Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

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

Are You Listening? Influence and Participation Above the Noise

Filed Under Marketing, Successful Blog, The Big Idea | 12 Comments

Listening Is Essential to Communication

“To listen well, is as powerful a means of influence as to talk well, and is as essential to all true conversation” –Chinese Proverb

Last week, I got a chance to talk with Patrick Rooney, of the Zócalo Group in Chicago. As we discussed social media, Patrick discussed the perspective of corporate clients moving into the social media space now. He made a powerful point about how some corporate clients are slow to enter social media because they perceive bloggers as having no forgiveness for mistakes they might make. [not a direct quote]

Patrick and I talked about the digital divide that needs closing. the stereotypes in both directions: a bunch of undisciplined bloggers and social media rockstars who don’t like companies and a bunch of uptight, uppity corporate folks who think they know more than everything. We discussed opportunities to get some conversations started. I told him about the barns and bridges project. We made some plans to move things forward.

It seems so easy. All we had to was introduce them and get them talking and listening. Listening is the crucial part.

Influence and Participation Above the Noise

If you want to make a deal or a partnership, build a bridge, or solve a conflict, listening is the way in. If we don’t listen to what people believe, what they need, or what their goals are, how could we have their best interests in mind?

Listening is influence. A good listener has the power to change conduct, thought, or decisions, by encouraging discussions to go deeper, thoughts to get bigger, and people to raise their ideas above the noise.

Listening is participation. Great listeners are involved and thinking. That’s how we connect with other people’s ideas and values. Active listening helps us find the places where our minds meet and understand the places where our ideas separate. Here are just a few ways that listening enhances influence through participation.
Listening:

We talk, teach, tell people what we think and walk away feeling we’ve had an influence. Have we really? The folks we’re addressing could be ignoring every word we say and smiling while they do so.

If we want to form effective partnerships — raise barns and build bridges — we have to understand what the other guy cares about, where he or she is going and which of our goals match well alongside those. Listening tunes us in to potential partners.

Listen gives us direction and purpose in any collaboration. When we listen first, we make better choices about what we say and how we say it. Our voices become more powerful.

. . . it’s the listening that separates Social Media experts from Social Media theorists. said Brian Solis

Has social media changed the way you listen? How would you explain listening online to someone who’s new here?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Some Listening Resources:
Chris Brogan offers a slew of advice on how to listen.
Conversations are happening online in all kinds of places. It’s important to understand how to get in there, and how to listen where the conversations are happening. Here’s a very impartial list of places to listen and how.

Once you’re through Chris’ list, here’s a Starter List of a few more Web 2.0 Social Tools.

Some new new tools that help us tune in include:
monitter, which allows you to follow conversations by keywordyacktrack which allows you to track a single term or a url, social mention which searches across 8 web media formats

Can you hear the Internet? Buy my eBook.

Credibility: How to Connect with New Arrivals to the SocialSphere

Filed Under Successful Blog, The Big Idea | 17 Comments

What We Do Well

Susan Reid’s thoughts on women entrepreneurs got me thinking about the SocialSphere and what makes us all successful when we are. It’s no surprise that those entrepreneurial traits that she outlines are found in familiar places online.

Susan points out that successful entrepreneurs have several traits in common. I found those traits alive and well online.

She added business leadership characteristics that seem to be found more often in women — an affinity for balanced, life-style businesses; a bias toward service-focused, customer care; values-led business leadership; faith in intuition, trust, and holistic decision-making; and a success definition that includes relationships. Great social media practitioners — men and women — work toward those same people-centered values. . . . This framework for measuring social media from Peter Kim points to the core of that likemindedness. The very word social in social media and social networking seems to make that people-centeredness an obvious trait.

When I read the last section, Top Five Mistakes Made by Women in Business, I began looking at our online conversation and and how we might handle it best for new people arriving in the SocialSphere. .

How to Connect with New Arrivals to the SocialSphere

Credibility comes from the “context and content.” People meet us and try to place us among what they already know. They use their experience and our first impression — how we look, what we say, what we do — to recognize signs that might validate our consistency, integrity, competence, and trustworthiness.

Every person measures those qualities based on measures of content and context they have used in the past. Note this example and the differences in context.

When did you start using social media tools beyond blogs?

Three years of experience with social media tools can be a lot.

Three years ago, social media wasn’t discussed.
Three years ago Twitter didn’t exist.

Three years experience is still entry level in offline contexts.

It’s a contextual gap.

To establish an authentic relationships, we need to communicate within their context. If, for example, we want to do business, a first impression needs to convey credibly that three years of social media experience is more than entry level. Credible first impressions are crucial to authentic relationships. Authentic relationships are crucial to strong reputations.

Here are six ways to credible first impressions and authentic, lasting relationships.

We’ve built a highly collaborative social media culture — one that thrives on learning from each other openly, honestly, and with minimal hierarchy. We know how to meet, interact, and build communities with our customers / readers. That culture is what we value. It’s also what we have to offer.

New folks coming are potential. They will change a culture, just as we did when we got here. If we reach out in the best ways possible, they’ll be our new readers and our new clients. They’ll be the new members of our communities, and we’ll be theirs.

How can we help each other make credible connections with new arrivals? If you’re new to the SocialSphere, what advice do you have?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

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

A Barn Raisers Guide: 7 Ways to Leave the Field of Dreams to Build a Thriving Reality

Filed Under Strategy, Successful Blog, The Big Idea | 26 Comments

Field of Dreamers and Barn Raisers

For quite a while, I’ve been working with businesses who have or are preparing to build or expand a web presence or social community. They ask me to help focus their strategy and to help bring people to their communities. They want to attract, impress, and ultimately engage fiercely loyal participants.

If you’ve been online for a while, you’ve probably noticed that a percentage of new arrivals get a key strategic point of community sites out of order. Field of Dreamers are sure if they build their idea their way the people will come. Except the people don’t necessarily see the same thing.

More strategic folks Barn Raisers avoid the risk by building the community as they build the site. They believe that people will help build a powerful idea. Barn Raisers invite collaboration from the people they’ll be serving and so what they build is often a gathering place for people even before it’s fully finished.

A Barn Raisers Guide

Here are 7 ways to leave a field of dreams and get people to help you build a thriving reality.

If you invite folks to be part of a powerful idea, you’ll find that you suddenly have a knack for making spaces where people collect, connect, and start conversations. It might have something to do letting people help form the environments that they’re going to inhabit. It’s like painting a house that we’re going to live in — pride of ownership.

Barn raising has always been a brilliant strategy — building the relationships while you’re building a site.

It takes a little practice. And it takes leadership to let go enough to get the good stuff without getting the chaos. The best results always calls for the best from each of us.

I’m hoping as we build barns we might bring some Field of Dreamers to work with Barn Raisers on a community site. I thought maybe they might like the process. Do you think the two together would have a chance of success?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

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

It’s Time to Reach Our Best Hand Out to the Folks Coming In

Filed Under Successful Blog, The Big Idea | 30 Comments

Did You See the Discussion?

Yesterday’s discussion about playing for keeps was a peek at a the idea it’s important to our best selves to what we do. The best people connections in life and business happen when our inside values are visible on the outside. Or as John Haydon said in the comments:

… whenever I am being honest with myself and authentic with others, I don’t even have to ask if I’m walking the walk.

Why Here? Why Now?

Each wave of new bloggers and social media practioners finds a different socialsphere. They arrive a little further from where it all began. The information, tools, and practices change and move from hands to hands. People find new uses for the tools. People use the tools and application in unintended ways.

The socialsphere changes a little with the integration of each new group.

It’s getting harder to tell the authentic practioners from the frauds. One cause could be that not enough of us are clear about the expertise we offer or how competent we are.

Soon the waves will be larger — more in the form of companies. The companies will come with goals / plans, money, and their own traditions and histories. Some wlll learn the tools, join communities, and understand the cultural shift the tools were made to facilitate. Some will learn the tools, but succeed by applying them in old culture ways. It’s likely some will try the tools and fail miserably.

And a new generation is arriving who’ve been using and testing the tools while they get their degrees. What changes will they bring?

We want mainstream arrivals to succeed and to grow what we started rather than accidently knock it down. Yet, it’s almost as if we’re the company and they’re the customers now. Like customers responding to a product, they’ll decide whether social media works for them.

Mainstream definition of social media and its success or failure will define the culture of the Internet.

In an apprentice environment such as this, new arrivals are only as good as the one who teaches them. It’s natural for people to study the folks they connect with most quickly and trust the most. That would be the first people who look competent, who talk with intelligence and confidence, and if at all possible, who already know their friends.

Right here. Right now.
It’s time to reach our best hand out to the folks coming in.

4 Steps to Raise a Barn and Build a Bridge

The plan that is unfolding begins with this model project. It’s planned to be the first of many projects for many people on the Internet. If you have a dream project on the shelf, you might start yours and track it alongside this one of mine.


This project that I’ve named “Don’t Tell ‘em, Show ‘em” involves bringing out the best of this blog, of myself, of the SOB list, and in a second part, help for others to do the same. It’s a barnraising and a bridge building endeavor that has these four traits.

Then the folks who can will raise more barns and build more bridges on the next projects.

The process will be open. I’ll keep you in the plan as it unfolds. I’ll tell you what’s happening. I’ll ask for help when I get stuck. I plan to get attention, raise the bar, and show the value of what we’re about. If you have ideas how to do that better, faster, louder, or more efficiently — where to go what to start — if you have skills to volunteer, or if you want to track a project of your own, I’ve a comment box below. C’mon let’s talk.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Related:
Why Play the Game, If We Aren’t Playing for Keeps?

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Why Play the Game, If We Aren’t Playing for Keeps?

Filed Under Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog, The Big Idea | 76 Comments

A Story of More than That

I’ve bought five homes. From the time the real estate agent was engaged until the offer was made not one took longer than a week. Two offers were completed in a single day. The real estate agent in Austin told me that in 25 years we were his only clients who actually purchased the house we said we were looking to buy.

I chose my university the same way.

I married my husband 42 days after we met — 24 years and 11 months ago.

My point is I know how to make a decision. I have a good sense of who I am. . . .

Yet I’ve been thinking about redesigning my blog for almost a year. Obviously it wasn’t a case of finding a new template. It’s a story of more than that.

Unwieldy Blog Unwieldy Me

Sometime around last October I realized that my blog had grown unwieldy. People can’t see the content or how it reflects me. The writing blog, the business blog, the branding blog all sit buried beneath pages. That same October, I realized that my personal presentation was in the same unwieldy state of outward presentation.

I took time to map out how to solve the blog problems. I took even longer to work out the same things about me. That done, I started looking for how to get the work done and get my life in order.

I Was in the Game . . . Not Really

Every day, I kept bumping into things that reinforced what I’d learned or suspected. Some incidents were small. Some events were larger.

At SOBCon08, I came face to face with a fact.

I was in the game, but I wasn’t playing with all that was in me.

I looked around and saw I wasn’t the only one that was holding back.

And the question stood in front of me.

Why play the game, if we aren’t playing for keeps?

And it stayed with me.
They have their act together better than I do.
Oh God, another “bad hair day” video.

Why should anyone believe the shoemaker makes fabulous shoes if his own shoes are ratty? The shoemaker ought to be wearing the best shoes in town.

It’s a rationalization, a total disconnect to think otherwise.

Why do we let ourselves off the hook on that?
No famous shoemaker ever wore ratty shoes.

If we’re not the best examples of our own talents, if we’re not walking our values, might as well hang up our uniforms — why would anyone waste good time and money on someone who’s heart isn’t in the game?

This isn’t just about shoes. It’s about people seeing what we can do.



Can people see you?

I’m Getting in the Game for Keeps . . . How About You?

People have relationships with people they can “see” — real people — people they trust. Social networking, social media, social anything is about connecting people with people. It’s relating, showing up, revealing something about the who we are inside.

We trust people whose inside values are visible on the outside.

That means giving a sign that we see them too and understand their values.
Time to quit talking about blogging in our jammies. It doesn’t make sense to people who don’t know our culture.

I’m getting in the game for keeps.
I’m showing up for the people in my life and my business. Gonna let them and you see me learn as well as let ‘em see what I already know.

I used to think “Don’t tell ‘em, show ‘em,” was just a writer’s line.

It’s more. It’s a way of living.

Talk is cheap.
Showing up, showing who we are is relational gold.
If you value people in your life — business, social, friendship, family . . .


It’s okay to let people see you trying.
Trying happens right before succeeding.

How much
can they hear
if what they see
isn’t all that we could show them?

What would be easier if we got the offline world to take the blogosphere seriously?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

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

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