Successful Blog

How Do You Let Folks Know What You Do Without Pitching Them?

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Tools Need a Purpose

Got a hammer, looking for nails to use it?

Got a Twitter account, don’t do that.

Social media tools work so much more effectively when we decide a few things before we use them.

What to Do Before You Twitter

Know what business you’re in and know your ideal online customer.

If you’ve not done that in the last six months, the definition you’re using probably isn’t the best one. The generational nature of the online culture means that our base of customers is always shifting, growing, learning.

Draw a picture. Make a prototype of the customer you’ve just identified. What do you offer that makes that customer’s life faster, easier, or more meaningful?

Now that you think you know that. Go find people who meet that description and ask them what they care about … and listen.

Go back and revise your offer to meet what they care about not what you thought they did. Then keep listening — build relationships and get to know your potential customers better. When you talk about what you do, talk the way you tell friends what’s going on in your life.

You don’t pitch your friends do you?

The folks you meet will say when they need you. When you hear them talk about a way you might help, just say, “By the way, that’s what I do.”

When we’re authentically listening, we can hear who actually needs our help.

How do you let folks know what you do without pitching them? I bet you have some secret ways of doing that.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your web presence!!

What We Gotta Know about These Tools

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It’s Not What Comes After Twitter …

With the advent of SOBCon Hands-On event partnerships, I’m enjoyng the pleasure of forming relationships and working alongside people who share my business passions organizations, businesses, and individuals learning to serve their markets by working online and off seamlessly. Watch for them in the next few weeks.

The authentic candor of the conversations with Susan Kuhn Frost, Gio Galluci, Erica O’Grady, DDGriffith and Starbucker has totally convinced me that teaching the tools isn’t an end in itself.

Businesses of every size seem confused about integrating the Internet — they see social media tools as key drivers of business. Social media tools don’t build a business.

I keep thinking of an editor with a writing assignment. She had talent, experience, and the best equipment to use to write the piece she was assigned. She came to me on day three, saying that she just couldn’t do it.

After a few minutes, the problem was easy to spot. All of the tools in the world wouldn’t fix it.

She hadn’t decided — didn’t know — exactly what she wanted to say.

You can’t use the tools of a writer if you don’t know that.

Gotta Know the Goal Before the Tool Is Gonna Help

To bring it down to it’s most basic form, the business that picks up the tools first without setting goals first won’t don’t do well.

Email, telephone, Twitter, any tool is only as useful as it match to the purpose. Not the other way around.

If we want to be successful using social media tools, we need to know a few things to make the tools work:

  • Who we are.
  • What we offer.
  • Who we’re offering that to.
  • Which tool is a match.

Just like the editor, who had to know what she wanted to say to use the tools at her disposal …

I’ve decided to let the other guys worry about what comes after Twitter … from the pencil to to the typewriter to the telephone to the computer … they’re all tools.

We gotta know what we’re using these tools to do.

Have you seen people get so involved in a tool like Twitter that they’ve used it without really having a goal?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your web presence!!

How to Blog Like a Beginner …

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A few words I’ve said before that I want to share on my birthday …

Something blogging has taught me a lot about — not just the beauty of paying attention to one thing at a time — but the fulfillment of offering other people a chance to talk.

Half the show is in the comments. Thank you HART for saying that!

That was one of the first things we discovered here.

When I first started blogging, I often tried to do too much. I’d write a post that carried the load of too many thoughts at one time. Those blogging posts went both deep and wide. They were so complete, I left no room for readers to add their thoughts.

It’s not a conversation when all a reader can say is I agree with you, Great post. or You covered that subject really well. There’s just nowhere for a conversation to go, if I don’t leave room for a reader’s thoughts to squeeze in between my own. Now I know to think about the conversation when I write.

Here are a few things that I do differently now. What they add up to is staying in the mind of a beginner.

  • I ask more questions without answering them.
  • I don’t try to think through every possibility as I used to do. I write what I know and I let other folks add what they know to that.
  • I’ve backed off on holding myself accountable as an expert on the what I write about and instead, think of myself as one of the audience talking to another reader about an idea, waiting to hear his or her point of view.

The result? This social media beginner is having so much more fun than any teacher … and feeling so much more authentic.

What do you do to stay a social media beginner?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Saying No With Authenticity … When No Becomes Yes Unexpectedly

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Don’t Agree to What You Can’t Do

On Monday while waiting at DFW, I got a back channel message from @LisaDJenkins saying that a friend and potential client had asked for social media help in an area that “wasn’t her thing.” The message said, “Could I recommend you?” I checked it over, saw a nice fit, and said yes.

A relationship started … I haven’t met the client yet, but I’ve gotten to know Lisa pretty well. I wanted to know more about her and what she was doing. Her follow up email and the recommendation she sent her friend were well-written and compelling. A good turn on her part become more than that. Lisa tells the story better than I do.

On the other hand, once I had a conversation with a potential client that became a negotiation via email. We discussed a project in detail. It was a blast talking to him about the project. The conversation was more than worth looking forward to, but as he told me about his expectations, the more I felt I was unable to gather the resources I’d need to do the work to my satisfaction.

It was a sad moment for me. The project had sounded exciting. I’d enjoyed beginning a relationship that was authentic, filled with fun, and an example of with great communication.

I didn’t stay sad very long.

He must have felt the same values. When I declined, that potential client shifted the topic to other projects on which we might work together.

There is a lesson here. It’s one I like believing in.

Ever had a no become a yes like these?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Online Culture: Is Your Definition of Real Life Out of Date?

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In Real Life

I keep encountering the phrase “in real life.” People use it often to talk about the offline culture. Most of probably first heard that phrase as small children. Our families use it to help us differentiate between fantasy and reality, fact or fiction. It’s education curriculum — a skill essential to literacy and critical thinking — teachers help children sort real versus make believe in schools all over the world.

Out of school and grown, we rely on that skill to navigate information and relationships — to identify competence, credibility, relevance, predictability, integrity, authenticity. We trust what is “real.” We look to uncover fallacy.

It’s how we learn to trust who and what we know. But reality is perception and perception is made of more than information — personal filters and cultural beliefs change our view of what’s authentic.

Hopefully with new information and new experience we changed how we see and what we know.

Culture Shock

Lately I’ve realized that my definition of real life and the words around the online experience need to change. My view hasn’t kept up with the new seamless online and offline line communication world. Here’s how I got to that thought.

When we go to another country, we find another culture. It’s just as likely that we’ll find another culture in the next neighborhood. Culture is a context that frames our reality.

What’s fine and natural in one context can be a reputational blunder in another. We start to “get” this the first time our peer group has different values than our family. Peer culture has different rules.

Vocabulary changes from one culture to another too. The most used definition of community can be a group of like minded thinkers here, a church group there, or a small town depending on the group we’re talking with.

Even the mode of communication has its effect. We dress and act differently in person than we might on the phone. Without the visual input our words have more power and are offered in a verbal behavior set. This tool changes the culture in which it works just that much. Yet we never say that we’re in another world when we talk on the phone or when we text.

AND it’s a new cultural fact: No one wants to hear our cell phone convervastions.

Similarly, online culture is developing rules of behavior that change in different situations too.

Yet because folks have imagined virtual reality that is not all true, we’ve developed this mindset that being online isn’t the real world when in fact, the Internet is just another set of tools.

Being online isn’t another world … it’s a set of tools in another culture paradigm. It’s no less the real world than being on the phone.

To be visibly authentic in every conversation in every every culture, it’s important to be aware that media only mediates relationships and it only causes contextual cultural shifts. .

The media we use doesn’t define real life.
Media doesn’t change the world, people do.

Is your definition of real life out of date too?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.

How Many Ways Do You Offer Your Content?

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Repurposing Content Is a Service

relationships button

If you watch cable television carefully, you will see an interview clip from one program replayed again in another program. Perhaps you’ve had the feeling you’ve seen a show before, but then again . . . maybe not? Packaging and repackaging bits of content makes it worth more and last longer. Five uses for the same content stretches the corporate dollar.

It seems backwards doesn’t it . . . to reuse content in a time when there is so much of it? But it makes sense. If I know my content is accurate and high quality, I should share it with as large an audience as I can — particularly in this time of attention economy.

So Much Content . . . Why?

The amount of content and information available is more than anyone can read, yet we are all being asked to know more, and more, and more. If there’s so much content already, it seems miserly to repackage what is already published?

Not necessarily.

There are valid reasons to repackage content in this age of attention economy. Repackaging and repurposing content allows a publisher

  • to custom publish for individual niche markets.
  • to focus publications on key principles they want to highlight.
  • to show their flexibility in the marketplace.
  • to give old customers new reasons to buy.

Granted, those three points actually say the same thing in different ways. That’s exactly what repackaging is — tailoring content to suit the needs of the audience.

Just as some conversations are meant for an email, some for a meeting, and some are meant to be shared in person … content can be designed to fit the needs of the situation.

Giving the readers what they want instead of what we think they need — that’s a concept worth exploring. Much of existing content probably suits existing needs, if only we would structure it in way that our readers found it relevant and offer it so that they could use it as they want to rather than as we think they should.

How many ways do you offer your content? Just one? Is that enough?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.