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?

cooltext443809437_relationships

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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Teaching Sells

Buyers, Readers, Buzz Snackers and Bandwidth Bandits

Filed Under Successful Blog, Tech/Stats | 5 Comments

Not Live, but from Blog World Expo

Some asked that I post my slide deck. I’m delighted to say an hour after I put it up on slide share last night it was featured on the front page.

The Presentation had two parts.

The main points of Part One are about stats.

The main points of Part Two are about strategically using stats.

The rest supports those points.

Buyers Readers Buzz Snackers Bandwidth Bandits By Liz Strauss
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: strategy business)

Note: Clicking the little screen next to the x/23 pages allows you to see the show full screen.
Hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Get your best voice in the conversation. Buy my eBook.

The SOBCon Influence According to BuzzLogic

Filed Under SOB Business, Successful Blog, Tech/Stats | 16 Comments

Conversationally

BuzzLogic logo

This news from Valerie Coombs at BuzzLogic . . .

I just did an influence query on “sobcon liz strauss” and got these results.

How did we get these results?
BuzzLogic’s influence algorithm takes a dozen factors into account in determining the influence of posts and a blog overall. They include:

Congrats to Lorelle VanFossen for the most influential post in the entire sobcon conversation!

SOBCon Remembered and Recommended

See below the Top 25 right as of the close of SOBCon.

  1. Liz Strauss
  2. Lorelle – Lorelle has the single most influential post ever about SOBCON!
  3. Phil Gerbyshak
  4. Brain Based Business
  5. David Armano
  6. The Blog Herald
  7. James D Walton
  8. Timothy L Johnson
  9. Bootsnall travel community
  10. Ben Yonkavitz
  11. Joe Hauckes
  12. Tim Draayer
  13. Des Walsh
  14. Dawud Miracle
  15. Jon Gatrell
  16. Drew McLellan
  17. FutureLab blog
  18. Kent Blumberberg
  19. Geoffrey Philp
  20. Robert Hruzek
  21. Christine Kane
  22. Amy Palko
  23. problogger
  24. Mary Schmidt
  25. Adam Kayce

See the screenshot of the Social Map around Lorelle’s post. Click to see it full size.

BuzzLogic Conversation around the Most Influential Blog Post

We will continue to watch the conversation and update you on changes…. Valerie, BuzzLogic

Do you have influence? Will the SOBCon blog posts you write change this listing?

For more about BuzzLogic, visit Jeremiah’s post of Shel’s Interview with the Co-Founder. Sandra and Valerie are both in the vid.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Dear Google, I’m the Relationship Blogger

Filed Under SEO, Successful Blog, Tech/Stats | 63 Comments

Dear Google,
It’s Liz.

I’m a little confused about our relationship. After two years, you dumped me from Page Rank 6 to a Page Rank 3.

I would have thought it was text-links I had — they’re gone now. I’m sorry. The world knows I’m not an SEO whiz, if I was one, I wouldn’t have 40-some categories in my sidebar. At least, that’s what folks tell me.

But you dumped my LizStrauss blog too, and it doesn’t have any ads and never did.

It’s disheartening when I think of how I advocate NOT GAMING the system.

You might remember when I said

Links and relationships are intertwined and inseparable to me. It’s about people and connections that last.

Did you misunderstand the SOB program after all of this time? Not all of these folks have all of the links you might expect, but they will, because they show the key traits of a successful blogger. I know they will because they write good content and they make good relationships.

Is it that I write creative entertainment sometimes? Isn’t that better than just regurgitating someone else’s content?

Everyone knows that a link exchange on this blog is out of the question.

I’m the kind of blogger who wants a relationship not a one link stand.

And then there was my personal stance on link trains and other valueless link posts.

Dear Emperor: A Test for Your Next Link Post

If the recent birthday party invitation to 646 blogs threw you, please know that it lived up to the “Dear Emperor” standard. So will the link posts like this first one that celebrate the links the party guests brought to show their most successful and outstanding experiences — a birthday only happens once a year. You can believe I’m checking them. I do that for you, for me, and for my readers.

So Google, that’s our history. I know you know me better. I’m the person behind the numbers. I don’t link promiscuously.

I’m the relationship blogger. I want folks to respect me in the morning.

Liz's Signature

Great Find: Better Comments Manager — Reply INSIDE the WordPress Dashboard

Filed Under Successful Blog, Tech/Stats | 6 Comments

I Want One!

From the first I started corresponding with Keith Dsouza, he’s been a special one — talented and creative. He can ask a simple question and turn the answer into a blog post. . . . Keith is one surprise after another. The biggest of all was when I turned around at the problogger meetup and heard a guy say, “I’m Keith.”

Keith is the guy who developed Better Comments Manager for WordPress. If you’re on WordPress and you don’t know about it; you’re missing something . . .

Great Find: Better Comments Manager
Permalink: http://techie-buzz.com/wordpress-plugins/better-comments-manager-just-got-better.html
Target Audience: WordPress users
Content: Put simply the Better Comments Manager plugin allows publishers to respond to comments from inside the WordPress dashboard — rather than making us wait for another pageload to type in the comment on the page itself. The process is easy.

  1. Click reply.
  2. A box will appear.
  3. Type a reply in the box.
  4. Click save reply.
  5. A message will say it’s being saved.
  6. The reply will appear as a comment in the lists.

To check this out, click the title below.

Better comments manager just got better

This is cool.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
If you’d like Liz to help you find your strategy, click on the Work with Liz!!

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