Successful Blog

Get Visible! Grow UP! Solve Your Problem for Everyone

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When Location Becomes Solution

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In the days of my dad’s saloon, everything was location, location, location. If you wanted to be noticed, you put your store at the corner of State and Main. Every car driving past, every person on the sidewalk saw you.

Big brands and entrepreneurs now find ourselves in a 24/7 world where time and space don’t limit our community as they once did. Many businesses only meet customers on their computer screens.

And location is taking on new meaning online and off.

Now the grand location might be at the top of the search engine page 1 or a huge twitter retweet list. Social Media’s new Location, Location, Location is another thing. It’s showing up on your smart phone screen.

To do that it’s really solution, solution, solution. Solution is the new location. People search for answers to the problems they have.

So it makes sense to have a problem-solving mindset.

Solve problems in your own business.
Solve problems that everyone has.
Solve problems that will still be problems when the social media tools change.

Make a habit of recognizing what’s a problem in your business and solve that problem for everyone else. It’s a strategy that works to raise visibility and grow a business because …

  • Though we may think we’re the only ones who have a certain fear, problem, or issue, a conversation about almost any problem will prove that we’re not.
  • The people you can reach as clients, customers, and readers are a lot like us. It’s the nature of how people connect. We gravitate toward those who have similar values and think in similar ways.
  • Some of those people are looking for the same solution. If we talk to them about solving their problem, we move outside of our view of the problem and our feelings about it. Being outside of the problem brings new perspective, new ideas, and new approaches to solutions.

With a problem-solving mindset, we stay in a learning and listening attitude. Leaders who reach out to listen and learn, to find solutions and value the people who share their ideas are irresistibly attractive. The leaders grow and so do their businesses.

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And when you’ve tackled one problem, look again for the problems or glitches inside that new solution, the discomfort around the new process, or the old habits that no longer work. That’s how we keep our growing businesses growing up when we reach a small hitch.

Which of your business problems can you solve for someone else?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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The Minute I’m Sure I’m Right, I’m Most Certainly Wrong

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Stepping Back and Shutting Up

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This week at the Windy City Social Marketing Challenge I had the wonderful responsibility and opportunity to be part of the Team Chevy Cruze Challenge.

Chevy is launching their Cruze for a Cause program, a grass roots awareness building program that challenges people to “Change the World in a Week” using a fleet of Chevy Cruzes. The purpose of the program is to create name awareness of Cruze in advance of the launch and to foster positive feelings about Cruze and start to address social acceptability

My teammates were an intelligent group of awesome and invested people. They were in it for the experience of making some thing good together, not for winning some prize.

I had just left a great meeting with Carol Roth in which we had talked about working with a new team that was incredibly smart. We had discussed the value of stating the objectives and possible ideas, then letting the team work so that someone stays outside the system and doesn’t know what built the thoughts.

It was my first time doing the challenge. That approach seemed a good approach for a time like this.

  • Participate in restating the challenge, target market and values, and choose an appropriate message.
  • Step back when folks were ready to run with the challenge on their own. Check in every now and then.
  • Tell the team that was the plan.

It seemed to work well with the team.

What I lost sight of was that … we weren’t the only team in the room.

Cheer – leading for Your Team Isn’t Always Good

A leader wants to be there for structure and thinking, but more than that a leader knows that too much of one voice means great thoughts and ideas of others don’t come up. At times any person’s voice becomes amplified into a leader’s voice even when we just want to be one of the team.

It happens when we are considered to be …

  • a team leader
  • more experienced
  • more knowledgeable
  • more known, respected, or powerful
  • more fluent or facile with ideas

so realizing when our words carry more weight than we want and stepping back a little can be a good thing.

Sitting at the table while folks are thinking and planning doesn’t remove you from their thinking, you still know how they built it so you can’t look at the whole to question how they got there when the time to question comes.

So what do you do when you leave the group? Sometimes we can use our louder voice to be a cheerleader, but that’s a tricky thing too.

I know because I did it wrong.

Other teams were working in different ways toward the same outcome. This is the big learning …

I learned how brands, teams, and any one of us can be other-centered and self-absorbed at the same time …

You see I was so invested in supporting my own team. I was blind to how I interrupted other folks while they were supporting their own.

My apologies to the other teams. My apology to the folks on my team too. You deserved better from me.

Thanks for all I learned from all of you.

And it underscores something I have to keep reminding myself:

The minute I’m sure I’m right, I’m most certainly wrong.

Does your brand, your business, or you have your own version of this? I’d love to hear how you manage it.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

How to Be Good Greedy for Your Brand, Your Business, and the People Who Help You Thrive

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Attracting Minds

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IT BEGAN with a conversation right after someone had handed me a glass of wine. The vibrant Sally Hogshead walked up and began telling me a story that showed me she livesher life. Fascinating is what Sally calls it. Irresistible is my word for for it. Some folks call it influence or attracting like minds.

It’s a pair of eyes filled with the curiosity and fearless hear of a beginner that’s out test-driving what wisdom and models and learnings already collected to try new ideas on for size. Kind of like when we all were captivating unself-conscious children asking questions like “Would a chair still be a chair if it only had two legs?” And everyone knows it’s not a test or meant to make folks crazy.

Appetizing. Appealing. Outright attractive … you pick the word that means “can’t keep away” to you.

Makes us good greedy for more.

What brand what business wouldn’t want to have and share some of that?

IT CONTINUED the next day with more smiles, more questions, more answers, more ideas. And there it was another single glass of wine. Hers this time.

The excitement grew as more and more people discovered the fascinating, irresistible fun of just being who we are and then tweaking that toward the people who help us thrive … customers, clients, friends, family, sort of everyone who know it’s not about taking a test or giving one.

THEN IT BECAME A PLAN when we met on Twitter the next morning and knew that we’d be in a different city, but the same city as each other again. So we set up a lunch meeting to be fascinated by the irresistible ideas again.

And in an email as we were blocking out the time. How much time could we set aside for such kind of thing? Sally would be on her way to the airport — so our meeting would be a risk of the very best kind — an airplane on a schedule versus a chance to have a truly unique, meaningful mind-growing experience.

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I wrote: You know what kind of risk taker you are and what kind of risk I pose. heh heh

She responded: Yes, I’m a risk-taker but ALSO I’m greedy, so if I get time with you, then I want more more more!

I chimed: We are so the same. You get all of my time you want … for the same reasons.

And then I added: Topic of conversation over a bottle of wine — they have a wonderful Sancerre — and title of a blog post:

How to Be Greedy in a Good Way for Your Brand, Your Business and the People Who Help You Thrive

She said: I’m so In!

Of course, I called ahead to order the wine. There would be two glasses this time.

And here’s what we gathered from that meeting …

How to Be Greedy in a Good Way for Your Brand, Your Business and the People Who Help You Thrive
by Sally Hogshead and Liz Strauss over a nice wine

We had left everything to chance. Well, not really, the atmosphere was outstanding; the food was delicious; and the wine was as promised. The conversation was ideation, sharing, and good greedy — filled with everything that is fascinating and irresistible.

Here’s a few things that came home with me about how to get good greedy for your brand, your business, and the people who help you thrive over and over again.

  • Get good greedy about offering the best quality experience you can so that folks can relax and trust that you care about them. When an atmosphere is well cared for, we can’t help but feel that we’re cared about too.
  • Get good greedy about trusting yourself and trusting that good intentions will win. Trust telegraphs itself as confidence and safety. Fear or insecurity have a hard time putting up barriers to communication when true trust is in the room.
  • Get good greedy about anticipating the company of smart people whenever you you get to meet one or two or two million of them. Anticipation heightens an experience and prepares us to take it all in. Smart people recognize the smart in you.
  • Get good greedy about making space for great ideas and have rituals for celebrating the heroes who bring them to you. Great ideas expand into more great ideas, but ironically they get simpler the more space you give them to breathe.
  • Get good greedy about gathering up curiosity and asking questions. Explore the mysteries of why we do what we do by talking about them … don’t just measure behaviors or deep down-inside you’ll be in the shallow end of the pool. Meaning inspires and moves people to action.
  • Get good greedy about telling your stories over and over again and inviting other people to do that too. Hearing a story gives us something to capture, cherish, and share. It helps us belong and feel part of a common history. Oral histories, parables, fairy tales, fables, stories are how we take ideas out of our heads and learn from them. Let us learn what it’s like to be you. Powerful relationships happen when stories are shared. .
  • Get good greedy about the urgency of your story and tell how much you rely on the folks who believe in you. When we’re greedy generous about sharing our vision, our goals, and our plans, people share theirs too. Passion is urgent even when the goal is long-term.
  • Get good greedy about finding ways to be your highest standards and raise up folks who share those standards with you. Live what you want your customers to value. That will attract people who want to invest their loyalty in you.
  • Get good greedy about playing and enjoying every minute of what you do. Don’t seek the hard road when the playful road will invite people to join you. People who are having fun doing something intelligent and meaningful are fascinating and irresistibly attractive.
  • Get good greedy about playing and enjoying every minute of what you do. People who are having fun doing something intelligent and meaningful are fascinating and irresistibly attractive.

And don’t forget the power of the simple invitation, reminder, excuse to reach out to a customer, a client, a friend to say “thank you.”

What ways of being good greedy are part of what you do to take care of the people who help build your business for you?

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

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What Social Media Strategists Don’t Know About Growing Your Business

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Less Is More

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Recently, after a long introductory phone call, I received an email from a client about how he thought I might help his business. The list included almost every facet of online and offline presence and interactions with customers, vendors, and employees.

I was flattered and also bowled over by his commitment. I had to tell him that I needed him to participate equally in making those things reality.

I started to write a response that turned into this blog post.

What Social Media Strategists Don’t Know About Growing Your Business

Social media — the tools and social networking sites — have come to be looked upon as some sort of “industry.” But it’s not. in the same way a mechanic’s Craftsman tool kit and his classes in who to use it aren’t why we hire him, our fluency with tools and knowledge of sites we use aren’t what grows businesses.

The art and the science of a social media professional is understanding your business and helping you choose the right tools and sites that will connect you to the customers who love what you do.

Our experience, our expertise, and our ability to build strategies and tactics that move businesses forward are what can bring, but they’re limited by what works in general. The answer for you isn’t a “general go do these things.”

Strategy is a realistic and practical plan to gain ground over time. It’s sets the plan of campaigns and tactics that will gain you visibility, traffic, brand identity, and loyal customers and fans. Upon meeting you and working with your business there are five things every social media strategist doesn’t know … (though every strategist should know these things about his or her own offering.)

  1. Is your business culture fit ready to participate and make relationships that last beyond a single transaction? A social media strategist can help you choose and learn how to use the tools to do that, but only you can follow through and make the relationships.
  2. What do you offer that no business like yours offers? How have you removed what customers don’t like and enhanced what they love? That single clear message is what your social media strategist can amplify, magnify, and help you connect people with.
  3. What is unique about the customers that you’re reaching out to? If you reach out to everyone, you’ll look just like the thousands of other businesses doing the same thing. Find that one group who needs what you offer and tailor all you do to make their lives easier, faster, and more meaningful. A social media strategist can help you find those people using the speed and the reach of the Internet.

A social media strategist can help you build tactics to reach goals and grow your business the ways business have been growing since business started … with relationships that stand behind your work and your products and services.

Yet no social media strategist can know whether a business is willing to invite the people who help it grow to participate, collaborate, and be part of what makes that business great.

If you’re a social media strategist, how do you find out whether a business is ready to grow? If you’re a business how do you know you’ve got the right social media strategist?

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

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8 Powerfully Subtle Ways to Let Your Work Show Your Expertise

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It’s the Work We Do that Adds Value

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The Internet is fast being filled with people with skills and talent for hire. Some have worked online and off for years to attain experience and expertise. Some are using the Internet to re-career and reinvent themselves and us as a chance to prove themselves. Most folks who can afford it want to connect with the people who’ve got real expertise, not those who hope to practice until they do.

There’s no question that to be an expert, we have to be knowledgeable, authentic, and hardworking. Everyone pays dues to get to the top, but knowing what to work at helps a lot too, because …

For the rest of us, it’s hard to tell the guy with a professional camera from a professional photographer unless you share what you know with the rest of us in the right way.

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To be recognized as a expert requires communication skills and social skills as well as technical expertise.

8 Subtle, Powerful Ways to Let Your Work Show Your Expertise

A true expert isn’t a preacher or even a teacher. He or she is a guide who cares about and understands the folks he or she serves. Lead me value to your work and know its quality, then help me understand how it can be relevant and useful to the customers, clients, and people I value and serve.

A true expert, like a truly rich man, doesn’t need to tell you he is one … his value shows in his confidence, competence, consistency, generosity, humility, and his work.

Here are 8 often powerfully subtle ways to being recognized as a true expert.

  1. Be the expert you are, not the expert someone else is. You are the only you the world has. That differentiates what you offer from the start. Play to your strengths. Let your work demonstrate your strengths. When people ask about what you do … point to something you’ve done well and talk about it.
  2. Get known first as an expert in ONE thing. Decide what sort of problems you solve quickly and well. Find ONE niche or one vertical and solve that problem there. People look for a “go to” person for a specific need. You’ll grow a following faster if you solve one problem well. It’s easier to refer the expert who can prove one great solution than the one who can’t be pinned down. Once folks learn about you as a master one skill, they can find out about the other wonderful things you do.
  3. Write expert content in the language of the folks you want to serve. Readers want top-notch, quality, relevant content — information, answers, AND analysis. Your market can get news anywhere. Add your expert opinion, analysis, evaluation, synthesis, or predictions — in words and thoughts they can relate to and apply immediately..
  4. Be an expert at keeping track of your niche. Don’t overwhelm yourself … but don’t live in your own head and don’t live online only. Look for great ideas and innovation everywhere. Follow Alltop to get the latest news. Read print magazines, blogs, and news that cover the topics you cover. Pre-select it for people interested in what you do. Add value by explaining why you’re passing it on.
  5. Be an expert at specialized search and information mining. Make finding interesting content tidbits your expert quest. Get to be friends with Google Alerts and similar services. Follow terms around the Internet.
  6. Be an expert at sharing your work where your customers are. Be where your potential customers are. Don’t just Tweet a great photo. Say something about it. Tell a story about it. Not every great client is on Twitter. Not every great mind is either. Go to conferences; meet local businesses; visit universities; get to know the other experts and authors in your niche. Ask everyone for their stories and tell anyone who cares about the stories you’ve collected. Tweet, speak, visit, and comment on blogs. Get opinions and think about what people say. Talk about your work like you to talk to your friends about what you do.
  7. Be an expert at thinking deeply. Saturate yourself in the trends, and think about how they influence your work. Go deeper too. Find out what researchers are thinking so that you can offer your readers how you think the highest quality and most relevant information might change what you’re doing today and in the future. Always tie it back to them in real and relevant ways. It’s your field be interested in it and they’ll be interested in you.
  8. Have an opinion. Don’t just pass on information. What the Internet is missing is your informed expertise and unique point of view. You’ve learned and earned something. Show us how you got there and why you care about it. Share your passion for your expertise. Nothing is more appealing than an expert who loves what he or she does.

Awards are nice, but they’re not something our customers can use. Quality is important, but if my customers can’t see or at least feel the fine lighting, perfect composition, or the artfullness of that photograph … then the time it took to add it … to them will be just cost. Some folks need basic transportation to get to work not a Ferrari this time around — an expert recognizes that too.

When we do the work, invest, and offer what we learn freely and care about those we serve, our true expertise shines through. People need what we know and sharing it isn’t shameless promotion, it’s contributing value to the community.

Are you an expert? How do you let your work speak for you?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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Winning at Social Media in an International Market

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A Guest Post by Christian Arno

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Marketing, in one form or another, has been helping the cause since time immemorial and now it just got personal. Market savvy entrepreneurs are using social media websites like Facebook and Twitter and their online communities to target customers and listen to exactly what they say.

Social Media websites give both producer and consumer a voice and offer the transparency and sense of community that are now charming customers across the world into parting with large amounts of money. Here are some things to remember:

Marketing, the Differences

Traditional marketing, like press releases and advertising can be likened to throwing your advertising budget up in the air and saying ‘I hope these lands on someone interested.’ Tapping social media opens up a dialogue with your customers and usefully corrals all of your cash-cows in a few, easy to find, on-line fields. People can then say what they specifically like or loathe about your product and you, through careful monitoring, can act accordingly.

Marketing, the Similarities

You need not think that you can set up a group on Facebook and Lo! Your product has created an on-line community of well-wishers and unpaid market researchers. You still need to put the advertisements out there. Pay Per Click advertising campaigns (PPCs), for example, allow you to see which adverts the fish have been nibbling at and allow you to tailor your approach. Targeted audiences have always been at the heart of marketing, social media just takes it a step further.

Get Community Going

People will work for free. The happy sense of bonhomie and camaraderie that web groups and chat forums engender brings out the best in human nature and offers entrepreneurs a splendid opportunity to profit from this.

Translating is one way of doing this. Any international marketing scheme has to face the thorny question of translation. Keywords for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and subtle nuances must all be carefully interpreted and adapted to suit new target audiences, but a team of professional, native-speaker translators can be a serious drain on the purses.

Crowdsourcing is one way round this — when you invite the community of web-users out there to come and do the spadework for you. People always like showing off their bright ideas and this increasingly popular practice is the perfect forum for doing so. It also allows people to get directly involved in your brand. Wikipedia is one such example.

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival ran an extremely successful crowdsourcing project on Twitter for their 2010 program cover. Festival lovers were encouraged to tweet their ideas for illustrations, which were then heaped with praise and/or criticism by everyone else before the successful ones were drawn by a professional illustrator, whose work was streamlined live online. The festival hype this built up created a strong sense of community and beat all but the most ambitious advertising campaigns.

The Misguided Public

The problem with People Power is that people can get it wrong and this is particularly true of translation and technical material. Take, for example the case of Chicken entrepreneur Frank Purdue. His slogan was ‘It Takes a Tough Man to Make a Tender Chicken!’ Taking his campaign into Spanish this became, ‘It Takes a Tough Man to Make a Chicken Aroused!’

If you do not invite a professional to translate your material from the start then you should strongly consider getting one to check what the well-meaning public have submitted.

Wit Goes a Long Way

Burger King put Facebook to good use with its whoppervirgins.com campaign. It offered the ‘sacrifice ten friends’ application which caught people’s imaginations to the tune of over 20 000 users, who ‘sacrificed’ 200 000 friends for free whoppers. The campaign was memorable, unusual and had just enough humour to make it a real hit.

An Honest Embrace

Social media encourages a culture of transparency and honesty that can create great interest in your company. Sun Microsystems’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz set up a blog that received about 400 000 hits a month and attracted positive, negative and downright insane comments. This kind of transparency, at the highest level, increased trust among consumers and therefore interest in the product.

Likewise, Graco have managed to hugely personalise their brand by building a community on Flickr. They promote it heavily on the Graco blog and in doing so encourage people to submit pictures. The pictures highlight the people behind Graco and the people who use their products. They have introduced offline community gatherings and the pictures from these are also posted on the Flickr page. This takes the concept of social media beyond the blogosphere and combines it with offline marketing, humanising the community around the product. Something that TV advertising campaigns struggle to do at a much higher cost.

Who Does All This Reach?

Lots of people. Young, geeky men are not the only people who use the simple to use and highly gregarious social media sites. You have only to take a look at Facebook to see the number of middle aged users has risen dramatically in recent years. A survey by Insidefacebook.com reports that 22 percent of registered users are between 35 and 65, and that the fastest growing group is women over the age of 55.

But this is just one site. The international marketer must look beyond Twitter and Facebook et al, to capitalize on the opportunities social media offer. In Japan, for example, 80% of social media users are signed onto Mixi.jp, while Orkut predominates in Brazil, Xanga in Hong Kong.

Wherever you launch, social media marketing is a source to be reckoned with.

What do you think it takes to win in social media?

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About the author: Christian Arno is the founder and managing director of Lingo24, an international translation company which provides language translation services to and from all the major languages in the world. Follow him as @lingo24chr on Twitter.

Thanks, Christian! The whole thing changes when we realize the world is our community!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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