I’ve learned a few things over the past few years regarding what works and what doesn’t and thought I’d share for those interested in getting started in the biz dev world. First, let me say this — every business opportunity is different. Each company is likely looking for something slightly different — traffic, branding, and/or links are the primary things most people are looking for from online partnerships. And of course revenue (now more than ever). With that said, here’s what I think are the three most important factors to succeeding in a business development role:

1. Determine your value proposition — If you aren’t bringing anything to the table in a partnership, you don’t stand much of a chance to land the partnership. And if you can’t demonstrate the value proposition you provide verbally, in text, or visually, then you stand zero chance of landing a deal. How do you figure out your value prop? Talk through your value proposition with others. I’ve been managing the Zillow API program for a couple years, yet I was just recently talking to Zillow’s VP of Sales, Greg Schwartz (raves9 on Twitter), and he helped me nail down the value proposition of the Zillow API program to potential partners (primarily agents, broker, and financial institutions) into something much clearer and succinct than the way I had been explaining it. I was getting at the same point all along, but in a roundabout way. Greg made me realize that “more qualified and profitable customers” is what brokerages, agents, financial institutions are looking for and that I needed to do a better job driving home that selling point and how the API program helps accomplish that goal.

If you seriously have nothing to give in the way of content, data, time, resources, connections, branding, etc — ie don’t have a value prop — then quit wasting everyone’s time and just spend money on advertising.

2. Build strong relationships – This is absolutely crucial to succeeding. Larger partnerships inevitably have to go through layers of bureaucracy before they come to fruition. Without your main contact vouching for you and your company, the deal probably won’t get done. Relate to them with something outside of business, get face to face, talk constantly, help them with other deals, etc. My best partners are now friends more so than just business connections and we help each other on multiple fronts. Expect your good partners to be the same type of contacts for you. Even once you win the deal, you have to keep the deal away from competitors. Inevitably, your competitors will come after your partners (they’d be stupid not to); make sure you have strong enough relationships with your main contact(s) so they are compelled to fight for you internally when those discussions happen.

3. Persistence — To get partnerships done, you need to be VERY persistent. I really wish everyone answered every single e-mail within 2 days (or at all), but the fact of the matter is they don’t. Everyone has busy schedules at their own respective companies and if you send one e-mail to someone and don’t follow up after not getting a response, then you’re missing the boat. In regards to lack of responses to e-mails, I’ve heard numerous people tell me that “If something is important enough and I don’t respond, inevitably the other person will e-mail me again or pick up the phone to get to me”; it may be frustrating, but that’s how life works. You’ve got to want it. Follow up until the partner firmly tells you no. And then follow up again using a different approach or value proposition.

A couple other tips worth mentioning:

• Find your way to the right contact first — The hardest part of business development is actually finding the right contact to talk to. The larger the organization, the harder and more important this becomes. It really is all about who you know and how good your relationships are.
• Be strategic — There are only so many hours in the day to spend on closing deals, so determining where to spend your time is important. While larger strategic partnerships take significant time and energy to complete, they are absolutely worth it in my mind. Having partnerships with recognized brands that you can talk about with other potential partners goes a long way toward closing the next deal.

If you have your own tips to succeeding in a business development role, please leave them in the comments.