I don't often write much about my business here on My Thermos. While it's not exactly a secret
who I am or
what I do, I do like to maintain at least a cursory distinction between the personal me and the professional me, as blurred as that distinction often is.
The outlet for my professional writing has come from my contributions to
TechFires and now
Web Worker Daily. There I get to discuss all the geeky stuff, the cool web apps and services that I love. Here I get to write about my other passions, my wife, my music, my family, etc...
Sometimes though, that blurriness rears it's head and something happens to bridge those worlds, something cool that I want to write about, something that is sort of business related but not really suitable for my other gigs. For example, a week or so ago I entered and won a contest run by the fine folks at
BatchBlue who make small business software, particularly the BatchBook Contact Manager which I am currently evaluating.
My mission, in honor of National Small Business Week, was to write about what makes my business super.
Gina and I did some brainstorming and came up with a suitable entry, along with a superhero inspired logo (which upon further inspection now looks really sinister and creepy - and possibly more of flasher rather than superhero...)
We used clever Batman-ish action words like Pow!, Bam! and Zoof! (which they seemed to really like, and for which I can't take credit - that was all Gina). I also put in a bit about "With great power comes great responsibility", which in hindsight might have actually hurt me. More about that soon.
I thought our entry was clever, but not as clever as it could have been (or should have been really) but I wanted to get something submitted and it was what we came up with as the deadline approached. First prize was an airline voucher and as the concert season approaches, that could come in really handy (Allman Bros and Gov't Mule at Red Rocks anyone?)
So I was actually pretty surprised to hear that I had won the 2nd place prize of a couple of free months of the service, the Spider-Man DVD Trilogy and a nifty t-shirt. Actually, because of my Spider-Man reference, I believe that they may have subconsciously associated my entry with the second place prize rather than the grand prize - but I was just glad to be nominated.
So the end result is that I get a cool prize, a nice badge for my site, a very nice
write up of my business, and an idea for a post here. I also get the opportunity to tie things together - which is cool when it happens. Watch how this works:
One of the things I really like about the folks at BatchBlue is that they deal with the personal / professional blurriness perfectly. Their blog mixes product updates with photos of their kids modeling their company t-shirts. They provide photos and bios of everyone on the team so that when you read their posts or chat in their forums, or read a tweet of theirs on Twitter, you know there is a real person behind the keyboard on the other side. It humanizes their product and their service in a way that I rarely see, which is very very cool.
Finding this balance has been a challenge for me over the last few years as I try to both grow my business and develop my personal brand so it's good to see that it can be done successfully. So I imagine that they weren't really eligible to win their own contest, but as role models for other small businesses, the folks at BatchBlue are doing a good job of the Super Hero thing as well.
SB
This post means a lot. Glad to see our enthusiasm goes noticed.
On blurriness... you know very well that when you're a web worker the "I'm on the clock/I'm not on the clock" paradigm completely changes. You're on the clock when a forum post is made at 2am or you push some new code at the wee hours of the morning. But you're off the clock during the sunny hours where you can play with your kiddos or kitties.
It's a paradigm shift, that's for sure. I see it as 24 hours on the clock, but with extended breaks.
The fact that we're able to be so responsive and personable with our users is really a byproduct of the fact that we have some really super cool users. It doesn't feel like work at all.
Thanks again, and congrats (you super hero, you)!
SB
SB