Interviews – What Prompted Yesterday’s Post
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 26, 2011
Yesterday I wrote a post telling people that I was available for both interviews and questions. It may have seemed like a strange post to some, and I mentioned in that post that I was looking to increase my influence and find more topics to make videos about. But that’s not all, and I thought I’d talk about the rest of it in a secondary post.
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I’ve done a lot of interviews with other people. I’ve posted them on this blog, my Syracuse blog, and my business blog, Mitch’s Blog. The thing is that I’ve actually put out way more requests than that, and it’s that point where things have been a bit irksome for me.
As I write this I have 6 interview requests out there. Actually that’s not quite accurate. I have one interview requests and I’m waiting for 5 people with whom I’ve requested interviews from to respond to the questions so I can put them, well, somewhere. These are people that agreed to be interviewed, people I’ve already sent the questions to.
Now, I know people get busy, and I know I didn’t specify a time frame. However, when I sent the interview questions, I actually figured I’d get responses back in 1 to 2 weeks. This isn’t the case, though. Three of the interview requests are more than 3 months old at this stage, and I’ve sent them all followups. I figure it’s not going to happen, and that’s too bad because I think it would have been as good for them as it would have been for my blogs.
People are funny. They have these businesses and they say “I don’t know how to increase my sales or get people to know more about me”, and then an opportunity arises, it’s free, and they disappear. Months ago I put out a call to interview people for my business blog. In general it has a format that everyone has to adhere to, only 5 questions, and folks have to be independent or a small business for participation. I had one person who responded; now that’s a shame. I put it out on Twitter and I repeated it twice, and only one person? This from, at the time, almost 3,000 people who supposedly follow my stream? Even people I know didn’t pony up for it.
What does this say? To me it says people have no idea what an opportunity looks like. Sure, this blog might not have an Alexa rating under 10,000, but it is under 100,000 and that’s a pretty good accomplishment. According to Feedburner there are more than 250 people subscribed to this blog, and that probably means there’s at least that many people coming to the blog in other ways on a daily basis. Many of those people are consumers in some fashion, or looking for ideas, or are just interested in learning more about something or someone. And let’s face it, you never know when someone might reach out to you to ask for your services or products if they get to know you better, right?
This was on my mind when I wrote yesterday’s post. If others don’t want to jump on opportunities to get their name out there, to increase their influence and possibly affect their income, I’ll take their place. Strangely enough, a couple of days ago I was listening to an interview I did with someone 4 years ago talking about SEO and websites, and the good thing is that interview is still out there affecting someone’s life; okay, maybe not but I can dream. lol One just never knows.
And now, back to your regularly scheduled reading. 
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Go Ahead, Interview Me
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 25, 2011
Well now, this is a different kind of post. The title kind of says it all, but I figure I should add a little bit of something extra.
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In August of last year I wrote a post about influence and social media. I talked about how I wanted to work on growing my influence and I talked about a few things I was going to try to do to achieve that goal. I talked about how I was going to work through Twitter and Facebook. I’ve gone that route, and I’ve actually had a little bit of success with it. I even talked about this blog and, at that time, my business blog and the number of links I supposedly had between the two. Now that Yahoo Site Explorer is gone I’ll have to check somewhere else to see the numbers again.
I’m also done with Klout, as you know, although using that to measure influence was really ridiculous. There really isn’t a true tool to measure clout that way. But I still want to increase my influence, and thus I’m asking for help while offering help; how’s that sound?
Here’s the deal. I’m putting myself out there to do interviews. You’ve seen examples of how I do interviews on this site and you’ve probably seen me being interviewed on other sites. This post on influence listed a bunch of interviews I’ve done with other people on this blog. This page to interviews are some I’ve done with other people; I think it needs to be updated.
Anyway, part one is putting myself out there to be interviewed. It can be through questions you send me by email (look at my contact page for my email address), or I’ll do your podcast, or even video interview. I’d like to do a lot of them, but any interviews would work nicely. I can speak on a variety of topics, but I’m not going to tell you what they are just yet.
That’s because I have part two. Last December I wrote a post asking how I could be useful to you. I got enough comments on that post and people were very nice, but no one really asked me for help on anything. I’m going a different route here. I need to create some more videos and what I thought I could do was see what people might be interested in asking me so I could answer those questions or address those topics by video. This time, instead of asking people to write their questions on the blog, I’ll ask you to go through the email route to send me your question. I started wondering if folks didn’t want to put questions in comments so everyone else could see them; by going the email route, maybe folks will feel more free in asking questions.
And now the topics. Y’all know I can talk about a bunch of different subjects, so maybe these will fit your qualifications for an interview, or give you an idea of things to ask me questions on that I might be able to answer. This certainly isn’t a comprehensive list, and frankly I know if I actually get questions that there might be some I can’t answer. Let’s see how all of this goes; if nothing else I got another unique blog post out of it. The subjects are:
Leadership/management; racial diversity; customer service; medical billing; health care finance/revenue cycle; SEO; social media; writing; budgeting; blogging; 70′s music (odd one, eh?); and speaking.
That’s what I know I know, but I’ve talked about all sorts of things on this blog over almost 1,200 posts so I know something about other topics as well that one might find intriguing. I’m game to try almost anything; almost, that is. 
Consider this a social experiment; at the very least you know you’ll end up with a link back to this blog if you interview me, since I always mention when I’ve been interviewed; let’s see how we can benefit each other. Thanks; enjoy your weekend.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
What Happened To… When People Disappear
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Apr 18, 2011
My buddy Mitchell Allen and I were discussing how one of the online sites we used to visit on occasion and actually wrote content for has disappeared. So has the site owner, whose blog and entire presence seems to have been wiped from the face of the earth.
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Of course we have our speculations, which shall remain so, but it points out one of those weird things that happens sometimes online, and often without any advance notice. It’s pretty much the “now you see them, now you don’t” thing. It’s not so much when people stop visiting your blog and you wonder why. It’s when you go to visit them and notice they’re no longer there, or you send email and accounts shut down or you never hear anything back. That’s when it’s, well, weird.
Of course people disappear for a variety of reasons. The biggest reasons are time and money. Either they don’t have the time anymore to communicate as much as they did in the past or they didn’t have the money to renew their blog or domain name or even an internet service. True, if they have something like Gmail or Yahoo email all they have to do is go someplace like a library or internet cafe and access things that way, but usually that’s not convenient enough for everyone and thus they don’t do any of it.
Humans are social; we like to know what’s going on with people we’ve gotten to know, whether we like them or not. If someone announces they’re leaving for awhile or permanently, that’s preferable to someone just disappearing without a clue. Of course, if someone has expired and their spouse isn’t internet savvy, there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it.
Or is there? I have kind of a backup plan. I’ve asked one of my friends to kind of intercede on my behalf if I’m unable to get the word out to anyone. Of course one of these days I’ll have to tell him where I’ve hidden my passwords, but to many things on my browser he won’t have any problems accessing any of it. That and I have other friends who I’m sure would get the word out if I went missing for any length of time.
Have any of you thought about what to do to try to get the word out if suddenly you’re unable to yourself? Do you think it’s important enough to at least think about? Would you be missed?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Why Aren’t You Well Known Where You Live?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Apr 3, 2011
I often think about my place in the blogosphere. I’ve been online for a very long time by now, close to a decade. I’ve got articles all over the place. I have 8 websites which includes 4 blogs. I’ve commented on hundreds of blogs and, for the most part, I have some name recognition, the other Mitch Mitchell notwithstanding.
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And you know what? Locally it means absolutely nothing. I think I have maybe 4 or 5 people locally that might ever read any of my blogs, even when I write about things in the Syracuse NY area. Almost all the retweets I get on Twitter come from people that live elsewhere; that’s kind of fascinating because I’m connected on Twitter to a lot of people from this area. I’ve written about local tweetups on this blog and on my Syracuse blog, and mentioned a lot of people’s names and linked to their Twitter accounts, sometimes to their businesses as well.
I’ve always wondered about this concept of “you’re never as big at home as you are elsewhere” often over the years. Truth be told, I really didn’t believe it until I got into business for myself. I have spoken in 8 or 9 states professionally, and in New York I’ve only been paid once, and it was very low. People get this impression that, unless you’re an ultra millionaire, you just can’t be that good if you live where they are, and it’s so strange. Yet when I went to Nebraska, they must have been thinking “hey, we got someone from New York to come here”. And it didn’t have to be New York, per se; just someone from another state (though they probably wouldn’t have been as happy if I’d come from Oklahoma if they were football fans lol).
Almost 18 months ago I asked this question on this blog: can you actually be considered successful if you can’t get your family and friends to subscribe or even stop by to read your blog, or subscribe to your newsletters, or, for that matter, actually try to figure out what you do? Only one person could say they had friends and/or family subscribing, that being Rummuser; how wild is that? Most even said they didn’t expect it and would be surprised if anyone they knew did visit or subscribe.
Not that I’m a total unknown in my area. I have given many presentations around town, as you know, and I have been featured in the local newspapers here and there. But for the most part I’m fairly easily ignored locally. I have to admit that I thought I’d get more people I knew locally to retweet this post for me, as others locally have had gripes with someone and gotten a fairly nice local response from people in retweeting things; I got 2 people locally who did it for me, and I’m thinking that’s kind of shame. But I got a lot of folks who don’t live here, who had never even heard of the company (which was surprising) that retweeted it, and I thank all of you for that.
I put this thought out there to ask it this way; if you can’t be influential locally, can you really be influential anywhere else? I believe you can, but my mind still finds the concept, well, strange.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
10 Things I’ve Learned About Giving A Workshop
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Aug 26, 2010
As y’all know, I’ve been doing some workshops on social media marketing. I expect to do more, and I’m working with my friend Renée to possibly do a local workshop the first weekend of October.
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It’s actually the first time I’ve done the same exact workshop more than once, and if I’m going to be doing it more and more I need to continue to refine it to a degree. This is different than a one-and-done, which I’m usually used to doing, mainly because some of the participants might talk with other potential visitors, and thus you want to always try to be better each time you do a live presentation. However, sometimes it’s not all that easy. Here are 10 things I’ve learned from the first two presentations.
1. You can’t control the traffic. Of all things, there was a major tractor/trailer accident on the major highway to get to where I was giving the presentation. It took them 6 hours to clear things up, which of course meant that all the people who were on their way were going to be late, since it seems none of them had listened to the news to know the accident had already occurred. The seminar ended up starting 80 minutes late; oh well…
2. There’s a different between a formal group and a nonformal group. With the first group, I didn’t know any of the people who came. With the second, I knew everyone who came. The first group listened intently, asked questions when they had them respectfully, and all was good. The second group had a couple of people who wanted to try to share what they knew about some of the things I was talking about and basically just blurted out things as they saw fit. That made for a rough day, especially since they still insisted on finishing at the same time even though we started late.
3. People form their own expectations of what they think they’ll get out of your presentation, no matter what you tell them. I think the flyer was very clear on our objectives; you will learn what you need in order to create a social media marketing campaign of your own for your business. First time around, one lady said she came to learn ways to keep people from asking them a lot of questions. This time around, one guy said he was hoping to learn how to find time in his busy schedule to do this type of marketing. Both said they didn’t get what they came for; that was expected since I wasn’t teaching what they were expecting, and didn’t come close to indicating that’s what I was going to do.
4. When people think they know your topic, they actually don’t most of the time. One guy at the last workshop said he used LinkedIn a certain way. When I made a suggestion based on my material and knowledge he said he didn’t want to use it that way. I said that was fine, went on with my presentation, and he kept interrupting to counter how it wouldn’t work for him, which was disruptive, until I got to one point when he finally said he got it. Another guy said his impression of Twitter was that it was writing things on the internet via one’s cellphone. He also said he’d spent the previous day participating in a webinar on social media marketing. Either he missed that part or it wasn’t very good if his impression of Twitter was so bad. But early on he’d been someone who said he didn’t want to talk about Twitter much, and it was based on his misperception of what it was. He’s still not going to do it, but at least I now know he understands what it’s really about.
5. When people think they know you, sometimes they just don’t understand how to respect you. I’ve thought about this one a lot over the past few days. One of the people there does presentations around town, and I’ve seen him in action a couple of times. I know his topic, as I’ve read many of the same books he’s read. I’ve written about his topic on both this blog and my business blog, and in other articles in other places. Yet, whenever I’ve seen him present, I’ve never interrupted him or called him out on something I’ve read, and rarely offered anything else. In my mind, he’s the presenter, the professional at that moment, and it’s not about me but about what he has to share, and if I can get a nugget then it’s all good. However, it seems many people aren’t like that, and thus you have to work on building up a thick enough skin to deal with it at the time, and figure out what to do with it later on. I’m still working on that second part.
6. It’s always nice when you see someone have an “aha” moment. At the first workshop, I happened to mention Meebo and how I use it for business. This one guy thought it was a great idea, and on the spur of the moment he figured out many ways he could use it in his business and the customer service benefits of it. And the thing that felt good is that he was a marketing consultant who came to learn about social media marketing and actually got something really beneficial out of it.
7. Doing a workshop is like trying to teach someone how to play a musical instrument. I play piano, and while I was in college, people would ask me to teach them how to play. So I’d start by telling them where middle C was, and they’d invariably say “I don’t want to learn all that, I just want to learn how to play a song. In music, you can’t learn how to play anything until you know a couple of foundation pieces to help you know where you need to put your fingers. With social media marketing, if you have no idea what it is or why it can be beneficial then it does me no good to tell you how to use it. A couple of times I got interrupted by someone asking me how they could use something when I was still building the foundation as to why it was important. Since they already had my presentation in their hands, they knew what was coming. I would always have to say “I’m going to get to that”, which is irritating, but you do what you have to do.
8. Building the foundation is important. Why? Because at the end of each workshop there was at least one person who came to me and said they didn’t know any of the stuff I taught them, and how much they appreciated that I took the time explaining it all and then giving them ideas on how to use it. That’s what it’s all about, and the thing anyone who gives a presentation of any kind has to remember. Because…
9. You can’t please everyone. Well, if they’re open to what you have to say maybe you can, but in general you’re going to hit some home runs, and you’re going to have to bunt to get on base a couple of times. I go to very few things where, in the long run, I didn’t think I made a good decision. That’s called evaluation, and if you have everything you need, you should be able to evaluate whether something will help you or not. I know that the two workshops reached the majority of the people who came, and I’ve always been a numbers guy, so in my mind they were both fairly successful.
10. Rehearsing is paramount. I can’t believe people will put together a presentation and not rehearse it, then wonder why things didn’t go well. The first presentation went six hours including a 45-minute lunch break. The second one went 4 hours and 45 minutes with a 30 minute lunch break. I presented over 4 hours both time, yet ended up not quite giving the same presentation each time. Without rehearsing, timing different concepts to see how long they would take for me to talk about, building in what I considered was legitimate question time, I wouldn’t have known how to change things up to achieve my objective. And I really needed that skill the second time around.
I could add more but this post is already long enough. Suffice it to say I’m definitely doing more of these, and hopefully each time I do it, I’ll learn something else I can use the next time.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
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