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The Ties That Bond

December 3, 2009 by Guest Author

A Guest Post by Linda M. Lopeke, The SMARTSTART Coach

Not feeling the love in your social media relations?

Social media is a channel for building relationships from the comfort of home while cloaked in the anonymity of the internet. A place where your own actions and behaviours determine whether you thrive or dive. A place where your voice is a more likely to be unheard, lost in the gathering crowd, or (worse) deemed unremarkable. The same place where lasting friendships and stellar reputations can be made (or lost) in 140 characters at the touch of a send button.

If you truly seek to connect and fully experience the wonder of social community, you must first accept that the same standards required for successful face-to-face interactions apply to creating distant ties that bond. Satisfying relationships are born when you communicate effectively and establish mutual trust. Only then can bonds grow strong enough to meet our human need to connect. If you remain anonymous, or are incongruent in your actions, comments and tweets, the digital world will likely be a lonely, meaningless place for you.

In the virtual world, everyone is suspect until proven otherwise. And body language is expressed in punctuation, personality in photos and multi-media and both are responded to by sharing, digging and re-tweeting. The good news is it is entirely possible to feel close to someone you have never met. Sharing the truth about who you are is one way. Seeing the truth about those you encounter along the way is another.

Don’t overcomplicate the friendships you establish online. Just wear your truth. Unpretentiously. Confidently. Through trial and error, you’ll soon be able to quickly see who is loyal, interesting, and trustworthy and who is just there to pimp a link or push another product.

Ditch the fake personas, wannabes and also rans. Care less about what people think about you and more about whether or not you have anything useful to contribute. Be harder on yourself than others, but don’t take any of it so seriously you start measuring your own worth (and that of others) in meaningless friend and follower counts.

There are many ties that bond across the digital divide if you let them. The mentor who can teach you things you won’t learn in any book. The v-friend you feel comfortable reaching out to and sharing private information with. The e-lover who is neither friend or frenemy but who could turn out to be either in a nanosecond. The i-quaintance whose name you recognize but with whom your relationship is more casual than committed. There’s even the f-buddy who fails at social media because they’ll never see you as anything other than an outlet for link lust or an opportunity to pimp themselves.

Ahh, the digital playground. Where everyone wants to plug in and get naked. And everyone else needs to learn how to play safe and follow the unspoken rules.

Take care! —
Linda M. Lopeke
SMARTSTART: Success-to-go for people working @ the speed of life!

Thanks, Linda! I couldn’t agree more!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Make social media work toward your goals!

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It's Easier to Plan an Irresistible Event When …

December 1, 2009 by Liz

At a meeting this fall, we brainstormed ideas for events that might bring more people into a client’s store. The conversation was exciting the way ideation can be. No holds barred. We were having fun imagining the themes and content that would be the most irresistible offer.

Wait, wait, wait.

We were planning an event and we hadn’t even thought about who we wanted to come.

It’s hard to be irresistible when the audience — the customers for our products — have no faces or names. How can we be irresistible for people we don’t even know?

Have you done that before? I know that I have.

What’s more fun is to find out who’s looking for an event, a meal, a learning experience, get to know them and to make every bit of the event exactly what would rocks their world.

It’s easier to be irresistible, we need to know who we’re being irresistible for. Then we can

chose and build every nuance to be exactly what they love.
leave out the things that distract, irritate, or disrupt their enjoyment of what they came to share.
and build in a special surprise that will be make the experience unforgettable — something that lets them know you know them really well.

If we make a great meal and invite people, some folks will come and eat and be satisfied. But when we find out who we want to serve and put every thought, every detail toward making the experience one that perfectly suits them, they tell each other and often bring their friends.

Promotion changes from “why this is better” to “You belong here. We listened. We made this for you.”

That’s the formula for an irresistible event. And with that attention to that group you’ve chosen, you can bet they’ll remember and be talking about when you’ll be offering something like your event again.

Businesses thrive like that. People know when you care about them.

How do you find the people you want to invite to shape your irresistible business?

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

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Stop Thinking Poor – Start Irresistibly Growing Your Business

November 30, 2009 by Liz

No one does it on purpose. Who would? Why would they? Yet I’ve seen it. I see it now. Something negative happens. People hit a wall with their business. They pull back, retreat to safer ground to protect what they have. They question their commitment, their strategy, their decisions. This sort of risk mitigation can be a good thing

The problem happens when we start thinking poor.

Is Thinking Poor Managing Your Business Down the Drain?

Whenever an unexpected life event, the economy, or kismet puts a hitch in our giddyup, it’s a natural response to question how we got where we are. Panic or just sheer exhausted frustration can lead us to believe our thinking was wrong from the start, that it’s time to change direction and save what we’ve got before we lose it all.

That’s thinking poor. Thinking poor leads us to throw away the good things without seeing them and to increase our chances of following them down into that hole. Some great examples of poor thinking include:

slashing the marketing budget across the board … reaching fewer customers won’t grow the business
discounting prices for unlimited periods … customers who value us only for discounts will leave when they’re gone
reducing services … just tells customers we don’t value them at the time we need them most
raising prices … passing on our pain to our customers doesn’t win their loyalty

We’ve seen plenty of examples of ways businesses think poor. Thinking poor is a reaction based in fear and weakness.

Great businesses work from strength, strategy, and commitment. We evaluate where we are, what got us here, and how we might adapt to keep moving forward. To do that we go back to the original strategy and check every premise to see which are still vibrant and which no longer work in the new environment. Here are some questions to help you do that.

Which parts of our old strategy still truly brings us closer to our customers? Which parts no longer work in the current market?
Which are our most robust markets? Who are our most reachable customers? How can we celebrate them and make them heroes?
What do those customers value about our products? How can we find out what they wish we would leave out of our offer? How can we invite them to help make our business stronger?
What small, high-value enticements might we add to our current offer that would get new customers to try us and entice old customers to try us again?
How might we repackage what we’ve offered before so that it becomes a new and vibrant offer for a market of customers that has already shown interest in what we are doing?
How can we invest more in skills, services, and learning how to get closer to what our customers want?

Each of these questions is centered in becoming more intimate with the people, the customers, who grow our business.

Delivering service, product, and value to customers by listening to those who are nearest to us is the fastest way to grow a thriving, stable business.

And it’s more fun than thinking poor …

What are you going to do today to start growing your business?

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

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Why People Pay Attention…

November 26, 2009 by Liz

A Hospital with ADD

In the ER
It was a long flight home from Amsterdam through Madrid to Chicago. I expected to be tired on arrival, but the day after I arrived something terrible was wrong. I felt like I was shot in my left side. The pain was constant, strong, and worse than childbirth. Five hours in, I knew I needed to find out what was going on.

My husband had H1N1. No way he could come with me. I went to the ER alone. In a short time they found me a place. set me up for a x-ray and a CT scan. A friend caught up with me via text and came to sit by me for hours while I waited. My cell phone didn’t work so I couldn’t call home.

My mouth was dry, too dry to talk. They gave me ice chips when they remembered. They never gave me a way to call for more. On the way back from the x-ray I asked for more ice or water. An hour later, I was still without.

When the tests were over, they said I had a mass in my lungs (pneumonia), a blood infection (ecoli), and kidney stones. Maybe and hour later or so, they said were going to admit me. My friend went home.

After being alone for a long while, I sent a note to the ER desk asking someone to call my husband or my son before they admitted me to tell them what was going on. The Dr. in charge of ER that night pronounced that he didn’t have time to make such a call. He spoke loud enough for me to hear him, but couldn’t walk the ten steps over to tell me himself.

I’d now been gone from home almost 6 hours. My husband had no idea what was happening with me. By then what the doctor had told me was a faint memory. I wasn’t able to answer questions about it. The pain was still there despite the pain meds they’d given me.

In the Room
The first doctors I saw were residents. They didn’t introduce themselves as such they just started asking questions about what medications I take. One took notes and took the name of my pharmacy wrote both in my chart

She told me to keep taking those meds.

I asked three times to be sure that was what she wanted, explaining that I have gone as long as week with out those meds and she said keep taking them.

Apparently this information was not important enough for other doctors to read.

This proved a serious mistake when they put me out for the procedure to remove the kidney stone. Because my meds interacted with the meds they gave me for procedure.

My oxygen level dropped deadly low — well below 80, I heard as low as 60 — causing me twice to have seizures on the table while they were getting me ready to go for removal of the stone.

I didn’t die, but I could have.

Back in my room I was on oxygen and a monitor now. Some help that monitor was. If I moved a certain way, the alarm on the monitor would show zero and sound an alarm. No one would come. We timed it once at 20 minutes without a response. Another friend who was there every day to watch over me knew how to turn off the noise.

I asked the charge nurse why bother with a machine if they weren’t going to come. The answer was a weak smile, a look away with her eyes, and a blanket apology.
“I’m sorry.”
“No. You are not.”

I can’t help but wonder what was more distracting or important than reading the charts and answering alarms?

What was more worth their attention?

Some people don’t pay attention even when it’s their job.

A Community Who Paid Attention

I was released after 8 days. The surgeon who performed the procedure hadn’t been to check that all was well with the stent he’d left in. I’d not seen him since 5 days before. I went home with about half as much pain as when I had arrived.

Then something beautiful, embarrassing, and unexpected happened. People started to tell my simple story of how hospital stay had knocked me low. They shared it on their blog and on Twitter and in messages to me that are unforgettable. Thank you, Deb Ng, Lucretia Pruitt, and Jenn Fowler for thinking of me. Thank you everyone who chipped in. And thank you to Kathryn and everyone who guest posted for all of the work you did keeping my blog going on.

People pay attention because they care.

I am grateful this Thanksgiving for every second of your attention.

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

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.

The Blogging Brain

November 25, 2009 by Guest Author

Todays guest post is from Dr. Robyn McMaster.

Dr. Robyn McMaster is Sr. VP of the MITA International Brain Center. She’s the author of Brain Based Biz. She’s a close friend and wise advisor.

Blogging stimulates the brain as you make public ideas that rouse “aha’s.” Shaping and sharing ideas with a wider community provides incentive, especially as you’re rewarded by readers’ comments. Another bonus comes as surprises unwrap themselves as you read and learn from others’ blogs.

Interestingly, mental activities required for blogging, such as learning how to use technology to launch a blog, using your computer to write, writing for an audience, selecting just the right photo to go with posts, researching what others have written about your topic, commenting on their posts and writing from a new, fresh approach, leads to changes in the structures of your brain. How so?

Your brain rewires nightly as you sleep, based on the activities you do during the day. “It’s really a matter of neurons and dendrites,” Dr. Ellen Weber reports, “that spark new synapses for change. Ellen describes the process…

Your browser may not support display of this image. Remember, a neuron’s nothing more than a nerve cell, and your brain holds about 100 billion of these little critters. You can march them much more in your favor – with a few carefully crafted acts. How so? Neurons project extensions called dendrite brain cells – which connect and reconnect daily, based on what you do. Axons, in contrast, relay information back from the body back to the brain. In a rather complex electrochemical process, neurons communicate with each other in synapses, and that connection creates chemicals called neurotransmitters. Chemicals release at each synapse, and these shape mood, open brains to optimize learning and stoke creative solutions to complex problems. Many mysteries still occur in the quadrillion synapses within a human brain, and yet wonderful benefits await people who act on what recent research suggests.

As your dendrites rewire they strengthen blogging and writing skills. The more you write, seek to improve, try new formats, and use tips good writers, like Liz Strauss, share, the more new dendrites for writing skills will be wired into your brain.

Once you launch a blog and you are underway, you can gather readers interested in your topic by becoming active in social networks. And even joining social networks prompts our brains to rewire…

Social Networks Change the Face of Friendships Here’re some facts on ways blogging and networking alter the face of your friendships:

* The human brain steps up to challenges and intellectual ideas. These lead people to discuss deeper issues on topics of similar interest.

* Online users have the same number of friends in real-life, but even more counterparts online

* Myspace, Facebook and Twitter are changing the number of friends people have and the way they communicate

* 90% of online friends rated as ‘close’ have met face to face

* People choose friends in person and online based on their ‘quality’… In person, facial and bodily cues help, but online it’s harder to spot dishonest signals

* Social networks aid communication and may bring about a change in the size and structure of real-life social networks in the future

Social networks change us and we change social networks! Over time the demographics of bloggers changes, as described in Cason Analytics blogging stats.

Blogging promotes higher cognitive skills, according to Dr’s. Fernette and Brock Eide. You stretch your brain through:

* critical and analytical thinking The best of blogs are rich in ideas and promote active exchange and critique.

* creative, intuitive, and associational thinking Blogs must be updated frequently. This constant demand for output promotes a kind of spontaneity and ‘raw thinking’–the fleeting associations and the occasional outlandish ideas–seldom found in more formal media.

* analogical thinking Back-and-forth blog-based exchanges between experts also provide a unique opportunity for young thinkers to witness and evaluate arguments from analogy on an ongoing basis.

* medium for increasing access and exposure to quality information Because blogs link many facts and arguments in branching “threads” and webs, and append primary source materials and reference works, they foster deeper understanding and exposure to quality information.

* combinations of best solitary reflection and social interaction Bloggers have solitary time to plan their posts, but they can also receive rapid feedback on their ideas. The responses may open up entirely new avenues of thought as posts circulate and garner comments.

Think about it … Blogging’s quite a workout. When I finish writing a blog, I find satisfaction from all the intellectual stimulation. You?

5 shared habits that shape every effective blogger’s brain….

A blogger’s brain comes alive … Dr. Ellen Weber summarizes it well …

* Visitors stop by …. Have you seen your messages come to life with a new twist … an unusual turn … or two-bits of wit-‘n-wisdom that bumps a good idea to the next level.

* Traffic means humans more than scores or pings.

* Ideas… images … and applications pop up like popcorn ready to serve and share with eager … diverse crowds.

* Small rewards pay it forward. It could be in the form of a badge … a cup… or just a few words that lift a thought up to the rainbow for another look.

* You learn something new … from somebody new … about a topic that’s new….

Blogs are not only changing the way we think… act … and do business …. They are also helping us to come and go into one another’s worlds… and that reshapes the best bloggers’ brains. What do you think?