Successful Blog

Are Blog Comments the new Mundane Commute?

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A Guest Post by Scott P. Dailey

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I’m concerned about the purity of the conversations undergone in blog comments. I’m concerned that many are not all that pure after all.

I’m finding that often blog commenting appears to be something akin to a bunch of people not-so gingerly exchanging business cards and PowerPoints and even worse, trite and banal ass-kissing.

Yawn.

What if hundreds of comments on a blog you love were actually nothing more than a mirage? The post was terrific, but the post’s comment mojo was less the result of the post’s quality and more the result of self-important opportunism and profiteering? What if the 100 comments can be reasonably likened to a pack of hyenas scrambling to snag a bite of the feast the author has laid out by virtue of her blog’s popularity? Popular blog, popular blogger, hmmm?

The New Commute

What if everyone put driving traffic via comments above any other engagement priority? What degree of coloring the commenting exercise with this agenda is too much degree? “It’s networking,” some of you may be saying to yourself. I get that. But what I asked was, what if everyone did this? That’s my concern. I mix for business purposes too. But what if we’re cheapening the commenting progression to such a degree that it’s becoming the new overcrowded commute we all try so hard each day to avoid? You know the one? We funnel like drones off the train and force ourselves through the turnstyles, up the stairs, out the doors, all to chase a little bit of money? What if blog comments were the new matrix, the new false reality devoid of any pure and true moments?

To some of you, perhaps I sound naive, or maybe even a bit of a whiner. I’m probably a little of both to tell the truth. Well look, I believe, pie in the sky or not, that the world is what we make it. And so it is with blog commenting.

A Challenge to Contributors

Draft a comment to a blog post you sincerely enjoyed reading. Launch your word processing software and dazzle us. Done? Super. Now do it again, this time imagining that you do not have an online identity. No Twitter, Facebook or YouTube accounts either. You have nothing you want to sell, teach or promote. You need nothing from me. Plain and simple: you enjoyed the post and wanted to add to the dialog. There is literally no gain for you outside that which is had by engaging others in a meaningful discussion.

Are the two drafts the same? Now that you’ve completed both versions, each with a different agenda motivating you, what observations can you make about your commenting habits?

What kind of observations have you made about the state of blog commenting in today’s blogosphere? I would love to hear your take.

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Scott P. Dailey is a Web designer, copywriter and network administrator. Recently Scott launched ( http://scottpdailey.com ), his social media blog that makes connections between social networking etiquette and the prevailing human social habits that drive on and offline business engagement patterns. You can connect with Scott via Twitter at @scottpdailey.

Creative Commons License photo credit: Maguis & David

Thanks, Scott!

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

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Beach Notes: Worming – Some Good Things Take Time and Patience

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by Des Walsh and Suzie Cheel

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The bloke in this picture is “worming”, i.e. out to catch beach worms for bait. You can see he has a bag on the end of a piece of string. In the bag, which he is swishing back and forth across the sand as the tide comes in, he will have put some some berley, very smelly fish – which is why the bag sometimes goes by the very elegant name of “stink bag”, the smellier the better to entice the worms. He will also have a piece of bait in his hand and a pair of worm pliers to take hold of the worm that sticks its head above the sand and fastens onto his bait. Some people use a nylon stocking rather than a bag.

If the fisherman is an old hand at this he has probably discarded the pliers and just uses his fingers to get a grip on the worm and then haul it out.

Not a pasttime for the impatient: Des read where one keen fisherman declared he had taken two years to develop the necessary skills. But ask anyone who fishes off the beach and they’ll tell you the beach worm is the best bait of all.

Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh

What’s the Most Surprising #ROI on Anything You’ve Bought?

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This is a sponsored announcement, part of a paid promotion. It’s rare that I do those. But the question behind it is so worth pondering that I felt compelled to write about it. So it’s with pleasure I invite you to read along.

Win a Napa Retreat for 6 and a Tech Makeover!

Our desks and our offices are fitted and filled with tools and equipment that we’ve purchased to help us do business. Office supply stores, computer stores, furniture stores, and providers online and offline shower us with information about products and services that will make our lives easier, faster, and more productive. But how often do we stop to consider which of those we invest in have given us the highest return?

We know the ones we like and the ones we don’t. We know the ones we use every day and the ones we reach for in emergency. But if we lined them all up in a row, which would be the winner as the most surprising, great investment we’ve made so far? Was it …

  • that bus ticket that took you to the best project meeting of your career?
  • that pair of ice skates that inspired you when your feet almost froze?
  • that video camera that captured the first cut of your documentary?
  • that ticket to a conference where you sketched out the idea for your business launch?
  • that chicken that changed the world?

Think about it. Tell your story and you’ll learn something about yourself and how you work.

HP’s “Reboot With ROI” Retreat Giveaway

HP has posed the question and made it worth your while to answer. They’re giving away an amazing prize: a trip to Napa for six people on your team and a technology makeover for your team! To enter, all you have to do is share a story about surprising returns on something you bought.

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Here’s how it works:

Tell Your Story

The best user-submitted stories of surprising ROI will be featured on the site.

Complete prize details:

Grand Prize
A five-day trip for six to Northern California wine country, including:

* Round-trip coach class ticket to San Francisco International Airport
* Two full-size rental cars for the duration of the trip
* Five nights’ accommodation at Fairmont Mission Inn & Spa (double occupancy in a Luxury Suite with a fireplace)
* Daily breakfast
* Six-hour wine country limousine tour, with tours and tastings at three wineries
* Ride on the Napa Valley Wine Train, including gourmet lunch and wine-tasting seminar
* Hot air balloon ride over wine country with Up & Away, including brunch
* $550 gift certificate per person for winner’s choice of spa treatments
* A gift certificate for dinner for six at a fine-dining restaurant in Yountville

And, after your refreshing reboot in wine country, go back to work with new HP technology.

Grand prize:

* Four HP ProBook computers and 1 Palm smartphone
* Two HP Color Laserjet CM2320fxi printers
* One HP Color Laserjet CP2025dn printer

Silver Prize:

* HP ProBook 4520s computer with broadband included and free case
* HP Color LaserJet CP2025dn printer

Bronze Prize:

* HP Mini 5103 computer
* HP Color LaserJet CP2025n printer

The contest closes on October 31, 2010. ( http://bit.ly/95QWoo )

Read the detailsand find out how to get your story with those already on the HP ROI Giveaway site.

Now that you’ve thought about it. Do it!

Read some stories and realize how they connect us to the people who wrote them. Notice how each business became more interesting because of the story behind it.
Your story is part of what makes your brand and your business one of a kind.

The real prize here is what you’ll get by act of answering the question — share your story and you’ve already won a great brand insight.

Share it with HP and you might get another huge ROI story about your brand — the story of how writing about surprising ROI became a business retreat for six and a makeover for your business tech.

So you see now why I wanted to share this sponsored event. The insight gained from participation is in itself a prize.

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

I’m a proud affiliate of

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How Do You Know When Quitting that Quest Is a Good Idea?

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It’s Something Like Business Infatuation

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I just spent an hour working on art for a blog post that I couldn’t write. The concept was too hard, to convoluted and too stupid to deserve the time and space it would take to explain it. It didn’t deserve a diagram. It didn’t even deserve a blog post.

I’ve done that before. It happens when I get too involved with my own ideas and lose sight of the people I’m writing for. Lucky for me, I recognize the symptoms sooner and sooner each time.

Most of them have to do with working too hard to make something work right.

How to Know When to Quit

It happens with ideas, with projects, and with relationships. We get started on something small or something big. Somewhere along the line infatuation sets in. We’re inspired with a foolish or extravagant love for some part of it.

It may be that we’ve discovered a little known fact that’s fascinating to think about.

Why your friends will always have more friends that you do.

It may be the most musical sentence we’ve ever written, that doesn’t fit inside any paragraph of what we’re writing now.


When I give my soul room to breathe, everyone I know gets nicer.

It may be the person, the career, or the company that immediately caught our attention and got us thinking new thoughts. It may be the project or idea we just thought up that moved us to get to doing our most outstanding work.

Whichever it is that has captured our inspired commitment to work at some point, when things stop working, we don’t want to believe we were wrong. Rather than recognizing the problem, we keep fighting to make it right again. We unconsciously find ourselves committed to a failing course. It’s an emotional response. It’s irrational and time wasting at best. Costly at worst.

When we’re on a quest, we’re emotionally involved. Emotions filter judgment and skew our evaluations. They build cognitive bias which reinforces our beliefs and often clouds the truth. How do you know when to give it up? Here are questions you might ask to figure out if you’re working too hard to make something work.

  • Do you find yourself moving things around more than you’re moving things forward? Measure the time and effort you’re spending compared to similar situations.
  • Do you find that you’re talking more about how things could / should / might work than talking about the work itself? Talking about behavior and process is not the same as talking about the work.
  • Do you find that you’re spending time rewriting or reworking all around one detail, one person, one idea that you love? When a detail becomes more important than the work, stop to remind yourself of your goal.
  • When you try to explain to others what’s holding you up, do they suggest that you lose the exact piece that you care about most? Do you hear yourself arguing for the problem rather than looking for a solution?

If you’re finding yourself saying “yes,” you might want to get some distance to find a less personal view. Imagine what the situation or the project would be like without the part or person that you have formed a personal relationship with.

Suppose you were offered the option to move that “lovely dear” to another project where he, she, or it is a far better fit? If the feeling you get in thinking of your answer is relief, then you know you’re working too hard to make things work.

How do you know when quitting your current quest is a good idea?

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

Successful-Blog is a proud affiliate of

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How to Defuse Customer Skepticism and Cynicism

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A Guest Post by Scott P. Dailey

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Want to eliminate the healthy skepticism your customers have of you and instead be seen as a trusted servant? Terrific. Here’s what you do: don’t give them cause to be skeptical. Trust me, they’re skeptical. Real skeptical. Mark Twain once said the wisest people are also the most cynical. That’s your target audience. Cynics – every last one of them. Don’t blame them either. It’s our fault they’re that way. Years of forcing ourselves on them has created doubters of most of our potential buyers. I’m the same way and if you’re smart, so are you. Frankly, I like being skeptical and cynical. Healthy doses of both arm me to buy smarter, shop carefully, invest intelligently – in life and in business. I can sniff out a phony and I don’t hang with them. Your prospects can sniff just the same. They’re diligently watching as much for the BSer as they are the best buy. [More…]

Being honest isn’t achieved in telling the truth alone. Being honest has an end point. Be truthful. There’s a difference between being honest and behaving truthfully. Let your actions, not merely your words, speak of your truthfulness. Truthful actions have no vanishing line. They just go on and on, resonating with your audience well after you’ve stopped yapping. Make your contribution to the networking landscape count to the skeptical buyer that’s questioning your motives. If your networking efforts are fraught with hurried, self-promoting drivel, think again before inserting yourself into the fray. If you know you’re being disingenuous and let’s face it, you do know, then what are the odds we know too? Here, let me help you with this one: the odds are extremely high.

Deputize yourself.

Do your part to clean up the sales noise found in networking and prospecting circles. On or offline, the rules are the same. Mean it! Make selfless contributions to talks, meetings and mixers. Shape and guide the conversation, not your latest opt-in initiatives. If you do this well, people will want to know what you do and what you sell and never because you forced it upon them using absurdly urgent sales tactics. Authenticity is a commodity in sales, your transparent attempt to bait me is not.

Patience, Patience, Patience

Proving to prospects that you’re not full of it takes time. After all, you’re starting out with people who suspect you’re motivated by your sales goals alone and believe nothing matters more to you. So the prospect is ready for you to strike fast – while the proverbial iron is hot. Etc, etc. Blah, blah, blah. Borrrrr-iiiiiing.

Business relationships, like those you share with your spouse, partner, brother or mother, require time to develop. This is not news to us. Yet often, I see salespeople and business owners go for the quick close and forgo the opportunity to build repeat business through authentic bonding rituals. Prove you’re interested by forgetting what you sell and instead, talk with your prospect, not at him or to him. Imagine the pleasure derived from business conversations had through conversing about stuff other than your business. Ironic, right? Try it. You’ll be surprised how effective a salesperson you become the moment you stop trying to sell your stuff. Again, ironic.

Have you ever pushed too much, too far, too fast? Maybe you got this right the first and every time. How do you dispel the myths that the sales process must include a pushy pitch?

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Scott P. Dailey is a Web designer, copywriter and network administrator. Recently Scott launched ( http://scottpdailey.com ), his social media blog that makes connections between social networking etiquette and the prevailing human social habits that drive on and offline business engagement patterns. You can connect with Scott via Twitter at @scottpdailey.

Creative Commons License photo credit: Jody McNary Photography

Thanks, Scott!

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

Successful-Blog is a proud affiliate of

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Five Ways to Manage the Present and Create the Future at the Same Time

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Do You Over Focus on the Present?

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I had the privilege of listening in and live tweeting for two days as world-class thinkers spoke to an international audience about business and the state of the world at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. It’s been my experience that when leaderships gathers to share current thoughts, though they might prepare and speak individually, if you listen carefully to their words and the big ideas an overriding theme evolves.

One overriding theme this year at the World Business Forum was the character of leadership is the foundation of great business, innovation. Vijay Govindarajan — a leading expert on strategy and innovation — spoke to three strategies for creating the future.

  1. Manage the Present
  2. Selectively Abandon the Past
  3. Create the Future

Vijay says stratefy has nothing to do with competing for the present, but everything to do competing for the future. However, we cannot compete for the future if we are not taking care of the present. The thinking process it takes to excel at managing the present is fundamentally different from that of managing the past and future to grow.

This three minute video gives a great summary of Vijay Govindarajan’s points.

Vijay speaks to the enterprise, but any small business owner, entrepreneur, consultant or freelancer knows that living in the present and building the future is the only way to survive.

Here are five of my ideas for managing the present while creating the future.

  1. Reserve time to claim what you’ve learned. Take a hour a day, a day a week, or 3 days a month to do the work of keeping your business in line.
  2. Study your losses to find the lessons. Keep the lesson and leave the losses behind.
  3. Assume that every new idea holds an opportunity in the form of a problem.
  4. Keep the realistic present in focus and keep asking people What a future version of this might look like? <-- Note: that's a different question than What is the next ____?
  5. Surround yourself with people who will tell you when your ideas are brilliant and when they are brilliantly stupid.

In an ever-changing venue with an increasing influx of information, the winning objective is not to know what we know, but be able to respond and react to changes with solid experience and a learner’s mind.

How do you manage the present and create your future at the same time?

Read more about the World Business Forum 2010 at WBFNY.com and WBFNY-bloggershub

Be irresistible.

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

Successful-Blog is a proud affiliate of

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