A lot of people claim to be “bloggers” for a living, but few people are actually making one. It’s astonishing how many times you’ll tell someone you blog your way to the bank only to have them tell tales of that one time their Google Ads gave them a spare $50 to play with.

Blogging is not just a career – it’s a lifestyle. You will swiftly realise that running a blog is not like running a website, or a magazine. It’s about researching both the world inside and outside of your head and constantly generating ideas without the assistance of a team.

First up is consistency. No one is going to stick with you unless you’re providing them with regular content (of a high standard, of course). Whether you’re talking about Cheeky Bingo or social networks, it’s imperative that you ensure your content is a constant stream to a user. Daily, weekly, even monthly – just don’t miss your self-set deadlines, or you’ll become yet another unreliable blog taking up space on someone’s RSS reader.

It’s also important to actually make your blog posts interesting to read. This seems simple enough, but it isn’t. Work on your writing style – keep it engaging, witty, informative, and even if you’re not going for the big laughs, ensure that you’re engaging with people on a level that makes it easy for them to digest what they’re telling you. This applies whether you’ve got a PhD in astrophysics or a college qualification in geography.

Last but not least, do not commit to a blog if you won’t enjoy it! Plenty of people start out well and then get demotivated, and if you’re hating the writing process, your finished content is going to showcase your distaste to anyone who wants to read it. So keep yourself keen, stay consistent, be informative and easy to read depending on your target audience, and most importantly – have fun! Good luck with your blog!

NB: this is a paid submission to divahh.com.

Guest post by Cam McRae

As the self-righteousness of those decrying the Vancouver riots reaches a fever pitch I find myself asking some uncomfortable questions. Not just of myself but of many of the people who found themselves swept up in the current of destruction and violence.

If I had been there when everything began to melt down – perhaps at the ripe age of 18 and filled with some scary combination of testosterone, adrenaline, alcoholic beverages and/or drugs – would I have found myself carried into the melee beyond the point of curious voyeur? Would I now be facing the wrath of friends, coworker and relatives? Would I have been expelled, lost my job, kicked off a team or perhaps be facing charges? I hope not but I’m afraid I can’t say for sure – because I’ve never found myself in the midst of a riot. I hope my younger self would have left immediately when things went sideways – but it’s a hope that lacks the confidence of experience.

Those who lit the first fires, those who swarmed and beat individuals or those who confronted police because the VPD’s officers were showing tremendous restraint, are not the people I’m talking about. Those who started the literal and figurative fires deserve to be the focus of the city’s rage and I hope they face the consequences of their actions. I’m referring to those like a young high school student who found himself in front of a large chanting audience – with a hockey stick that someone had handed him – faced with a wall of glass, or a young athlete whose buddies encourage him to pose for a photo in front of a burning truck on Georgia St. Or the water polo star that felt compelled to try to set a police car ablaze. That last example is particularly troubling and tragic, but are we really to conclude that this young lad had this planned, that we can explain his behaviour by looking at past examples from his life? If not then how do we explain it?

There’s one common theme I’ve noticed in every video, every photo and every description of the night’s events; everyone involved was human. Of course there are more commonalities; the overwhelming majority are young males, many have had too much to drink, smoke or injest otherwise. I was watching a youtube video http://bb.nsmb.com/showthread.php?t=142703 showing the faces of those cleaning up broken glass and other refuse – and virtually all of those faces – particularly the younger ones – have doppelgangers who caused the mess they were cleaning up.

The fundamental attribution error states that when we see others make mistakes we blame it on their character, their intelligence or perhaps even their race. Driving is a perfect example. That guy who cut you off in traffic is an idiot or asshole – not someone rushing home because his wife is in labour – or late for his first day work because his daughter was up all night vomiting.

On the other side is the actor-observer bias – which leads us to explain our own behaviour because of the situations we find ourselves in. We ran that red light because some cirumstance caused us to be in a hurry. These are mistakes all of us make every day – generally without knowing it.

When we see those who were swept up in the frenzy of chaos and violence we say they are bad people. This may be true in many cases – particularly when we consider those who brought tools of destruction to the party. But in many more cases the psyches of these individuals may have been twisted and diverted by the insanity they saw around them.

It is now virtually impossible for many of us to be aware on a daiy basis that we are animals. We started off as single cell beings and we’ve become increasingly complex over millions of years – but all that DNA, which has kept our species alive and growing, still courses through our veins and influences our actions on a daily basis. Herd behaviour describes how people like you and I – individuals – can act together in unplanned ways when we find ourselves in a group. We do things because we see others doing things – sometimes good and sometimes bad. How and why this happens long after we lived in herds to survive isn’t clear. What is clear though is that the morality of the mob sinks to the lowest common denominator and individuals find themselves doing things they would never normally do. Our reptilian brains take over and we act like imbeciles. I say ‘we’ not because I can remember an example when this has happened to me – but because we are all humans.

Many seem to be delighted by the public shaming facebook and other venues is bringing down on many rioters. I’ve been guilty of it myself. We savour the schadenfreude http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude and tell ourselves we are better – that we’d never do anything like that.

For some of us this may be true. Another herd behaviour is the well known ‘Bystander Effect’. This causes normally helpful, caring and productive members of society to fail to offer help to those in distress when there is a group witnessing the situation. The smaller the group the more likely it is that someone will help. There are those who aren’t affected by this tendency and they have been studied and shown to be fundamentally different from most of us. They are consistently more likely to make their own decisions in group situations – but they are a small minority. And there were many examples during the Stanley Cup riot of brave souls who stood up to the rampaging hordes – and sadly many of them paid for it with a shower of fists and feet.

While listening to a sports radio call in show I heard an interesting Vancouverite tell his tale. He was at the 1994 riot and he participated. He was young and perhaps a little drunk – he didn’t say – and carried by the masses to a place he never thought he would find himself. He was as disgusted and ashamed as you or I by what happened on June 15th 2011 – and he still can’t explain what happened to him the last time the Canucks lost a game 7 in the Stanley Cup Final.

Before you begin writing another self-righteous and self-congratulatory reply to this (as I have done) let me say that I was and am as disgusted, repulsed and ashamed as anyone by the events of this past Wednesday night. I sat mute disbelief in front of the television while the reputation of our beautiful city – where my parents and I were born and raised – was forever defaced. I also believe that those involved should face penalties for what they have done – particularly those who instigated the meltdown. But if we explain all of this by calling all of those involved idiots, vandals and morons who have nothing in common with the rest of humanity we risk having this scenario repeated again and again– as it has been throughout history.

I hyphenated environ-mentalism in this post because I was just over on Timmy’s “The Environment” page.

It’s awesome! [sarcasm] They have 5 environmental “events” that they deem worthy of a couple of sentences each. The events are meant to show the website visitor that Tim Horton’s is committed to the environment yet there is no follow up. There are no testimonials. In short, there is nothing to engage anyone. Even the few photos are lame.

After that visit I did a google search for “Tim hortons environmental issues” and BAMB! 21,000 results, most of them NOT in Tim’s favour. Including this blog, on the first page.

One of the posts was written in June 2009, 2 years ago! The post discusses giving kudos to Tim’s for their attempt at encouraging their customers to use recycle cups to receive a 10¢ discount. You can read the entire thing here.

The post also outlines that Tim’s have had no end of environmental activists at the door demanding they clean up their act. I guess that would explain why Tim Horton’s has not yet felt compelled to contact me about my concerns for our environment.

They get this all the time!

The thing is, they’ve obviously thrown so much money at the problem over the last several years. That Sustainability and Responsibility Report must have cost a few pretty pennies. They’re so close to a successful environmental campaign but they just can’t pull the trigger to get it to the store level.

It’s almost like the head office peeps sat around, brain stormed, hired experts, came up with a great strategy, wrote it all out, patted themselves on the back then left. What’s missing? Implementation!!!

I’m sorry about all the !!!!’s but this has been a problem for a long time. A problem that Tim Horton’s has recognized and yet, they do not seem, in all their collective corporate wisdom, to get the message across to Canadians.

I’m all about strategy so I’m going to go one better than suggesting they sort this out. I’m actually going to give Tim Horton’s an idea of how to begin. Yep, I’d do this for Tim’s and for the environment because I love Tim’s coffee (I’m sorry to those of you who are purists but I don’t like my coffee super strong.) Anyway, I want to help this National icon of Canada succeed where they are failing. I want them to be the best they can be!

Ready Timmy’s?

Here it is…..

You need a champion in each and every store with the Tim Horton’s name on it. Yep, it’s really that easy. You don’t even have to hire someone new (maybe in some places you might) It won’t cost much but the rewards will be so epic that you will wonder why the hell you hadn’t done it sooner.

I have some strategies for you too but you have to contact me. I want to help but since you don’t have anyone monitoring your branding online, you will have to find me first. I will continue to do everything in my power to stand out in this crowded internet space but you have to point yourself out to me to turn this into a conversation rather than a rant.

Many of my readers know that I also own a business blog that publishes content on the use of Social Media in the corporate, charitable and retail world. I do the research, summarize what I’ve learned and post articles to help anyone who would like to learn more about Social Media and its applications.

This blog is a little more personal. I use this space to offer up opinion and illicit action from my readers. I want people to find out something they don’t know when they come here. Something that may persuade them to take action.

Again, I do the research and share it with you.

In the case of Tim Horton’s lack of social responsibility I have not only done the research offline, at the retail level, but I have also done searches for things like “Tim Hortons Sustainability” and anything else that might lead to a reprieve for Tim’s store-level policy.

This week I found a site called 3BL Media. Quoting directly from their website: “We are the experts in corporate social responsibility, sustainability and cause marketing communications. Our experienced team of professionals has helped leading organizations, both large and small, from all corners of the globe get their message out. We are dedicated to helping businesses have a positive influence on society and the environment through information sharing that leverages technology and social media.”

When I read that I thought “great, a company that insists on social responsibility when iterating, or re-iterating, about the policies employed by organizations.”

What I learned was that they are, instead, a portal for companies to push their initiatives to a larger audience. Specifically an audience that actively looks for socially responsible corporations to support.

Ok, so that wouldn’t be a bad thing except that the experts at 3BL Media don’t actually screen or comment on the material they post. In fact, if you have a company that you’d like to promote on their site you can write the press release yourself (they don’t seem to offer that service) then submit it. I have not been able to determine if there is a fee for this service.

Essentially sites like 3BL Media are used for distributing media but I don’t see where the “responsibility” part comes in if companies like Tim Hortons can simply post their material and automatically have a degree of credibility simply by being featured on the site.

This didn’t sit very well with me. I wrote to the CEO of the company, Greg Schneider, and he had his Online Media Director get back to me. I was quite distressed to read several parts of John Howell’s email but this line was particularly confusing to me. “3BL Media is dedicated to corporate social responsibitiy-, sustainability-, and ESG -related missions, practices, initiatives, and events. Environmental issues are part of our focus, but we are not dedicated to the environment, per se.”

Huh?

So you promote companies that “claim” to be socially responsible and sustainable but you don’t place much focus on environmental issues? Ummm, did I miss something?

Here’s the bottom line; Tim Hortons cannot get their corporate initiatives out of the boardroom and into the restaurants. Rather than spend the money and time to do so, they prefer to spread endless corporate doublespeak around the net and hope that it will be sufficient to quiet their detractors.

Perhaps the fact that no one from Tims has tried to contact me is an indication that their corporate policy on online branding is to ignore complaints. Seems so.

While I am deeply ashamed of Tims I am equally distressed that an American company like 3BL Media (located in Mass.) seems to just take the word of companies promoting themselves as “responsible” on their site.

Who’s next? BP?

If Social Media can affect change we can start by showing Tims (and 3BL Media) that’s it’s not OK to say you’re going to do it. We need to insist they live up to their policies. We need to be vocal and loud and engaged. We need to share!

Please share this article with anyone you feel might be interested in TRUE CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY.

At the beginning of this week I wrote a blog post about Tim Horton’s dreadful sustainability efforts.

I haven’t heard from Tim’s.

I realize it may sound somewhat snooty to think that I would but if Tim Hortons has a social media team that monitors their brand online then there is really no reason why they should not be able to find the article and comment, or at the very least, contact me.

In fact, rather than being passive aggressive I also tried to add Director of Public Affairs, David Morelli, to my Linked In network, sending him a link to the article for his perusal.

Still nothing.

I heard today that a friend has forwarded the article to someone that should know if Tims is monitoring their brand online. Again, nothing.

So despite my efforts to get this in front of the corporate team (I even posted it, with a link, on their Facebook page and received “likes” from the general public.) I have heard nothing.

What’s even more interesting is that today Tim Hortons, through their Facebook page, announced their Sustainability and Responsibility Report.

Wow.

While I applaud the notion of such a report I am dismally disappointed in this execution. The first 20 pages are filled with corporate cheerleading and pats on the back for their great initiatives. There are lots of nice graphs too, to break up the monotony of the 85 pages of “Look how great we’re doing!”.

Uggg.

I’m so much more disappointed now than I was before this report was published. First of all, who wants to read 85 pages of this nonesense when all one has to do to see if Tim Hortons is sustainable is simply walk a block or two to the nearest restaurant and take a look in the garbage bin?

Secondly, it’s clear this report has been written to applaud the corporate initiatives to shareholders and board members. It’s not written for the general public and it’s either laziness or apathy that has allowed someone to post this to their site and claim it answers all the sustainability questions.

There are pages and pages on what they have been doing to create this report. How the “commitment” and “goals” have been determined. And while they claim that sustainability is written into their core values one is hard-pressed to understand if they simply mean sustaining Tim Hortons restaurants rather than any sort of environmental responsibility.

Come on Tim Hortons! We want you to succeed. We want you to be a leader in Canada. We’re cheering for you! Why aren’t you paying attention to us?

Believe me, I know the frustration of bureaucratic paralysis. I get that pushing initiatives through a giant corporate machine is an exercise in patience and manipulation. But this is too important to make such a mess of.

I’m confident that I could put together a team of trainers and experts who could turn Tims into a corporate leader rather than an embarrassment to those of us who believe that Canada deserves a better role model.

I am a die-hard Tim Horton’s fan! I love the coffee. I love the prices. I love that Tim Horton is a Canadian hockey hero. I love that they put kids through camp. I’m a fan.

As a fan, I can no longer sit idly by and watch as my beloved Tim Horton’s continues to ignore the environmental crisis that they’re causing.

I’m so sad to say that Tim’s is a failure at sustainability. It breaks my heart but it’s true.

Now, I’m not saying that the Tim Horton’s corporate people are not unaware of this and have not made an effort to do something about it. I get it. They’ve put recycle bins in the restaurants and have china available to people who eat in. These initiatives are great but they are NOT WORKING!

First of all, the bins that have popped up all over Tim’s in BC has a place for “waste” and a place for “recyclables” but the image on the “recyclables” does not include cups. Obviously the #1 culprit for waste.

There is no where to recycle the cups.

But that is not the worst part. Not by a long shot. Not so long ago, when you stood at the cash and placed your order the cashier would ask “eat in or take out?”. If you replied “in” they would serve your coffee in a mug and your food on a plate.

Now there is no question. (I can list the several restaurants I have tested to see if they do or do not ask) Every cup of coffee is served in a paper cup unless you are like me and insist that it be in a mug or you have, at the ready, your recycle cup.

Today, I was at Tims. (as I am almost daily) I ordered my coffee “for here, in a mug”. The cashier keyed it in and the girl next to him put milk in a paper cup then started adding coffee while I was practically yelling at her to put it in a mug!!! I was so upset that a cup had now been wasted by my order. I pride myself on the fact that I have not used a paper cup in over a year. I use only my recycle cup for take out and mugs for eat in. What’s worse is, she threw it away because there is no paper cup recycling behind the cash at our local restaurant.

My passion is well-known at our local Tims. I am quite sure that I am considered a nut job by the staff but this is serious.

Tim’s head office professes to be doing something about the environment. They have tons of posters asking people to recycle and/or purchase a cup. But they are grossly negligent in educating the staff and customers on these initiatives.

I would, gladly, volunteer to visit Tim Horton restaurants across the lower mainland and perform a sustainability assessment on them to help the mucky-mucks in Toronto understand that they are failing miserably at sustainability. Tim’s is meant to be a Canadian success story. We want to be proud of the brand. For now, I’m quite disappointed in their complete lack of follow-up and social and environmental responsibility to the citizens of Canada.

(and don’t even get me started on Roll Up the Rim! What a joke.)

So a few things have happened since my last post about Social Media having the power to buy one a house (one being any”one” not just me)

The first thing that happened is I put an ad on Craigslist. I said that I am the mom of 2 cool kids and that I want to move to the area. I didn’t really expect anyone to come back with an offer to buy me a house but I did hope that someone who was looking to rent their place would find my ad and ring me up.

A really cool thing happened! A woman, in the right part of town, answered my ad! Now, her home is big, really big and it’s beautiful, really beautiful and, well, it’s just too expensive. That said, we had a great chat and found out we have similar business interests. Who knows, it might end up that we become great friends and business associates.

So while the CL ad did not find me a house…yet, it may very well have found my a great new business contact and friend.

WIN!

The thing about the house offer got me thinking though. At the moment I pay about $1300/month in rent. I expect that, in the new part of town which is more expensive, I’ll have to pay somewhere in the area of $2,000/month for something a wee bit nicer than where we’re at.

My business is going very well and I don’t expect that the added expense will be a lot to contend with. What burns me up though is that I would be more than happy to up that if it meant some sort of equity share.

There must be people out there who are in a situation where they cannot sell their home for what they want or who are downsizing and want to enable someone else to own their own home. I am pretty confident that these people exist, we just have to find them.

This week is going to be about networking. I’m going to a major networking conference in Vancouver on Thursday called Twestival and am hoping to make the kind of contacts that will propel my business to the next level.

I’ll add them to the myriad of very cool people I know already and I will work all of them for a solution to solve my housing expectations.

I can do this because I am always, without fail, ready to help anyone who asks. To me that’s what social networking is all about. Provide value, provide value, provide value….and don’t expect anything in return.

If you show people that you want to help them just for the sake of helping you’ll get it back in droves in ways you never considered. That’s what I love about what I do. I see random acts of kindness every day and it empowers me to pay it forward.

I’ve changed the title of the series from “Can Social Media Buy ME a House?” to “Can Social Media Buy YOU a House?” for the simple reason that, as a social experiment I don’t really care if what comes from this is personal gain. In fact, it would be far more interesting if it were someone else who was the beneficiary of the experiment.

When I first put this notion out into cyber-space a few days ago I received several Facebook notes from friends telling me how I could go about finding a place to live. Some suggested social housing even. While I am not against social housing I must say that the attitude required, in ones mind, to accept socially assisted living is part of the problem that I want to solve with this experiment.

Social assistance is, by now means, a new notion. The Romans did it. In the Jewish tradition it was considered a right of the poor to receive charity from the wealthy. Most organize religions promote charity as a way to shave off some of ones sins.

But there is a price to charity. Often (and I’m not saying always) people who live on the charity of others become dependant on that charity. It becomes a mind-set that is passed through generations. There are numerous stories of individuals who pull themselves out of such lives but that requires a herculean effort that not many can aspire to.

So, the notion of just buying someone a house is not going to work. If someone does not have to work for their success they won’t. It’s human nature.

When I was at Trent University I had a job on the line, at General Motors. I worked 89 days (90 would’ve put me in the union) and I was able to use the money to pay for my education. I graduated in 3 years with a BA. I had several friends who’s parents paid for their post-secondary education while they lounged around at the cottage in the summers. Guess what? 80% of them had to go on to a 4th year to finish their degrees. It was a great lesson for me. As much as I resented their free-ride, I realized quickly that the value of doing it yourself far out-weighs sipping margaritas by the lake.

Having said that I do believe that providing charity to others is a social obligation that should be part of everyone’s life. We are among the top 10% of the world’s richest people. We shouldn’t be receiving charity, we should be giving it.

The question becomes “where can my efforts produce the greatest good?”. If you look at the opportunities to help others you an break it down into several categories.

The world.
The country.
The community.
The home.
The family.
Self.

Yep, you have to include self because helping yourself may just lead to helping others.

Helping others. Where would you get the most bang for your buck and the most satisfaction? I would suggest that helping others in your community could potentially have the largest impact and here’s why.

If you set up someone to succeed you help to change the way they think about money, giving etc. If they have come from a place of receiving charity and you take them to a place where they can make their own successes then you enable (in a good way) them to pay that behaviour forward and help others. Thus creating a community of people who think in a philanthropic way first.

To that end, I think that looking around your community and seeing how you can help to make it better, not by donating money but by improving someone’s situation so that they can help someone else may just be the best sort of “giver” you could be.

As always, I am very interested in your thoughts about this notion. I’m sure there are skeptics so bring it on, I’ll try to answer all of your questions and comments.

Next article: How can we make this funner (I know it’s not a word, that’s what makes it funner

As a Social Media Strategist I am fascinated by the power of this medium to bring about all sorts of new, unexpected results.

Take the BP oil spill for example. In the past a company like BP completely screws up, screws the environment then white-washes the entire affair through expensive ad campaigns and propaganda. Not so this time. Enter a twitter page that tells us the truth and BAMB! BP is kicked to the curb, made to own up to their mistakes and, essentially (and rightly so) vilified in pretty much every sort of media.

BP is a great example of how the internet and the lightening-fast dissemination of information is changing the way that business is done. In my ever-optimistic brain, I hope that one day the use of social media will hold all companies to a higher standard where “what’s in it for us” becomes “what’s in it for everyone”. But I’m a dreamer

I decided that I would offer up my own social media experiment. While I spend most of my time providing value to others and preaching that providing value to the public is the corner-stone to a well-run social media campaign, I will admit that there this experiment was born from a more selfish motive. i.e. to, once again, own my own home.

That said, I think that by setting this up as an authentic, transparent experiment I can provide a great deal of value to others who want to use social media to grow their business or help out their non-profit. The successes and mistakes made over the next few months will be well-documented and should serve as a guide of either what to do or what not to do to gain exposure. (I hope it’s the ‘what to do’

Let’s begin.

Here’s the background story: When I had my 2 daughters, 9 and 12 years ago, I was a stay-at-home mom. I had a small photography business but, for all intents and purposes, I didn’t really work. When my marriage ended 3 years ago I had just lucked in to a great job as a Recruiter for a video game company. Unfortunately the Korean company that owned us shut us down and I was left with, essentially nothing, in the worst economic crisis in my adult life.

We had to sell our house in June of 2009. 6 months before, or after, would have garnered about $50,000 more but we had to sell then and so we took a massive hit. My equity share, after any debts were paid, was $19,000. I bought an $11,000 Volvo and used the rest to pay first and last and a pet deposit on a rented home for my kids and myself.

This story is not unique. Far from it. In the recent economy both in the US and Canada there are hundreds of thousands of people with exactly the same story. I don’t even think it’s a sad story, it’s simply the way things are for many of us and there are many worse stories out there.

In addition to the circumstances that bring most of us to this point (not a bad point, just a point) is the fact that it is very difficult to get back into the housing market on your own, especially with a couple of kids.

The choices about spending become a major focus. Do you put your life on hold, no vacations, no movies, no skiing etc in order to save for a downpayment on a home that costs over 3/4 million dollars? That seems a bit crazy. And it’s not fair to the kids.

Most families, at least in Vancouver, have so many financial obligations it would make your head spin and if having a home is a priority it means that you’ll have to sacrifice those things that make the day-to-day fun like sports teams and summer road trips.

So what’s the answer? Is it time for the upper 10% to start finding ways to support society’s lower 90%? I don’t really know.

So I’m conducting this experiment to find out if there is a way to relieve some of the pressure from this middle class who want to give their kids a head start but don’t want to completely, financially devastate their own future in the process.

I’ll be collecting and publishing ideas that people come up with. One idea I had was an investors group that works with the “client” (that would be someone like me) who chooses a house then they work out a lease-to-own arrangement. That way, rather than paying just rent, the client has that satisfaction of working toward their own goals.

What’s your idea?

I’m sure it sounds strange that some random homeless man could teach me the secrets of network marketing but I have to tell you about this fella, Patrick, I met today.

Today I was in downtown Vancouver, in a parking lot, meeting a guy who would sell me the Amazing Amazon Kindle because Amazon is out of the 3g Kindles and I need one for my mom’s 80th birthday in a few weeks. I had decided a while ago that it would be the perfect gift, easy to use, holds a billion books and it wouldn’t cost me a bundle to ship it to Ontario where she lives.

But I digress.

The Kindle fella arrived and we stood next to my car, on a gorgeous Vancouver summer day and went over the device. He showed me all the cool stuff it does and then remembered to erase his own settings so mom couldn’t purchase books on his credit card (good move there:)

While we were chatting I mentioned that I was taking my girls to Cupcakes, a store of infinite delectability and a “must do” for us whenever we’re within about 10 miles of the place.

Coincidentally as I was telling the story of the Cupcake company a man named Patrick interrupted us.

Now Patrick was not particularly clean. His hands were dirty and his boots (I snuck a look) were pretty scuffed up. Patrick was clearly a man down on his luck. Although he did not seem drunk or stoned. Just homeless.

Patrick interrupted us to tell me that while Cupcakes did make some spectacular cupcakes, Starbucks (only a block away…this IS Vancouver after all) had equally amazing cakery and was closer and cheaper.

He went on to expound the benefits of going to Starbucks: it was closer, less expensive, I wouldn’t have to find another parking spot etc.

Patrick was providing me with free information on a subject I had shown and interest in.

Hmmmm. Imagine that? Free info with no regard for personal gain but rather an authentic need to help a fellow human being find the perfect cupcake.

I likely would have spoken to Patrick further but I was in the middle of a transaction, my kids were dead set on Cupcakes and, well, Patrick did not really smell that great.

I thanked him for the information and dug in my wallet for a toonie (a $2 Canadian coin that makes having a change compartment in your wallet a must!) Patrick accepted my “payment” for his “service” and was off to McDonald’s to buy a cup of coffee.

I thought about it as I was driving….to Cupcakes of course, that Patrick had just taught me the first lesson of successful network marketing; Provide value to qualified prospects without “selling” them something.

Damn, I wish I’d met Patrick before I’d spent all that money on “how to make money online” ebooks!:)

Thanks Patrick! Enjoy your coffee. If we meet again I will gladly seek out your advice on restaurants and parking spaces in the city.