Successful Blog

Here is a good place for a call to action.

  • Home
  • Community
  • About
  • Author Guidelines
  • Liz’s Book
  • Stay Tuned

This Shoemaker Has Decided the Ratty Shoes Have to Go

March 4, 2009 by Liz

To Be Seen, Heard, and Understood

Yessir, Chris Brogan, I have ideas. Thank you for linking my ideas to yours. I’m good at ideas and when they connect, my ideas light fires.

It’s the connecting that makes the ideas take off.
Connecting happens when people see, hear, and understand our ideas.

I’ve decided this year I want my connections working online and off.

Meet Vince

I’ve enlisted the best designer, Vincent Franco, to bring out the hidden content on this blog, to get it ready for where we’re going. The concept is rolling. We’ll be making room for new features, a bow to the past and a long look to the future. I’m taking over my dad’s saloon once and for. The new look will focus on what this blog and the successful and outstanding bloggers who hang out here are about.

  • We’ll be rolling up the categories into key locations. As we get going the content become more focused around the main topics of web strategy, how communities form, communication, social media, blogging / writing, and creativity / ideas.
  • I’ve already invited Kathryn Jennex to write a column called “Practical Communication.” Have you been reading what she writes every Thursday? She constantly hits it out of the park!
  • My dear friends from OZ, Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh will still challenge us to reflect as they share coastline of tomorrowland.
  • If you’d like to participate email me. It’s always been a community blog.

Meet The Image Studios

The most professional soft skills, image communication consultancy in Chicago, The Image Studios, has agreed to show me how to leverage the best of my head, heart, and purpose so that people can see, hear, and understand who I am — at first glance.

  • This is not a TV makeover. This is a serious quest to be recognized. The operative term is visible authenticity. You’ll be hearing more of that from me all year.
  • I had my first meeting with image team last fall. My meeting with Kali Evans-Raoul, the founder, brought out a baseline that is firmly grounded in who I am and where I want to be. The plan is to get what doesn’t work out of my way, not layering new things on.
  • I’ll be blogging. We’ll be taking photos and video. Most importantly I’ll be trying to track the thoughts behind the decisions and changes.

The why of this is simple enough. Social media, social business is about connections. Connecting starts long before we talk.

2009 is the Year to be SEEN, HEARD, AND UNDERSTOOD.

This shoemaker has decided the ratty shoes have to go.

How about you? Are you ready for visible authenticity?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Register now for SOBCon09

Invest in your business. Invest in yourself.

Filed Under: Motivation, Successful Blog Tagged With: barn raising, bc, LinkedIn, The Image Studios, Vincent Franco, visible authenticity

How Social Media Can Help You Build a Better Business

December 1, 2008 by Liz


Why Didn’t the People Come?

When people ask my help, it’s often to avoid or to remedy a situation like this one.

He had a dream, an idea, for a new business. It was a product and a service. He saw it in its glory. It was part store, part community bustling with transactions. He saw the people coming — they knew they couldnn’t wait for it.

So he got busy building that dream. He invested time, money, and enthusiasm in something …

  • that he thought was cool.
  • that was costly, but “worth” it.
  • that was harder to use than he realized.
  • that he didn’t know how to sell.
  • that he imagined would get people change how they do what they do
  • that someone else had already built — better, faster, less expensively.

Nothing happened. No one lined us. No bustling community developed. The dream was built and no one lined up. No one has noticed it. Why?

He didn’t remember to talk to the people who were supposed to come.

Get the People to Come Before You Build It

Suppose, instead of building that business and offering it to them, we invited the people we want to serve build the business with us? The culture of social media and social networking offer huge opportunities to build a business with a community rather than for them.

In the 18th and 19th rural North America, building a barn — the most important structure of farm — required many hands and many skills. Time was often short and funds could be tight. Barn raising was the work of an interdependent community that saw barns as an important part of life.

A barn raising used to be a one- or two-day event. Materials were purchased and plans were finished ahead. When the community came able-bodied and quick-minded members could start right in. Barn raisings were lead a barn raiser who with a well-thought plan who was paid to identify and manage crew chiefs, specialists, and volunteers for “pitching in.” New barn raisers were expected to watch before they took up their work.

A barn raising is the ultimate community collaboration to complete a common, organized goal.

Barn raising a business in the social media culture offers the business and the community members who participate clear benefits. Here’s why your social media business building should be a barn raising.

  • A community needs a plan and organization to build. We can’t fool a community by building parts that don’t work together. We can’t get stuck or be moved to fall in love with our own ideas.
  • Enlisting a barn raiser and crew chiefs keeps your plan organized and on schedule.
  • Ideas and costs get questioned.
  • We have to be able to explain how things will work, what makes them useful, and why they’re worth building
  • We all gain skills and relationships from participating in the process.
  • The final business reflects the needs and values of the community that built it.
  • Participants showcase their best work in a short-term commitment
  • The process provides a product or service has proven its worth by the community support.

Barn raising builds the community at the same time that it builds the business that will serve us. Everyone who has participated is invested in its success. Don’t just think … do.

Ever been part of a project that worked like a barn raising?

What would be the first step in helping some get a social media barn raising started for their business idea?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Want to build barn? Work with Liz!!
Image: Haussler Cluster Raising in CA

Get your best voice in the conversation. Buy my eBook.

Filed Under: Community, Successful Blog Tagged With: barn raising, bc, Community, LinkedIn, visible authenticity

What’s Your Best Advice on Hitches, Glitches, and People Who Don’t Show Up?

November 12, 2008 by Liz

(Updated in 2020)

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Even Big Hairy Audacious Goals Get Stuck

What makes me think that everyone has been here?

We get an idea. The concept seems whole, simple, brilliant. We can’t wait to start. So we set a dream on the horizon, and we go for it. Enthusiasm, drive, and determination propel us.

We set a plan.
We get to work.
We talk about what we’re doing.
Things are rolling
until …
a hitch, a glitch, someone doesn’t show up.
Now what?

Gotta Get a Big Hairy Audacious Goal

Putting a dream on the horizon and moving toward it is a start, but it isn’t quite enough. We need to make it a Big Hairy Audacious Goal.
Suzie Cheel and Glenda Watson Hyatt live by their Big Hairy Audacious Goals. Lots of folks believe in BHAGs. Tim O’Reilly and Rosa Say blogged about their value. Geoff Livingston wasn’t shy about explaining what he why he thinks big hairy audacious goals make things happen.

When they name the BHAG, marching orders crystallize. It’s messy and non-linear, but voracious. Just the ticket for a little magic. The Buzz Bin

I agree. Big hairy audacious goals are messy and nonlinear. The very “big, hairy” name makes it clear that they’re likely to offer deadends, detours, and doers who don’t do what they said they would. Those big hairy interruptions are when too much thinking can get us stuck.

It’s the thinking … questioning?
Is it us?
Is the goal too big and too hairy?
Are we up to the struggle?
That’s the danger. The goal didn’t change, nor did it’s value. What changes is our resolve. Enthusiasm, drive, and determination fade into black and we’re left with voices saying we might have misjudged.

Hitches, Glitches, and People Who Don’t Show Up

I said I’d tell you about the barns and bridges project as things moved forward. It’s been a week since then.

Here’s what’s going on.

  • Hitches: People are asking how to help and I don’t have a system for answering them.
  • Glitches: Bad code stole time from the project and other work needs to get done.
  • People who don’t show up: My designer has gone into the code cave. I think I need to find a new one.
  • What’s on track: conversations with possible sponsors are moving forward, I’ve got help forming the message and the documentation they’ll need to see the project clearly and know their part.

As my friend, Lorelle, often tells me, “You’d be brilliant for other folks, now’s the time to be brilliant for yourself.” With that in mind, I’m offering these plans for now.

The next few days, my free time will be about: keeping the sponsor conversation alive; planning out how to get 2 or 3 key volunteers committed to help manage the project for 2-3 hours a week; start the quest for a new designer; finish the details left open by my computer mess.

Action has always been my best response to making sure a big goal doesn’t get stuck. That’s my advice for me. What’s yours?

Here’s the keys. I hand it over to you …

What’s your best advice about hitches, glitches, and people who don’t show up? What action steps should come next to keep this Big Hairy Audacious Goal of Raising Barns and Building Bridges moving forward? What good things have you been doing that we don’t know about?

Looking forward to what you write in the comment box.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related:
Why Play the Game, If We Aren’t Playing for Keeps?

Filed Under: Business Life, Successful Blog Tagged With: barn raising, BHAG, bridge building, The Big Idea, visible authenticity

Recently Updated Posts

Top 5 Email Holiday Prep Tips – Don’t Forget the Basics

6 Keys to Managing Your Remote Workforce

passion into blogging

How to Build Income with Your Blog

Face Identification a Security Risk?

market business

Five Ideas To Market Your Small Business

9 Reasons To Use WordPress



From Liz Strauss & GeniusShared Press

  • What IS an SOB?!
  • SOB A-Z Directory
  • Letting Liz Be

© 2023 ME Strauss & GeniusShared