Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

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

The Only Way to Attract a Vibrant, High-Trust Community

Filed Under Comments, Community, Design, Inside-Out Thinking, Liz Talks Corporate, Marketing, One Way to CC It, SEO, Successful Blog, Tech/Stats, Tools | 35 Comments

Last summer at AdTech, a VP at huge corporate brand extended her arms completely — way out in front her — and used her hands to gesture as she said something close to this about her goal for building a community:

I want to build a community in which peers are talking to peers openly.

I’m sure she didn’t mean it the way it looked … Her hands were so far away from her. — or sounded … peers talking to peers?

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I couldn’t help thinking … Where will YOU be? Studying me? Is that what you think of me? I’m not a peer. I’m a person. I only do well in places where people “get” me.

Users. Consumers. Buyers. Customers. Leads. Eyeballs. Peers. Those are faceless, flattening labels. They come from the time of one-size-fits-all.

People are individual human beings complete with aspirations, intentions, ideas, opinions, habits, behaviors, thoughts, and emotions.

Which community would you join?

More Communities and More Time for Them

Online social communities aren’t a new thing. People have been linking and sharing via blogs since the 20th century. Organized social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn have become a part of our lives.

Our communities are becoming more about communicating and being creative about what interests us. It’s all about making it relevant to the people we want to attract. As this Pew Internet Slideshare describes …

Social Media – Making it Business Relevant
View more presentations from Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.


We’re participating more. We’re spending more time in communities. We’re building more of them. How do attract people to the communities we’re building that are perfect for them?

The Only Way to Attract a Vibrant, High-Trust Community

Just as a building is not a business, a community is not a collection of profiles or a url. People won’t visit our community because it’s pretty. People will come because it offers them something they value.

From two people to more than plenty, a community is a social structure that shares personal values, cultural values, business goals, attitudes, or a world view. What binds it is a culture of social rules and group dynamics that identify members. In the most concise terms, an online social community is a group of like-minded individuals connected by relevant interactions and protected by a high-trust environment.

A high-trust community is an agreement, a pact or contract, like love or friendship. We can’t order, build, or wish our way to one. What we can do is attract people who want to join what we’re doing. The only way to do that is clear passionate commitment, obvious generosity, trustworthiness, and a touch of intentional serendipity … which looks something like this.

  1. Be a person (or people) who likes people. People work with, talk with, and relate to other people not a business.
  2. Articulate a clear and passionate vision worth investing in. Live your commitment. Get your hands dirty.
  3. Seek out people who would love what you’re doing. Find them where they are already gathering and talking. Join THEIR conversations. Get to know them.
  4. Be a beginner, but keep the vision. Learn from everyone who’s been anywhere near where you’re going. Learn to sort wrong from unexpected or different. Ideas that jar you could be the best ones.
  5. Invite everyone who “gets” the vision to help build this new thing. Look for ways to include their skills and their passions.
  6. Keep participation efficient and easy. Curb the urge to add cool things that get in the way of conversation and sharing.
  7. Let trust sort things. Model the standards of behavior. Keep rules to a minimum.
  8. Be visible authenticity. Lean toward full disclosure, but avoid over-exposure. Most of us look better with our clothes on.
  9. Protect everyone’s investment. Forgive mistakes. Ignore little missteps. Eradicate what is destructive. Know the difference by holding thing up to trust, values, and the community vision.
  10. Stop doing what isn’t working. Be lethal about keeping things easy, efficient, and meaningful.
  11. Promote your members … and honor your competition! Secure communities need both to thrive and get new ideas.
  12. Encourage mutation. Let the environment change to meet the changing needs of the people it serves.
  13. Celebrate contagion. Make it heroic to share what’s going on!
  14. Be grateful and always about the people. The community wouldn’t be a community without them.

An online community isn’t built or befriended, it’s connected by offering and accepting. Community is affinity, identity, and kinship that make room for ideas, thoughts, and solutions. –What Is a Social Community?

We create vibrant, high trust community by letting other folks raise the barn with us, by being their first offering trust and a passionate vision, and valuing the trust and energy they give us.

What attracts you to a community? What keeps you coming back again?

-ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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The Relationsheep Factor: A Successful Blog Birthday Bash Interview with the Phil Gerbyshak and Lisa Gates!

Filed Under One Way to CC It, Successful Blog | 16 Comments

Phil Gerbyshak, sheep, Liz Strauss, Lisa Gates = Relationship Geeks



In honor of Liz Strauss, the fabulously sticky writer and queen of relationship blogging, Lisa Gates of Design Your Writing Life and Phil Gerbyshak of Make it Great team up to offer this first-time-ever interview to talk about Liz’s impact on the Relationsheep factor and what it’s like to have Liz inside your computer.

What is He Talking About? Chris Cree on Hard Work

Filed Under One Way to CC It, Successful Blog | 17 Comments

“The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.” –Harry Golden

The Blame Game

We live in a lottery culture. Instant gratification is the working model we are presented with most times. If it doesn’t happen right away, then most folks tend to give up.

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When they give up they tend to fall into one of two categories, both of which are looking to find a place outside themselves to affix the blame for their lack of success. I guess our psyches are somehow wired in such a way that as long as there is an outside source that we can point to as the cause of our circumstance, then we can press on without facing the pain of actually working though our own part in events leading up to where we find ourselves.

This blame phenomenon is so prevalent in our culture that we used to joke about it when I was in the Navy. “It doesn’t matter if you fix the problem as long as you fix the blame.”

The first category of blame fixers either point to some entity as the cause of their circumstances (“I can’t save any money because the government taxes me too much.”) or they will double down on their circumstances and blame one circumstance for another (“I can never be wealthy because I was born poor”).

When I ask one of these folks how they are doing I’ll probably hear something like, “{Sigh} OK. Under the circumstances.” I want to fire right back, “What are you doing under there?”

But usually I don’t. Read more

What is He Talking About? Chris Cree on Friends

Filed Under One Way to CC It, Successful Blog | 7 Comments

“Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.”
–Peter Ustinov

I like people.

I mean as a general principle.

Oh, sure. There are some folks that I really would rather not be around. But mostly I like hanging out with other people.

In my book there is nothing better than hanging out with a couple people either over a good meal, or perhaps in a big cushy chair with some coffee and shooting the breeze. It doesn’t much matter to me whether we are solving the world’s problems - politics, religion, famine, disaster, war, WordPress vs. TypePad - or just simply making small talk, either way I’m for a good round of jawing most times.

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So when it comes down to it, I’m all about friends.

Friend Defined

Who is a friend? I mean there are friends and there are Friends, if you know what I mean. Read more

What is He Talking About? Chris Cree on Order

Filed Under One Way to CC It, Successful Blog | 4 Comments

“First things first. But not necessarily in that order.” –Doctor Who

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Liz said something very kind to me the other day.

We were catching up on some post conference details when she said, “Chris, you are a Choreographer of Success. You clear roadblocks so things can get done.”

That’s me. Mr. Snow-Plow.

I clear the way and things happen.

I guess you could say I’m sorta like Doctor Who, but on a much smaller scale.
Doctor Who
I mean the good Doctor seems to chronically stumble onto some sort of doomsday end-of-humanity scenario. Then he’ll figure out exactly what needs to be done (and no more), and get it done just in the nick of time. All with a cheery attitude and a touch of drama (of course). And then he slides off into the Tardis as anonymously as possible.

One of the tricks to being a successful snow plow (a snow plow of success?) is the ability to prioritize well. And that obviously means the ability to put first things first.

Except when it doesn’t.

The thing is we try so hard to formula-ize things like success as though we can follow a recipe or program ourselves like a computer to achieve success. There is a whole industry making a ton of money selling people all kinds of formulas.

Some work better than others, no doubt.

But the truth is success isn’t so much a set of action steps as it is a montage of guiding principles that when collectively applied produce desirable results.

One trick is to know when to keep first things first. And then recognize those times when you will get better results doing something else first. Unfortunately I haven’t found the formula that will tell the difference every time.

Until I come up with one, I’ll just plow on. Like the good Doctor, I’ll keep applying what I know and making the rest up as I go.

And that’s just the Way I C it.

–Chris Cree, SuccessCREEations.

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