New job: social-media tweeter

"The secret for these companies is to have identifiable people whose job it is to tweet," Paul Carr told New York Times blogger MP Mueller in a piece posted today on "You're the Boss," the NYT blog on small business.

That's the first time I've ever heard it spelled out. New media is creating jobs in small businesses if only the small business owners recognize that new media needs full-time workers filling the jobs. What small business is going to hire someone to "tweet" all day?

Naturally, Carr, who is making the recommendation, is also a blogger and a journalist, someone getting paid for writing up suggestions, not for making payroll.

But Mueller also quotes a businessman, Gary Vaynerchuk, who sells wine and helped boost revenues of his dad's New Jersey liquor store from $4 million to $50 million through social media. Vaynerchuk told Mueller he spent 12 hours a day answering e-mail and working Facebook and Twitter since 2006 to accomplish that. I suppose his dad was working the counter all that time.

The point I'm trying to make here is that new media requires work time from those who would use it to self-market and build their businesses. True, the time can be written off to marketing and customer service, but the time has a per-hour cost that often goes overlooked by those who recommend such investment.

"You're the Boss" features Mueller and a half dozen other bloggers on small-business issues at the New York Times website. I recently discovered the blog and have found the content interesting although a bit too "ivory tower." Check it out for yourself at the same link as I've included above.  

Baby Boom a bust

I come here on Labor Day Weekend 2010 to declare the Baby Boom generation a failure.

I'm part of the failure. In fact, all my life I liked to tell people I was born at the cusp of the wave of the boomers. Born in 1947, the official second year of the boom, I have turned 63 and am still trying to make a success of myself.

Reading the business section of the Denver Post today, pushed me to the conclusion that I am not alone. All my fellow baby boomers have, as Peter Fonda said in "Easy Rider," blown it.

Here's a little inventory of the stories and comment you'll find in the Post that back me up.

"Unions facing tough times," by Steve Raabe tells the story of a decades-long decline in union membership in Colorado and nationally, which coincides with the devastation of the nation's middle class in America.

Most of us baby boomers came from the loins of the blue-collar generation that organized America after World War II, although even that great generation never reached more than a 34 percent share of the workforce as union members.

That means, too, we baby boomers were young witnesses to the worst of union abuses: Jimmy Hoffa, wages paid for work not done, false claims of on-the-job-injuries, and a cycle of wage increases that made the work not worth the price.

So most of us chose the white-collar way, and found ourselves going to work, and teaching our children to go to work, in what is now parodied on TV as "The Office." The idiots are real; the trouble is they are us.

All the while the old wealthy and the new wealthy, the very establishment we rebelled against as hippies, made sure that,along with unions, the entire middle class in America was drained of power and influence, reduced to a status just above poverty line.

But let me continue my inventory.

Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, offers a piece in favor of a second round of stimulus measures for the economy, arguing that the unemployed and underemployed in America will never get back to work without one.

It's hard for me to even mention the idiocy of the article paired with Weisbrot's, by William F. Shughart II, a senior fellow at The Independent Institute in Oakland,Calif., who argues against a second stimulus package because: "The only sure way to perk up the job market is to cut taxes permanently and rein in public spending and excessive regulation."

Which, by the way, is also the establishment's sure formula to push what's left of the lower middle class below that poverty line, and to ensure future opportunities for the wealthy to become more and more -- even exceedingly -- rich.

But then there is the column by Robert J. Samuelson that provides the real indictment of an entire generation.

Samuelson gets to the failure of baby boomers to provide their children and their children's children a proper education, which was the real route baby boomers took to whatever prosperity they have gained.

Samuelson catalogs the failure of parents and education reformers in America to improve learning for large swaths of U.S. students over the years. "Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don't like school, don't work hard and don't do well."

That's where we blew it. Unfortunately, there's no way to go back and make repairs.

Give and take, Part II

It's no surprise, nor improper, for Colorado Attorney General John Suthers to order up an opinion on the legislative plan to balance the state budget with surplus assets of Pinnacol Assurance. It is inaccurate to call the opinion a ruling, however, as The Denver Post did in its Saturday morning editions.

The opinion is just politics; how one plays the game. And, yes, Republican AG Suthers is trying to influence the Democratic majorities in both houses of the General Assembly.

If Suthers can keep the Democrats from passing a law to take $500 million in employer-paid workers' comp insurance premiums from Pinnacol, the AG's office won't be forced to defend the law when some taxpaying or insurance-premium-paying Republican businessman or woman challenges it in court.

As The Post pointed out in its coverage, which started on its front page, the challenge to the Pinnacol law before it is even enacted echoes Suthers' challenge of a Ritter administration policy last year that allowed the state to collect more tax money from school property taxes. That law passed despite a negative Suthers opinion of it; it was challenged and upheld by the state Supreme Court; and the tax money that was collected helped fund Colorado schools.

The same result probably would be repeated in the Pinnacol situation.

Pinnacol is a quasi-government entity created by the state to offer employers low-cost workers' comp insurance and it has done such a good job of that it has built up a surplus of assets -- some might call the money surplus business taxes -- that serve to overprotect Pinnacol's ability to pay claims as well as serve as equity to support Pinnacol's ability to offer the low rates it charges private businesses.

Pro-business people naturally suggest the money should be kept by Pinnacol to enable it to continue the business tax breaks they get via the low insurance premiums.

Democrats who argue the money belongs to the state are essentially suggesting it be used for the common good of all Coloradans, not just to enhance the state's business environment.

Still, Suthers' opinion has weight and ought to be considered.

Democratic lawmakers, however, need not treat it like a ruling, and probably ought to do the same thing with it they did with the property-tax law: Pass it; get the governor to sign it, let the law be challenged, and then collect the money after the Colorado Supreme Court rules it's okay. Pinnacol might even have more of a surplus by the time that all happens, and new funds could help cushion the pre-set hit.

It may be that the Supreme Court could throw its own opinion into the legislative debate and save a lot of people a lot of wasted time.

But the Court's decisions can be just as political as the AG's, and, in politics, timing is everything.

Give and take at the legislature

Cutting state-employee salaries rather than the budgets of the state colleges is a good idea, especially if state legislators take several hundred more millions of dollars from Pinnacol Assurance to plug the budget sink holes.

Generally, Republican lawmakers favor the salary cuts and oppose the Pinnacol raid, and Democrats, generally, mirror those positions in reverse, meaning they favor the raid on assets and oppose the salary cuts.

But Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter's administration has grown the state payroll, so he should be just as willing to cut back to save the state dough in its financial crisis.

At the same time, Pinnacol has grown its surplus by keeping the cost of workers-comp insurance low for businesses throughout the state. To give some of the money up for the best interests of all the people, shouldn't be too hard a political stretch. Ken Ross, president and CEO of Pinnacol, may already have seen that light on the subject.

Compromise is the height of lawmaking, so our legislators, who usually plum the debths of partisanship, should get together on this and work out a solution.

It would be refreshing to see it get done.

'Traitor to Myself'

That's the title to my new book, which I'll be writing here, day by day, in between other postings about business, politics and literature.

It will be a compilation of my failures, the things I have not yet accomplished in my life, like getting rich, becoming a famous writer and providing the funding for my children's education.

Or, like turning ColoradoBiz magazine, a publication I edited for six years, into a gushing cash-cow of a magazine. Something I was not able to do. Or like becoming a respected national political voice, which is also something I have fantasized about being one day.

Or like being on the Johnny Carson show, now Jay Leno and soon to be Conan O'Brien, to read my poems, which you can buy at www.robertschwabpoet.com.

Sort of a how-not-to-do-it book. That's what I'm thinking.

Maybe you can help. By corresponding through this blog when you see it. An anti-advice business book. Created on the not-so-money-making Internet.

What do you think? Good idea? Or bad.

Inaugural post

This is my first post to Schwab on Anything, a blog I want to introduce to my website, http://www.robertschwabpoet.com/.

The title is a take off on the title of my former column in The Denver Post's business section, "Schwab on Small Business." Also, it is a take off on my column for several years in ColoradoBiz magazine, called "On Colorado." You see, I like being "on" things. It seems like a safe platform.

It may take me a while to post the blog on my website, but I'm learning these things as I go along, which is the way I've lived my life in journalism and as an entrepreneur writer.

I'm making a business out of my writing ability, and the columns I use to write for publications are part of the business product I hope to make of my website.

On it, you'll find my poems available for sale through PayPal. You can copy the featured poem for free, but you'll have to buy any of the other titles, at very low cost.

If you buy, I hope you enjoy.

I also write about literature on www.Examiner.com/Denver. Check out my work there as well. Naturally I welcome all comments from readers.

I hope this becomes an interesting conversation.