Despite all the hype, it’s not common knowledge what the cloud actually is. We all know that the cloud is exciting, but the whys and hows of it seem relegated to esoteric IT realms.

Perhaps one reason for that lack of public comprehension is that the cloud is so customizable. Take Egnyte, an SMB-oriented cloud platform that lets you store data, share files, centralize company information, open up cross-platform mobile access, and more. As a cloud-based service, Egnyte saves you the time and money associated with building out an IT structure, laboring to put a hacked file server back together and upgrading servers. Essentially, Egnyte gives you a flexible, cost-effective platform. How you use Egnyte is up to you, however, and that’s where it helps to know more about the cloud than the usual “get on it” mantra.

I caught up with Egnyte co-founder and CEO Vineet Jain, who helped design the powerful platform from the ground up, to de-fog some ideas around cloud computing. He talked about working around the psychological challenges that come up with using the cloud, its real security holes, in what direction the trend winds are blowing the cloud, and more.

Can you tell me a little bit about the challenges associated with using the cloud?

Even when I started the company, I knew that a pure cloud-based service will only go so far. That’s because you’re trying to address something that is traditionally run in your firewall in your local area network. A pure cloud-based platform for something that data-intensive will always have technical and psychological challenges.

The technical part is the latency challenge. When you’re dealing with extremely large files—let’s say you’re a web design firm and you work on Adobe Illustrator files or Photoshop files—when these files are hosted in somebody’s cloud server, in this case us, they will never match the speed you will get in your local area network. We’re dealing with the public internet (Ed.: which is slower than a LAN).

The other big problem always seems to be that when the internet service is down, if I am an SMB, I am dead in the water. I cannot access my corporate data. Even if that problem exists for only three minutes, it has a pretty significant impact on my business.

But the biggest problem I still see is more psychological. That is the perception that I, as a company, am not in control of my data because my files are hosted on somebody else’s server, in this case Egnyte’s. Even though that server may provide much better security and redundancy, there is still this sense that I am losing control of my data.

I think that is a psychological barrier that a lot of businesses are still exhibiting. They want something that they can touch, literally speaking, something that is locally available, for their peace of mind.

Image: B Rosen/Flickr

How did you adapt Egnyte to address those problems?

I was aware of this combination of problems from day one. After fourteen months in existence with a pure cloud file server solution, we introduced an adjunct product, sort of an extension. We call it the local cloud.

It’s a little bit of an oxymoron. Essentially, we give you a local copy or a local cache of your data, on commodity hardware, which will span all the way from a low-end computer hard drive–a low-level solution like a drop box–to commercial off-the-shelf network-attached storage (NAS) devices that you would get from the likes of Netgear, and including now virtual appliances that you could pretty much deploy in any existing piece of hardware.

The whole idea is that we have evolved cloud into a hybrid solution. It is attracting a much larger customer accounts than we would have been able to if we only had a cloud-based solution. People get the best of both worlds. They combine the ease of use of the cloud with the fast local performance of a LAN. Theyhave a local copy of their sensitive data and control access rights. My employees have a local cloud folder on their desktop that looks like an Explorer file folder, and they don’t really care how the files are being served. When they are sitting in the office, thefiles are served from the local cloud and when they are at home or remote, the files will be served from the cloud file server. Whether you access your files on the cloud or locally (unbeknownst to you), the same file access rules are enforced. We have taken away the complexity of giving you fast performance, as well as any-device,any-location access with this hybrid cloud solution.

How do you think people are using the cloud in one way that they’re not? Are there some technologies that people use off the cloud that you think should be migrated to the cloud?

I’d like to see people who are used to software that runs within the firewall using the cloud more. Quickbooks is an example. A lot of small businesses use Quickbooks. A few years back, I was at Intuit and they invited me to a usability session and would pay me $200 an hour for being there, and I thought, I’ll go and try it out. So they were teaching Quickbooks online as a substitution. Yet even today, Quickbooks is still selling more of the package desktop software than the online version. So why is online not taking off? For the amount of usability or the feature richness that the desktop version has, it’s still does not match what they have online. So in this particular case, the desktop or the old style still rules.

The cloud is a big change in peoples’ habits. For certain kinds of applications where they’re still not willing to go to the cloud. It’s a very interesting mix. It depends on which application, which area we are talking about, to say are people using the cloud properly or not.

It’s not simple answer is what you’re saying, right?

Right. When you look at Egnyte, what do people use Egnyte for? We have some people who use every nook and cranny of Egnyte, every feature, they use it as a full replacement for their web- and file servers. Some people use Egnyte for simple file sharing. They still have an internal file service, they still have VPN for remote access for their employees. But when it comes to external, project-based collaboration, they use Egnyte as an add-on to what they currently do. But they don’t replace other things they have. I could try to ask them “why are you wasting so much money doing it all yourself, you can put everything into my solution.” But it’s just a mindset, what is the comfort level? So it’s hard to say how I should advocate people to use the cloud, it’s very subjective.

You’ve talked about the fact that people get used to their desktops and servers, that they have psychological objections to the cloud. What are the actual security risks associated with the cloud? What should people be worried about?

There are several types of security. People should be worried about access security. Many cloud server solutions do not have the robust user access controls and audit reports required to enforce business policies.They should also be worried about transmission security. Not only is there encryption needed at storage, but there’s encryption during access,. The transmission should be secure with a mobile device as well as with a PC and wired network connection.

Another risk that I think people should evaluate is what happens if a provider is not online. The internet provider could go down, or the cloud service could be down.

As a customer, I would evaluate what your vendor’s service level agreement (SLA) is for uptime and availability. Our SLA is currently 99.97%, which means we will subject you to three hours of downtime in an entire year, which by the way is a very good SLA.

If you cannot access the cloud you should still have offline access to your files on your PC. Now I go back to my favorite thing to say, the world of cloud in our opinion is hybrid. That should be applicable to pretty much everything that you’re trying to use from a cloud provider. The hybrid technology provideslocal access if you cannot access the cloud. Of course, this goes both ways. The Cloud File Server provides access in thecase your local computer is damaged or stolen.

Are there any new trends in terms of cloud storage, or is the cloud the trend?

I know it sounds like you’ve been hearing it everywhere, but mobile is becoming so big that I have been surprised. We found that 40% of Egnyte users are sharing and accessing files with a mobile device.

You wouldn’t believe the number of potential customers who request the same capabilities—the same interface, the same access capabilities as your typical laptop—for their mobile devices.

I would make a distinction between a phone and a tablet. We are running into more and more situations where customers will sign up with Egnyte purely based on the fact that we will give you a rich application or app for mobile. My favorite buzzword is that this is the “applification” of the Web. It seems to be a bigger trend than just the cloud.

It is becoming so common that we have been trying as a service provider to keep on adding more and more capabilities to devices like a tablet, whether it’s an IOS-based, an iPad, Android-based or the upcoming HP Touchpad. Much to my surprise, people want to create content, they want to consume content, they want to do everything that they can do with a laptop.

I own an iPad, I have my Mac, but I still can’t for the life of me use my iPad for creating content. I use it for searching the Web or checking email. But when it comes to real stuff, I go to my computer.

Maybe I’m odd. The other day I was on a flight, and I would say 25% of people had their iPads out, and I peered—I shouldn’t have done that, I was in the middle—but the person on my right was writing a Word doc and the other was doing an Excel thing, I was like wow, with an iPad.

Image: Wagsomedog/Flickr

Is there something that you want to provide through Egnyte in the future that you haven’t gotten the chance to provide yet?

Yes, absolutely. The way I see the evolution of the cloud is that it being hybrid addresses the problem of the any-time access, the latency and all that stuff, and the peace of mind.

Currently big companies, Fortune 1000 types, are not subscribing to the cloud.

There are two reasons. One is that they have a lot of investment in their own data centers, and secondly there are a lot of appliance problems that the public cloud service does not satisfy.

I am placing a bet that you will see larger companies adopt some of the solutions like Egnyte if they can basically create a solution set where Egnyte will give you a control layer. What I mean by that is when you log into your Egnyte account you will see the file listing, but when you say open the file, there is no file in Egnyte. That file is going to be served from the data center that you currently own, your own storage, running behind your own firewall, and you will not miss a beat in terms of latency.

You will see a hybrid model where you would use a public service like Egnyte for the control layer, but the actual object, the actual physical file, would still be residing behind your firewall. You want the best of both worlds in that situation. It’s sort of the evolution of a private/public cloud in that sense. Specifically from a large company point of view, it’s what I see happening.

Do you have any other remarks?

The thing is evolving quite fast. Today there are many companies who have not embraced the cloud because they do not understand how their organizations will benefit. Delivering safe file sharing and access from any locationand devicewith minimal investment is a big opportunities for businesses.This is the reason so many large companies are considering cloud solutions, Drea, there is so much opportunity for Egnyte to grow.

Official bio: Vineet Jain is the CEO and co-founder of Egnyte. Prior to Egnyte, Vineet founded and successfully built Valdero, a supply chain software solution provider, funded by KPCB, MDV and Trinity Ventures. He has held a rich variety of senior operational positions at companies like KPMG, Bechtel etc. in the past. He has 20 years of experience in building capital efficient and nimble organizations.

Yet some experts only take a seated approach to investing. They read, sit at meetings, make phone calls, and ride planes that take them to more seated meetings, perhaps over food and with the occasional golf interlude.

Although Byron King does his time in a seat, his overall approach is more versatile. He might be deep inside of a rare earths mine in China one week, at an offshore oil conference in Houston the next, then visiting gold mining startups in South Africa after that. Byron, a geologist* by training but a polymath in practice, makes his living by taking a hard-hatted look at earth-based commodities investing, from large cap oil companies like BP to Canadian juniors, gold to hydraulically-fractured oil.

I caught up with Byron to learn more about the work behind his Agora Financial newsletters, Outstanding Investments and Energy & Scarcity Investor. Along the way, he shared his ideas on what makes Canadian culture better, how the US has regulated itself out of the global competition for resources, why oil takes so long to extract, and much more.

*and lawyer, and Navy pilot, and businessman, and historian…did I mention he’s a polymath?

Why do you travel?

St. Augustine once said “the world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” I’m the energy and minerals guy for Agora Financial’s publications. My job is to know what’s going on in the energy world and the minerals world. I try to know as much as one person can know about a vast, globe-spanning topic like that.

In the course of my work, I spend a lot of time studying, learning, reading things like trade magazines and even textbooks on mineralogy and geochemistry. I also spend a lot of time on the phone talking with people, asking questions, thinking, analyzing; but in order to really understand what’s going on, they call it due diligence in the financial world, it’s an absolute necessity to get out and see things.

Seeing is learning. It’s talking to people, it’s examining the equipment, it’s getting a feel for the geography of where you’re working, whether it’s a mountain range or a ship out in the middle of the ocean.

You want to see as much as you can. I’m fortunate that I’m in a situation where I can do that.

It looks like you cover a variety of geological assets. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

I’m a geologist by training, I’ve worked for oil companies, I’ve spent a lot of time in the Navy, traveling the globe. Several years ago I started writing freelance for Agora Financial, and about four years ago they said “hey, the guy that runs our energy and mining newsletter just quit, do you want the job?” I said, “Let’s talk.”

I cover the oil and gas industry in a lot of depth. For example, I probably know as much about the offshore and deepwater industry as anybody who’s not inside, collecting a paycheck. The difference between them and me is that I’m independent. I don’t get paid by the industry. There’s no conflict of interest. My interest is in getting the story right, and out to my subscribers.

I also know a lot about onshore drilling, oil sands, oil shale, shale gas, and the like. Then there are other things I’ve developed an interest in. In the past couple of years, I’ve become one of the go-to guys in a field called rare earths. These are 17 elements on the periodic table with exotic magnetic, optical, electrical and even electronic properties. They’re a hot item right now for a lot of reasons.

When you say they’re a hot item, does that mean that regular Joes investing in them right now would be ahead of the curve?

Well, the whole idea is to get people into investment ideas early. The reality of the market is that stocks go up and down. You want to buy as far down as your risk tolerance will allow.

Last year, for example, when the BP well blew out, a couple of my picks became household names. One of them was BP. Another was Transocean, the rig operator. Another was Halliburton. Another was Cameron International Corporation, which manufactured the blowout preventer. Within a couple days of that blowout, all four of those stocks were getting crushed.

About 3-4 weeks later, I told everybody to go buy them again. I said that this is a bad blowout. I said that I’m not making light of it. But the share prices for these companies were about as low as they’ve been in years, and they presented opportunities. I told people to buy BP at a low, Transocean at a low, Halliburton at a low, Cameron at a low. If investors took the plunge and bought those shares, they watched those stocks move upwards again.

The idea behind the recommendations was that, even with all the bad news about BP, Transocean, etc. they’re big, solid, cash-rich companies. These guys have lots of assets and lots of technical skills.

Quite frankly, if the world didn’t have a company like Transocean, with the world’s largest deepwater drilling rig fleet, you’d have to invent it.

The oil service company Halliburton has nothing to do, legally, economically, or emotionally with the Halliburton that Dick Cheney ran years ago. Bottom line is that Halliburton is one of the world’s great oil service companies. The world energy industry probably couldn’t run efficiently without it. To my mind, that makes it a great investment.

It gets back to the original point here. My goal is to place my readers ahead of the curve.

In a more current example, this month’s issue of Outstanding Investments is almost entirely devoted to deepwater oil development. I wrote it after I spent a week in Houston at the Offshore Technology Conference. Down in Houston, I was meeting and talking with people, checking out the latest, greatest, newest equipment.

Doing that — going places, seeing things, meeting people — allows me to give my readers insight and information that they can’t get in the mainstream media. The fact is you won’t find most of the things I talk about in the mainstream media, and you would really have to know where to look to find them in the professional trade and industry media.

In that sense, your $49/year Joe Average Investor subscriber could be three months, six months, one year ahead of the curve on some of the things I’m talking about.

Are most of the investments you recommend short term, medium term or long term?

I don’t dwell too much on the short term. There are good days in the office and bad days in the office. Short term is for day traders and market timers. Short term is day to day, week to week, a month or so.

I’d rather look at the medium and long term To my mind, medium term is about six months to 24 months. Long term is two years to five years.

When you look at some of these exploration projects, you have to think in terms of medium to long term, because just to drill one oil well could be a 5- to 10-year process. Building a mine takes a decade and more.

It works like this. Someone has an idea. They say, “Out in the ocean, or up here on the prairie, I think that there might be some hydrocarbons. Let’s drill a well and find out.”

OK, great. Now you’ve got to acquire the legal right to explore. Then you’ve got to explore. You have to do your basic geology. You’ve got to do geophysics and geochemistry. You have to put together a package. You have to raise money, eventually obtain a rig. Usually you don’t just hire a rig to drill one hole, because it’s expensive to obtain a rig. You’re going to drill 3, 5, 8, 10 wells. It’s an exploration and development program. You have to get out there and start drilling.

For an oil well, say, and depending on how deep your hole is, it could take a month. It could take 3 months. It can take six months. For some of the deeper stuff, it can take a year to drill these wells. Depending on the well, that could be a million dollars a day. Petrobras put about $200 million into one of its first deep wells far offshore of Brazil.

Above all this process teaches one to respect the calendar and how important it is to get things done in the proper order. You have to let the egg hatch. You have to let the thing happen. You have to understand patience, and accept the risk of development ideas.

I’ve noticed that you focus a lot on Canadian companies and Canada. Why is that?

Canada is the world’s second-largest country, in terms of geography, after Russia. There are lots of great resources in Canada.

What’s equally important — maybe more, really — is that Canadians have a different worldview than we in the US. The Canadians like to travel, they don’t mind working all over the world. It’s not something you see all that much in U.S. culture. So the Canadians train lots of mining geologists and engineers in Canada, and these guys go all over the world.

Let’s say you’re from Canada and you go to school there, you get a mining engineering degree or you get a petroleum degree. Maybe your first job out of college is at one of the Canadian mining projects in Ontario or you’ll go out west and you’ll work in Calgary in the oil business. The massive Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin is full of structures and traps and all sorts of things. If you can find oil out in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin, you can probably find oil anywhere.

The key point is that they train people extremely well in Canada. They have a mining and resource extraction culture there that, I would suggest, we abandoned in the US two generations ago. Canadians tend to go all over the world. You’ll find them in the most bizarre places, in the courthouses and ministries of countries that you can barely spell, working with people of every culture and tribe, and saying “let’s put a deal together.”

There’s a business process behind all this. The Canadian stock markets, the Toronto Exchange and what’s called the Toronto Venture Exchange, are all favorable to stock companies that want to raise money to do resource development.

The Canadians favor resource development much more so than in the US, where there are all sorts of capital restrictions and conduct requirements that make it hard. Over the past two generations, in the U.S., we’ve regulated ourselves into a state where it’s difficult if not impossible for the country, and maybe even the society and culture, to compete globally.

Canada doesn’t have that issue. They still have their laws and expectations; they have their conduct rules. If you’re a Canadian company, you can’t go to some other part of the world and pillage the ground and leave open strip mines or anything like that. You’re still subject to Canadian jurisdiction. In that sense, you’ll generally find that Canadians bring global best practices to the project.

Wherever they operate, the Canadians go out and they hire local talent—geologists and engineers, and equally important, they’re adept at working with the local politicians.

There’s a whole business culture built around this in Canada. And when you look at the best resource development places in the world, you’ll find Canadians there, along with British and Australians, and probably a few intrepid Americans who’ve learned the Canadian way.

Can you tell me a little bit more about how Canadian juniors work?

Canadian juniors are small, Canada-based resource developers. Their shares trade on the Canadian exchanges. At the junior development stage, a lot of times what happens is these smaller companies will go out and they’ll start finding resources — whether new discoveries, or just revisiting old plays from years past. By applying more modern exploration techniques, like seismic that didn’t used to exist or chemical tests that didn’t used to exist, they’ll bring some new concept to light.

At any rate, the idea is that some of these Canadian guys — SOME of them — make intriguing discoveries. There’ll be a mineral show on the side of a mountain. They’ll explore it, they’ll drill it, they might have a site for a potential mine.

Then, along comes a big mining company, Barrick Gold or Gold Corp. and they’ll buy that smaller mining company. It gets back to how it’s easier for a big guy to dig for gold on Wall Street than it is to actually go out there and try to find your own, gigantic new discovery.

There’s actually an entire business model built around generating prospects and it’s called the Prospect Generation Model. That is, there are small companies that may have six or eight or ten exploration plays in Brazil or Africa or wherever.

The prospect generator holds those plays, and places investment into each one. The company will do drilling, chemistry, geophysics. It’s taking the play from a patch of dirt on the far side of nowhere, and turning it into a marketable resource idea.

The goal is to get that prospect worked up to a point where you can then partner with a larger company that can bring in more people, more money, more political horsepower and turn your great idea into an active working mine.

At the end of the day, prospect generators leverage capital and human resources. They create new, mineable resources to sell to the fast-growing world where we live.

You said that about two generations ago, something happened to American mining. Would you elaborate on that?

For about a hundred years after the Civil War, there was a period of unprecedented innovation and economic growth in the United States. Admittedly it came at a price, and growing up in Pittsburgh, in the 1960s, I remember the smokestacks and pollution.

In 1962 Rachel Carson published Silent Spring and it brought about a sea change in the political culture in the US. People in a big way adopted the modern environmental culture. By the early 1970s we saw things like the establishment of the EPA, the Clean Water Act, things like that. We also saw things like the empowerment of individuals or groups to go into either state or federal courts and use environmental laws to essentially shut down resource development in the United States.

Were their goals worthy or unworthy? Well, who wants to argue against clean air or clean water? I like to breathe, I like to drink water. But as a result of this movement, across the US, the industrial side of the economy began to decline. We cleaned up the U.S. environment, after a fashion. We may or may not have cleaned up the earth. The jobs and the industries went someplace else.

It’s not that the US stopped using steel or copper, it’s that we exported much of the industry and got the steel and copper from other places. We exported the jobs, the technology, and to a large extent the pollution. You see that in China, where they have a much lower environmental standard than we do in the US.

Then, like Rip Van Winkle, we woke up two generations later, and realized that our economy is hollowed out. We have this great service economy where we’re all going to get rich giving each other haircuts, or doing each others dry cleaning or something.

All kidding aside, one of the largest industries in the United States is legal services. It’s something like 6% of GDP. That means we have a big piece of the economy resting on the “industry” of people litigating with each other. Where’s the new, primary wealth creation in all this?

Image: CCHarmon/Flickr

What do you mean when you’re talking about primary wealth creation?

For as long as there has been human history, the fact is that an economy has to create wealth. If you don’t grow it in a field, or pluck it off a tree, you dig it or pump it out of the ground.

When you don’t create new wealth, you’re living on past wealth. It gets into a lot of philosophical discussions about the merits and direction of the environmental movement. Of course it’s worthy to do things right, and operate in a clean manner. But is it also worthy to make it impossible for other people to do things, period? That’s a fair question.

Let me illustrate. I’m old enough to remember when the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) discovered the Prudhoe Bay oil field up in the northern part of Alaska in late 1967. They found a massive oil deposit after drilling into an oil-bearing formation that was as big as a 50-story building. Nothing but oil-saturated rock, one of the largest oil fields in the history of the world, with tens of billions of barrels up there.

It was way above the Arctic Circle, in one of the most remote locales you can imagine. It’s 10 months of winter, and two months of just really cold and windy. So the oil industry immediately said “we’re going to drill it and we’re going to build a pipeline to transport the oil.” The environmental movement was just starting to flex its muscles. They went to court and asked for injunctions saying “you can’t do it.”

The oil industry actually bought the pipe for the Alaska Pipeline from two mills in Japan, because no American mill could roll pipe as big as they needed. So early on, there was all this pipe literally sitting out in the snow near Anchorage, waiting for people to build this project. But it was frozen in Alaska — literally and figuratively — due to environmental lawsuits.

The environmental battle went back and forth for a couple of years, and in 1973, we had the Arab-Israeli War, the Yom Kippur War, and the US sided with Israel. The Arab world said “Oh yeah? You’re supporting Israel so we’re going to embargo our oil exports to you.”

Basically at the end of 1973 the Arab world quit selling oil to the United States. That meant their oil tankers went to Europe and then other oil tankers went to the United States. It was really more of an oil routing issue than an oil scarcity issue. But due to the shock of the embargo, there were gasoline lines in the U.S.

The political message to Congress was “we need oil. We need it now. We’re building a pipeline.”

So Congress passed a law and it said we’re going to build a pipeline. Here’s the route. Anybody who opposes this pipeline, you have 30 days to file your suit in one particular court. That court has 90 days to decide the case. If there’s any appeal, the appeals court has another 90 days to decide the claims. Basically, within a period of months, all the legal claims went away, end of story. The pipeline was built.

They built the Alaskan pipeline, all 800-something miles of it, in about 3 years. If you’ve seen the Alaskan pipeline, it’s an absolutely astonishing piece of engineering. It crosses three 10,000-foot mountain ranges, it goes under several hundred river and stream crossings. It crosses the Denali fault system, which is larger than the famous San Andreas system of California.

Over the last 35-40 years or so, the country has benefited greatly from the Alaska Pipeline. The worst incident that ever happened was when a drunk guy shot a couple holes in the line with a high powered rifle.

I mention the Alaska Pipeline because we can say, factually and categorically, that it was a critical energy development project for the country. It’s been a net benefit to the country and to the world.

Yet in the beginning, the environmental movement almost killed the Alaska Pipeline. It almost never got built. It was only extreme events—an oil embargo in the country, people rioting in the streets over gasoline—that got the U.S. to pass a specific piece of purposeful legislation to build this important project.

Image: Luca Galuzzi/Wikimedia

So have we seen anything else like the Alaska Pipeline in the past 35 years or so?

I would say no to that. And your question and the answer gets into the need and nature of large-scale resource development. The U.S. is a big place, filled with lots of people who enjoy their standard of living. It’s “non-negotiable,” according to some politicians. To which I say, “Oh really?”

We spent the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and the 2000s in the US basically importing more and more oil from more and more foreign countries that don’t like us. We buy our copper elsewhere, we buy our graphite elsewhere, we import all of our rare earths from China. We’re at the mercy of a lot of other people for that “non-negotiable” standard of living.

Sure, there’s a lot of industry, a lot of manufacturing still in the US, but not as much as there used to be and ought to be. There are vast tracts of the country closed to development. You can say “well, it’s national park, it’s an important national monument for us.”

I’ll say well, okay, that’s fine, that’s a social and political decision we made. But by making that decision not to develop something, you’re also making the decision that we’re going to buy a product or resource from somebody else, from someplace else.

Who are these sellers? Well, there’s a world full of people who do business and send things to the U.S. They take our dollars—and they’re done so, so far, but we don’t know about the future. And they deliver the product to us. They’re going to give us what we need, when we need it, in the volume and quality that we want. Until they don’t. And then what?

Yes, it’s been a good easy generations. We’ve been able to get away with feeling pretty good about ourselves. We bask in the aura of our own moral superiority over everybody–hey, we have bigger national parks than they do or something. All while saying to each other that we’re not going to build that copper deposit, we’re not going to drill those oil wells, build pipelines or slurry mines or roads in this or that area.

That’s great. Congratulations to us, right? We can all feel good about that for a while, until we get to the point where the wheels start to fall off the economy. Then we get to the issue of peak everything. We get to where there’s not enough of what the economy needs, so the price for necessities goes up while more and more people drop out of the middle class into the growing, long term economic underclass.

Looking from the present, into the future? When we import oil into the U.S., it’s not our oil. We’re buying it from somebody else, which means they can sell it to somebody besides us. If some Chinese guy comes along and says “I’ll pay you more to load my tanker than those guys will pay you to load theirs,” guess who will get the oil?

The resource situation hasn’t quite gotten there yet, but we’re right on the cusp.

Which gets us back to my original question. Why do you travel?

I travel to see what’s really going on. When you get out there, you see the development that occurs in other parts of the world. You see people’s willingness to accept that development. And you come back to the US and you switch on the news and see that the culture is clueless about its foundations in the availability of resources. It’s bizarre.

If you go to most other countries in the world, the big oil company is likely some national champion, filled with the nation’s best and brightest scientists and engineers, as well as really good executives. In some places, they utterly revere their oil companies. I’m not saying we need to revere Exxon and Shell and Conoco, but I think we need to treat them with a certain element of respect that’s not there, not in the broad culture.

Here’s a comparison. When I was at the offshore technology development conference in Houston a couple of weeks ago, a senior executive from Petrobras gave a fascinating talk about what Brazil is doing to develop its offshore oil. The Brazilians have spent three years putting together a strategic plan for developing their energy resources 25, 50 years out.

Developing oil will be the industrial and political revival of Brazil. The Brazilians think that their oil and energy development will vault them into the ranks of a great nation of the 21st century. In fact, they’re thinking a century ahead into the 22nd century. They know where they’re going to build their shipyards, they know where they’re going to build their power plants, their rail lines, their telecommunications lines.

Right now, as we speak, there are kindergarten teachers in Brazil teaching little children about all the great things that are going to happen to them when they grow up and get a job in the Brazilian energy industry. They’ve completely revised the national curriculum, from preschool through college, to get kids interested in science, engineering, and energy development, interested in growing up and working in these fields.

So back to your question. I travel because it opens my eyes and shows me what the rest of the world is doing. It’s enlightening. I go to places in the world and meet interesting, accomplished people who are changing their world — and by extension changing our existence here in the U.S.

Then I come back to the US, where everything is so polarized. We don’t do big energy development here, not anymore. We don’t do big industrial development, not anymore. We turn shipyards into housing developments. We’re not creating primary wealth, we’re consuming the accumulation of past generations.

Whether you’re in the U.S. or elsewhere, any nation can only be the country it can afford to be. If you aren’t creating primary wealth, through resource development or adding other value, then you’re in trouble.

What travel has driven home to me is that, here in the U.S., we’re on the cusp of going broke as a nation. We’ve spent a couple of generations doing things we can’t afford to do. We’ve spent a couple of generations not doing things that we need to accomplish. The bill is coming due.

Byron King is the editor of Agora Financial’s Outstanding Investments and Energy & Scarcity Investor newsletters. He is a Harvard-trained geologist who worked for a major oil company for years. He is also an attorney. To boot, he spent years flying aircraft for the U.S. Navy, and served on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations. You can find his work on Agora Financial and Daily Resource Hunter.

In today’s media-rich economy, “even not having an online presence tells people something about you,” says Vizibility founder and CEO James Alexander, who himself has two first names. He founded Vizibility to address the problem of online invisibility, even for John Smiths. We caught up with him to learn more about Vizibility, what it does, and how it helps people gain search-engine traction.

Why would people want to use a Vizibility SearchMe button?

The inspiration for Vizibility hit when I couldn’t find myself in Google. I’m a guy with two first names, which makes my results impossible to find. I spent a great deal of time learning how the engine worked and experimented with the advanced search features (which less than 5% of people use because it’s so hard). Ultimately, I was able to create the perfect query for me that returned the right set of search results every time. The query was long and used a lot of Boolean jargon, but it worked.

In going through this process, I was struck by four things: First, using advanced search is just too time-consuming for most people; second, the ability to easily post or share searches didn’t exist; third, even if someone could share their personal search results, they would need to be able to change it from time-to-time (when they changed jobs or got married, for instance), and; fourth, a user also wants to know when their search results change and when they’re being “Googled.”

All the ingredients were there for a new approach to people search.

What are the biggest problems people have with the way Google displays their name or their business?

I believe one of the biggest issues is that of mistaken identity. It is a real and growing problem. In many respects, it is the opposite of privacy — many people want to be found but they can’t. Their results are buried in the results of other people who have similar names, with more relevancy. To help illustrate this point, there are more than 2,000 people on LinkedIn today who share the same name as someone on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List.

Millions of people want to be found online for professional or personal reasons. But if they are someone like me, James Alexander, with a common name, a hiring manager would never have made it past page one or two of Google search results to validate my background. Even people with unique names, which are often difficult to spell, are affected by this problem. We’re invisible.

And being invisible online can have a significant economic impact for individuals. In one recent study, 45% of hiring managers said they hired someone because of what they found online. Imagine how many people were not hired because of what could not be found or verified easily.

When 90% of recruiters make hiring decisions based on Google search results and few go beyond the first page, mistaken identity is inevitable. Our own research shows that only 12% of search results are actually about the person being searched. The consequences of making critical buying or hiring decisions with poor information are undeniable.

The second issue is that search engines hide behind a veil of algorithms, but unlike credit card monitoring services, search engines don’t verify their search results. Nor do they have to. They don’t have the mechanisms or incentives to do so. But just like credit monitoring services, however, the information that search engines provide may have significant and profound economic impact.

Vizibility is putting people in control of what others see about them online. But there are two sides to this coin. Any solution impacting search results has to be transparent because the people searching have to trust what they see. This requires full disclosure of the search criteria, including and excluding words and terms and seeing the result in the search engine itself.

It sounds like you have really big plans for Vizibility–to get a SearchMe button on 20 million professional profiles in the next 5 years. Can you elaborate on what you mean by “professional profiles”?

We define professional profiles as a brief description of one’s accomplishments, qualifications, strengths, qualities, etc., that are posted online by business professionals, job seekers, executives, singles, and service providers such as doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, etc. There are thousands of these sites, and a few examples include LinkedIn, TheLadders, BlueSteps, 6FigureJobs, About.me, Flavors.me and Match.com.

How are you going to reach your goal?

Wouldn’t it be great if got a text message whenever someone Googled you? Or you received an email whenever your personal search results changed? These are the kinds of “sticky” features that we enable partners to offer delivering a personal branding solution that is effective and unique.

We also provide our partners with a number of services with the potential to increase renewal rates and generate higher levels of engagement with their users. For example, the text messages and emails can be co-branded providing our partners a low-cost tool to remain usefully engaged with their users while reinforcing the value of their membership.

Basically, our go-to-market strategy is to partner with profile-driven websites and embed VizibilityTM into their offerings. Many of these sites face high customer acquisition costs and also have high churn rates – the average customer relationship is less than six months. With Vizibility, our partners and potential partners recognize that we deliver value to their customers by making it easy for them to be found online while providing a set of tools to help manage their online brands.

We recently launched a new service for our partners where we pre-create Vizibility accounts for all their customers and then send a co-branded email containing their personal Vizibility SearchMeTM link, making it easy for them place on their profile, resume, social networking sites and business cards. YouTern was our first partner to provide this service to their customers, and we anticipate many others taking advantage of this service.

To date we have approximately twenty partner sites that reach over 1 million users. These include 6FigureJobs, BlueSteps, realmatch, Brand-Yourself, Reach, and MyLegal.com among others. Our plan is to more than double the number of partners over the next six months.

Any other remarks?

Today’s competitive market for professional services and jobs is changing career management behavior forever. The concept of taking control and managing one’s online identity is becoming mainstream, and expected. One’s digital content has to be managed and curated in order to reflect their online brand – even not having an online presence tells people something about you.

To address one trend, the notion of building digital bridges between your online and offline experiences, we have created a mobile solution. We are providing Vizibility users with the ability to turn their SearchMe link into a QR code that can be placed on resumes, business cards, online profiles, presentations – anywhere someone wants to provide a quick snapshot of who they are and what they are about.

It’s an exciting trend around which a set of solutions is quickly evolving to help people take control and manage what is found about them online, and Vizibility is among them.

Official bio: James Alexander is Vizibility’s founder and CEO. He’s the guy with two first names. If you ‘Googled’ his name in 2009, you would never have found him. Now, he ranks within the first few results of a Google search. Find James in Google at http://vizibility.com/james.

Wanna be an entrepreneur? Think it’s a glamorous gig that will change your life for the better?

Carol Roth will set you straight. Roth, a longtime business adviser and former investment banker, has made a career out of helping businesses succeed through endearingly frank and applicable advice. In a floppy economy full of wannabe business owners, Carol has turned her attention to entrepreneurs–what helps them succeed and, equally importantly, why they fail. I caught up with Carol to learn more about her unique take on entrepreneurship.

BP: What are some of the main reasons that people fail at entrepreneurship?

I have a saying that if you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail. So many people go into business because they are in lust with a business idea. I call it business beer goggling.

They basically see something as a new idea and it looks really good. Then, all of a sudden they wake up one day and go, “Oh boy! That wasn’t what I thought it looked like.”

I think people are in lust with the idea when they’re creative and trying to fill a hole. They go in with the wrong mindset, not really understanding what it takes to run a business, not taking the time to stack the odds in their favor, not pursuing opportunities that have enough upside. Those are the things that make them fail–or some people don’t like that word, so we’ll say “fail to succeed”–in business.

BP: It sounds a lot like a relationship.

It is. I would say they have similar principles. Don’t date anyone before you get married. You would never do that unless you were in Las Vegas and there was a lot of alcohol involved.

People don’t take the time. They want to rush in. They want to marry their idea. They want to put all of their money into a business opportunity, and they haven’t taken the time to test it out. I use that analogy all the time. It would be like marrying a bad kisser because you didn’t take the time to test that out before you committed to marry it.

BP: How can people take the time to test, or prepare in the way that you say, without losing their enthusiasm for the idea?

I think what happens is, a lot of times, they do lose the enthusiasm for the idea, which gives you the feeling that if you’re not going to be excited and passionate about this over the long-term, you shouldn’t pursue it.

But there are a couple of ways that you can test out the businesses. One is really simple and this is usually the eye-opener. You can actually go work in somebody else’s business for a couple of months, on nights or weekends, or you can even quit your job and work there full time.

I had a woman who came to me and wanted to open a restaurant, as about every third person does. She was really passionate. She was in the banking industry and financial services and had been through all kinds of roller coasters over the past couple of years. She just wanted something that she thought was going to be better suited for her.
So she was going to open a sandwich franchise. I said, “Great! How much time have you spent in the restaurant industry?”

“Well, I eat there every day,” she said.

“Well, that doesn’t really qualify you,” I said to her. “Do me a favor. Nights and weekends, go get a part-time job at your local franchise. See if you like it. See if you’re any good at it. See if you can get yourself promoted. Pretend you’re Nancy Drew and take a magnifying glass to learn all the ins and outs and the things that might be stumbling blocks for you and let’s reconvene.”

I really only think it lasted three months and she came back to me and said, “If I never see another $5 foot long again in my entire life, it will be too soon.” It’s because she had really glamorized what it meant to own this restaurant and to have this supposed freedom. When she got to see it up close, the enthusiasm did wane.

Had she said, at that point in time, “you know what, this verifies it. This is great. I learned that you really need to be focused on quick turn time or servicing the customer.” Then she would have been in a really great position. But no, she went right from lust to let’s get married. That’s not a good thing.

Another really great example, and again it happens to be a restaurant, but the Rainforest Café. The gentleman who started that–it’s a big theme restaurant that really looks like you’re in a rainforest–built a prototype for the concept in his backyard, before he built it out. He had people come over to see if it was cool and a place they would go to. He evaluated what kind of food they wanted. He really tested it on a small scale and on a limited budget before he invested the millions and millions of dollars it took to open up the first unit.

I think the key is if you can go through it on somebody else’s dime and someone else’s location, fantastic. If you can set aside a budget, even if you’re baking cupcakes, bake them for your friends and family and people in the neighborhood first. And don’t just see if you can just sell them once because everyone has friends or family that will buy something from you once because they feel bad for you.

Do they call you up the next day jonesing for them; “Oh my God. I can’t stop thinking about those cupcakes,” or do they never call you again? If they never call you again, then guess what? Your cupcakes maybe aren’t so good and you shouldn’t go into business.

It’s these really small things you can do to test something out on a limited budget in a defined period of time to really stack the odds of success in your favor.

BP: I remember when I first started my own business. I kind of got thrown into it. I got laid off from a job the same week I closed on a property and was taking care of somebody’s nightmarish kitten. I was just going nuts. I just felt like I had no alternatives. So I bought a book on how to freelance and I just started doing it. I had no idea what I was doing.

I know there are some people who have become entrepreneurs in similar situations. I know also that a lot of people tend to freak out once they lose their jobs. How do you reconcile that very strategic, rational, “OK, Let’s try it,” mindset with the desperation that drives a fair amount of entrepreneurs?

I think that there is a difference between making money to supplement an existing situation and making a long-term investment and career decision. So absolutely, if you need to pay your mortgage or put some food on the table and there’s a way you can do that, then you do that for the short-term, but eventually, you’re going to need to make a decision on whether you’re going to invest in that path or go back to find a job. That’s when it’s time to be strategic. You definitely don’t want to do it in a state of panic, because chances are, you’re going to make a poor decision.

You probably know from being in this situation, that we’re not just talking about the startup costs for business; you have to be willing to operate it and live for a certain period of time. For a lot of businesses, it can take a couple of years for it to really get going.

Some people are fortunate and they can make some money real quickly. But a lot of times, people aren’t necessarily looking for the product or service or there’s a long sale cycle and not everybody’s ready and raring to go as a customer the day that you’re ready to hang your shingle out.

I think that if you’re in this panic of desperation, you might have to go down this path temporarily. You might do something on the side to make some money or you might even take up lesser jobs to make some money, while you pursue whatever it is you ultimately want to do.

The one thing that really kills me that people always tell me is, “Oh, well, my job is not secure.” Well, neither is your business. They say, “Well, I have to go and I have to convince all these companies to hire me.” Well, you also have to convince all your customers to buy from you on a regular basis.

I think that there was a perception of job security in the past and now people are realizing that nothing is a given. Now they’re just sitting there and going, “oh, well then I can take control of my own business.”

The reality is that you still don’t have control. At the end of the day whether it’s a company or a business, the customers are in charge. And so, I think that there’s a little bit of irrational thinking there. That leads people onto that path without realizing that they have to encounter the same challenges but now their bosses all have different agendas.

BP: Is there a certain kind of person that’s most likely to fail at entrepreneurship?

Yeah, I create a framework that I call ‘The Entrepreneur Equation’ from my book of the same name. I go through motivation, and timing, opportunity and personality.

I always say, if you don’t have the personality for it, it doesn’t matter if you’re motivated by the right reasons, or the opportunity is the best one in the world. If you’re not the right person and then regardless of the rest of it, it’s not the way to go.

There are a probably two different ways that I would categorize that. One is the very scientific test that I call, ‘Are you Santa Claus, or are you an Elf?’ And the thing about Christmas, it takes one Santa Claus that has the vision, and lots of elves to do the execution day in and day out.

Starting a business is very much like being Santa Claus. You have to wear multiple hats, you have to organize lots of different tasks and be good at doing different things. You don’t’ really get to focus on any one thing. And oh, by the way, if the presents don’t get delivered, you get blamed.

If you are somebody who doesn’t really want to do that, but you want to focus on one thing, or you really like to take direction, but you don’t like to take the ball and run with it, or you just like to really go deep into something, or you like to be behind the scenes, then you’re more like an elf. And if you’re more like an elf, then you shouldn’t be running a business, you shouldn’t be playing Santa Claus.

So, Santa has a good chance of success, and an elf shouldn’t quit their day job. I think that that’s one thing right up front.

The other thing is that personality traits can change over time. If you think about entrepreneurship, there has to be the ability to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. You have to be able to tolerate risk. You have to be willing to ride a roller coaster on a day–to-day basis. And really do different things, whether it’s financial risk or just kind of not knowing what’s ahead of you, because some people really just don’t like that.

If you don’t like that, you’re going to be miserable as a business owner, because that is very much what you’re going to endure on a day to day basis. So if you’re the one that just likes the routine, likes to know what’s ahead of you, likes the predictability, great. Good. Know yourself, and know that this is not going to be for you.

BP: What are some of the difficulties that females face in entrepreneurship?

A lot of women go into business based on creativity and passion. It’s something that is, you know, is cute or creative, but they don’t necessarily have a goal for their business. They don’t really know what they want it to be. They’ll end up with what I call ‘jobbies’, which is a hobby that’s disguised as a job or a business.

Or think of a job-business, which is just nothing more than a business which is entirely dependent upon them. And then, if they go on vacation, their business doesn’t make any money.

I think that for women, it’s really important for them to set goals and intentions for the business, and really make some decisions as far as what it is that they want to do. I see so many women over and over again with jobbies, who basically have invested tons and tons of money in a website and business cards and a built up a bunch of inventory for something that really isn’t a viable business, just because they have a creative brainstorm. They don’t really take the time to think about the goals, and to see if it was a viable business and come up with a plan behind it.

If you really want to really build something, if want to be somebody who employs other people and helps the economy grow, and really make a name for yourself, then you have to do something totally different. And I think that just having that intention is so critical because you can’t come up with a plan to get somewhere if you don’t know where it is that you want to go.

Official bio: Carol Roth helps businesses grow and make more money. An investment banker, business strategist and deal maker, she has helped her clients, ranging from solopreneurs to multinational corporations, raise more than $1 billion in capital, complete hundreds of millions of dollars in M&A transactions, secure high-profile licensing and partnership deals, create brand loyalty programs and more.

Carol is a frequent radio, television and print media contributor on the topics of business and entrepreneurship, having appeared on Fox News, MSNBC, Fox Business, WGN TV Chicago (video) and more. She is also signed to LA-based t.v. production company Snackaholic who is currently developing a television show around Carol’s life as a business expert and personality. Carol’s Unsolicited Business Advice blog at CarolRoth.com was recently named as one of the Top 10 small business blogs online.

Harrah’s became the most successful casino in the US with one deadly weapon: Loyalty cards. When customers sign up for Harrah’s loyalty program, they get free money to gamble with. Who wouldn’t want that at a casino?

As a result of the loyalty program, Harrah’s gets a treasure trove of customer information*. They know what games you play, how long you play them, how much you usually spend before leaving, and how much you’re winning (or not).

If you’re a slots player, when the Harrah’s system senses you’re losing more than usual, a dispatcher calls the casino attendant on the floor. That person finds you and offers cash or a free dinner or discount concert tickets. Because of this, you feel like you still “won” something. You’re happy. You become the ultimate loyal customer.

Harrah’s program is a goldmine. But when it comes to online loyalty programs, many other retailers flail around, like they’re trying to mine gold with a miniature screwdriver.

Image: James Bowe/Flickr

A recent survey by real-time rewards management company ACI Worldwide found that 49% of loyalty program members never or rarely take advantage of their programs while shopping online. 53% of Americans who are members of loyalty programs visit retailer websites to look for discounts. 52% of Americans want a consolidated retail card; most retailers just don’t give them out. Nearly 80% of respondents didn’t understand the value that they were getting from at least one of their programs.

What gives? I caught up with Robert Seward, ACI Worldwide’s Senior Industry Marketing Manager, to learn more about the survey, where companies are falling short, and what they need to do to actually spur loyalty in their programs.

BP: Can you tell me a little bit about why loyalty programs are so important in general?

During the last couple of years, with the recession, consumers have shifted to discount shopping. It’s the new normal. Many retailers have had to find ways to reconnect with their consumers and drive opportunity for them to shop in their stores again. That is the loyalty aspect.

These rewards programs are really an opportunity for retailers to improve the store sales and get more people into the store. But rewards are also important as a customer servicing aspect of the business. Retailers can reward the people that do shop with them.

BP: The survey mentioned that half of Americans prefer a consolidated loyalty device (where consumers have different retailers’ programs on one card). Why haven’t companies made these more available if people want them?

Many retailers have come out with their own type of card-based program. You trace this back through grocery stores. They were the first ones to market their frequent shopper cards. So I think that’s the genesis behind the need.

What was surprising to me was that the loyalty movement went towards a consolidated card. I assumed that mobile applications would garner much more attention. Based on the demographics of the survey, going from anybody 18 and up, I really expected to see a higher response rate to the mobile side of it.

I think the challenge there is that consolidated cards drive back towards coalition programs. I think that’s where the challenge is going to be, for retailers to work together to drive that consolidation.

BP: Can you tell me what a coalition program is and how it works?

It’s where you’ve got at least three retailers or parties working together to drive cross-retailer programs. For example, maybe you have a convenience station, a fuel station, and maybe they don’t have a car wash. So they work out an agreement with the local car wash provider. Show your receipt at the car wash if you bought at least 8 gallons of gas, and you get a buck off at the car wash, that kind of thing.

Coalition programs can become very elaborate. We referenced a couple of the programs in place in the UK and South Africa where you have a lot of retailers that are participating with a consolidated card.

BP: I noticed in your survey that customers want easy online access to their loyalty programs. I assume that that’s not quite in place. Why would it be hard for customers to have online access? What’s in the way?

Over the past couple of years, if you’re following the retail segment, you’ll hear about multi-channel retailing, customer-centric retailing.

A lot of stores, especially the larger retailers, followed a best-of-breed approach when they chose their software and business applications. Now, you have the consumers wanting to shop online, in the store, shop online and pick up at the store, shop online and return product to the store, all the aspects of it. Now you factor in mobility, with mobile payments, mobile marketing, the access to information. Consumers are expecting retailers to be a little bit more agile.

That’s where retailers struggle with the previous strategy and the best-of-breed approach being able to integrate those systems. To me, it was coupling of two systems as opposed to an integrated approach. So they have to do a modernization of their business applications to achieve that. I think that’s where the challenge comes from not being able to utilize the rewards programs online.

I think the other thing is a lot of the retailer rewards programs today are driven out of their point-of-sales (POS) systems. The POS systems will work well to a certain extent, but typically a POS system isn’t integrated with the ecommerce website. I don’t think I was surprised by the survey responses in terms of being able to use their loyalty or see a value of a loyalty program online.

BP: Do you think retailers will upgrade their systems within the next couple years or do you think they’ll hold out as long as they can?

I think they absolutely will, and I think they are starting to kick in a more concerted effort of looking at the programs with how they can update their applications. So yeah, I absolutely believe that.

BP: Could you talk about a couple of other things that retailers could do to get their loyalty programs right?

One of our survey questions was “which of the following, if any, has happened to you when you were trying to use your loyalty card at the store or retailer?” We had 7% say that they received a reward or promotion that actually made them think less of a store or a retailer.

You first look at it, you go, “Okay, not a big deal.” Then you realize that the purpose of a reward program is to basically thank a customer for shopping and incentivize them to continue shopping or buy more with you. To think that 1/10 had a bad experience is–I’m just surprised there were even that many responses to that question.

What retailers need to do is really evaluate the program and what they are trying to do with it. At the end of the day, you’re trying to increase sales, but to me it drives back to being a customer service opportunity for them, an opportunity to optimize the customer interaction with that retailer. I think that’s where the challenges lie. Retailers probably are not looking at it from that perspective.

I think this is moving towards driving that consistent shopping experience. I can offer personal experiences at looking at products online, going into the store, and finding out, “well hold on, the store price is a hundred dollars more than the online price.” And working with the store managers to try and get that resolved, and in some cases getting the price, and in other cases not getting the price and leaving. That’s the only time I don’t know if I’d shop there again.

Retailers need to evaluate customers’ personal experiences at their stores. They need to think about what consumers want in their shopping experience. And I think there are ways for them to execute against scenarios where customers want to leave.

Official bio: Robert Seward is a senior marketing manager for ACI Worldwide and is responsible for the delivery and execution of marketing programs and product strategy for ACI’s merchant retail line of business. Seward has over 18 years of professional experience in the payments industry.

*Source: a Radiolab episode.

What strategy did you use to win the Facebook challenge?

We have two college-age interns that have been working with us. They know Facebook extremely well, so we basically gave them free reign to develop a strategy for getting additional followers.

The first thing we came up with was a way to tap into our existing network. We gave away our reports that we normally charge $120 about the bike industry for free to anyone who liked our Facebook page. We sent that to our newsletter list of thousands of people from transportation departments all around the world, and then got an amazing response. It didn’t cost us anything to do that campaign, but we got a huge response.

Since then, we’ve been leveraging the Facebook profiles that we have, and have been marketing directly to the people that have an interest.

How many hours did you put into that Facebook campaign?

The interns pretty much worked 20 hours a week each on that. They spent a good amount of timing building it, and we saw massive results in a short period of time.

How powerful a tool has Facebook been in growing your business?

Our strategy has been–instead of just having people like our business, what we’ve done is branded the generic bike sharing information portal. When people look bike sharing information, they find our information page and ultimately come to our website. It’s been a great tool that’s brought in a significant amount of traffic, 20-30% increase in traffic through our website. A lot of that was coming through Facebook.

We keep a pretty extensive blog on the industry. If you search for anything bike sharing related, our blog comes up first. Having this on Facebook, actually pushing it out to people who see the news feed, has gotten us a much better response from our existing followers. A lot of people who come to our website for the first time come through our blog, but if they like us on Facebook, they’re getting a constant reminder that we keep it up to date.

Can you give entrepreneurs any advice on expanding their businesses using Facebook?

This competition was kind of a kick in the ass, we really needed it to push this strategy forward. Everyone pops up a Twitter account and Facebook page, but very few people really go out there and create a campaign to generate followers, and then ultimately follow up to turn it into revenue. You’re better off not putting up a Facebook account unless you’re going to really go out there and create a campaign to make it worthwhile for your business.

We had 100 followers beforehand, which was nothing, and now we have something we can actually leverage.

How many followers do you have now?

4,301. We went from 100 to that. I think we were a little higher before–naturally some people dropped off after they got the free report–but kept the majority of people, which we’re really happy about. We’ve integrated our Facebook account with our email campaigns, Twitter and our blog, so literally Facebook is the portal where all of our social media directions come together in one feed. That makes it pretty attractive.

*At time of writing.

Social entrepreneurs are becoming a permanent fixture in the American business landscape. Doing business to do good is especially popular among the Gen-Y generation, but former nonprofit executives are migrating towards the for-profit model, as well.

It’s only recently that new, hybrid legal designations for these kinds of businesses–the L3C is an example–have started popping up in states across America. Former nonprofit (now for-profit) exec Lys Anzia, who runs a global media outlet called Women News Network (WNN), just took the leap from nonprofit to L3C, thanks in part to a sour economy that wasn’t giving her the donations she needed to run her organization. I caught up with Lys to learn more about the process.

(Disclosure: I have written articles for WNN in the past.)

BP: What inspired you to start the Women’s News Network in the first place?

Women News Network (WNN) started six years ago after I became delegate for a global conference called the UNCSW – Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations in New York.

I was part of the delegation for the oldest women’s peace organization in the world, WILPF – Women’s League for Peace and Freedom, which started as an anti WWI movement in 1915. WILPF gained consultative status at the UN in 1948, this means they are allowed to actually give input and speak at meetings of the UN General Assembly.

My background is in journalism, especially radio journalism; so when I went to this conference I was shocked. Why? Because I heard the stories of women who had flown from the heartland of Sudan to tell their stories of atrocity in front of a UN group where no national media was present. This infuriated me. The only time large media would show up at the UN was when a celebrity appeared at the UN. So WNN was born to fill the gaps and tell these stories.

BP: Why did you decide to take it nonprofit instead of exploring a for-profit model?

Because I believed so much in the power of media to improve society. It really is something that does fit easily with non-profit. But the non-profit didn’t work.

BP: Why not?

I realized that running a non-profit, along with board meetings and event planning committees, was a full-time job. WNN really needed my full-time attention as editor-at-large instead.

When the U.S. economy took a dive, it was even harder to keep the non-profit viable. Donations went down to a trickle.

Most people don’t think they need to donate to media publications to keep them going. Somehow they think the money appears easily out of the air. Most people think they have a right to get the news for free.

After thinking about this concept much more, I realized I agree with this. People should get their news for free. I checked into what other options were available; like forming an L3C company for WNN, and went with it.

BP: Can you talk about the process of turning WNN into an L3C? How will you profit? Where will your profits go?

The LC3 process is simple. Find a state that allows L3C status first. If it isn’t happening in your home state yet, you will need to get a registered agent in the state where you choose to file.

Unfortunately, the State of Colorado hasn’t approved this as a new form for companies yet. For us at WNN, it was very easy to register in the State of Wyoming. The capital is only 67 miles north from my WNN office.

It wasn’t hard to prove that WNN’s goal meets the primary purpose of an L3C as described in section 170(c)(2)(B) of the IRS Code; as a media production group that produces online materials that encourage the improvement of society through news distribution and education on global human rights issues and women’s rights.

As a Low Profit Limited Liability Company (L3C), WNN can now sell products, such as advertising, as well as stay open to foundation funding through PRIs (Program Related Investments) also.

BP: Can you give me an example of what it means to have high standards in journalism?

In 2009, a WNN featured story was used by the UN Tribunal Court, along with a story by the BBC (UK and Australia). We feel that the use of WNN featured news for the UN Tribunal trial helped save the lives of 2 activist women and families. This is an example of good use of media.

BP: Do you have any advice for anyone who wants to start a business that also does good? How about for people running nonprofits who are considering going into the hybrid (L3C) space?

While not everything about L3C has been figured out completely yet, especially the issue of PRI – Program Related Investments funding and the allowance of filing by the IRS under L3C status, we feel confident that all of this will fall positively in the shakedown on new future options for companies.

I think that companies who have been struggling under non-profit status are perfect for this designation, as it brings much more flexibility in funding opportunity through standard business practices, and in getting funding through PRIs — as long as service to humanity is the primary, not secondary, goal of the company.

President Obama recently mentioned L3Cs in a press conference about new company opportunities, so L3Cs are now on the screen of the White House. The IRS also mentions L3C designation under LLC tax filing now, so it is gaining ground nationally. I feel it will be coming also to Colorado. The January 2011 State Congress has an L3C bill on the table for discussion that may get traction.

BP: Can you tell me a little bit about WNN’s rapid growth and growing prestige? Did you have a strategy, or did it just grow organically?

The strategy for any endeavor that grows is simple. This sounds corny but it’s true: It takes honest hard work; endless work. There really is no way around this.

The focus with WNN was to bring high-standard journalism to the public, from journalists on the ground around the world. Now WNN has over 12 journalists from locations like Nepal, Kenya and Egypt.

During the early days, our tracking for our site at WNN showed CNN, BBC, ABC and other big media coming over to our site to take a look. The industry has exploded since then, but we were one of the very first online sites to place videos inside a featured news story to bring greater impact to that story. CNN and the others started doing this too, but it was after WNN had videos in featured stories.

Later, we gathered more steam as we received (through one of our journalists in Zambia) an Every Human Has Rights Media Award, given out each year by The Elders–which include Desmond Tutu, Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela.

UNESCO gave us honors too as they recognized WNN as a news network showing “Professional Journalistic Standards and Code of Ethics” during a campaign to help eastern European media gain more transparency and better standards with their news. Very recently, we have become content partners with The Guardian News, with a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-partnered launch for The Guardian Global Development Network.

BP: Where do you envision WNN in a few years (or, how do you envision WNN in its bigger form)?

WNN will be working to bring compatible media subsidiary companies into our new company, the WNN Media Group L3C, in the coming years. We also expect to have PRI money to open press offices in at least five regional locations in the next 2 years. The idea is to bring women’s news, and high standards in journalism, together to bring the issues for global women to the forefront in news.

Official bio: In 1979, WNN founder/director, award-winning playwright, (2007) Pushcart Prize nominee, (2010) United Nations panelist on media and ongoing humanitarian journalist – Lys Anzia, was the first woman on the programming board for US Public TV Channel12 KBDI in Denver, CO (US). With an early career that began in public radio via Pacifica affiliate radio station WPFW-FM in Washington, DC, Lys has a strong dedication in bringing the highest quality online journalism available to the public. WNN currently covers hard news stories on women from 6+ global regions. Lys is also a radio producer for WINGS – Women’s International News Gathering Service and is director/curator for Women News Network Video collection.

Sometimes you have to be hard on yourself in order to save money. Anna Newell Jones should know. At the beginning of 2010, Jones, fed up with her prodigious spending habits and mountain of debt, decided to go on a “Spending Fast,” which she documented on her blog, And Then She Saved.

That meant no spending on anything except necessities, including her mortgage, car payments, and utilities, for an entire year. She denied herself new clothes, hair cuts, eating out, movies, and more (see her full list of self-negation here). The only luxury Anna allowed herself all year was hair dye–she is a professional photographer and needs to look good for clients.

What did Anna get for her 365-day foray into financial asceticism? More than $13,000 in savings. No more credit card debt. Much less student loan debt. And, perhaps best of all, a better way of managing money.

Despite her pain and suffering–or perhaps because of it–Jones serves as a personal-finance inspiration for 2011. I caught up with her to talk more about her project, her accomplishments, and what she plans on doing next.

BP: Can you list your five biggest accomplishments for your year of saving in 2010, starting with the biggest?

Wow! There have been so many accomplishments this year.

#1 is definitely that I met my main goal of eliminating all of my consumer debt. I never thought that would actually happen and it was the driving force behind deciding to go forward with the Spending Fast in the first place.

2. Paying off my parents. They took out a college loan for me years ago and I had been trying to get it paid off forever and I could never seem to make a dent in it until this year when I did the Spending Fast. Actually getting them paid off is such a huge weight off me emotionally and mentally that I’m just beyond overjoyed to have that debt wiped out.

3. Learning to say “No” to myself and that learning that just because I have money doesn’t mean I should buy whatever I want.

4. Learning the concept of “Enough”. Before the Spending Fast I was never satisfied with what I had or did because I was always trying to have and get MORE, MORE, MORE… my wants were completely insatiable. I would compare myself to others and could never be satisfied since there was always something new that I needed to make me and my life perfect. Because of the Spending Fast I’ve found that I can get by with a lot less and be okay with it.

5. Lastly, starting and actually completing the Spending Fast for an entire year is pretty huge accomplishment. I’m kind of shocked and amazed that I actually did this for an entire year! Did I really just not spend money, except on necessities, for a whole year?! It’s crazy to think that I really pulled this off.

BP: What was the hardest part? What about the easiest part?

The hardest part of the Spending Fast was the beginning. I had to force myself to get used to a completely new and foreign way of thinking about money and spending and saving and debt re-payment.

There were some rough moments there for a while, and I knew I would’ve given up on the whole idea if I wasn’t being held accountable by the blog I had started to document my year with the Spending Fast.

Knowing that I had to write about any failures made me work even harder at doing well because I didn’t want to write that I had messed up. It was also surprisingly hard at certain points to decline on some things because of the Spending Fast and then have people offer to pay my way or pay for my dinner so I could participate. Those situations were a little awkward. I had to explain that I chose to do this and I was going to deal with the good, the bad, all of it.

On the other hand, the easiest part has been that after I got the hang of the Spending Fast and got used to telling myself “No,” the Spending Fast has actually been okay. More okay than I ever anticipated it would be. At this point, at the end of the Spending Fast, I’m feeling far more comfortable with not spending money and I’m way more comfortable with finding creative ways to do things that need to get done rather than automatically going for the quick fix of buying something new.

BP: What are the main things you learned? Will you take any of them with you into the future, or do you think you’ll eventually just revert to your old habits?

I’ve learned so many things. I found that I had to want to be out of debt more than I wanted whatever item I had my eye on. As I mentioned earlier, learning to say “No” to myself has been very powerful and I learned that I can be okay with having less. I’ve also learned that having everything I want is not all that amazing and that I’d rather be doing other things than maintaining, managing and caring about things that I own. I’ve got better things to do with my time! I have learned throughout this year that I am very industrious and that once I set my mind to do something I will do it. I learned that I can make zombie portraits and people will actually pay me for them (www.etsy.com/shop/annanewell). That is very awesome.

I’ve also learned that getting that first credit card paid off was an amazing feeling. Getting that first card knocked out encouraged me to keep going. There is no doubt in my mind that I will take what I’ve learned this year with me into the future.

There’s no way I could go through an experience like this and not have it affect me. Though, I have to admit I have been panicking that once the Spending Fast ends I will become possessed with some wild spending craze and go buck wild again. I hope that doesn’t happen and doubt that it will.

Throughout this whole past year, I have been creating new habits regarding money and spending and my financial life. Now my finances are in the best spot they’ve ever been in before. I won’t let myself get into trouble with money like I did in the past. I can’t go down that road again. I won’t let the year long Spending Fast be for nothing.

BP: What’s your plan for 2011 in terms of saving money?

In 2011 I plan on doing a modified version of the Spending Fast. It will be a Spending Diet and it will be quite a bit less extreme. I still have a college loan hanging over my head and I plan on wiping that out as soon as possible. Getting funds into a savings account and investing are some of my other goals for this upcoming year. I will continue to write on my blog And Then She Saved, since I’ve found that accountability so beneficial.

BP: Can you share any advice for people who want to get out of debt?

I would recommend starting by cutting out one thing a week. Maybe it’s making a gift rather than buying one or wearing something to an event that you already own. Change one thing per week and just keep adding healthy spending/saving habits in there. It is a process.

Money and spending and saving have so much symbolism for so many people and it taps into the priorities and values that we each hold for ourselves. Changing those ideas about money is not something that happens overnight.

I also highly recommend going on a Spending Fast for a couple of months or for even just a month, if not for a whole year. In a lot of ways my life has been re-calibrated because of the Spending Fast.

My style has changed, my financial life is in order, I feel empowered, I appreciate the hours of my life a lot more and I am no longer willing to sell the hours of my life for things. The Spending Fast has literally changed my life.

Anna Newell Jones is a freelance photographer based in Denver, Colorado who shoots a lot of conceptual gallery work. She’s married to a fellow photographer and they travel all over the United States shooting weddings. She started a year-long Spending Fast in January 2010 along with an accompanying blog to document her progress and setbacks throughout the year. Because of the Spending Fast, she has managed to save $17,911.89 in one year and get completely out of consumer debt.

Social networking for small business took off about 6 years ago. If you’re like me, and you didn’t know that, then welcome to SaleSpider. This all-encompassing, small biz-specific social network touts its ability to make you money instead of–or in addition to–just friends.

SaleSpider helps you find leads, jobs, contracts, hundreds of thousands of other members, and most of the other kinds of contacts that you’d need as a small business owner. I caught up with CEO Russell Rothstein to learn more about what SaleSpider does, who uses it, and how it is evolving.

BP: How fast has SaleSpider grown?

We grow pretty much steady. At this point, we get 5,000 to 7,000 new members a week, and that’s been steady for years now. We are non-venture capitalist, so we did not try step on the gas and spend $20 million at all costs. We actually grew with the concept of let’s be profitable the entire time. We were a real business if you will. So we’ve had steady growth at 25,000 new members a month.

BP: You sound like kind of a rarity in being an online business that is making steady money and has been without venture capital. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you monetize so effectively?

I had a previous background in finance and in being an entrepreneur. I decided not to take venture capital money. I was offered it in the Valley four years ago by a number of different well-known venture capitalists. I turned them down because I saw their term sheets, and it seemed too diluted.

What we did is we tried to monetize as much as we could while balancing our two main stakeholders: the members and the advertising clients. The concept was simple. Large companies and enterprises want to reach small business owners. They are a very difficult group to reach, they are complex, there are multiple verticals. There’s many of them, and they want to be treated like large companies, given customized service. But they are like small companies, consumers, in that there are so many of them.

What we did to monetize is we really went after the advertising model . We did not just offer display advertising, we had newsletters, we had text notifications. Every time I send you a social message on SaleSpider, you’ll be notified “Russell has just sent you this message.” It will say at the bottom “Brought to you by Campaigner.“

We monetized through links, text messages and advertising. That has driven the growth of the company and allows us to be profitable.

We’re also very focused on automation. Every time we’ve taken on a project to make the site better, we constantly add value to the users to make it better without costing the users money. That’s been a philosophy. For example, as opposed to having 50 people in the corner collecting government opportunities, writing them down, and entering them into a database, we actually have an automated library system that we’ve built.

We’re really a bunch of engineers who have automated as much as we could. It means a lot of development, but once you finished the development of it, it’s very much a maintenance game. That’s really how we’ve monetized it.

It’s been good. Growth is always something we’re looking at. We are taking more and more steps. We just released mobile a couple months of go, we’re looking at going out of North America in January. We’re increasing our growth to get the market share.

BP: You mentioned that small businesses are notoriously hard to reach. Could you tell me more about that? You said big enterprises want to get in touch with small businesses but it’s hard to do. Why is that besides there’s so many?

Have you heard of Geoffrey Moore, who wrote Crossing the Chasm or Inside the Tornado?

BP: I haven’t.

His first book came out 15 to 17 years ago. I attended his keynote presentation at a Sales 2.0 event a few years ago, and I think he really nailed it. There’s always been two types of models in sales in North America generally. One was the grocery chain model where you walked into a grocery chain, you pulled out the cereal, and it was self-served completely. That was targeted towards consumers, meaning no one is going to sell you cereal boxes, you’re going to have to choose your own and they pull you in the store by commercials.

Then you have the other model, which is the older model, where you have expensive sales reps whose job it was to go target large companies and enterprises and sell them multimillion dollar solutions. They have to be multimillion dollars in order to justify the resources resources–the sales reps, engineers, and sales engineers involved in customizing the solution to an enterprise.

The problem is the small business owner is in between. So what if he or she wants to receive the personal handheld holding to say “well I know you’re running a company with 7 or 18 people, I know you need an accounting system and a CRM system, here’s how we can tweak it for you, here’s how we can specialize it for you. By the way, it’s going to be $1800 or $100 or $1,200 a month, but we’re not going to be able to fly someone in to meet with you.”

That’s why we’re so challenged. The costs were too expensive to have direct sales, but the market was so large that it was the most untapped market in the United States.

The enterprise market became fatigued with purchasing. They were public companies and they had to cut down their numbers and were expensive. When this happened, the small business market became the most open and lucrative available that had not been tapped.

BP: If I’m a small business owner and I go onto SaleSpider, can I just put up a profile and will people find me? Or do I have to be more proactive and engage with the site?

If you join SaleSpider, you have to put up your profile. If you don’t put up your picture, or who you are, then you’re a silhouette with a blank and obviously no one is going to try and contact you. But if you put up your profile, upload your resume, your company profile–it takes 20 minutes–I bet you that within 4-5 hours you’ll have messages and connections

It’s a very active community. Small business owners are active. They are looking to connect and leverage relationships. When you’re a large company you may be able to afford to have offices in 25 different cities, but when you’re a small company you’re looking to leverage partnerships in order to compete.

In order to make it easier for people, we put a keyword search in where you could put your keyword in, whatever word it is, you could say iron, or widget, you could set your location, state, multiple states, whatever you want, and you press go and within half a second you’re connected to opportunities which have those keywords in it.

That includes thing like 35,000 government open contracts which are those open contracts anywhere in the states, Canada, or the European Union. That included 730,000 members and their profiles, that includes classified ads for probably 70,000 classified ads, and about 500,000 job opportunities—instantly.

It’s like a Google Alerts when it arrives. Same kind of popup feel as that.

In a survey we recently handed out, we found that 3/4 of small businesses told us that they are going to be putting more effort into social networking as a way of marketing their business. It’s low cost, they’re able to do it, it’s easy, and that’s where the customers are also.

The question is how to do it. If you’re a local business or restaurant, I imagine you may be interested in having a Facebook Ad, although it’s tough to know whether people would use Facebook to choose their restaurants.

If you’re a small business, you’re going to want to be able to vet for some social networking and connect. That’s why we have this keyword search and opportunity matching, because you’re going to want an easier way to connecting. The whole idea of that keyword search is just to make it easier for people.

We copied the Google bar, if it’s just a search term, and you press go, it makes life so much easier. Our mobile app is completely based on that search. Put your keyword in, press go.

BP: That’s a very convenient way of using social networking.

We learned it the hard way. We constantly learn the same things over and over again. You listen to your users, your members, ask them the questions, they tell you what to do, and you deliver it.

It took a lot of engineering to make it fast enough. The biggest challenge of our keyword search was the speed issue because you’re searching three quarters of a million members profiles, 35,000 government RFPs and open contracts, hundreds of thousands of classified ads, and 500,000 jobs, and it’s just a lot to search and you do it by keyword. So there was a lot of engineering that went on to that. It took us eight months of testing.

BP: What kinds of opportunities could you find on SaleSpider easily that you couldn’t easily find elsewhere? Or is it kind of a mix?

It is a mix. Let me give you an example. Most of the information we’re getting is public information but it is scattered in thousands and thousands of sites. Some of the most convoluted sites you can imagine.

For example, California opportunities and Colorado opportunities, in terms of government opportunities, are completely distributed differently. Every state does a completely different job of how they are going to show their open contracts.

We take this information, we scrub it, and we make it available and complete for every member. That includes ever state, the Canadian provinces, the federal government, and the European nations. That’s a perfect example that you can’t get anywhere else. We have a patent pending on that.

Another example is just our membership. With 730,000 small business owners and being able to instantly connect with them by keyword, that’s just unique, because you can’t do that otherwise. I mean, LinkedIn has six degrees of separation, and you’re looking by a company name. LinkedIn is more a resume place. To be frank I use it a lot. I was just with the CMO of LinkedIn and their business model is based primarily on recruiters and HR people.

Facebook is more for my eleven-year-old or my sixteen-year-old, who are on it all the time.

BP: I know plenty of 40-somethings who are also on it all the time.

It’s amazing, isn’t it? There’s no business to be done. Just a lot of just idle chatter. It’s fun to listen to a little bit but you can’t go on it every day.

The one thing you’re going to remember is that if you’re in your office, you’ve got SaleSpider on, and your boss walks by and sees you, he’s going to know that you’re driving business. He doesn’t want to see you on Facebook.

BP: Is there anything else that you’d like to share?

Really, it’s exciting times, because with the economy it way it is, people want opportunities. The truth is, we’re so much cheaper than a trade show. It will cost you $5,000 for a show, you walk through, you get a hotel, you meet 500 people and 30 would be good, now you can do it online and that’s a big thing.

Honestly, our biggest challenge is unless we want to raise $20 million dollars in venture capital, we just want to get people to try it. Go to the site. Put a keyword in. There’s no cost. Press go and see if it gives you value. It’s free, and you’ll get leads and opportunities, and be connected every day.

Official bio: Russell Rothstein is the President and Founder of Sales Spider. A business social network, Sales Spider was launched in March 2006. Prior to the development of Sales Spider, Rothstein was the President and Founder of NorthPath, a Sales Outsourcing company offering lead generation and field sales outsourcing to leading technology companies. Previous to NorthPath, Rothstein served in numerous sales and application capacities for Oracle. Before Oracle, Russell was the Managing Partner and Founder of Bizware, a software supply chain for retail petroleum and major convenience stores. He successfully built Bizware into the industry market leader before selling to a Nasdaq listed public company in 1995.

David Siteman Garland is a multimedia maven. He educates and inspires fellow entrepreneurs through RISE, his biweekly, entrepreneur-focused television show. Three times a week, David publishes articles and videos geared at helping you build your business. He hosts regular events and workshops. Most recently, he has published a book called Smarter Faster Cheaper: Non-Boring, Fluff-free Strategies for Marketing and Promoting Your Business.

Note that David, who seems to be blessed with insatiable energy, built this all from scratch not too long ago. His new book lives up to its name by indeed being fluff-free and non-boring, not to mention practical. I caught up with the ever-enthusiastic David to talk more about his book, as well as glean some tips on being smart, faster, and cheaper–and just plain better–at marketing.

What are three of the main ways anyone can market smarter, faster and cheaper?

#1: Become a media source: The secret sauce is to promote educational, entertaining and inspiring media that you create as opposed to product pushing. It might be a fascinating blog or unique web show centered around a topic you are passionate about. Because content is what spreads. Product and marketing messages don’t.

#2: Focus on building a community: A mistake folks often make is they get the whole idea of creating content, but then spend all their time creating. The key is what you do after you create the content to build a following. It means getting into the social media trenches, meeting people one-on-one, forming relationships with other content creators in your niche (bloggers, etc.). I use the 20/80 rule. 20% of time allotted to create great content. 80% spent marketing, promoting and relationship building.

#3: Taking it offline. The smarter, faster, cheaper approach is all about becoming a resource on a particular subject. A go-to person. That subject might be dogs, mom’s in Missouri or boxing. Often overlooked is building your brand offline. This might be positioning yourself as a speaker or bringing like-minded people together in the “real world” for dinner or drinks. The best online networking happens offline.

What’s the hardest part about creating a successful (smarter/faster/cheaper) campaign? The easiest part?

The hardest point, somewhat ironically, is patience. Things can definitely be done faster. The ability to create content and publish it to the world is super quick. Word of mouth is at lighting speed. But, it takes time to build a following of people who know, like and trust you. Sort of like a weight loss program, you don’t see results right away. But consistent effort, over time, wins.

The easiest part to deal with is cost. Nothing mentioned in the book costs an arm and a leg or just an arm. The cost is time and effort as opposed to big marketing dollars.

You mention old, stuffy marketing/PR methods as being outdated. What’s one method that still works?

Getting into traditional media sources as a quoted expert is still valuable. However, I think the true value comes from once those blurbs or clips are posted online. If you tell folks, “Tune in to the Sunday morning news. I’ll be on talking about kittens!” many folks will probably miss it. But once that links up online, it lives forever and people can tune in later. Traditional media isn’t bad by any respects and you use those shiny “as seen on” logos on your website.

Last year, you made 10 big marketing predictions for 2010. Did they come true?

Great question. I’d say most are definitely coming true as we speak. I should have maybe titled it “10 Big Marketing Predictions For The Next 10 Years” as things sometimes move a bit slowly. But, I was going through that post the other day and could come up with tons of examples that happened over the past year that fits in with many of them. One key trend we are going to see way into the future is the humanization of business. In little and big ways. The story hasn’t changed: We do business with people we know, like and trust…not faceless logos.

Sounds like you’ve been working on this book for about 3 years. What was the hardest part of writing this book?

It has DEFINITELY been a fun work in progress. Over the past three years I’ve spent my time interviewing over 200 of the world’s most creative entrepreneurs and also building my brand using the principles in the book which has taken my web show RISE from 0 to over 100,000 a month in less than two years. The hardest part of writing the book was selecting among all the great stories over the past few years. I wanted the book to not be filled with any fluffy theory, but instead focus on learning and takeaways from people actually walking the walk.

What is the most important thing you want readers to take away from your book?

The key concept I want people to take away is that now the Davids of the business world (no pun intended) have the advantage over the goliaths. You can become a trusted resource and leader as opposed to a sketchy product pusher. The Internet has caused a massive shift in marketing and promoting. Those that jump on it now are going to be VERY happy in the upcoming years and decades.

Official bio: Entrepreneur, mediapreneur, marketer, speaker and author David Siteman Garland is the Founder of The Rise To The Top, The #1 Non-Boring Resource For Building Your Business Smarter, Faster, Cheaper and author of Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: Non-Boring, Fluff-Free Strategies for Marketing and Promoting Your Business (Wiley Publishing). He writes/hosts RISE, a web show for entrepreneurs, forward-thinkers, business owners and marketers, as well as The Rise To The Top TV show on ABC. In less than two years, David has attracted a loyal community of 100,000+ through the power of relationships and without spending a cent on traditional advertising.