Image via CrunchBase

I have been working on some alternatives to Smugmug over the last 24 hours since I finally bit the bullet and decided that it is time to go, as I explained here yesterday. What I am seeing is that the sites are basically breaking down into two categories, showcase and warehouse. While my experience doesn’t really mean anything, it is interesting to see how picture storage has changed over the years. I started with Smugmug, I stayed with Smugmug, and now that I am looking for those specific things I am looking for, it is interesting to see how other sites have taken on the industry.

Alternatives seem to break down into two categories, Warehouses like Flickr or Zenfolio, or showcase sites like 500PX or Deviant Art. The big difference seems to be in bulk upload, tagging and management of the pictures on the site you are using. So I will break the down by what I have discovered, if you want to share your opinion by all means feel free to comment.

Please remember the reason for why I post pictures on line, it is to get feedback, meet new people, see what others have done that might be useful to helping me grow as a photographer.

Warehouse Sites

Flickr and Zenfolio both seem to behave much like Smugmug does with bulk uploads, bulk editing of tags, names, alt tags, and other ways to help a search engine find your pictures. I like the bulk editing that I have not been able to find or use on Smugmug even if they had it.

Flickr and Zenfolio also have some very nice sharing options that Smugmug is missing. Both will share to Pinterest, Zenfolio shares to G+ (which has rapidly become another home to showcasing pictures, there are a lot of very active very wonderful photographers on G+), all will share to Facebook and twitter. Smugmug only shares to Facebook and Twitter bypassing two very hot ways of sharing pictures. Flickr and Zenfolio will do individual sharing or total gallery sharing. These options are extraordinarily important to me to have.

Custom Price Lists – Flickr does not seem to do this in any other way that through Getty Images, so they are missing an important revenue stream. With the new CEO, maybe we will get lucky and get some commerce going on Flickr that bypasses Getty which is in a totally different orbit for most photographers on the planet. Few if any have the name or reputation for being part of Getty. Zenfolio much like Smugmug allows for custom price lists and markups. It also has a deeper product base than Smugmug does, you can put your pictures on everything from Kitchen Aprons to single prints. Zenfolio has a much richer and deeper product line that will add a differing product base for photographers.

Setup and Use, both Flickr and Zenfolio are stupid simple to set up. Much like your camera, your web site is a tool you should know intimately. If you need customer support for simple functions, like it sounds like Smugmug is providing a lot of tier one “how do I upload a picture” support that is bleeding them dry, go with Flickr and/or Zenfolio.

Zenfolio has some options that are found nowhere else in terms of bulk warehousing. The blog feature is critical if you want to have good hits from a search engine. You can discuss a picture (remember search engines need words to properly categorize what your picture is about along with the Alt Tags) in the blog, link to it, and get more search engine goodness by being a prolific or good blogger. Maybe a picture a day with descriptors of what that picture is about. I can live without Zenfolio’s guest book, but some might like that functionality.

I am finding that the audiences are different on each site; to appeal to different audiences you want to be represented across as many sites as you can afford. Flickr comes in at 30 bucks a year for all you can eat, while Zenfolio comes in at a price point of 120 dollars a year for what I need. Your needs might vary, but that is a heck of a lot less for all you can eat Zenfolio than the 300 dollar Smugmug. The ability to truly tag, alt tag, and describe your pictures is something that search engines need. I find that when I tag pictures adequately I usually end up on the first page of Google Image Search rapidly. Both Flickr and Zenfolio seem to be deeply integrated with Google Images, which is a primary way that people find pictures. Smugmug not so much, usually my Smugmug pictures end up beyond page 10 in an image search for an event in favor of Flickr people.

Showcase Sites

Showcase sites like 500PX and Deviant Art really have few if any true bulk (and by bulk I am talking hundreds of pictures at a shot) upload, editing, tagging, or other functions that are not extraordinarily painful to use. Showcase sites are really about showing off your best work, or the work you love the best, then pointing those users to your bigger galleries on the bulk warehouse sites. DA, Imagur, 500PX, and other sites like that are really geared around one picture, one upload, heavy on the descriptors so that search engines can find it.

I have been a member of DA for two years now, and find it very easy and wonderful to use with a beautiful community. I barely use Imagur because it is mobile only, and while I do a lot of mobile work, it is such a pain in the ass to upload to Imagur then to Facebook then to G+ that the steps are too many for me to take. I also hate working on the mobile screen unless it is an Ipad or bigger. 500PX has turned into an interesting experience, and one that I am starting to like. I treat 500PX like a showcase site (which is not necessarily true with DA), and I do compare my pictures with others on 500PX.

500PX feels snooty cow, I am a “professional photographer” go away your bugging me kid, but if you aspire to be an excellent photographer, learning from professionals and their work is a great way of approaching the problem. It is worth uploading only the very super best of your stuff to 500PX and see if anyone notices. I have only six likes on 500PX, but those are real likes from real photographers, they mean more than 100 likes over on DA or on Flickr. That means I appealed to a real photographer that is super important if you want to grow in your art. You did something right, and a snooty cow photographer stopped long enough to like your work.

The breakdown then is going to be for my alternatives, Flickr and Zenfolio for bulk warehousing needs, DA and 500PX along with G+ and Facebook for sharing the pictures I truly love. Then point people off to my bulk sites so that consumers can see the whole nine yards when it comes to pictures.

Remember that Upload Junction can move your pictures from point A to point B, but it might not be 100 correct in the move. If you are moving I would recommend downloading all your pictures from Smugmug (or indeed any site when you are considering a move), then using an automated tool like Upload Junction to see what crosses over and what does not. All this depends on your gallery settings (private/public), password protection, watermarking, and other issues that go along with being a photographer.

Let me know what you think.

Related articles

• Why I am leaving Smugmug Hint it is not just about the money
• Zenfolio and ShootDotEdit Partner up to Save Photographers Time
• PhotographyTalk.com and Zenfolio Strategic Partnership Provides Zenfolio Clients with Expanded Benefits
• SmugMug: Bad Timing on a Price Increase and a Social Media Crisis Unfolds #smugmugged
• Flickr, Smugmug or a WordPress plug-in? Snowflake details within.

Image via CrunchBase

About seven years ago, a friend of mine who was helping me get into photography recommended that I check out Smugmug, and a wonderful relationship was born. I love, have loved, and will appreciate Smugmug even as I am walking away from the web site. Over the last three years I have shoved some 853,000 picture views down the wire, and uploaded some 123 gig’s worth of pictures over the lifetime of my account. I am not a big picture viewer, photography is something I do for fun, and I don’t plan on or intend to make money off my picture taking. I like to share, I love comments, I love feedback, I want to see how other people see what I see in a picture. Smugmug has been ok for that, but there are better sites for what I need out of picture taking.

I am probably an average Smugmug customer. Little guy, maybe 30,000 pictures in total on the site, but have seen the majority of my growth in visitors and picture views in the last year as I took 15,000 of those pictures in the last year. I had an exceptional chance to really get into a number of events this year to cover, and got a trip to china to boot. Those are all going to generate a lot of pictures. I got a new camera and saw my average picture size go from 3 Megs to 6 Megs, but also saw a lot better quality in the pictures along the way.

I currently pay 100 dollars a year, less than 10 bucks a month for storage of my pictures. Everything I have on Smugmug is deeply embedded in blogs, reports, web sites, and other places where I use my own pictures, or others have picked them up for their own sites.

There are some things I don’t get on Smugmug though that I do get on Flickr and on Deviant Art (DA), which are increasingly critical for me to have. The lack of these services on Smugmug is the reason I opened up a Flickr and DA account to begin with.

I rely on feedback; I want to see what others think of the picture, good, bad, ugly. I live for comments, thoughts, likes, hearts, fave’s or whatever else a person looking at my picture is thinking at the time. I have had in the seven years at Smugmug 23 messages from customers, few if any fave’s hearts or tweets that I didn’t originate. But looking over at the year I have been at Flickr I have 98 comments, 1583 favorites, and 684,000 picture views in that time. One year at Flickr and I am almost at Smugmug levels of picture viewing. Deviant art is a similar story, but only 81,000 picture views, but hundreds of fave’s, likes, comments, and opinions from other photographers. All this in one year, which I have to go back three years to match out on Smugmug, but let’s look at apples to apples here, one year on each site.

Smugmug Number of Views 618,000, no likes, no fave’s, no comments, one sale for six bucks

Flickr Number of Views 644,000, 1,508 likes, 99 comments, no sales

Deviant Art Number of Views 82,000, 1,100 likes, 498 comments, no sales

What is important to me is the number of views, the response from the peanut gallery, the people who are excited that they saw a picture of themselves at a show, could share it with their friends seamlessly, and otherwise is what is important to me. Obviously sales are not a primary consideration for me, I don’t even bother to water mark them, and I have some odd ideas about copyright when it comes to “my work”. See “my work” is a hobby, mostly convention pictures, event pictures, but when KIRO, KUMO, OWS, Der Spiegel, and others want to use my work, they give me plenty of credit if no money. I am good with that, photography is how I blow off steam, it is my release, and it is my entertainment.

Smugmug just does not draw the consumer or picture viewer expressions that I need to have to see if I am taking good pictures. I thank those professionals on the other sites who give me awesome feedback, and I love the comments from the peanut gallery even when they make me wonder why I am alive.

So from the interactivity viewpoint, Smugmug simply is not worth 300 dollars a year, not when Flickr is 30, and DA is 20.

Then there is the little niggling thing about Nudity, see I got busted for that this year as well. If you troll Smugmug looking for “fine art nude” you will see tons of naked people. It is awesome if you are a fine art nude photographer. But god forbid you post someone with body paint. At the Freemont summer solstice parade the reason to go is for the body paint as a photographer. The Terms of Service at Smugmug clearly state no nudity, but if a customer of Smugmug complains about nudity on your web site (regardless of how many other nude pictures there are on the site), Smugmug will drop you a nice letter after they have locked off the gallery. I ran into that and discussed it earlier on this blog. Once we were over that hurdle, Flickr and DA both have “age gates” that allow you to mark nude or not safe for work or restricted. Heck almost every other web site that does photography has an age gate of some sort including 500PX, so seriously, really? No age gate Smugmug? Unevenly applied rules for nudity, when mine were body paint but you can see a lot more detail on other sites within Smugmug?

So from the nudity viewpoint, not having an age gate and a Terms of Service that would make a puritan proud, Smugmug is simply not worth the 300 dollars a year, not when Flickr is 30, and DA is 20, and both come with age gates on some of my more racy and popular photographs.

Legendary customer support, I don’t use it, don’t really need it, I am computer and technology literate enough not to have to call customer support every time I have a blown upload or something else goes wrong because I got sent a reset packet from Smugmug. I know how to use a computer, so the legendary customer support I use is only when Smugmug contacts me because someone whined about a picture I am hosting there that offended someone because they were too tender of opinion or mind to see a person coated in body paint.

So from a Customer Support viewpoint, I don’t use it unless Smugmug contacts me. Smugmug is simply not worth the 300 dollars a year, not when Flickr is 30, and DA is 20, and I don’t use their customer support either because I know how to use a computer and upload a picture, as well as share it across multiple blogs and other web sites.

The raise from 100 dollars to 300 dollars a year for me is really just the final nail in a coffin of more and more problems with simple things at Smugmug. From what I have been reading on multiple blogs and forums, it looks like the average person exodus is well underway, and the price raise even has its own twitter hashtag #smugmugged to go along with that. While some writers have compared this to the Netflix fiasco which Thomas Hawk has eloquently debated and refuted on his web site. But the real issue remains to be seen, from what I am reading the exodus is well under way which will leave Smugmug exactly the same as before, a series of silos rather than a way to truly share pictures and gather consumer feedback.

Regardless of why you take pictures, if you can absorb into your business model the price increase from 100 to 300 (for me) then good to go, this is a business issue. If you are a middle of the road or smaller photographer that price increase might not be absorb able when there are cheaper equally as brilliant systems as Smugmug provides. It depends on why you take pictures and what your expectations of those pictures are. Mine is consumer feedback, these are not customers, these are not people I am trying to make money off of, my people, my tribe, are people I want to share with, Smugmug has always had a hard time building community, Flickr and DA are communities from the outset. Since I am more interested in community than sales, I’ll be leaving Smugmug. As I stated on G+ yesterday, and on Thomas Hawks’ web site, it is like pulling the plug on grandma, it is cutting off my arm, I’ll miss Smugmug because they have been very good to me for seven years. But I no longer get what I really want from the web site, and I do get it somewhere else, the price increase was just a motivating factor, but one that is apparently motivating a lot of people to move away from Smugmug.

Related articles

• SmugMug Announces new Pro Subscription Accounts
• Subscriptions set to soar at SmugMug
• SmugMug: Bad Timing on a Price Increase and a Social Media Crisis Unfolds #smugmugged
• SmugMug’s Pro Pricing Change Sucks
• Photographers how much do your picture views matter

2012 has been a phenomenal six months of some of the most intense picture viewing on my Smugmug, Flickr and Deviant Art accounts I have ever recorded. In 2011, I had around 64,000 picture views for the year and thought that was awesome, this year so far in the first six months I have had some 671,000 picture views. It is possible given the shoots I know I have upcoming for the rest of the year that I might actually reach a million picture views this year.

The sad part is sales, I have sold exactly 3 pictures, these are my first ever sales. At that rate to make a living off this I’ll need 100’s of millions of picture views a year to make any kind of livable money off photography.

My work has been seen on KUOW and on KIRO TV’s Seattle Insider, some of my Occupy Wall Street pictures were picked up in Germany as part of an international journalist’s pool, and I have had lots of people ask me for permission to use my pictures as an avatar or for some other personal use, and I am good with this.

So the question is, with all these amazing picture views, and amazing feedback, and the hundreds of downloads of the pictures, how do picture views equate to dollars.

In my experience they don’t.

So how does anyone make money off of photography?

Hopefully someone will let me know, because what is on the net right now is pretty lame, I do not have the ability to frame and hang out at small local fairs, and I don’t take landscape pictures, I do Cosplay, punk rock shows, and parades with people in various states of dress and exhibitionism. I am not all that interested in doing landscapes or other nature oriented make you feel good pictures. I do graffiti, and subcultures, riots and protests. Let the world know what your tricks are for non-landscape photographers to make a couple of coins by answering here, I’ll be interested in what you have to say, and I’ll roll up the comments later and give you full credit.

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I would think that just about every third party seller on Amazon has read the article on the Wall Street Journal about Amazon and third party sellers. As a happy third party seller on Amazon myself through my company I have some thoughts on this one that some other third party sellers might agree with, or disagree with, yet in the longer run, what Amazon does, and what other third party sellers do greatly influences the products we put up for sale on the site.

Our buying decisions are simple, see something we think is neat, check the prices on Amazon, check the number of merchants offering the same product, check the pricing model to see what the discount rate is online, and then see if we can be competitive for that product. If we can’t we don’t purchase it, if we can, then we do get it from our distributor.

The biggest thing in my mind is that Amazon has become the low cost leader; they are the online equivalent to Wall-Mart. When you go into a category that Amazon has, you are competing not just with Amazon, but with their pricing structure. Some companies simply ask for the retail price and it will sit on their shelves for about two to three years before Amazon decides and the low ball sellers decide the product is not worth carrying, or it has gone out of print. It is the longer tail of retail or better prices that an Amazon seller who wants retail will need to think about if they are selling on the site. This is something we do, we will sit on products for a year or two before they finally sell, but then I also get the retail or a little over to make up for that time in storage.

We also do a lot of conventions, so we often sell our products there regardless of what is happening on Amazon. Sometimes we will sell out of a product long before it ever hits Amazon because we do both physical conventions and online sales.

One of the issues not addressed in the Wall Street Journal article is that an Amazon third party seller is also competing against other third party sellers. If the seller happens to purchase something and needs retail prices to make up for the fees charged, they are going to wait and sit on that product because some third party sellers sell well below the wholesale cost of an item just to get it off their shelves. You can see this in toys, and especially during the slower summer months.

Let take the Doctor Who Nano Recorder as an example. The wholesale price I pay for that item runs about 19 dollars, the retail price is about 38, 39 dollars depending on which supplier/distributor you believe in for pricing. The current low cost item for that is 12.99, the average price for that is 21.38, the high price for that item is 39.99. Most people are priced in around 21 dollars for the item, it is not popular, and it sells slowly. The average overhead for selling on Amazon is around 25% of the cost of the item. By overhead I mean the cut that Amazon takes, plus shipping overage because it is classic that the weight of the item and shipping costs are not always covered by the amount of money you get from Amazon to ship the item. Because it weighs over a pound, your average parcel post shipping is going to be around 9.50, of which you get 4.99 from Amazon, and the person who bought it. The other fun thing is that Amazon takes some of the postage as a service fee when selling toys to go along with that, so you actually get less postage depending on what shipping services you chose. Ebay does the same thing, so this is just another cost of doing business online.

Some quick math here,

12.99 + 4.99 = 17.98 (rounded), less shipping of 9.50 = 8.48 take home, then less Amazon fees of about 15% or about 2.70 wholesale cost of 19, roughly I would be in the hole or in the red no profit of about 13.22. I lost money, now if that is your business model that is awesome, go for it, you will not be in business long.

And that is the rub, if your business model is to liquidate items on Amazon and make sure you are always the lowest price, or the “Wall-Mart-ization” of the site, then that is awesome for customers. Customers will buy a lot of things for a penny, or discount toys, or anything under liquidation prices. This is also good for Amazon, they take money off the top, and they will always get paid regardless. It is up to the Third Party merchant to figure all this stuff out and decide what their business model is. By the way, Amazon does not directly sell the Doctor Who Nano Recorder either, these prices are independently set by other third party merchants.

Some of the Third Party merchants are huge and buy in enough quantity that they can do their own version of Amazon competition where other smaller merchants cannot do the same. These bigger merchants can and do and will reduce prices just to unlock anything from the items they are carrying, and often provide rock bottom pricing across the board, and some of those unpopular items are going to take a while to clear out of the warehouse. Prices will always be low until they are gone, even if the Third Party merchant is losing money on the deal. Other items will help make up for that loss by averaging out the total profit and loss across all their products.

Amazon is a tricky beast with many quirks that Third Party merchants needs to understand before they start selling there. There are actually better venues out there in terms of what you can charge for an item, but Amazon is the king of e-commerce right now and you would be foolish to bypass it. You simply need to know what you are getting into before you dive in. The good part is that there are awesome books on the subject (even I have written one), tons of online advice, the Amazon sellers forums, and other sites that can help you out. In the meantime, regardless of what the Wall Street Journal says, you run your own business your way, competitors come and go, your job is to sell enough stuff quickly enough in a niche so that you can make a profit.

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Some of you might know that I run my own company, and we have Amazon.com as an outlet for our awesome products. In 2011 we decided early on that we wanted to use

Amazon-New-Detail-Page (Photo credit: kokogiak)

FBA, Fulfillment By Amazon for our products that were top selling to help customers who were upset about the shipping prices. We really thought that we would see a huge bump in sales, and a lot of happy customers. We really thought we were about to embark on the right thing, and we were even talking to an Amazon FBA rep who was very cool and walked us through a lot of stuff.

We duly picked and pulled and packed our stuff and sent it on down to Amazon’s Phoenix Warehouse and were excited because this was going to be awesome. Here is a chance for us to take advantage of Amazon’s ability to do combined postage, and life would be wonderful. We really thought at that point that we were going to do our customers this amazingly good deal, and that everyone would win, happy customers, happy company, happy Amazon.

What happened out of that was a nightmare that lasted nine months as we realized that Amazon’s customers are different than our customers on Amazon. We are a very niche market, and we have very loyal customers via Amazon. We love our customers and our customers expect a very high level of service, packing and shipping that we are more than happy to provide. Amazon was not, as more and more returns for damaged product, without us knowing what was going on. More and more negative and neutral feedback like we have never ever seen in our company’s history started to roll in, complaints, anger, and the growing realization that Amazon did not love our company as much as we loved it. While we did see an increase in sales for those products, the damage that negative and neutral feedback did to us we are still recovering from, and took the better part of a year to bury the neutrals that Amazon would not remove. The good part is that for the most part Amazon did remove the negative feedback, but only upon my request, and only after on average 48 hours after the feedback was left. It was a customer relations nightmare.

Even our FBA guy stopped calling and talking to us.

We went into the belly of the beast, and it was ugly from a customer happiness viewpoint. We ended this experiment in FBA, and eventually pulled everything from Amazon or let it sell out without us sending them anything else.

Over the last couple of days we got a survey from Amazon asking us for our opinion on FBA. The bad part is that it was not really a survey that would let us tell them what we needed to tell them. Rather it was a more generic why you are not using the service any more, focusing more on costs of the service than anything else. Making customers happy is part of the cost process, but I really wanted a text box where I could sit down and write all this out. How Amazon’s core customers are very different in expectations from our core customers all on the same platform. While FBA might work for some things, it did not work for my product, and here is my hypothesis on the issue.

It was a meaningless survey.

It did not allow for customer interaction, there was almost no place to talk about my issues with FBA. Really this was a feel good survey for Amazon. Meaningless, valueless, meant to make managers happy and not really address any real issues with specific customers.

I am more than happy to talk to Amazon, but I don’t think I’ll take any more surveys from them. I love what I do, and early on Amazon was our key sales platform, but we have diversified into other platforms that are outperforming Amazon right now. We love Amazon, but as we grow bigger we have better things to do than take a survey that is a management exercise in feel good politics.

If Amazon really wants to know what we are thinking about FBA, maybe our FBA guy can call us someday and find out what we really think. In the meantime, pointless and useless B2B surveys on why business customers do not do something are on my list of things not to do again.

Related articles

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Image via Wikipedia

Note: Going through the back catalog of what I have written over here at Techwag, this one really popped out, because I never did find a solution for my friend. The incident of bad mouthing stopped after about 120 days, but there was so much bad blood after that between my friend, the company, and the old boss that I don’t think they will ever speak well of the company. I know she never talks about the company, and will divert business to other companies at every chance she gets. 

Interesting thought that a friend of mine posted on one of the social networks, I won’t mention the name or the situation but the comment is:

I’m totally P.O.’d as an old boss is trying to F#%# with my livelihood, bad mouthing my design to the client Source: Best not mentioned really

We are all familiar with bosses and companies suing employees for bad mouthing the company or the boss. We are also familiar with employees getting fired for bad mouthing bosses and companies online and getting fired. Those two are fairly common and a lot more common that anyone would like to admit, but what happens when an old boss starts badmouthing former employees? This is a new wrinkle on the old adage of watch what you say, it might come back to haunt you. See your old boss is coming from a position of strength, and while HR rules might preclude them from doing anything other than verifying your employment at a company, online maybe not so much.

Everything cuts both ways, and having your boss post online that you were the worst employee, or could not meet target dates, or never finished a product, or otherwise might all be considered legitimate in the viewpoint of the boss. Of course we are all going to beg to differ, we might have not hit a deadline for one reason or another, or we might have been caught playing a video game over lunch break or shopping for the holidays while at work. We might have even been caught out doing something perfectly reasonable at the time and circumstance but looks hokey in perfect 20/20 backwards vision.

Is there recourse, of course we can always sue, but we have to make sure that we can afford the lawsuit. I do not think that there has been any kind of lawsuit like this yet, and if there is feel free to let me know where it can be located so I can read the case file and court submission.

The part that strikes me the most interesting is that bad bosses abound and might need to take their vengeance further than is normal past firing. This would be a response to be expected if you are working for a truly controlling personality, they will attempt never to let you go, or realize the thoughts in their head “you’ll never work in this town again” kind of vindictiveness.

Personally I would seriously contact a lawyer, I have seen a similar situation where I was teaching a hacking class at a school, and someone from work called the school to tell them I was teaching hacking to students. Of course I was, it was a hacking class in a controlled environment with huge safeguards built in. But when they called the local CISSP group for sanctions that was when the problems really started, and took some interesting processes to make sure that no one got hurt in the process. They were voicing a legitimate concern, but hadn’t bothered to check out all the facts. This kind of problem is also more common than we would like to admit, it happens, we clear it up and move on, but the emotions remain behind.

If you think your old boss is trying to make sure you never work in this town again, and is stating things that meet the legal guidelines for slander, then by all means do what you think best. But engage a lawyer, they are the only ones that will be sure, and can see if you even have a case. The one thing I do know for sure is to remain the adult in the room, never get upset, but explain yourself clearly and succinctly if you are dealing with an interview, new client, or new job. The only way to truly prove you are what you think you are is to live it, be it, and enjoy it.

Related articles

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The recession still blazes on, and people are still losing their jobs right and left. A friend of mine was recently fired and as we sat drinking coffee in our other office, the question was “how do I handle this?” Handling being fired is not easy, it is not meant to be easy; it is a rejection, and few of us like rejection. It is also in some ways a betrayal, because look at all the extra hours I put in or all the extra things I did for you outside my job description. And it is also part of who we are, many of us define ourselves by what we do, who we work for, and what size paycheck we bring in.

As I sat with my friend, we discussed strategies for what she was going to do next. One of the first things we agreed on was that she will never badmouth the company, or speak well of the company. She will simply admit she worked there. For companies that rely on word of mouth for attention this is important, you do not have to say anything bad, or good, rather say nothing at all speaks volumes. Plus not saying anything bad means you get to be the adult in the room. When it comes down to interview time at your next possible gig, be honest and say you were let go, but also say that you saw this as a huge opportunity to retool, retrain, and revise what you wanted to, and this is why you are here interviewing now.

One of the other things we did was read Penelope Trunk over on her blog, she has two very good articles on how to manage being let go from a company. The two articles were on her own experience being let from Yahoo, and another one on some of the tougher decisions that she and her husband had to make when they decided to strike out on their own.

Another thing we talked about was survivability, or the “backup plan”. She had one, which I thought was rather interesting, which was to keep her skills up by volunteering at various non-profits and other organizations. We talked about the Seattle Startup Scene as one way to approach this, and we also talked about taking minor equity in some of the smaller startups for work she was doing for them. When we ran the numbers, it was a good way to defer income for later on, but she also needed to pay the bills now.

Getting income now is always going to be a challenge. There are always bills to pay, cats to feed, and gasoline to purchase. No money in means changes in lifestyle, that weekly pizza bill for 25 dollars a week could be a savings of 100 dollars a month if not spent. Not everything has to go out the window, but money management just became a needed skill. The good part is that she is married, so there is some income coming into the house, but belt tightening is in order. She decided against unemployment filing for now, hoping that she can find something in the short term. She also discussed becoming an “a-dasher” with any one of the consulting firms here in town as a possible option. Realistically, it is much easier to become an “A-dasher” (Microsoft contract employee with an orange badge) than it will be to find a decent long term job in this market. At the very least it will show that she was working soon after being let go.

One of the more interesting things to come out of the conversation though was the idea of “never again”. She really did not want to work for another company that saw her as a cog in the machine. That means she needs to start her own company, her own startup with what she knows and the people she knows outside and inside the company she used to work for or other companies and friends. I have seen this a lot in people as the recession grinds on into its third year, people worked hundreds if not thousands of extra off book hours at their job only to find out that they were replaceable. There is a certain amount of resentment on that idea of “look at all the free work I did for you”. The reality is that technology is a 60 to 80 hour work week regardless of where you are; she thought it might be refreshing to only have to work 40 hours as a contractor and spending the rest of the time working on her own safety net. She really liked the idea of starting her own company doing something she loves to do, and taking that big risk was very important to her. She needs to work out the logistics of it with the people in her life who will be most impacted, but it looks like this is something she is going to seriously do, and being the general advisor that I have been for years will help her get started.

The gamut of emotions wandering throughout the conversation was also something that needs to be discussed. Being fired is never going to be easy, and in many ways the person being fired goes through the same process as grief, we deny, we get angry, we discuss, until we finally accept that indeed this thing happened, and now it is time to do something different. There is no easy way to manage this process, there are no hard and fast answers, and while there are jobs out there, finding one that pays a living wage is difficult. What makes this interesting is that this is a hit home for me, I have been there in the past and came to many of the same conclusions that she has come to. Work can be transitory for some people; it is accepted practice to work about 3 years in a job now without taking any weird questions at interview time. What a person does with that knowledge is important, as they will be continually planning their next three year plan to make sure there is always a safety net.

Job loss is never easy, as I stated in the opening paragraph, it is not meant to be easy for multiple reasons. Hopefully though you have someone, friends, family, compadres who can help you get support you do need. There is a huge mental toll on being fired, there are huge financial risks to being fired, and there is a hugely uncertain job market right now as well. Even though Silicon Valley is hiring, things are a bit quieter in other locations.  If you have been fired, drop me a note here and let me know what you did to survive it and how you overcame it. I will share these with my friend.

Note: I wrote this and I don’t think I posted it anywhere. Being fired is traumatic, it is that simple, and my friend has since moved on and gotten an awesome job with an employer she really likes. She is a temporary contractor now, but they are trying to find room to make her full time. She is questioning the idea of going full time, because she does not want to end up in another bad situation. While she loves being a contractor, I really don’t think she is going to take the FTE job that they are arranging for her. Have to see how this goes, right now though she is happy, healthy, and simply enjoying her life.

Related articles

• How Soon is ‘Too Soon’? – On Replacing Recent Hires With ‘Better’ Ones (smallbusiness.uprinting.com)
• A strengthening job market reflected in numbers (news.yahoo.com)
• The February job market: not bad by recent standards (lbo-news.com)
• If You Are Going To Fire Me Today, Here Are A Few Tips On What To Say (managebetternow.com)

Sensual (Lilly Blum) (Photo credit: Wasfi Akab (I'll be back soon))

The comic book industry is hard, good times or bad times, the entire industry has crashed and burned so many times there should be a hazard warning out for anyone insane enough to get into this industry. The economic recession of 2008 through today has been very hard on comic book stores as customers stop spending money on comic books, and spend money on food. Comic Book Ink in Tacoma was in serious trouble by the time mid 2011 was rolling around, and in danger of closing. In their original announcement they were behind at least 30,000 dollars with their credit maxed out, their suppliers working on a cash upfront process, and they were in danger of not getting their weekly shipments in that would help keep customers coming in.

How they responded to this was very different than many companies though, they started appealing to the general public to help them out. Being frank and upfront about their situation, they posted a note spelling out exactly what was going on, and what would need to be done to help them survive. Then they went public, seriously public, twitter, Facebook, reddit, all picked up the thread which allowed people to donate any amount of money to help keep the store going.

Once the social media channels picked up the story, the local press started running with it because it is a unique social story, as well as a feel good story. If you help now, Comic Book Ink which serves Tacoma could keep operating and selling comic books. Not just sell comic books, but continue to be the Eisner Award winning comic book store that they are. Not just a comic book store, but a Tacoma treasure that is recognized across the USA as a special place to go, visit, and spend money at.

The appeal worked, and worked brilliantly as the Facebook likes, twitter retweets, and reddit fans started spreading the story around the internet. The more attention it got, the more it was liked, retweeted and reshared. The end of the story culminated with an Indiagogo project to raise the last five thousand dollars that they needed, and at the last minute they were able to get the full amount they needed to stay open. The way that the story was shared across the community also incorporated other blogs and their audiences to help drive the story home. That a special place was in financial trouble, and they really needed help.

Some of the key differentiators though were that they are an award winning comic book store and generally respected throughout the entire comic book industry. They were also very honest about their situation and exactly what they needed. The story was true; it rang true, and overall was easily verifiable as a real issue. That was one of the more important aspects of the social media campaign that they used to get the message out, real need that could only be addressed by real fans who wanted to help keep the comic book store open.

Effectively they were able to keep this message; we need help, in front of their fans throughout the months it took them to raise the money they needed to keep their doors open. The use of Facebook and Reddit was probably the two most important sections of keeping their message in front of the public. Reddit is known for its fanatical devotee’s to a cause, as well as being one of the more important places on the internet for finding out cutting edge issues. Between these groups the message kept on getting repeated and reposted as way to help out someone who really needed it, and really deserved to be helped.

While I do not believe that just any comic book store could have done this, Comic Book Ink’s use of social media formed much like a grass roots political campaign. I do not think that the original intention of the store owners was to have the process extend and expand the way it did, but once it did, the comic book store owners were very good about keeping the momentum going using their Facebook page and updating their fans on what was happening. The combination of grass roots, and continually updating interested parties also played a great role in the message that was being shared across the internet.

The key points of this:

1. Believable story for an award winning comic book store in danger of closing
2. The economy and the havoc it has had on just about everyone on main street
3. An unplanned grass roots campaigned that once noticed was fed with a steady stream of updates so that people could follow the progress of the campaign
4. A planned and well executed inclusion of traditional media and social media to get the story out
5. An honest reason why they needed the help, including a total amount, and a way to reach endgame, or the full amount needed
6. An interesting and successful use of Indieagogo to help raise the last five thousand dollars

If your social media campaign is not using any or all of these elements to help raise money for a project, you might want to take a closer look at what was going on with Comic Book Ink by reading the many articles that went out on this save the store campaign. Google is an awesome way to start becoming familiar with this story, and it is well worth watching for anyone who is looking to do something similar.

This was originally posted on Techwag 2.0, and with a quick follow up – Comic Book Ink is still going strong, and without the crushing debt burden that they have taken on. The social media campaign really helped save a local business.

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• The Comic book Straight Jacket (comicsforge.com)
• SLG Comics, Kickstarter, and the reality of being a comic book publisher (comicsforge.com)
• Franny Vales Great Consummations (adultcomics.comicsforge.com)
• Surviving the new age of Digital Comics (comicsforge.com)