Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

Thinking, writing, business ideas … You’re only a stranger once.

Is Influencer Marketing Limiting You?

Filed Under Business Book, Business Life, Successful Blog | 18 Comments

We Limit Ourselves When We Limit Our Words

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UPDATE:
What is an influencer? Traditionally it has meant someone or something with psychological and social power to motivate change …

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These days the word, influencer, has become almost a proper noun. Use it in the social media world and we assume that it tags a person who has a close relationship to folks we want to reach and the word, influence, has become an active verb, something we do …

When we talk about influencers in the social media space what we’re really talking about is influencer marketing … looking for people who have an advantage, authority, the agency to cause others to act.

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Influencer marketing is a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers. –Wikipedia

If we check with folks and references who live off the Internet, influence has a much larger definition than that. Think about “driving under the influence of alcohol” and you’ll get grounded again. People who get folks to buy are not the only influencers at work in our world. And for every influencer / person we would like to move, someone or something is influencing us to choose them too. Here are a few influencers we don’t talk about enough.

Influence is what we allow to move our actions and thoughts. It’s all around us and available to explore in ways that provoke new thoughts and experiences. We limit ourselves and our thinking when we limit our words.

We limit our marketing by limiting how we define influencer too. Great strategy looks farther and deeper than that.

What influences you?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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Trust Agents and a Last Laugh of Visible Joy!

Filed Under Business Book, Community, Successful Blog | 4 Comments

Go Get Yours Now!

Early this year I wrote Cool Kids, Granny Dresses, and Back Channel Intercoms: How Do You Trust People You Can’t See? It was the humiliating tale of something that happened at the awful age of 13. It was the problem of trusting people / kids who weren’t worth trusting.

I’ve grown up some since then.

I found people I trust can and we’ve formed a virbrant efficient community.

Community grows from what we see, what we are, what we imagine together. We learn from and teach each other. That the more we see, the more we find in each other and the more we help each other, we all become more.

Trust is speeds action and lowers cost and fear.

Chris Brogan and Julien Smith talked about that at SOBCon They’re the authors of Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust

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But Chris and Julien weren’t there to hawk books. Chris and Julien helped Terry and I built the SOBCon community by speaking, and attending, and sharing with the folks long before the Trust Agents was written.

Who are the trust agents? We all are, especially when we start or inspire new communities. Learn what it means to grow and work with a community of trust agents. This book is head and heart and purpose true to them and true to us so that we and others can use the web more efficiently in business.

Get the book at your favorite supplier: 800 CEO READ (also recommended for bulk orders)
Amazon.com, Amazon.ca (Canada), Barnes & Noble,
Book Depository (UK), Books-A-Million, Borders, Chapters (Canada)
IndieBound

Trust them and me … we’re all serious.

Congratulations, Chris and Julien! A visible last laugh of joy to think how far I’ve come since those granny dresses to a real trust community … to be here with you watching your day!

… and I trust Julien and Chris will never, ever wear a granny dress. except maybe for Karoake…. K?

Buy your copy of Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust
… this minute!

I trust these connections.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your web presence!!

Buy the eBook. and Register for SOBCon2010 NOW!!

Building A Powerful Personal Developmental Network - Is Your Next Teacher on Twitter?

Filed Under Business Book, Strategy, Successful Blog | 12 Comments

Great Networks and Partners Are Where You Find Them

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Last week was an exciting example of how Twitter has moved seamlessly into our lives. I left for D.C. on Wednesday stayed through Monday. It was the most productive week. Ideas were flying. Plans were being made.

How could so much happen in a city where I’ve hardly spent time?

It started with a quick conversation on Twitter with @SweetSue about her blog. Next thing you know, Susan Kuhn Frost, and I were planning an Association conference over several long phone calls, twitter DMs, and emails.

Susan had reached out to her networks — online and offline. I did to mine too. By the time I arrived in the capitol city. We had a week of meetings planned that made the conference and the content come together in record time. In the process, I think we both taught each other a lot. I’m delighted to have her in my network.

But I bet the story isn’t that unusual.

Building Your Powerful Personal Developmental Network - Is Your Next Teacher on Twitter?

Most of are great at seeing others, but it’s hard to see AND be the one we’re looking at. Whether we’re a company or an individual, it’s easy to find reasons that we made our successes, but that our failures were due to other circumstances. That’s where a powerful personal developmental network can keep things real.

In his new book, “Who’s Got Your Back?” Keith Ferrazzi talks about lifeline friends. They’re the sort of friends who hold us accountable and won’t let us fail. He suggests we build a handful of relationships based on vulnerability, generosity, candor, and accountability that’s reciprocal, constant, and intelligent.

Take Keith’s qualities and roll them into my definition of a Personal Developmental Network — a group of incredible people, individually chosen because of their unique abilities and their genuine interest in your success.

Imagine the power of that. It’s a personal board of directors time ten to the 23rd power!

Every day I touch base with people I trust — like Susan — to check my thinking and to stay accountable. Staying consistently in touch with my partners keeps the projects we’re working strong and able to move with action when opportunity arises.

My partners are a core part of my Personal Developmental Network — intelligent, incredible people, who help me stay on track with my most important goals. Many of my closest advisers are right there in my Twitter stream.

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Building A Powerful Personal Developmental Network - Is Your Next Teacher on Twitter?

Success for me, is when my whole life — head and heart — are focused on the same purpose. So my network helps me grow as a human meant to achieve something. I also believe that a network that grows with me will offer priceless depth and support.

To do that, build from the ground up.

1. Start with a foundation of concrete not sand.
– Qualitative Observations: Ask people who know you to describe your strongest traits — those that serve you well and those that get in the way. Make list. Then make a list of the kind of teachers who can teach you.

Use Twitter to ask questions and to find people who know what you’re looking to find out.

On Twitter, you’ll recognize the people who know you best by the way that they receive you. When we’re communicating people who know us, we don’t need to edit our behaviors for fear they’ll be misinterpreted. Explain why you’re asking and offer them more than one way to give you feedback: directly to you via DM, via email, or through an interview by a mutual friend.

– Quantitative Assessment: Check every test, performance appraisal, and personality measure you’ve taken. Ask your twitter friends for others that might offer a fresh view of your online persona. Learn what you can from all of them.

Use Twitter to find friends who have experience working with the tools or tests you choose. You might try a combination of Strengths Finder, the Enneagram, and the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory.

– Personal Reflection: Spend an hour / day for a week thinking about personal and business successes in your life. Look for traits and strategies that show up throw all of them.

2. Lay out a path.
Look three years down the road. Where do you see your best self? If you can’t pick a path, that’s a great place to start.

Pull it all together. Then look for online and offline partners who might help you define and refine what you found.

3. Wisely choose unique and valuable guides.
Choose people you would bet your life success and your reputation on — people who share your standards and your values, and who care enough never to let you fail. Choose people strong enough to tell you when they disagree. A strong network might include:

— a close friend who knows you and your history, both business and personal.
— someone from your business industry who knows you less well
— two or three someones who are from other industries
— two or three someones you respect and admire, but don’t know well

Use Twitter to choose people who can see the “you” people online see.

4. Check your bearings regularly.
Decide how you’ll meet with them. Will you call when you have questions or meet regularly? Will you meet one at a time? Check in with your network by asking, “How’ve I changed that you can see?”

Demand they hold you accountable. Do it by trading ways that you might hold them accountable for something they need to accomplish of their own.

5. Don’t Leave Out Learners.
People who are learning often teach us just by the questions they ask. Invite a learner to join your network to help you on your quest. That will make it easier to be a learner yourself.

When someone teaches you a skill, ask how you might use that skill to help that teacher. Ask questions, listen actively, and be first to offer a favor without strings. People remember sincere curiosity and true generosity. Add vulnerability and accountability and the combination is unstoppable, just as Keith Ferrazzi says.

6. Ask for Help — Communicate. Let your network know when you need help, when you have questions, or even when you need to vent safely. A developmental network that doesn’t know where we are can’t help.

A developmental network is not made from casual friending or among random followers. It’s the people who understand why we’re passionate about our calling. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find the right folks on Twitter and getting to know them well.

Wise teachers show up in all sorts of places.

Watch for and welcome every wise teacher you encounter. Wisdom and experience are a prize. True teachers show themselves by offering advice, expecting nothing in return. Mentors who come your way, offering experience and connections, see something in you. Let them help you discover what that is and what it could be if you let it grow.

Welcome all wise teachers into a Powerful Developmental Network, wherever you find them.

Nobody likes to go it alone, and it’s not a good idea. We need each other for information, insight, and inspiration.

Is your next teacher on Twitter? You never know.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Liz can help you find focus or direction, check out the Work with Liz!! page.

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Can Social Media Produce World-Changing Creativity?

Filed Under Business Book, Successful Blog | 29 Comments

Creativity with a Capital C

Creativity at Work

Every two or three years, I return to the book, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Creativity is based on a rigorous study of 91 internationally recognized creative people as part of his “effort to make more understandable the mysterious process by which men and women come up with new ideas and new things.” He called it Creativity with a capital C, because their contributions had world changing impact.

The study included writers, astronomers, Nobel Prize winners, actors, Historians, paleontologists, scultors, painters, architects, scientists, biologists, musicians, photographers, economists, philosophers, inventors, composers, physicians, chemists, psychologists, politicians.

According to Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, three things must come together for culture changing Creativity to occur.

  1. a domain that contains symbolic rules
  2. people who bring novelty into that domain
  3. a field of experts who recognize and validate the innovation

All three are necessary for a creative idea, product, or discovery to take place.

Can the Social Media Produce World-Changing Creativity?

Every morning, we wake up to the challenge of being creative in our lives. As Lateral Action points out this morning, Creativity is Economic Priority Number One. Some cynically don’t see value in thinking beyond the fundamentals, but that doesn’t change the challenge continues to grow. The present shift moving programmable and scripted jobs offshore requires a high concept, creative and human response.

I see us with the toys of social media communication. Some days, I wonder how many of us are caught up in the playing. What’s the value Plurking on Plurk about Plurking? How much of that is really necessary to understanding the humans think? What problems does it help us solve?

Conversation without a clear purpose is still conversation that doesn’t go anywhere. Collecting friends isn’t a noble goal in itself.

How are we to put these virtual applications toward getting the world to work?

  1. Is social media a domain that contains symbolic rules?
  2. Are there people who bring to it novel ideas?
  3. Has it established a field of experts who can recognize and validate an innovation?

Can social media produce world-changing Creativity with a Capital C?

I wonder.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

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18.5 Getting Free of Success Mythology

Filed Under Business Book, Interviews, Successful Blog | Leave a Comment

The Secret of a Lifetime

Bounce! The Path to True Business Confidence

Are we at the end of the week already? In this five-day series, we’re talking with Barry Moltz about five key facets of his book, Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success, which goes on sale January 28, 2008.

Barry has explained what he means by the idea of Bounce! He’s shown us the three paths we’re told lead to success and why we should honor our failures. Then he’s explained how to enjoy a one-hit wonder. With this last question, we explore the mythology of success.

Barry, You talk in the book about ways to free ourselves from success myths that strangle us by “Downsizing our Dreams” and “Striving For Minimal Achievement.” People search a lifetime to find this type of secret. Can we really do that?

We are constantly told to conquer that next mountain. To grow our businesses and our careers as big as possible. To get richer, bigger better faster, Achievement has become our addiction. If so, why can’t we just lower the bar a bit. Get in touch with that inner laziness that up to this point has eluded us.

That is why I want all of you to commit to me that after this meeting that you will downsize our dreams and begin too define our own brand of success – not someone elses. Forget the grand vision. Besides there is always someone that is going to be richer, smarter or better looking than you- I know, not you but for the most of us.

First, we need to set patient, interim goals…get small!. I remember when I asked my Zen master when I first began mediating, how long I should mediate for- 15 minutes, half hour or an hour each day? He said that I should try it for a minute for each day for the next few months. If I was successful, I should go to two minutes. He always taught me to strive for minimal achievement by focusing on one small goal at a time This is where I learned when striving for new goals, what we important in the climb was not even to get a foothold. Get a toehold…if you can get some progress toward your goal, you have a better chance of achieving it in the long run.

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Who won the race, the tortoise or the hare? And who lives longer. Hares live to 4 years old and tortoises, well the can live to 100

After downsizing our dreams and getting that toehold, we next figure out what will make us happily successful. Most of us will immediately say is to make a lot of money. Money is an important measure of success. It is how we keep score. But if we never get to that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, will our life trip be for nothing. However, we can all take solace that many people that have a lot of money are really unhappy!

Thanks, Barry, for five days of great conversation!
And thanks for lunch yesterday too.

Find more great information about Bounce! and advice on success and failure at BarryMoltz.com And buy his book Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success !!! I’ve read it. You should too!

–ME “Liz” Strauss

If you’d like Barry to do a guest post or an interview at your blog during his virtual book tour, email me at lizsun2 at gmail.com

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