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!!

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.

I’m a proud affiliate of

Teaching Sells

Using Cooliris … Here’s How You Do It!! Part 2

Filed Under Marketing, Tools | 2 Comments

Brand New Today

relationships button

Social business has left the world of broadcasting to enter the world of making customers into heroes and celebrities. Every chance we get to bring them together and allow them to shine, shines well on our business too.

Our customers are the fuel that lead our businesses to thrive. Why not give them some traction and support by letting the world know what they mean to our success?

One easy way to do that is choosing great tools from those the social web supplies.

As you might remember from two days ago, I started to make a Cooliris wall from some photos of my SOBCon09 heroes …

A typical use case to share rich media involves selecting content from Flickr. So I’m making a Flickr Set from SOBCon09. I’ve been playing with it to see how I might include some SOBCon09 heroes in my blog …

expresssharepage

Unfortunately I got stuck in the middle … with a static screenshot.

cooliris

I couldn’t find a way to fully integrate it yet.

Good Customer Service Still Happens

A few hours after I blogged about it, Matt from Cooliris called offering to help. We decided that it might be easier if he sent me directions that I could share with you.

To embed your cooliris wall in your blog post … start your journey at cooliris.com/express/builder and follow the instructions below.

I did that and here’s the result!!


Thank you, Matt and cooliris! I appreciate your patience, your help, and your service!
You’ve converted my photos and converted me into a fan!!

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

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversion. .

I’m a proud affiliate of

Teaching Sells

Using CoolIris to Make Customer Heroes — in more time than I have! Ma

Filed Under Successful Blog, Tools | 1 Comment

Brand New Today

relationships button

Social business has left the world of broadcasting to enter the world of making customers into heroes and celebrities. Every chance we get to bring them together and allow them to shine, shines well on our business too.

Our customers are the fuel that lead our businesses to thrive. Why not give them some traction and support by letting the world know what they mean to our success?

One easy way to do that is choosing great tools from those the social web supplies.

Meet Cooliris and Make Social Heroes

Cooliris , innovator of the fastest and most stunning way to browse photos and videos from desktops or mobile devices, today announced Cooliris Express, a free tool that lets non-technical users create compelling digital experiences that showcase their photo and video content.

With Cooliris Express users can easily build and share fully customizable, cohesive, and immersive walls of photos and videos – not just a single photo or album – to websites, social networks, and blogs.

expressstartpage

Customized Media Walls in Seconds
Cooliris makes it easy for users to get started creating custom galleries by providing a simple to understand, intuitive, step-by-step wizard that walks them through the gallery building and posting process. First it prompts them to locate their personal media-rich content, then it provides options for where the content will be viewable, and finally with just one-click post they are able to share their custom galleries to the world, or just to their friends.

expresssharepage

A typical use case to share rich media involves selecting content from Flickr. So I’m making a Flickr Set from SOBCon09. I’ve been playing with it to see how I might include some SOBCon09 heroes in my blog …

cooliris

I couldn’t find a way to fully integrate it yet, but I hear that’s coming … meanwhile, click on the screenshot above to see more.

Leaves ME Feeling like not such a Hero

Another compelling feature is that the Cooliris Express galleries are dynamic. Once you create and post a gallery you can update it at the content source (ie: YouTube or Flickr) and the galleries you have posted to your blog or social media sites will be automatically updated with no additional steps required from the end-user.

Express works across the web
Incorporating Gigya social media technology, Express supports social media sites and blogs include: Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, TypePad, Netvibes, Yahoo, Hi5 and Orkut.

In addition to social media sites and blogs, Cooliris Express also allows uss to intntegrate the Cooliris Wall into their person websitetes. Instead of selecting a social media location, the user would select a personal site and the tool automatically generates the code they need to copy and paste into their page for the Cooliris Wall to appear.

Hold , cowboy! I have to go somewhere else to make it work on my blog? Not cool.
I just spent more time than I had trying to make this work.

You didn’t make that clear in the demo. This program has power and I can’t wait to learn more about how to get it into my blog!

Thanks to Matt from Cool Iris who brought me the directions on how to make the rest happen.
See part two of this post …

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

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversion. .

I’m a proud affiliate of

Teaching Sells

Cool Tool: screenr - Screencasting How to Add Text to Your Twitter Background

Filed Under Marketing, Successful Blog, Tools | 9 Comments

Screencasting Fast and Easy

screenr_logo

Screencasting is recording actions on the screen with narration. It’s a great way to show people how.

What it says it does: allow screencasting without software.
How well it does that: screenr is easy and intuitive.

  1. Size the capture screen to the website you want to discuss.
  2. Click the record button and record.
  3. Pause if you want.
  4. Then wait, a few minutes for it to process.

Embed the screencast in your eCourse, download the video as MP4, upload it to your You-Tube channel, and watch it on your iPhone! Send it to Twitter. Post it on your blog.

It’s free and great to use.

How to Add Text to Your Twitter Background

For fun, I made this screencast of how to add text to your Twitter Background. It was mostly to test the tool.



Here’s the link to the screenr version.

Lots of ways to share information with people using screenr and your expertise.

I make connections . . .

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
Buy the ebook and find out the secret.

How To Announce Your New Blog Post In Your Twitter?

Filed Under Tips, Tools | 12 Comments

This is a how-to post.  I’ll keep this post simple.

Background

I think I am a lazy person actually.  Whenever I write a blog post, I know that the next thing I must do is to tweet about it in my Twitter account so that I can let my followers know.  Such a task can be leveraged to the computer to help us do it since it is just telling our twitter followers about our new blog post.

Requirements

  1. You must be using a WordPress platform.
  2. You must be an administrator in order to configure this properly.
  3. It is ok if you are using the free wordpress.com platform, or if you have installed wordpress in your own domain name.

Let’s get it started!

Step 1: You will need to download “Twitter tools“.

Step 2: Unzip the contents of the entire folder “twitter-tools” and upload into your wp-content/plugins/ directory. (You’ll need to know how to use FTP)

Step 3: Go to the Plugins page in your WordPress Administration area and click ‘Activate’ for Twitter Tools.

Step 4: Go to the Twitter Tools Options page (Options > Twitter Tools) to set your Twitter account information and preferences as shown in the screenshot below.

twitter-tools-1

This is my way of tweeting automatically after adding my new post.  What other methods have you used?

This post was written by Charles. He has been an Internet reviewer since June 2007.  He pours his passion for Internet marketing and Internet branding into his Twitter account actively at @charleslau,

keep looking »