Successful Blog

Ask someone to dance

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Rosemary O’Neill

Ask Someone to Dance

There are so many small business owners and entrepreneurs out there, just plugging away, waiting for someone to reach out and invite them into the social media party. They’re excited, intrigued, and all dressed up, just waiting for someone to notice them.

The Gym is Crowded

The high school gym is sweaty, packed with breathless teenagers of all types. There is a gaggle of jock types over near the punch bowl, a gaggle of cool girls dancing as a group to Rock Lobster, and a slew of hopeful, terrified boys strung along the outer wall of bleachers. On the other side of the gym, against the wall, are clusters of shy girls, furtively glancing toward the other side.

Burning down the House


I have an idea. Let’s light this sucker on fire. Let’s run across the gym, grab one of those shy kids by the hand, and drag them out into the Soul Train line.

  • Pick one of your Twitter followers who has very few followers themselves and give them a FollowFriday this week.
  • Search for one of your customer’s blogs and comment on a post that had zero comments.
  • Know someone who’d be a great speaker? Email them the panel submission form for SXSW or another conference.
  • Ask to do a video interview with one of your colleagues who’s never done it before.
  • Find a way to shine a spotlight on someone who’s working behind the scenes (an IT person, a administrator, a great community manager).
  • Do you know a blogger who’s awesome, but just needs a little attention? Round up your Twitter friends and do a surprise “blog bomb” one day.

Report back, please…who did you ask to dance this week? Was it fun?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

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Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

Stop Giving Them Fish, Start Teaching Them How To Fish

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Rosemary O’Neill

Amazing advice, freely given, is a powerful thing. It activates the “reciprocity rule,” it cements a relationship, and establishes trust. Even better than amazing advice? Lessons in how to do it yourself.

The Copy Machine Conundrum

Fresh out of college, I was last in the pecking order. Therefore, I was usually tasked with using the copy machine, and unjamming it when someone else tried to use it.

Copy machines aren’t particularly complex, but there were legions of my colleagues who actively avoided learning how to use them. Why? Because they didn’t want to be stuck doing the copying.

Those people? They’re the same ones right now who say “I have no idea what the Tweeter is for, and I don’t want to know.”

Make Your Communications Action-Oriented

Whether you’re providing customer support, answering a sales inquiry, or providing consulting services, start to think as a teacher, not just a broadcaster. The essence of great communication is providing a practical application for your message.

What’s the practical application of this blog post?

  • Rather than just jumping in and fixing a customer’s issue, show them how you did it so that they can fix it themselves next time.
  • Don’t advise a prospect to “do their homework” on your product or service, illustrate how it works by offering customer examples and references.
  • Don’t make your social media clients think you’re doing “voodoo,” teach them how to use the tools that are supporting their strategy.

If you give fishing lessons, you become someone who empowers the people around you. Much more valuable than someone who just delivers fish.

Are there aspects of your job that you can start teaching?

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Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

_____

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

Be Your Own Digital Secret Shopper – 5 Ideas

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by
Rosemary O’Neill

When’s the last time you called yourself?

Go ahead, pick up your phone right now and call your business line. What happens? Is it a friendly greeting, or is it the third ring of voicemail hell?

On a roughly quarterly basis, it’s great to do a little secret shopping on yourself. It can be very revealing to step into the shoes of someone trying to get in touch with you. And you do want people to be able to reach out to you, right?

Here are 5 quick ideas for your secret shopping project:

  1. Check out your business cards. Do the URLs, email, and phone numbers work? If you have something fancy on there like a QR code, does it work correctly? Has your title changed?
  2. Log out and look at your websites. Go to a friend’s computer and look up your website, your Facebook page, other social accounts…how do they look from the “outside?” Sometimes it’s different than when you’re the account owner.
  3. Call your voicemails. If you’re still using the robot voice that came with your account, change it to something warm and professional. Unless you sell robots.
  4. Try to buy something. Go through the whole buying process for whatever you sell, as if you are a new customer. If it’s an online ordering process, take screenshots at each step, so that you can go back and update things if you need to.
  5. Put in a support ticket. If you offer customer support, put in a ticket using whatever mechanism is appropriate. Post in your own ticket system, send an email from an outside account, and/or ask a friend to Tweet for help (including an @mention of your company).

I gave this list a quick trial run, and noticed that I hadn’t ever changed my personal greeting in the company phone system!

What did you uncover?

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Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

_____

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

How Much Digital Clutter Can You Delete Today?

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Rosemary O’Neill

It’s Not the Equipment. It’s You

The garage is filled with racquetball rackets, tennis rackets, several bags of golf clubs, jump ropes, a dusty Bowflex machine, and stacks of exercise videos in formats ranging from Betamax to Blu-Ray. This is the debris of good intentions.

Is your hard drive full of unread PDFs, video training sessions, free eBooks, and email offers that you thought would help your business? Yup, mine too.

We need to clear the decks and make room for real progress. The only “equipment” you really need is your brain. So if those digital support systems are creating mental drag, hit delete. I promise you’ll feel better.

In 2011, The Princeton Neuroscience Institute released a study that concluded (I’m paraphrasing in English), “too much clutter in your visual field prevents you from focusing effectively.”

All of those unorganized files are like mental clutter. They are in your subconscious “to read someday” list, which grows every day. Eventually you’ll be that guy who has 10 years worth of National Geographic magazines saved in the basement. Don’t be that guy.

Do these three things today. It will allow you to start next week with a clear field of vision.

  1. Do a full search of your computer for anything with a .pdf extension. Any PDF that’s more than two weeks old, delete. Be ruthless. If you haven’t read it yet, you’re not going to read it.
  2. Any emails that you’re holding on to because they have links to interesting videos or white papers, run through them quickly and delete as many as possible. If there are very useful items in them, go to the web page and use StumbleUpon, Digg, Pinterest, Instapaper, or some other bookmarking tool to save or share them.
  3. Once you’re purged, create one central location for things you want to read (an Evernote folder, Dropbox folder, or just a folder on your computer). Put things in there when you run across them, and once a month, clear it out. I like to use the last day of the month, so that I can start fresh each month.

Here’s your challenge: how many unread pieces of digital clutter can you delete today? Post your results here, if you dare.

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Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

_____

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

You Are an Investor

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by
Rosemary O’Neill

Yes, you are a big-time investor. Like, Warren Buffet big. What? You don’t see it?

Every morning you wake up with 24 hours to invest. You’re rich beyond compare.

That 24 hours has a value that can’t even be measured. When you stack up a whole week of those, you’re talking about 168 hours!

Will you invest in Facebook? (No, not the stock shares, the status checking). Will you invest in your children? Your business? Will you choose to invest in yourself?

There’s a reason it’s called “spending time.” It feels like an unlimited resource, but it’s truly not. We all have an unknowable limit.

Sometimes people get caught up in believing that social media is “free” because Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ don’t charge our credit cards. But in fact, you are investing a far more precious resource when you use social media—your own time or that of your staff.

Furthermore, by choosing to invest your limited resource in social media, you are de facto choosing not to spend it elsewhere. Should you ignore your customer newsletter to post pictures on Pinterest? Only if it’s getting you an outcome you want. Should you cancel your sponsorship of the local 4th of July fireworks display so that you can record a YouTube video?

When you manage your time, whether it’s putting together a life plan or a business plan, remember that it’s all about where you choose to invest.

If you invest wisely, you’ll see dividends!

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Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

_____

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

What to do when you have Twitter block

by

by
Rosemary O’Neill

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So you’ve decided to use Twitter as one of your content marketing tools. You’ve built up a respectable following, you engage with people, send out a steady stream of diverse original content and RTs, and you occasionally attend a Twitter chat. Everything is good, until….Twitter block!

It’s similar to writers’ block, except in 140 characters. You see, if you aren’t contributing a reasonable number of Tweets throughout the day, you won’t be seen in your followers’ streams.

The average lifespan of a Tweet is supposedly only one hour, according to ReadWriteWeb. That means you need to space out your Tweets in order to keep your voice “in the stream.” I believe that the optimum number of Tweets per day is somewhere around 5-10 for the normal user.

Here are 10 solid tips on how to stay visible without driving yourself insane.

  • It’s OK to tweet an important piece of content 2-3 times in one day, at different times; just change your Tweet wording up a bit to keep it fresh.
  • It’s OK to use a scheduling app like Buffer or Crowdbooster to space out your Tweets, as long as you are actually available to reply to people who respond to your content.
  • Look for 5 people who recently RTd you, and RT something of theirs that you think will resonate with your followers.
  • Take a pretty picture and add a relevant comment to it.
  • Find 5 people who follow you who you haven’t directly engaged with yet, read their bio and/or website, and mention them with a comment or compliment.
  • Use the “OH” tag to tweet something interesting you heard someone else say IRL.
  • Don’t resort to quotes all the time! But if you’re reading something interesting on your Kindle app, highlight a great phrase and Tweet it out using the integrated share tool.
  • Ask a question. It could be something industry specific, or as minimal as “what should I watch on Netflix next?”
  • What big project are you working on? Can you “leak” out a little tidbit of it as a teaser? People love to be on the inside, behind the scenes.
  • Do a series of Tweets that are related…Christopher Penn does “#the5” which is the five things you need to know that day. Could you do 3 tips for starting your day happy? Perhaps a series of 10 great blog links?

Where do you find great stuff to share with your connections? Have you ever felt Twitter block?

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Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

_____

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss