Blogs: If You're Out There, You're In Them

Since making the decision to start off on my own (actually, I've formed a Delaware S-Corp with a very experienced partner), it's been a little bit like being back at the University. I'm learning an amazing number of new things. Here are some tips and resources regarding blogging and creating a personal brand. Over the next several months, I'll be testing the value of my personal brand, separate from my soon-to-be-former employer, IDC. The notion of a personal brand is not new, but it is not something to which I've paid a lot of attention over the years, though I've paid a lot of attention to reputation.

In discussing my desire to create a personal brand, my partner, David, passed on this recommendation from one of my former clients: "John should start a blog." Of course, I knew nothing about starting a blog. In fact, other than Jonathan's blog, (CEO of Sun Microsystems), I had barely visited any blogs. I certainly had never considered writing one and, in fact, was active in preventing one of my employees from creating one. In this particular case, I likened it to giving a guy a loaded grenade with the pin pulled. Sorry. I might make a different decision today, but I have more information now. Here's some of the information I found.

I consulted the web and found an excellent blog entry by Guy Kawasaki on how to evangelize a blog. I also consulted the one family member of mine who knows anything about blogging, my brother Ken, whose conference, jvAlert Live!, I missed this weekend (sorry Ken). Ken referred me to "The Corporate BLOGGING Book," which has taught me more than enough to get started. I highly recommend the book. Go to the site and you can preview the book. The first chapter is free to download.

One of the things that I learned from the book was that, whether or not you decide to blog, if your name is "out there," someone is probably blogging about you. And it may not all be favorable. So you might as well participate in the dialogue.

Here's a useful tip:

Type in your name, in my case [John McArthur], and the word [blog] in the Google search engine and see what is being said about you. I did, and found a posting by an industry pundit discussing the fact that I had filled in for him at the opening of a major computer storage industry event in Frankfurt a few years ago. I'm still trying to decide if he was expressing gratitude, when he wrote, "while I’m sure he did a good job presenting the IDC perspective, it wasn’t the presentation that was billed." Let me know what you think. Is there a hint of sarcasm there?

For the record, I did the speech on about 3 hours sleep and with about 8 hours notice. Actually, that presentation was one of my favorites - no slides, no graphs, no charts. I started with a rapid-fire, 3-minute recitation of all of the buzzwords that exhibitors were proclaiming in their booth banner ads and concluded with a discussion on how to move beyond the hype.

OK, I hope you find these resources helpful. If you've got suggestions or comments on blogging and personal branding, please let me know. I'd love to hear from you.

Company Startup - What's the Exit Strategy?

I just finished up a great two-hour meeting with my financial advisor, who continued to reinforce the notion that, while I have no idea what I'm doing, I've got a great bunch of advisors and friends that can help me avoid the mistakes of my own ignorance.

I won't bore you with all of the advise, but one thing I thought warranted sharing with everyone is this:

"When starting a new company, always consider your exit strategy and your transition strategy."

OK, that's not exactly how Paul said it, but you get the point. In my case, I'm setting up a company with long-time friend, David Burmon. So how does this rule apply here? David is several years older and he started his family sooner than I - his kids are almost out of college, while my oldest is just interviewing for middle schools. From that you should assume he is:

a) Age-wise, closer to retirement than I
b) Financially better positioned to consider retirement

So the issues that need to be top of mind go something like this:

a) If David wants to leave the company, is there a mechanism to buy him out?
b) How do we evaluate the value of the company, if David wants to leave?

I'm off to the first meeting. I'll let you know how it goes.