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UTOPIAN Coffee Co. founders Patrick Smith (left) and Brendon Maxwell.

I’ve been writing a lot about social media lately, and I decided to have some Q&A time with a good friend that is actually using it to help power his business.  Patrick Smith is the co-founder of UTOPIAN Coffee Co., and an overall great guy.  He and business partner Brendon Maxwell (insert obligatory cheap coffee aside here) employ no full-time social media guru or consultant, and are bootstrapping most aspects of their business.  Social media presents a key marketing opportunity, and like most small business owners, it’s an avenue that they must navigate on their own.

As the coffee expert so astutely articulates, the very basics of product marketing (start with a genuinely good product) and relationships (be nice to people and they will be nice in return) are the foundations that are propelling UTOPIAN Coffee Co. forward. That and lots of caffeine.

The following is our exchange about social channels, the coffee business, and the ethics of underage coffee consumption.

Tell the readers a bit about your business.  What do you sell?  How are you selling it?
UTOPIAN Coffee Co. is a web-based quality-oriented specialty coffee micro-roaster.  That’s the official answer.  What does that mean to the average Joe/Jane?  We are uber-picky about the green/raw coffees we buy, meticulous in roasting, and we bag and ship straight out of the roaster.  This way the coffee arrives on your doorstep (anywhere in the contiguous 48) within 4 days of roasting.  Crazy fresh.

At a time when McDonald’s is undercutting more expensive coffee brands such as Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, etc., with the McCaffe versions, why do you believe your more upscale, niche product will be successful?
Great question, Andy.  I’ll answer anecdotally then more substantively.

When I was in college, I drank lots of coffee.  Knowing this, a buddy of mine bought me a freshly-roasted pound of Sumatra as a gift.  I noticed immediately that this was far superior to anything I’d ever had.  The curse came when poor, tuition-drained Patrick tried to revert to Chock-Full-o-Nuts.  NO WAY.  I literally skipped meals to ensure that from that point forward I would have good coffee around.

Driving through a coffee shop (or McDonald’s) on your way to work will cost you $2 to $5 each day five days a week.  That’s a monthly habit of $40 – $100 for 20 cups of coffee.  If you were on a myUTOPIA membership receiving 2 pounds a month you would save between $7 – $67, and it would yield 80 cups of coffee!  You’d have more money, more time, better coffee, less stress, heck I bet you’d even live longer!

On the objective end, Google Analytics allows us to simply track the sources of our traffic.  Additionally, any coupon codes we generate are always specific to the outlet through which they are disseminated.  This allows us to carefully track the effectiveness of any such campaign.

People are using social media for everything….obtaining news updates, getting shopping leads, and let’s not leave out socializing.  It leads to a smaller world, but also a smaller attention span.  In order to successfully utilize these channels, we need to remain specific, concise, and relevant.

Any plans to enter the brick and mortar retail market?
Not if I can help it!  The hours are rough, overhead is higher, & managing hourly employees is difficult.

What are the things that social channels can’t help a small business with?
Product quality.  It is one of the pillars of our business.  Social media can help with marketing, and if you’re really clever distribution, but never product quality.

Who should quit their day job and start their own business?
Anyone with a good, somehow original idea, the expertise to make it a reality, a high stress threshold, low sleep requirement, good marriage (or none at all), strong work ethic, optimistic outlook, and billionaire parents.

What advice do you have for closet tea drinkers like myself?
Switch to coffee.  It doesn’t stain your teeth as badly and is more readily accessible stateside.  No, honestly, I don’t know a load about tea.  Give some serious thought to the science of extraction when you’re tooling around with tea. You might have some fun results.  Play with variables like water purity (RO or tap), water temp, contact time, and agitation.

I know you have small children.  How early do you plan on letting them have their first cup of Utopian Coffee?
Been there. Done that. Calvin is almost a year.  He’s not super keen on coffee.

Hudson is 2 and a half.  He loves coffee.  If you ask him his favorite kind, he responds “mytopian.”  He apparently thinks that the first syllable of the word “UTOPIAN” is the pronoun “you” and than “-topian” is a separate word.  Naturally since he is referring to himself and not to you, he calls it “mytopian coffee.”  I have a photo somewhere with Hudson at 2 years old with a crema mustache from having a sip of my espresso.

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Thanks Patrick, and if you ever get a hold of some high quality imported teas, I’ll be first in line.

You can follow UTOPIAN Coffee Co. on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/UTOPIANcoffee

Photo Credit: Johnathan Beard

Disturbing, but not at all surprising.  That’s what I think of the story featured on the Associated Press titled, “Do “I’m on vacation” posts pose security concerns?“.  In it, the author describes an Arizona couple who own two home-based businesses.  As part of their promotional efforts, both individuals Twitter regularly, up to and including their detailed vacation plans where they would be out of town for an extended trip.  The couple Twittered when they left, where they stopped, and most conveniently for the felons who burglarized their Arizona home, how long they would be gone.

It was, as far as I know, a pretty isolated incident.  But I’m not sure why.  How do celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s #1 user with over 2 million followers, feel safe with that many people being able to know so much about their whereabouts?  Last month, Kutcher, Oprah, and several others’ Twitter accounts were hacked precisely because they were high profile users with massive followings.

Even in the tamer blogosphere , where authors generally consider their posts more carefully than a 140 character Twitter post, there was the high profile stalking of Kathy Sierra in 2007.   The author of the popular (top 50) marketing blog Creating Passionate Users felt compelled to leave the blogosphere and lecture circuit after some bad people posted her name, home address, disturbing images of her, and death threats online.

Maybe it’s just simple math.  Most people are good, but a certain percentage will always be bad.  And in America, it is generally accepted that the price of fame is a lack of personal privacy.  The more followers you have, or visitors to your blog, or Facebook friends, the more likely it is that someone you don’t know so well (or at all) could be using your full disclosure to their advantage.  And if you don’t believe me that there is full disclosure going on in social media, check out some high school kid’s myspace page.  Any of them.  You’ll see what I mean.

The last thing I want to do is to throw a wet blanket on the social media movement.  After all, I blog (putting my name as the URL!), Facebook, etc., and see the tools as very powerful to me personally and professionally.  Some of our clients are experimenting quite successfully in social media, and I think the best is yet to come.  But I also keep my family blog, with pictures of my kids and the details of our comings and goings, private and only open to people who have registered on the site.

What do you think?  I’m really curious here.  Does increased visibility always mean increased risk?  Should I unplug my computer from the wall at night just to be safe (I know someone who actually does this)?  Should I stop worrying so much and make all of my profiles totally open and broadcast my every move?  Let me know in the comments.

Thanks Meeker for the tip.

[EDIT] – I just found out that Kathy Sierra is on Twitter.  Interesting.

A few days ago, I outlined some of the horrors of my painful switch from using Blogger to using WordPress.  Now that the anguish is beginning to fade, I thought I’d distill the steps I took (and failures I had) into a step by step guide that I wish I would have had at my disposal.  This process is definitely the easiest and safest way to transfer your Blogger blog to a WordPress site that I know of.

First off, this guide is for people who have their own domain and webspace, and who simply use Blogger to publish their blog via FTP to their own webspace.  I found several guides for people who have their blogs hosted with Blogger (e.g., yourblogname.blogspot.com), but scarce resources for those who host their own site. This guide assumes that you have complete FTP access to your webspace (and that you know what that means).  I am not a technologist, and couldn’t write a line of code to save my life, so hopefully these instructions are easy to follow.

I moved to WordPress because of the increased control I could get over my blog look and feel, and the ease of use of adding plugins to customize how my blog behaves.  There are some other great articles on the advantages of WordPress if you Google “WordPress vs Blogger”.

So here’s what you do.

Step 1: Back up everything.

One of the nice things about Blogger is that is publishes everything to HTML files and neatly-labeled folders.  It’s a weakness in some ways compared the the way that WordPress uses a database to store most of your content, but it sure makes backing the files up easier because they are all in one place.  The best way to back up your Blogger site is to grab all of the content in your root directory (all HTML files and folders), and make a copy of it to your local computer.  I would suggest going one step further and backing it up on a CD or DVD, just in case.  You can never underestimate the power of your own ability to screw something up (especially if you’re me).

I use Filezilla as my FTP client.  It’s free, stable, easy to use and brought to you by the same open source community that produces Firefox.

Step 2: Change your Blogger hosting settings.

In your Blogger Dashboard under your blog name, click on Settings=>Publishing.  It should say at the top of the page, “You’re publishing via FTP”.  Click on the very first option below that statement, “Switch to: Blogspot.com (Blogger’s free hosting service)”.  On the following screen, give your new URL a name (it doesn’t really matter what, since this will be temporary), type in the Spam verification and click “Save Settings.”

This critical step makes sure that your Blogger blog is in a format that is easy for WordPress to import, so don’t skip it.   If you have a high volume of traffic and don’t want to change the settings on your live site, then duplicate the blog first, and change the settings on the cloned blog rather than your original.

Step 3: Install WordPress.

After switching hosting providers to Bluehost.com, this was a really easy process because Bluehost has a one-click install of the latest version of WordPress. If your web host doesn’t support that, it’s still fairly easy and WordPress will tell you how here.

You can install WordPress in the same directory as your Blogger blog, if you’d like.

Step 4: Install the “must have” plugins and your theme.

You can always add plugins whenever you’d like, but I’ve found that installing them right off the bat is the best approach.    That way I’m not distracted with the look and feel of the site until after I’ve done all of the nuts and bolts type things that should be taken care of first.   I’m going to recommend my favorites:

1.  Askimet.  It’s so good at catching spam that it comes bundled with your WordPress installation.  To set it up, you just need to register a WordPress username.  The plugin will walk you through everything you need to do.

2.  All-in-One SEO Pack.  There are other SEO plugins out there, but I really like this one.  It’s updated frequently, and it helps me remember to enter all the content in where I should whenever I make a blog post.  If you don’t care about people being able to find specific posts on your site via Google or other search engines, you can skip this one.

3.  Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam.  This plugin adds a captcha to every post and lets you choose what words are displayed, which is pretty neat.  It also features audio pronunciation for the visually imparied.

4.  Google XML Sitemaps.  The easiest way to incorporate a search engine friendly sitemap into your site.  Once you set it, and tell Google Webmaster Tools where it is, you can forget it’s there. It updates automatically every time you make a change to the site and notifies Google of the change.  Simple and easy.  Again, if you don’t care about Search Engine Optimization, forget this one.

5.  Ultimate Google Analytics.  This easily implements the Google tracking code into your blog so that you don’t have to do it manually.  Google Analytics is free, and pretty comprehensive, so it’s a great tool for bloggers who want to monitor their traffic, etc.  If you don’t have a GA account, all you need is a Gmail address and you can set one up here.

6.  TinyMCE Advanced.  Last but certainly not least.  This one is of extreme importance to Blogger users because of a key difference between Blogger and WordPress.  In Blogger, if you want to add more line breaks, carriage returns, or whatever you call them, to a post, you simply hit “enter” over and over again until you have things positioned where you want them to be.  WordPress, in its infinite wisdom, doesn’t have that ability out of the gate, so it needs this plugin.

If you don’t install this, and try hitting the “enter” key multiple times to add line breaks to your post, WordPress will automatically delete them.  Once you have this installed and activiated, go to Settings=>Tiny MCE Advanced in your WordPress dashboard and click the checkbox, “Stop removing the <p> and <br> tags when saving and show them in the HTML editor”, then save your settings.  Trust me, you’ll thank me for saving you hours of frustration on this one.

Of course there are many, many more plugins available, but these 6 will give you good security, search engine visibility, and useability.  And tranquility.

There are a myriad of themes available here to change the look and feel of your site as well.  Install one that you like before you import your Blogger blog.  The reason for this is that you will likely have to make some manual formatting changes to it because it won’t import completely perfectly, and you don’t want to make formatting changes to fit the WordPress default theme, and then fall in love with a new theme a couple of weeks later and have to duplicate your efforts.  You can start your search here, and get help installing themes here.

Step 5: Export your Blogger blog.

Now, you can try to go directly into your WordPress dashboard and import your Blogger Blog under Tools=>Import=>Blogger.  But my experience was that this simply didn’t work for the hundreds of posts that I had.  This is really easy.  In your Blogger Dashboard, click on Settings=>Basic=>Export Blog.  Then click on “Download Blog”.  It may take a few minutes to download to your hard drive.

Please note that the file that is exported does not contain your images.  The images are only referenced as links, so unless you are a code wizard (which I am not), you’ll need to leave your old images folder from Blogger on your webspace until the end of time.

Step 6: Convert your export file to a WordPress format.

This step is skipped by many, but man, I couldn’t make anything work without doing it.  There is a free web-application aptly named “Blogger2Wordpress” that will make the necessary changes to your export file so that it is WordPress friendly.   Click on the link in the last sentence to go to the application.  Then, upload your Blogger export file, click “convert”, and save the result to your hard drive.

Step 7: Import your blog.

Now that you’ve converted your blog to a WordPress format, the rest is just details.  In your WordPress dashboard, browse to Tools=>Import=>Wordpress and upload the file you downloaded in Step 6.  Follow any additional on screen instructions that WordPress gives you.

Step 8: Fix stuff.

Although the TinyMCE Advanced plugin allows you to use multiple line breaks to format your posts, it won’t fix the posts that you’ve just imported.  You may find other discrepancies too, such as WordPress not picking up all of your Blogger tags, authors, etc..  Additionally, if you uploaded any videos through blogger (not just linked to them via Youtube, etc., but actually uploaded them), you will probably need to re-upload the videos through WordPress.   That wasn’t a deal breaker for me, since I only had about 6 videos that were easy to re-upload.

Go through all of your old posts and fix them until you’re happy.  This can be a long, manual process or a quick and easy one, just depending on the content and format of your previous blog.   Test everything you can think of so that your readers don’t email you with technical issues.

Step 9: Delete or move your Blogger HTML pages.

Finally, use your FTP client to browse to your site directory and move or delete your old Blogger HTML pages.  I chose to move them into an “old_html” folder, but if you’ve backed them up you may delete them if you like.  Make sure you leave the images folder untouched.  Again, you never moved your images, just the references to the images, so leave the folder where it is.  From now on, you can choose to have WordPress upload images into that same folder, or into a new one.  It’s up to you.

Step 10:  Get your party on.

You’ve done it!  You moved your blog and are now nestled snugly in the arms of a great open-source community.

I know a lot of other people have moved from Blogger to WordPress and may have other tricks and tips to share.  Please let me know in the comments, and good luck!