Click…good deed…click…good deed…

Squidoo is Seth Godin’s newest invention. You can make a lens to gather all your stuff about a particular topic, and share it with others. For example, I have one for my business while other folks have done them for their interest in SciFi or cooking or, well, just about everything.

Squidoo earns money by selling ads. When someone clicks on the ads, Squidoo (and the lensmaster if s/he so chooses) earns a bit.  Lots of this money goes to charity and now there’s a chance to help even more–there are lenses devoted entirely to charitable contributions. I made one. Please go there and click on the ads. Send the url to others, and have them do the same. All the money generated will be donated to various causes like helping kids in Africa get anti-viral meds or to buy schoolbooks for other kids. It’s all good, and it’s so easy.

More fun…

Here’s a quick diversion, also in the creative vein (but much less time consuming than yesterday’s fun): can you guess the correct logo? How fast?

Hat tip to Jane G. (aka caffeinegoddess) for the link. You should check out her blog for many good things creative/advertising/design related.

Creative play for the day

Sometimes it’s a good thing to just “waste” time in some sort of creative play. I suggest Line Rider as a good toy to play with. Deceptively simple idea: draw the slope for the sledder to slide on. The results, however, can be spectacular.

Warning…addictive.

How’s business?

Thanks to everyone who participated in my quick, 4-question survey (request posted on ASMP Pro/Student and APAnet forums). The results are in. There were 100 respondents, so this is by no means extensive, but it’s probably a decent sample.

When asked how business in 2006 has been (total billings), 49% said they were up this year over 2005. 37% said they were down and 12% said it was about the same (note, total is not 100% because someone didn’t answer). The largest group was those who said they were up 26-50% over 2005 (17%), which sounds like good news to me. On the down side, 13% said they were down by more than 25% for the year. Ouch.

For October 2006 compared to 2005, 43% said they were up, 22% said “the same,” and 32% said “down.”

On the open-ended question about how the respondents thought the rest of the year would be, and why, the answers were mostly positive, with neutral next and then a few negatives. However, the negatives were highly negative. For example “all I hear is that budgets are low or non-existent” and “dizzzzmal [sic] at best. A lot of companies are going out of town” are two of the negative comments.

On the positive side, one photographer said s/he was expecting a $2 Million year (bravo!) and several others said that their marketing was paying off (ex. “We […] have repositioned ourselves in our markets, targeted new markets and are rebuilding a client base. This has been successful and we are growing steadily.”).

As for what kind of photographers responded, here’s the breakdown (note, multiple answers were possible):

Advertising   60%
Corporate    53%
Editorial     48%
Weddings/Event     18%
Other, please specify  27% (mostly architecture, portrait, and a coupe of fine arts people)

While there weren’t enough data to do hard interpretations, my general sense is that those who were working their marketing plans were correlated to those who had more positive results and/or outlooks. Whether this is because people with plans generally feel more in control of their businesses (and thus are more positive in attitude) or not, as I said, there’s no sure way of knowing.

Thanks again to everyone who participated!!

Ethics

Seth Godin, on his blog, recently posted about how the idea of some action being labeled “just business” is a warning sign–that is, when someone does something mean or nasty or unethical and says “C’mon, it’s just business.” I completely agree with Seth (yes, again).

Every day we get to make choices about how we choose to run our businesses. There are those of us who choose to make a little less money now rather than shoot for tobacco or to give away full rights for little or nothing, but in doing so, those people are standing up for their beliefs. They are being ethical.

Yes, my ethics and your ethics may not be 100% the same. Maybe you don’t have a problem with tobacco ads but I do. That’s fine. Those are the fine points of individual ethics–everyone has her/his own code.

But the larger issues should have commonality. I think we can all say that killing someone to improve business is right out. But what about putting someone out of business by, say, undercutting their fees. Is that okay? I say no.

See, business, for small creative businesspeople especially, is life. Besides the intimate connection between one’s art and one’s soul, on a practical level, if a creative’s business fails, s/he could lose her/his home, pretty easily. Is putting a creative and her/his family out on the street, just so one can make a buck/pound/euro/loony, ever acceptable?

What if it happened to you? What if someone undercut your business by lowballing, or badmouthed you to clients, or took credit for work done by you, etc. How would you feel?

Would it be “just business” then?