FunnyBusiness: Everything About Business Except The Bottom Line

Should FunnyBusiness be my starter blog name?

                    

              
                      

Call it blogger's naivite. When I named this blog, FunnyBusiness I wasn't thinking long term.

I wasn't thinking that there was a newspaper columnist who owned the url for funnybusiness who might one day decide to start blogging.

I didn't think that another group of bloggers would launch their own blog called, Funny Business.

When you are in business, not thinking ahead is a problem. I have a problem.  In the next few days I will make a decision of whether to continue calling this blog FunnyBusiness or come up with a new name that  is less replicable.

I'm on the fence. But I'm thinking. You can read more at Blogher

Image Credit:Flickr Word Art

Life after Google

Getting Fired is nothing new. Getting fired for blogging is a relatively new phenomenon. What do you after you've been fired by Google for firing? You start an online contest inviting other people to share their best fired stories. For details visit Simply Fired.

The contest began on Monday. Grand prize is a cruise. There's also the obligatory iPods.You need to get your entry in by the 26th of August.

In case you want to see exactly why Mark Jen was fired from Google, he has some of the posts on his new site.

"Hi everyone, mark jen here – the fired google blogger. my story has been covered in a ton of different channels, but here's a new take on it. i've taken clips from my blog entries and added some commentary, kind of like that commentary soundtrack on your dvds that no one ever puts on; of course, links to my full blog entries are included if you're interested (just click on the links :-P)"

The contest just began on Monday. T I think there's still  lots of opportunity to win that cruise. Here's a sample of the entries so far.

My official title was “office manager” of a small distribution plant but I was the only one who worked in the office. It sounded good. One day, my redneck boss asked me take the ‘company car’ (a 1974 gutted-out green Gremlin) to deliver a machinery part to another office a few blocks away. As I drove out of the parking lot, I accidentally ran the front passenger wheel off the edge of the road into a rain-filled ditch. It got stuck. I tried franticly to jog the car out by throwing it back-and-forth thru the gears. My boss spotted me and ran out of the building. Bad timing. Just then, I flipped the car into reverse and ran over his foot. Mud splattered all over his face, hair and clothes. He was fuming! The good news was that he was not hurt but there were some nasty wheel marks all over his left shoe and ankle. We finally got the car out. The following week he fired me-- after I left a forklift in gear and running. It smashed into the warehouse garage door and got imbedded.

Good luck. Have fun. Oh, and Harold "Thanks for the heads up."

FunnyBusiness : The Brand Manifesto

When a consultant ( that includes me) talks to clients about branding they usually get around to the explanation that your brand is actually the relationship you have with your customers, clients, etc.

Today many companies are creating Brand Manifestos-- as Jennifer Rice  writes at What's Your Brand's Mantra

"... a brand manifesto as a declaration of 1) the core intention of the brand, 2) the guiding principles of the brand, and 3) the policies that guide each department to effectively realize the stated intention. So unlike brand visions or missions (which only focus on intention), a brand manifesto should get into the nitty gritty of turning the intention into reality"

Since Sunday's breakout discussion on Citizen Journalism at the Blogher Conference, I've been thinking a lot about the core intentions of FunnyBusiness.

This is what you'll find if you read the "About" section of this blog. I've updated it to address some of the issues of blogging

This blog delights in telling tales out of school. It’s about what really goes on in corporate America, corporate England,corporate Israel, corporate Australia, corporate Argentina...well you get it.

The focus  of this blog is on the story, not who’s telling it, or what company the story is about. I’ll leave that to the investigative reporters. If these stories were attributable and on the record, heads would surely roll, departments would re-org and HR would be working overtime and chances are someone would be dooced.

These are real stories, about real people, who work real jobs, for real organizations. Only the names have been changed to protect people's employment. If you have a story that you want to share, share with me.

I couldn’t make this stuff up. Not the shenanigans, not the showstopping, not the hidden agendas, and definitely not the policy statements.

Take the vice president who invited her team for a holiday dinner even though her boss had sent a memo saying all holiday parties were canceled as part of the company’s aggressive cost-cutting measures. (The company had just announced 6,000 layoffs.) How did she pull off her holiday party? She had her administrative assistant charge the dinner and then she, the VP approved the charge. And where did she learn such devious behavior? From her boss of course, who had the VP charge their holiday get-together the week earlier.

That’s right. The guy who put a kibosh on everyone else’s holiday celebrating used the system to break his own rule. Is that what the HR department means when they talk about modeling behavior? Corporate America is my playground and I invite you to come into the sandbox to see what kind of fun people have been up to. There’s no end to the mischief making!

I do try to be honest. However, I'm not sure if I'm always fair.Can you be fair when you are writing from a point of view.? Can you be fair if you're telling one person's perspective of a story?  I'm not trying to tell you the whole story here, just a story.

Here's my promise: I will do the best job I can to be honest, to adhere to the basic principles of blogging ethics . I will include a note at the bottom of all posts when I've changed some one's name, job, location or sex.

I will also include a note when the post has been edited beyond spelling and basic grammar errors which, if you read my blog on a regular basis, know that I have a definite love-hate relationship with commas.

No chance of getting dooced here. I work for myself. I don't write about my clients. ( Okay, I may write about them after we haven't worked together for around three years).

Blogomist vs. Citizen Journalist

To get ready for last weekend's Blogher conference I had some new business cards printed up. Blogher wasn't the only reason( the url and email were incorrect and there is just so many times you can scratch out an email address and write in a correct one),but as I was updating the card, I hesitated on what I should call myself. Am I a journalist? a columnist? a citizen journalist? Or, a Blogomist?

I chose blogomist. Not just because,as my friend John thought, I was playing off of the word bigamist --I reminded him that I chose blogomist much as a biology professional would call themselves a biologist.

Blogomist is an intentional choice.While in my heart of hearts I think of myself as a journalist,I know in this blog I do not always adhere to the code of ethics a newspaper requires.

That's not to say that I fabricate stories or sources, I don't . But, I definitely do not follow some of the fundamental rules that a newspaper editor would demand.  In particular:no anonymous quotes.

I"m all about anonymous quotes and often I rely on one person's experience to tell a story because it is their story, their perspective.

My friend John was partially right about why I chose blogomist. I think it sounds funny and it fits in  with the tone of this blog which is to share serious topics in a lighthearted format. So blogomist I am, at least for the time being.

Blogher was exhilarating. I'm still in process mode. It usually takes a couple of days for the real significance of a conference to settle in. However, there was one very profound moment for me. It was during a breakout session on Citizen Journalists.

To read more about that conversation and Blogher in general, check out Jay Rosen's PressThink. I'm recommending you read Jay because it was something he said during a breakout session that was my biggest AH-HA moment of the conference.

The conversation centered on citizen journalists and the pros and cons of that title. After about 30 minutes Jay suggested that it didn't matter what you called yourself as long as your readers understand what they've signed up for when they come to your blog. In other words, we should share our own code of ethics.

In other words, be transparent. I am committed to that and always include a note at the end of a post to alert viewers when I have changed names to protect people's jobs.

I'm going to be creating my own code of blogging over the next couple of days. In the meantime, A comment by Amy Gahran at Contentious led me to Rebecca Blood's Weblog Ethics which I basically follow.

More to come. I have to get to work now. See ya