A new segment of my blog, brockpredovich.com , is The Entrepreneurial Interviews, one a month I’ll feature a local, startup or prominent business owner and find out about their business, what makes them tic, lessons they’ve learned along the way and have a few laughs in the process. The Entrepreneurial Interviews starts off with a bang with our first guest, Reggie Rivers. Former Denver Bronco’s football player, Author, Sports Columnist, Color Commentary for NFL and College Football and Now Entrepreneur with AutomatedFlipCards.com

Alright, finally the results from my Google+ contest I ran last week. To my knowledge the first ever contest held on Google+. Last week, starting on Tuesday, I began a contest using just the “Photo Album” function on Google+ and basically ran the contest by asking people to “Share” my post with their Google+ Circles and get their followers to ‘vote’ for them by commenting on their shared post of my contest Album. Below is a screenshot of my post. In the contest I gave away a Motorola Xoom 10.1″ 32Gb Android Honeycomb tablet ($499 Value).

All in total, this post was share 48 times, pretty good right? Problem was that when it hit 48 something happened. Maybe it was a glitch, maybe Google didn’t like me running a contest on Google+, but nevertheless something happened and my contest post which was shared ‘publicly’ was no longer visible to the ‘public’.  I received several private messages from people who heard about the contest but could not find the contest post on my Google+ profile and hence were not about to Share it with their circles. Unfortunate, but, I figured, let’s go ahead and give Google the benefit of the doubt, let’s say it was a glitch and continue the contest… So, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, I uploaded and shared new photos and picture albums detailing the contest for people to Share with their circles and enter the contest with. Adding the results from these days my contest was shared a total of 87 times by various Google+ users. The average contestant received about 8 to 10 ‘votes’ from their followers. I was hoping for much more viral response, but, after all, this contest was the first of it’s kind, Google+ is a very new platform and potentially, as I unfortunately discovered, it may have some bugs. Like all experiments there’s some good data and lessons that came out of this.  I’ll be releasing a video later this week on exactly what I did to run the contest and the lessons I learned as well (including one major thing I’d do differently). But , right now let’s reveal the Winners of the contest

First, I randomly picked 20 finalist out of the 87 contestants. I did this random pick to make the contest less of a popularity contest and more of something that anyone would have a chance to win. But is a screenshot of the random people that were people highlighted in yellow. Now, originally, I was going to get the top 3 contestants a FREE copy of my “Google+ Attack Plan” product ($97 value), but tonight, as I write this, I’m feeling very generous. So, I’ve decided to give all 20 randomly selected contestants a free copy of my “Google+ Attack Plan” product!!!!! The 20 contestants below can receive there prize simply by private messaging me on Google+ and I’ll send them the instruction.

Now, the grande prize, Motorola Xoom Winner!

From this random list of 20 finalists I searched through each of their Shared posts on Google+ and counted how many comments they received to determine the top 3 winners of the contest. One finalist shined above all others. On just one of his Shared posts, he received well over a 140 comments (yes many of these were repeat comments from his followers, but since I never detailed in the contest rules that this couldn’t be done, more power to him and congrats on the ingenuity!). All in total, he receive close to 200 comments on all his Shared posts. This winner is Myroslaw Bytz (profile pics and screenshot of winning post below)

Myroslaw Bytz

The Awesome Post (148 Comments!!!!!)

I’ve been doing a lot of traveling the last few months and I’ve been fascinated by all the problems I’ve solved in my business and new ideas I’ve come across even during these hectic times of travel. I mean, packing, unpacking, departing, arriving, meeting, conferencing, logging in, logging out….constantly moving, going somewhere, doing something in between all the moving around. It’s been crazy. But, amongst all of it, I’ve come up with some great solutions to some things that have been nagging at me for months that I previously didn’t know what to do with and I’ve come up with some really cool business and marketing ideas along the way. Today I drove about 4 hours across my state of Colorado to meet my father for some fishing up in Gunnison, CO. Again, on the drive my mind was going on all cylinders solving problems and creating one idea after the next. I asked myself somewhere along the drive; “why can’t my mind work like this all the time?” Poof! The answer came to me. Boredom!

Yes, boredom! I started thinking about it. My mind HATES boredom and if you’re reading this right now then, chances are you’re the type of person who hates boredom too. I remember back in my school days in high school or college. I used the come up with the craziest ideas during class, I’d draw, I’d doodle, I’d write poems, think of jokes, think of a business idea, think of my next “invention.” My mind was constantly going in class. Why? Well, one, I had A.D.D. and two, I was incredible bored!  Same thing happened when I worked a corporate job for a short time. If I wasn’t actively doing something, my mind was racing with ideas.

Why is this? Whenever I’m on task, engaged in something, even working with others, brainstorming, my mind never seems as sharp or creative as it does when I’m driving, flying in a plane, sitting in class or worst… working at a JOB! It seems whenever I’m confined to a restricted space my mind seems to want to break free. So, I’ve deduced that there’s some incredible power lying here within this realization for me and for anyone reading this blog. If you’re ever stuck on something, where you can’t solve a problem, can’t come up with any new ideas, perhaps the best thing to do is confine yourself. Bore yourself to death!

If you’re really stuck, try it. Lock yourself in a room. No TV, no computer. Sit there. Get in your car. Start driving, somewhere, anywhere. Classical music is good, but so is silence. Another thing to try is grab a book on CD (or MP3), NOT a piece of fiction. You don’t want anything playing that DRIVES your imagination. You want something that FREES your imagination or provokes it. For me, business and marketing books do great. While I’m listening, my mind focuses but then, all of a sudden, some cool idea or thought is sparked from the material of the book and BOOM a whirlwind of thoughts, ideas and problem solving starts flowing.

So, if you’re stuck or next time you’re stuck. Try it. Make yourself bored. You’ll be amazed with what your mind can do with that space and time.

There’s a lot of buzz going around about Google+. The next several months are going to be very interesting for Facebook users I believe. Google+ looks to be very intuitively designed with great functionality. Potentially Google+ could reach a critical mass of users very quickly because of Google’s already far reaching user base, so I would pay close attention to this. My suggestion: get a Google+ account now and start playing around.

This week I answer a viewer question. “How do I stay up to date on the latest and greatest social media and internet marketing information?” Well, first I’m going to give you a BIG Shocker here… DON’T. As a business owner, you can get yourself in a lot of trouble trying to stay up to date all the time with the latest and greatest. In the video above, I’ll tell you why… check it out.

In working for yourself, building a business, or bringing a new concept to market one thing is for sure. You will have to deal with your own fears. Let me tell you about my little experience with fear.

My junior year of college my life was unexpectedly changed and with that came a new challenge in my life and a chance to grow. At the time I played rugby, and was training for the spring season when all of a sudden something in my lower back popped. The resulting injury had me barely able to walk for the next several months, I couldn’t sit down and I could only stand or lay down. I had herniated three discs in my lower back and was in more pain then I could have ever imagined. After a couple months trying everything from physical therapy and cortisone shots my doctors finally told me that it would be necessary to have surgery to fix the problem. I would have to take the spring semester off of school. Which means I would not graduate with my class (this is a big deal at the Academy, we spend four years dreaming about the day we can throw our caps in the air and drive off the Academy grounds and begin “real life”). Additionally, an even bigger blow, I was told I would probably not be able to fly planes in the Air Force, due the injury.

After surgery I spent six months rehabilitating at home. Upon returning to the Academy I felt unbelievably lost. Most of my friends had moved on and I had nothing to involve myself in. Team sports had always been a huge part of my life. I began to get more and more depressed. I was in incredibly weak physical condition, out of shape and was really depressed about watching all my classmates and friends (now seniors) graduate later that year while I was still a junior. It stuck with me. I got soo depressed that finally my roommate suggested I see a counselor. A psychology major myself, I knew it would do me good to talk to someone. So I did.

The counselor quickly understood what was going on. He said, “what you’re facing right now is a major change in your life. You’ve got to reinvent yourself, become someone other than Brock the football player or Brock the rugby player. You need to become Brock the …..” and he left it blank. He instructed me to come back to him the following week with a new challenge for myself. It had to be something I feared.

I went back to my room that night and thought a bit about what he asked of me. The answer came fairly quickly. Something that had terrified me since my freshman year. Thoughts of a required boxing class I had to take my freshman year raced through my head and it scared the hell out of me. Now, I was pretty good at it and the boxing coach had been asking me to box for the team since my freshmen year, but it scarred the crap out of me! To this day I’m typing this as my nervous hands shake and my jaw clenches tight. See boxing contains one of my biggest fears. In boxing you either win or lose, there’s no in-between. You either win or you lose, lose badly, pathetically, horribly! Growing up, I was an avid boxing fan, my father and I would eagerly critic all the heavyweight fights. I’ve seen the toughest men in the world win and in the very next fight crumble by the well placed blow of their opponent. Nothing was safe in this sport, nothing secure, you could lose and be the only one to blame.

The answer was obvious to me, even though I hated the answer. My challenge would be to start and finish one season of boxing. When I told my counselor this his eyes grew wide and he said; “are you sure you don’t want to conquer some other fear like heights or open water or something… something else?” I told him it had to be boxing. No other thing scared me more than my fear of failure and in no other way would I have to directly confront that fear than boxing.

So I did it, I boxed! I thought I would conquer my fears but something else happened. I learned that fear is not something to be conquered, it’s a part of life. Its always there, it never goes away. The only thing you can do is change how you deal with fear. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn this lesson until the very end though.

See, every day I was nervous before practice, every night I could barely sleep, every fight I felt sick to my stomach all day and wanted to quit and not show up for the fight. I wished for injury. I wished for anything that would get me out of fighting. I hated every minute of it. My plan to conquer my fear wasn’t working out so well. All my thoughts revolved around how I could avoid my fear. Making matters worse, my goal of just having to make it through one season was further complicated by the fact that I was winning more than I was losing. The regular season, the Wing Open Boxing championship, the regional championship, nationals. The season dragged on forever but finally the end of my season came. I had one fight left and for the first time, I wasn’t scared. It was the last fight. I had fought through my opponents, back injury, and constant fears. I had come so far and in my mind I had nothing to lose. I went into that fight with the goal to win, gave it my all and had no fear. BUT…..guess what?…..I lost! Not the end I was hoping for at that moment, probably not the end you were hoping for in reading this, but I lost. Yet, something incredibly powerful came from that experience.

I lost, I took silver. But guess what? The world didn’t end, people didn’t point and laugh. They didn’t call me a loser. I didn’t have to wear a dunce cap or anything else that signified my loser-ness. It was only then that I realized the importance of what I had done that season and why me losing that fight was the best lesson I would receive.

Lesson 1) It’s okay to try and fail. Sometimes, even when all the stars align and you think you can do nothing but succeed, you may fail. And that’s cool! You just get up and go again. No one cares, no one’s watching you. Get up and try again. Lesson 2) Treat everything like you’ve got nothing left to lose. You’re fear will subside, you’ll give it everything you’ve got and not hold back. Lesson 3) The mind, once focused, is an incredibly powerful mechanism. Through all my fear, internal fighting and struggles, I completed my goal. I finished the season, even when it lasted longer than I thought it would. Focus your mind and give yourself no other option but to attain it, no matter how long it takes or how many times you fall, get up! Lesson 4) Lastly, fear is within us for a purpose! Fear can sharpen your senses, make your stronger and more focused… if you let it. There was a reason I was a good boxer, why I made it as far as I did. Fear! I was faster, more aggressive and more focused then my competition. That’s how I won. Realize fear is a good thing. When you feel it, be thankful. It’s there to make you sharper, faster, more focused to achieve your immediate goals. Let it!

Listen, in business, fears come up. The “big pitch”, the sale, the meeting, the product / sales launch. EVERYONE has fears; and honestly, if you don’t you should probably be worried. If you don’t have some sort of fear you’re either stupid or crazy, neither of which account for high achievement. Recklessness is Action absent of Fear. Courage is Action in the presence of Fear.

Alright, so one of the biggest things I come across when working with clients in social media is lack of consistency. It’s easy to get going with social media marketing, it’s fun, but reality sets in that “oh, hmm, this is something I have to keep doing…?”. Social media marketing is like any marketing. To be affective, it’s gotta be consistent. What would happen if you sent a postcard to all your potential clients advertising some deal on your product or service? You might get a couple calls, a couple people stop by the store. What if you sent that same postcard each day for a week? By the third, fourth or fifth day you’d probably get a stream of calls and people swing by your store! Thing is that people have a short attention span, they forgot very easy, they don’t notice things right away; but, the third, fourth, fifth, six, seventh time they see something, they’re going to notice. That’s they way it is with social media. If you want people to know you, who you are, what you do, you’ve gotta be present more than once here and once there. You’ve gotta be in front of them every day! You’ve gotta be consistent.