I am an enormous fan of Seth Godin. In this two minute video here he talks about the value - or otherwise - of social networking.

It's fun to play around with social networking, but if you are running a business how much is it costing you to add new friends and keep up with old ones?

Try this exercise....

Start by giving your time a cost, an hourly rate. I talk about how to do this in "How to Bake a Business" but here's a quick snapshot. Take the annual salary that you could get as an employee and divide it by 1920 (40 hours a week for 48 weeks). So if you could earn $70,000 in employment land your hourly rate would be $36.46.

Then grab a diary for a week (or just a couple of days if a week is too long to bear) and make a note of how much time you spend on social networking. Write it down as you do it. If you leave noting it until the end of the day you will be enormously inclined to under estimate it (as when keeping a food diary as a prelude to a diet).

Now add up the hours you have spent on Social Networking.

Armed with your total social networking hours, multiply it by your hourly rate. The result is the cost to you of social networking over the diary period.

If that doesn't alarm you, calculate what it is costing you over a year.

Yes it's fun, yes it can make good business sense. But yes, social networking comes at a cost!

Here is an audio interview I did with ABN - the Australian Businesswomens Network. In the interview I talk about the Basic Business Recipe, how to manage (not cut!) costs and some thoughts about getting your business to work better. Much of what I say is covered in the book. So if you've not bought the book yet, listen as a taster. If you have bought it you might like to hear this short snappy version.

Can you get to Coogee on 8 July? I will be speaking at a Business Booster event with a fabulous line up. More details here. The event is being hosted by Carolyn Stafford of Connect Marketing - she also features in "How to Bake a Business"

You don’t have to have a big business to have a great business.

What would make you happier? Enticing people to become new customers or loving and nurturing the ones that you’ve got?

Which is better? 100 customers who pay their bills, keep coming back and love what you do or 1000 customers who are hard to manage and ambivalent because you are so busy loving everyone else?

Sam's cupcakes are the best because Samantha making them for you, not 2000 others

Sharon's yoga is the best because she's working on your pose, not filling 100 classes

Are you happy being small? Tell us about your business

The simple example usually trotted out to illustrate the brutality of seasonality is the ice cream business. Frenetic in summer; struggle city for the rest of the year.

But at Max & Mina’s Ice Cream, in New York sales were up 40% over the winter, more employees were hired and the owner was working the longest hours he had done in 12 years.

Why?

Because, according to the owner, Mr Becker, in tough economic times ice cream “is an affordable comfort food”

It’s no accident that Max& Mina’s ice cream is doing well during the cold of winter and the freezing of our wallet. Mr Becker made it happen. He tells people they deserve ice cream, he tells them it’s a little treat, he tells them it’s affordable.

And while he’s doing that he is also telling a tale to the grumps who say that you can’t sell ice cream in winter.

Daily juice: Lot’s of folk make assumptions about what can and can’t be done. Do a Max & Mina’s, prove them wrong.

You might remember Symbiosis from Biology lessons; it’s where two different species live intertwined lives for mutual benefit.

Think of Nemo (the clownfish) who lives in the sea anemone. Nemo looks after the sea anemone by scaring off unwanted guests and the sea anemone protects Nemo by poisoning intruders.

Symbiosis works for businesses too; but in a find-a-guest way, not by killing them.

Bread Euphoria, an organic artisan bakery shared building space with Quient, a Pottery business. Originally the pottery business had the street front and the bakery was at the back.  But because the bakery business was going rather well they needed larger premises.

What did they do?

The bakery moved to the front of the building and the potter to the back.

You may think that this spelled doom for the pottery. But actually it was quite the opposite

As Andrew Quient, the owner of the pottery, said "what's important for sales is not the amount of display space, but the number of eyeballs going past the pottery."

Yep, the bakery drummed up business for the pottery.

Daily juice: what would be a good symbiotic relationship for your business?

So Christian Lacroix, the French massively-expensive-haute-couture fashion house, last week declared insolvency. The official story being that it fell foul of the global recession.

Well yes, those that could are spending a little less on luxury goods. But Chanel, Dior, Hermes…. still seem to be making money: so it can’t just be down to the customers. Maybe it’s because Christian Lacroix was a struggling stand-alone business competing against couture cohorts – no, it was itself owned by the Falic group.

The reason seems to be that, like many struggling businesses, Christian Lacroix simply hadn’t actually worked out how to make money. The business has never been a financial success, it had never turned a profit and last year it reported a €10 million loss.
It has been said, diplomatically, of Lacroix that his brilliance was unquestionable, but his grip on reality a little less certain.
Daily Juice:  It isn’t enough to have a brilliant idea or brilliant product, You have to work out how, brilliantly, to make money out of it.

PS: I met two kitchen table tycoon businesses yesterday both of whom, sadly, hadn’t worked out how they were going to make money. And these weren’t new businesses, they were over 3 years old …..

Tennis legend Martina Navratilova, when asked about her winning ways, said "it doesn't really matter how well you are playing when you are playing well, what matters is how you are playing when you are playing badly”

I liked this.

Keeping up enthusiasm, fabulous customer service, being nice to employees, getting through the daily dross. We can’t be on fire all the time.

I think the difference between a good business and a less-than business is not about our moments of brilliance but in keeping up our (high) standards when morale is low.

I’m reading a book called Nudge. It’s by two economists (but don’t let that put you off). There’s lots of good stuff in the book but my fave so far are these:

 - We are all hopeless at filling in forms. Not because we are stupid, or the forms are hard to complete, but because it is boring and we are procrastinators. Yes!

 - More often than not the ‘default’ selection on a tick-the-boxes choice type thing is actually the best alternative.

I was amazed at this. My natural skepticism had led me to always pick something other than the default option. I have forever thought that the default option was the rip-off option. Seems I was wrong!

The examples in the book are about complicated stuff like choosing superannuation plans, mortgages, health insurance and the like. So I’m not saying you should blithely accept the default option but maybe don’t completely disregard it either.

I love Jo Malone. I’m a Pomegranate Noir/ Lime and Basil girl.  Jo Malone is expensive and my guess is that the sad economy is doing them absolutely no favours.

The other day I received an email from them headlined “Enhanced delivery options and reduced standard delivery” The title is a bit of a mouthful and the email is not the most exciting I have ever received, but it’s a good example of what to do with your pricing.

If you are going to do a discount, discount delivery, add-ons and incidentals but don’t discount your product. Discounting makes your product cheap, not desirable.