Besides Gary, there’s one other critical person associated with my business — my occasional business partner Andrea, of Four Tails Lampwork. Although we have separate online businesses, we team up to do shows, and that works out VERY well for us.
One reason is that our styles of work are complimentary but not copy-cat; she works mostly in soft glass and I work mostly in boro, and we both exploit the characteristics of our chosen glass as much as possible.
Having a second person there to “share the load,” so to speak, makes doing shows when both of you have a full-time Sort-of-Day Job possible. At our last show, Andrea’s job actually got seriously in the way to the point that on both Friday and Saturday she couldn’t get to the show until mid-afternoon. Without the partnership she would have had to cancel, but with two of us I could handle things (with help, of course, from Gary) until she got there. In return, I got to sleep in a bit on Sunday, which I muchly needed! It also makes it possible to make a bathroom run without worrying, or to take a walk around to peruse and schmooze the other vendors.
We also have complimentary strengths and weaknesses. She’s better than I am at the schmoozing; I’m better with the numbers. So Andrea does the bulk of the meet-and-greet and I handle the accounting, and we’re both happy.
Of course, we get along very well! If we didn’t, none of the above would matter at all because we wouldn’t be able to work together!
!
& Being a Polymath">Branding & Being a Polymath
November 17, 2009 in Business, Cat Comments, Lampworking & Glass, Rantings by Julia | No comments
My business partner Andrea commented on Twitter this week that
She’s not alone — I could almost have written that tweet, though mine would have said “I tweet about rescue cats, computing, lampwork and jewelry, bellydancing, chainmaille, and teaching.” The same thing is true of my blogging, as you know if you read Art of the Firebird regularly. I blog and Tweet and post about whatever I damn well please, which means I may focus on beads one day, cats the next, and my sore abs the third.
Of course, this goes against everything you see from the self-proclaimed “social media experts” who state that your Brand must be tightly focused and contain nothing extraneous or unrelated to your major product. By this theory, my blog/website/Twitter/Facebook should be focused only on my lampworking/jewelry business because everything else confuses my branding. I should have another set of accounts for animal rescue, and yet another for teaching matters (okay, I DO have a separate web site for the teaching, but still…).
I suspect that the people who say this either a) don’t have a real life into which they fit social media and marketing, or b) have no clue about being a Polymath (or, as Barbara Sher terms them, a Scanner). It’s just not realistic to manage multiple blogs or social media accounts for different things. There’s the time factor, of course, but there’s also the “keeping things straight” factor. Sure as anything I’d mis-post half of what I write to the wrong place.
I’m NOT only a lampwork glass artist, or a chainmailler, or an animal rescue activist, or a computer scientist, or a professor, or anything else. I’m all of these, and more. If I limit my postings to only one aspect, that isn’t the true me. Any polymath will tell you that we can’t be limited to one thing — even my brother the social media maven doesn’t manage to limit his Twitter and Facebook to one focus!
In truth my “Brand” is ME, ALL of me, and that’s what my blog, and my Twitter account, and my Facebook account, reflect. So SEO/marketing/branding rules be damned, I’m branding the Polymathic Me, all of her, because that’s what makes me unique!