Successful Blog

Thanks to Week 345 SOBs

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Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

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They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

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Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Influence: 5 Ways to Check Whether Your Online Business Relevance Is Eroding

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Offering Value and Meaning

As more tools and algorithms surface for the purpose of rating influence, across each measure and metric the hardest factor to isolate and measure is topical relevance. I may be influential to the SOBCon on the subject of strategy, small business, start ups, and entrepreneurship, because I’ve established expertise in the area of starting and growing a business. However, I wouldn’t have the same influential relevance on the topic of gourmet cooking or restaurant management.

Without relevance, there is no influence.

5 Ways to Check Whether Your Business Relevance Is Eroding

Eight to ten years ago, the social business Internet was centered in the blogosphere. Blogs were the most common vehicle by which online business people established their identities, connected, and conversed. Individuals picked up the tools and learned the culture from the people they met while using them. Now, this Insane Infographic-of-the-day: Social Media shows the complicated space the social business web has become. …


Click the image to view a larger format.

Blogging platforms have become one unit on a hugely varied landscape for sharing content.
Blogs were once a highly relevant main idea in a chart like that.
Now they are more of a secondary detail in relevance.

Keep up with the changing landscape or lose relevance. Keeping up requires participating and adding unique value to channel and enhance opportunities as the environment changes. Here are 5 ways to check whether your online business relevance is eroding.

  1. You (your brand or your business) spend more time sharing content than reading it. Strategic sharing can enhance relevance. Through focus and filtering, a business can underscore brand identity, values, expertise, and a service ethic. All of which builds trust and attracts a self-sorting group of ideal customers or clients.

    Oversharing without filtering, such as retweeting without reading first, adds noise not value and erodes relevance. Promiscuous sharing destroys relevance.

  2. You (your brand or your business) value social scores and metrics, such as Klout and follower counts, MORE than conversations with the people who help your business thrive. We can use metrics to fine tune our relevance. Metrics can reveal “who, what, how, when, and how many”.

    All metrics and algorithms carry the bias of assumptions about what is being measured. Beware of how metrics flatten data by removing individual particularities. To stay relevant, keep a continuous dialogue with individuals represented by the data. Balance in the people-data equation is foundational to relevance.

  3. You (your brand or your business) make decisions and develop expertise based on 2nd-hand experiences. Research and reading focused on current cases, predictions, trends, cycles, and conditions can increase relevance. Understanding the breadth of an industry environment extends our ability to recognize and leverage opportunity. Still vicarious knowledge is shallow, fades quickly, and lacks insight.

    Turning acquired knowledge into experience by applying it, trying it, testing, and measuring our outcomes increases relevance exponentially. Through application we develop the intuitive detail of experience and the ability to recognize nuance. In that way it erodes relevance.

  4. You (your brand or your business) have more answers than questions. Sharing answers and solutions is highly relevant. Doing so in the spaces where customers meet to talk — in their language — makes those answers even more relevant.

    More powerful than answers are the compelling questions that keep us connecting and searching. Working out and working on deep questions that are critical to our customers’ mission — how they will raise their families, how they can grow their business — offer the people we serve the most relevant connection to our business.

  5. You (your brand or your business) develop social marketing plans around “online and offline channels” rather than using connect more deeply with the people who build your business. A well-designed outreach strategy can spark relevant human connections.

    Reframing social business as customer connections rather than channels, we can build true “other-centered” intimacy into the way we reach out, A view to why people meet in each space changes the way we talk and the topics we talk about. Relevance online and off starts with caring about people.

As information and technology change at the speed of the Internet, staying relevant is a constant and always current criteria of true influence. Focused attention to the new problems, new solutions, and new opportunities that surround them is essential. Without that focus and a clear intention to acquire new competencies, internalize current culture, and cultivate new thinking, that same speed of the Internet can erode, as we continue to do what once made us successful but is no longer needed.

How do you stay irresitibly relevant to the people who help you thrive?

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

Influence Yourself

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Who Influences You?

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I’m proud of you. You inspire me. You’re a treasure.

Have you ever heard those words?

How nice it is to know that in some life you’ve been a treasure, a thing of beauty or inspiration. I never cease to wonder what prompts such a feeling, what someone saw in me. What does it mean to make another person proud?

Words like that influence me.
They change how I think, how I act, what I believe and what I do next.
They make me stop, think, and wonder what I did to earn them.
A powerful statement can change doubt into confidence.

When I get a response that says I’m valued, I’m influenced to do things that will earn that feeling again.

But …

Some folks think I’m brilliant and creative and other folks, well, think I’m … um … not.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

And on that idea, I figured out something when I was looking at the the stars.

When stars die they leave behind space debris. Space debris is gorgeous colors and shines with its own bright light. The wispy, windy patterns and reflections energize filmy fibers in the endless space night.

What (hu)man named it trash?
It’s a treasure for the heart and the eyes.

People and stars are made of the same stuff.
The carbon that makes cell in our bodies came from the same stuff that makes stars.

It’s true about stars.
It’s true about people too.

Stars shine no matter who is looking.
No one has to call them a treasure.
They shine because that’s what stars do.

Influence Yourself

This week …

Be a treasure.
Start a quest. Create and conspire.
Be a mentor, a leader, a teacher. Inspire.
Be a beginner, a learner, an adventurer. Aspire.
Shine at being you.
Shine because being brilliant is what you do.
Do it because YOU have decided you’re living up to being a treasure.

Influence yourself.

Be irresistible.
— ME “Liz” Strauss

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.

Thanks to Week 344 SOBs

by

muddy teal strip A

Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

muddy teal strip A

They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

deep purple strip

Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

5 Steps to Increasing Your Blog Comments

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How to blog series

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Virginia Cunningham

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You’ve created a blog, made a few posts, maybe even installed some ads for the extra income. You’re locked and loaded to take the Internet by storm. But where are all the comments? Where is the dedicated audience breathlessly hanging on your every word?

Don’t worry, you don’t have to succumb to the tumbleweeds just yet. If you’re eager for more fans, here are five steps to increasing your blog comments.

1. Comment On Other Blogs

Before anything else, you need to establish your presence in your field. This is most easily achieved by commenting on other blogs and making a name for yourself as someone worth listening to. By making smart, funny and helpful comments on other blogs, readers will be interested enough to follow you back to your own.

2: Respond To Comments

No one likes to be ignored, and if your commenters feel like they’re shouting into an empty void, they become much less likely to comment in the future. To gain (and keep) an active community of followers, you’ll need to make a habit of responding to their comments. Answer their questions. Suggest new tech. Outsource their problems if you have to. Regardless of the content, just make sure their comments don’t go unnoticed. They’ve taken time out of their lives to comment on your blog; the least you can do is offer them the same courtesy.

3. Create A Community

It’s basic psychology: people like to belong. Take advantage of this by turning your commenting pool into a community – a place with its own language and lingo, a place where people can build friendships and swap stories without feeling out of place. If something happens to one of your followers, spotlight it. If you think two people would really get along, mention it. Make introductions among your followers. Create memes. Reference inside jokes in your updates. When new visitors feel the urge to “fit in,” you’ll know you’re doing it right.

4. Ask For Opinions

The best thing that can happen to any blog is a lively debate, so inspire some passion by soliciting the opinions of your followers. Make polls, ask leading questions (“what do you guys think?”) and encourage the most vocal of your readers. Don’t be afraid to touch on scandalous topics, because those often create the most heated (and long-running) exchanges.

5. Be Interesting

What makes you comment on a blog? What pushes you from a mere reader to an active participant in an exchange of ideas? It wouldn’t have happened if the blog wasn’t interesting or engaging enough to merit your response.

To this extent, if you want comments, you just have to be a good blogger. You need to be active, interesting, and well-informed in your field. Your post should be entertaining and relevant. Your comments should be smart and useful.

Simply put, if you want more comments on your blog, make your blog worth commenting on.

Author’s Bio: Virginia Cunningham is a freelance technology writer based in Los Angeles, California. She currently blogs about id security, social media and gadgets.

Thank you, Virginia! Engagement is always a noble quest.

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

Choose Your Winners Wisely and Invest Unconditionally

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Relational Reciprocity

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I don’t play with every new social media tool. In fact, I ignore most of them. I’ve decided my view is that tools are vehicles for problem solving or uniquely rare opportunities for new learning. The former I go looking for when I need them. The latter show up without warning, but are few and far between.

Once the decision is made to participate, I’m in with “both feet.” I’m a saturation learner, always have been. It shows in my 14+ years of dance training, my 8 years of theater, my 35 years of education and educational publishing … even in the way I took on blogging.

Reciprocity is Relational, Not Transactional

I’ve been exploring EmpireAvenue for one year now. The game and the sociology caught my attention and offered me something new worth exploring.

The premise of Empire Avenue is that a player buys shares in other players’ participation on social media platforms across the Internet. So at first what fascinated me was the idea of getting a more rounded picture of the people who were playing the game and what was driving them — and also what would drive me.

Soon enough the game pushed the question of reciprocity.

The way the game is engineered, the currency I spend to purchase shares in your activity doesn’t flows through to you at much less. Basically, if I buy 100 shares in you, you’ll get a deposit worth about 10 of your shares. So complete reciprocity — for you to buy 100 shares back — is nearly impossible, even if my share price is WAY less than yours.

Yet some folks hold an unrealistic expectation of reciprocity — one that hurts their own success.
Their expectations seem to me out of balance with their best interests.

The reason I invest in your activity is because your shares earn value and deliver daily dividends. If I buy you I grow and pass on that growth to my shareholders. It’s a perk if you buy my shares too.

If I wait for every winner in the game to come back to buy equal shares in me — some never will. Their share price will get higher as they grow. I’ll lose the dividends I could have been earned while I waited for some transactional reciprocity.

Who loses in that scenario?
Me … not the winners I believe are ignoring me.

It works that way in everything. If I invest in you as a person, it’s because you’re growing, you add value by who you are and what you’re doing. By investing in you, I grow too!

Reciprocity is relational. Not transactional.

Plant a seed.
Watch it grow.
Enjoy the flower.

Reciprocity is the flower — color, beauty, fragrance.
It’s not “I cared for the seed. Now the seed cares for me.”
The act of helping the seed grow provided a far more powerful payoff.

It’s the same with people.

Choose Your Winners Wisely and Invest Unconditionally

An unforgiving belief in transactional reciprocity is a skewed form of not seeing the whole picture. When we close our eyes to seeing all point of view, we defeat ourselves — or as my mom would say “Cut off own nose to spite our face.”

And you can’t smell the flowers without a nose.

So if you’ve been hoarding your attention because someone’s not paying attention to you … could be you’re at the losing end of that idea. Look for the flower in the attention you’re giving. Not the seed of attention that you think you’re owed.

Build relational reciprocity by investing in what you’re willing to grow.

Choose your winners wisely and invest in them unconditionally.

Value the resources you’re investing dearly. Then offer them without fear.
For the most important, don’t hold back the blood, sweat, and tears.

See the flowers in the seeds even before you start helping them grow.
And keep your nose.

Be irresistible.
— ME “Liz” Strauss