Start a business - 7: Entrepreneurs do make mistakes, learn from them and react. PR and blogs and how your Company should deal with them

I take the recent events I have been going through as an opportunity to continue my series "Create a company" which I will just call now "Start a Business" as many people suggested me I should.

Good entrepreneurs are not the ones that never make mistakes, they are the ones that learn the most and react the best to their mistakes.
I don't know if I am a good entrepreneur, but I know I make a lot of mistakes.

I hear a lot about people who talk about my mistakes as an Entrepreneur in 8 years of business, usually they talk about them criticizing me sometimes strongly.

I make mistakes all the time, every day. I learn much more from my mistakes than my right decisions and people who want to become entrepreneurs often do not launch their projects because they fear making wrong decisions. I believe they should just take it as a normal entrepreneurial behavior.

Same with people who laugh at entrepreneurs who make mistakes, they clearly do not understand it is in the exact definition of an entrepreneur do make mistakes all the time. The people who do not take risks make fewer mistakes.

One of the last mistakes I have made is to disclose [FR] the information of my company Ublog being acquired by Six Apart to the French press before releasing it on my own blog and to Ublog users.

I read many people writing about my mistake who say "How can he make such mistakes having graduated from the business school that he did? Didn’t they teach him communications and marketing there?". Well precisely this is not the type of thing people learn at business schools -or at least the type of thing "I" learnt-.

How do you get PR ?

You learn PR by experimenting it. When I graduated from the business school, I did not even know that a PR agency even existed and I was wondering how my competitors or other companies got the press they got. Since the launch of Ublog as a company, we got a lot of press [FR] in France about Blogging, Ublog and Typepad. Now I see many bloggers in general or bloggers from competition who wonder how and why we got so much press, why does the journalists only talk about our solutions and not theirs, and they even laughed at the journalists on their blogs calling the articles advertising.

Well, as I commented on some blogs talking about this, getting press is not rocket science for most people and for most journalists, the subject must be interesting for the journalists, you have to prepare their work as much as you can if you want to speed the process by writing notes about what you may want the press to talk about (so that their articles are easier to write), and finally, you have to get the message to them.

For this, if you have had relationships with journalists for years -like me, but I started with none-, it helps, but also a good PR agency helps. The agency will write a press release if you are not capable of doing it yourself, send it to their journalist database if you don't have your own and call them back to possibly get their interest if you are lazy, don't have the time, or don't simply don't want to do it yourself.

Obviously, my above remarks cannot be generalized and good journalists do not wait for Press Releases or calls from PR agencies to arrive, they choose a subject, make an exhaustive research on it, verify their sources and in that process may finally integrate information coming from PR agencies, but not always.

How may you even get more PR ?

So there is something I learnt over the years is that when you have something important to announce for your company, your PR agency will always ask you to give the exclusivity of the information to some influential titles to try to get a better article. What they call "exclusivity of the release" is actually just giving the information to some journalists before others. When I was running a Web Agency back in 1996, we kept using this as we kept being asked by journalists the exclusivity of the new competitions we won (usually large brands such as Chanel -the site design is still mostly the same graphical charter we designed in 1998 or 99- would always make agencies compete to win the business).

So when I announced the acquisition of my Company by Six Apart, my PR agency and myself called a few journalists, some of them were interested by the news, and some of them asked us for exclusivity. I thought a lot about it as I know how PR is changing with blogging and I hesitated a lot this time, because not only did I think about the consequences with the bloggers, but I also actually hate this because when you give exclusivity to some journalists, the other ones are upset.

Discussing with some of them, I finally decided to give only a few hours advantage to Le Journal du Net (article [FR]), one of the most known online source in France for Internet business, and in print to Les Echos (article [FR]) which is one of the first financial daily in France, it belongs to the Financial Times. I apologize to other French journalists who may be reading this, but both journalists who wrote these articles insisted on the exclusivity and I accepted. Actually, Le Journal du Net did not benefit much of the advantage, although the article was ready quickly, they only uploaded it on their servers hours after some of their competitors. This I would say was not a mistake PR wise, it was a mistake blogging World wise.

The old rules have already changed, blogging changes the deal

Obviously I had thought of sending a special email or releasing the information on the Ublog home page before or at the same time as the press and honestly I had decided to do so. Discussing with my team, we talked about the impact it could have on the few angry Ublog users (on 22 000 blogs created even though not all are active) as we already had a lot of discussions months ago when we disclosed the fact that Ublog became exclusive representative of Six Apart in Europe, which this time we disclosed first on my blog (on my Ublog blog [FR] and my brand new TypePad blog [FR]).

The fact that we released it first on my blog before the press did not change anything to the fact that some Ublog users were not happy about the news and we launched a discussion immediately [FR] about it to try to solve the issue. So back to the decision about informing our users first, we had learnt from the past experience that some users were unsatisfied by us offering them to switch to TypePad (if they wanted to) and we knew these users will react strongly to any news anyway.

We also believed most of the Ublog users did not care at all about the news of Ublog being acquired by Six Apart as our product offering would not change at all (TypePad was already offered to them for a long time). As we expected the strong critics and insults from the users that we knew would react, we decided not to send anything to anybody. Having seen the reactions we had recently, this proved to be true in most cases and we saw many comments that showed that people do not care much about the company being acquired but more about the product offer, and that is normal. However this still was a mistake as it gave an additional argument to the angry users to say how poorly we communicate with them and gave some people interested by the story such as Stephanie (note) strong arguments too to explain why we don't talk well to our users.

So yes, it was a mistake, the articles we got in the press were clearly not worth all this.

Now if you look at it in a more detailed way, I think again about people who tell me that I should have learnt at my business school not to make mistakes like this one. What they do not take into account is that generally the rules of anything in business change all the time and Entrepreneurs learn more by experience than by what they are taught at school (actually many do not have business education and the business school I graduated from trains many managers and very few Entrepreneurs).

This time is special though, I have been reading and blogging a lot about Journalism & Blogging. My three main sources on this topic are obviously Joi, Dan and his new blog about his book, and the excellent PR Blog I can only advise you to read (check this interview of Dan on it). PR are changing completely with blogging, not only because the journalists do not have the exclusivity of writing the news anymore, not only because they want the Companies and the PR agencies to talk to them in a different way, but more importantly the clients of all products and services of all companies start to write their thoughts about them every day.

How did we react to the angry U-blog users ?

Immediately at the time of the launch of Typepad on Ublog, back in May 2004, we started a discussion on my post [FR] about the test Ublog users were doing with TypePad and I tried to listen as much as I could. There are tens of comments on these posts, with many satisfied bloggers comments too, and we also answered many emails. What people wanted mainly to hear is that we were not of course asking them to switch to TypePad by force, it was only an option, that the Ublog service as they knew it would stay if they chose not to shift. Also, to thank them for their trust since the beginning, we offered our paying users to have a TypePad pro account, a 15 euros per month value, for 4 euros, which is what they were paying. TypePad Pro has many more features than the old Ublog paid product, even though it lacks integration in the Ublog community. Many understood and either shifted or stayed on Ublog, which is fine too. The most angry people asked me to organize a chat, which I gladly accepted, and they unfortunately never joined it.

What was very difficult for us as well, is that there was no common voice, no common grouped request from them, even though they form a community. After this failed chat, the comments stopped on my blog and the complaints stopped for months. In the meantime, about 10 000 new Ublog blogs were created, not all of them being still active today of course.

When we announced the acquisition two weeks ago, I started a discussion [FR] again on my French blog (even though I started it too late) and it is going on now. As I have the same frustration as last time about the fact that a grouped angry users request does not exist, I have put together a proposal [FR] for them. In short, I reassured them again that
-if they do not want to switch to TypePad, they can stay on Ublog, we will maintain the service as long as we can
-we will make TypePad blogs ping the Ublog homepage so that the TypePad bloggers feel as still being part of the Ublog community if they like
-we will make the old paying Ublog product become free for its current users at the subscription renewal date, but we will leave them with all the current product features they have

One day after having posted this proposal, it seems that people came down and that we are solving as best as we can the issue. I continue to listen and to talk.

Now be careful, what happened to us will happen to you, too

We are a blogging company. What we wake up for every morning is to provide our clients the best tools to express themselves and build an audience (be it only their friends & family or a wider one). So no, we are not surprised that our clients use our own tools to say that they are not happy about our own services, this is absolutely normal. It just changes completely the way a Company interacts with its clients in general, it is happening to us first because we provide the tools (all our competitors, too).

This is why I think it is not fair and fair at the same time to say that all blogging companies communicate poorly with their users (see the comments: "Every blogging company whose services I have used has had an awful record for communicating with their customers"). Now when it comes to people wonder if I have tried to hide this issue to Six Apart, which is obviously not true, I am glad that Stephanie quickly updated her post.

We are all learning how to communicate in this new world. I am learning everyday and I learnt a lot in the last week alone. Don't think it will be only limited to blogging tools providers, expect your clients to "seem to feel that it is them who actually own the company" as well anytime soon. It is already happening to many companies such as Netflix, with the unofficial Netflix blog, hacking Netflix that the corporate communications department is ignoring so much right now (for how long with 30 000 customers reading and posting on it ?). I agree with the main author of the blog, "I think most companies don't get blogs yet".

This is going to spread to all businesses and we will all have to deal with it. As far as mistakes are concerned, expect me to do many, many, many more mistakes, and I will always try to listen, learn and react the best way I can, such as this time with close to a hundred comments on my French post that addresses the issue with the angry Ublog customers. I also address the issue in english too, to respond to this post, as not only your customers take part in the debate but also anybody interested in the issue.

As Didier says, "we see here clearly a side effect of using the blogs as a base for business communication. a few unsatisfied people can have a huge impact on the overall customer community and its feeling. some posts are acting as "unguided missiles" in the blogosphere. on the other hand, is the propagation of information really working in another way in the "real" world?"

I like this new World a lot, even though it is sometimes very hard to learn how to deal with it and it is clearly not the last time it will happen. This will just become business as usual. All Companies will have to listen to their clients and people interested in their products much more than they are used to, and they will have to talk to them in a different way, not through the standard "official story", which is dead.

I really hope the issue with our angry Ubloggers will be solved soon even though I have no doubts it is impossible to please everybody when you have thousands of users of any product.