Do Me a Favor, Read Mark’s Post

April 15, 2006 by Liz

Mark Wade of RWebdesigns.com has a post today about the immortality of blogging in a public form. It’s simple, short, and powerful. Please read it, and then share it with anyone who blogs–your family, especially your kids, your friends, your coworkers, your boss, your neighbors. It’s a reminder that we can all use.

As a past first-grade teacher, I also hope you’ll share the advice that he mentions, on Blog Safety by Jonathan Ezor with every teacher, principal, and school librarian you know. It belongs on school bulletin boards, in libraries, bathrooms and locker rooms too.

Thanks, Mark, for caring about it, for writing it in such a compelling fashion. Well-written words move people to action. Some things are too important not to do.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Thanks to Week 25 SOBs

April 15, 2006 by Liz

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 badge’s validity, send him or her directly to me. This award comes with a full “Liz said so” guarantee. It is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

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. Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

SOB Business Cafe 04-14-2006

April 14, 2006 by Liz

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

We offer the best in thinking–articles on the business of blogging written by the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the screenshot to enjoy each selection.

The Specials this Week are

Brian at Copyblogger catches the New York Times being clever with their headlines. Great analysis. Well-worth reading.

Copyblogger Linkbaiting New York Times Style

God over at the godblog lets us know she enters contests. The latest that she’s signed up for is Valleywag’s coin a Valleyspeak word contest. Win free music. Proof that god likes music. Like the new template, god–you must have a thing for change: seasons, day and night, people getting older . . .

If only Rocky could package this post and give it as a presentation to some CEOs I know. They need to learn that people need time and resources to do things right the first time. Lot’s of CEO’s could use a Hillbilly PhD. to get their priorities straight.

Hillbilly PhD Doing it right the first time

The essence of great writing and editing is knowing how to remove all of the words that you don’t need. This post from Jamdo Marketing does a great job of explaining that. (Apologies for that errant “b” earlier.” It’s Jamdo.” Get rid of the letters you don’t need too.)

Jamdo Stripping Excess Words from Your Blog

Freshblog comes through again with some creative hacking for Blogger. Now you can make your posts expand and contract. Congratulations on the new design Freshblog–like your name it’s FRESH . . . I’m looking for my link in the blogroll, I think it fell off by mistake. . . . hope this doesn’t mean that we’re breaking up.

Related ala carte selections include

Marianne Richmond’s article on paying attention had such a strong impact on me last week. I was led to rethink some things in the quality of my own life. This one by Liz, from my writing blog.

Letting me be The Essence of Being Alive

Sit back. Enjoy your read. Nachos and drinks will be right over. Stay as long as you like.
No tips required. Comments appreciated.

Have a great weekend!

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Customer Think: Saying Things without Talking

April 13, 2006 by Liz

Everything’s Equal or Is It?

You’ve just sold your car. Now you have a nice chunk of cash to start a new account until you need to use it. You head down to the bank where you have your accounts, and by some weird alignment of stars TWO account managers have time for you right away. This bank must be going through some sort of customer service training, you think, because both look up and say, “How may I help you?” They’re sitting right next to each other in identical, bank office-type cubicles. Both are dressed in the typical, bank office-type blue suits.

The only ways you have to tell them apart are their nameplates–Ms. Chase on the left and Ms. Fargo on the right–and the way they look at you as you try to decide which one you would like to spend the 15-20 minutes going over your accounts.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

You’re the customer, who gets your new business?

Saying Things Without Talking

So much of what we say to each other is communicated without a single word. Researcher vary on how much of a message is carried nonverbally, but they place the low end of the range at 65%. The sad part is we’re often not aware when we’re the ones communicating and too aware when we’re the ones being communicated to.

In a Brand You and Me situation, smiling a lot seems to be a good idea. Smiling releases chemicals in the brain that actually can raise your spirits, especially when you like the person you share a smile with. If that person smiles back, things get better than ever.

The moral seems to be. the more we care about customers and show them we do, the better we feel and the better they will too. Now that’s business promotion that should get us all smiling.

I like smiling. It makes me feel like I’m the nice one.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related Articles
Images & Sound-Bytes of a Brand YOU Leader
Brand YOUÃ¢â¬âYou Are What They See
Brand YOUÃ¢â¬âWhatÃ¢â¬â¢s the BIG IDEA?

Great Find: Success in Technology or in Life?

April 13, 2006 by Liz

Okay, so you may not call an editorial on technology and life a Great Find, especially one that harks back from last November. I’ve been keeping this one for some Thursday when I had the feeling that folks might be ready to think about the quality of life. Around here it’s about to be a glorious spring again. That seemed like reason enough to pull this piece out. It can’t be too preachy. It’s Wired News after all.

Great Find: Eat, Sleep, Consume, Die by Tony Long for Wired News
Type of Article: an editorial rant on life before technology
Permalink: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68742,00.html http://www.businessweek.com/careers/content/mar2006/ca20060327_414798.htm?campaign_id=nws_insdr_mar31&link_position=link18
Target Audience: Anyone who has tendencies toward work addiction

Content: Let’s face it. Research has proved it out. The laptop may have made our work lives easier, but it also meant that we are working longer. As Tony Long points out we’re living in a world where technology has this kind of impact in many places– in our homes, at work, and in our cities. Tony writes with intelligent phrasing and biting sarcasm. He’s decided there’s too much techonology being thrust on us, and he’s no shy about saying that it’s making him (and I think he’s implying us) cranky.

But that’s the point. My expectations have been raised to this ridiculous level by technology running amok through my heretofore-bucolic existence. I used to be a laid-back guy. Now I’m impatient. I chafe. I get irritable when my gratification isn’t instantaneous. And it isn’t just me. The whole world is bitchier these days.

It’s definitely a piece worth reading, especially now that we’re talking about how we’re treating each other. Being bitchy and overworked isn’t great promotion for your business, your brand, or your blog. As always, a click on the screenshot will take you to the article.

Wired News Eat, Sleep, Consume, Die Screenshot

I’m chaning my plan to work all weekend. I want to keep being the nice one.

I have a feeling this article will become more timely the older it gets.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Customer Think: I’m Not a Kid, I’m a Person

April 12, 2006 by Liz

Grouping People Doesn’t Work

Each year when my son started school with a new teacher, I would wait about three weeks. Then I would make an appointment to see her. I would bring along a few cool books I had carefully selected for her classroom as a gift. I gave her the three weeks because I wanted my son’s teacher to have a chance to get to know this rare and brilliant child on his own–we needed a common place to speak from. I brought the books because I wanted my child to move from being a “boy in class” to being a person–a child with a name, whose mother knows about books and cares about him.

I did those things because I was a teacher once. I know how easy it is to think of those faces as “the kids in my class,” not as individual people. Teachers are human beings and when you’re faced with 20-30 small people to get to know, it doesn’t happen very fast. The sad news is that extreme cases get center stage. Think of the names you remember from your early school days–they’re the extremes: the kids who were really smart, really bad, or really good friends with you. The rest become a blur. We’re human we make groups and unfortunately, we like to group people too.

Grouping people doesn’t work for getting to know them as individuals.

My son taught me that when he was all of three. I said, “Hey kid, let’s go.”
He stopped cold in his tracks, looked at me, and said, “I’m not a kid. I’m a people.”

We Have Relationships with People

We don’t have relationships with customers, or with users, or with eyeballs. We have relationships with people. It may sound like semantics, but it’s more than that. How we use words points to how we think and how we value ideas. If we think customer first and then person, we’re thinking backwards. Humanity wins out every time. Take care of the person and the personal relationship, and the work will take care of itself. Try it. It’s true. When we show people that we value them, they hardly ever let us down.

The reason that humanity wins is because real customer relationships are built around customer needs and desires. Needs and desires are individual human things, packed with individual human quirks and nuances. Sure there are patterns in any human group. You can even pile those patterns into demographics if you want. Stay at that level, and you’ll be skating on the surface where there’s only information and no heart.

I can’t begin to know my customers, if I don’t know what’s in their hearts.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Customers, visitors, and readers are people, not users, traffic, stats, or any other word that steals their humanity and steals our own humanity as well. It’s brand YOU and ME–together. My three-year-old customer-son was right to set me straight when he said, “I’m a people, not a kid.”

Who doesn’t want to walk into a restaurant where everybody knows your name? Who wouldn’t rather work with someone who knows who you are and cares about the things you care about? Who hasn’t had the experience of being treated like less than a person by a clerk, a doctor, or a boss? Didn’t that make you want to say, “Hey, I’m a person I have a name.”?

Do something small today to show a reader, a customer, or a visitor–someone who’s just met you–that you know that he or she is a person of value. See what happens. Then see how many times today people treat you–a customer–in that same personal way.

A business that values me as a person has my business and my brand loyalty from minute one. By week three, they’ll have the business of all my friends as well. There is no better promotion than valuing customers as the people that they are.

–ME “Liz” Strauss