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Top 10 Social Media Fears that Go Bump in the Night and How to Make Them Worse!

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Nightmare

In honor of Halloween, I’ve updated this advice, I first wrote in 2007. Read it now and be wise. heh heh.

help me

It’s the middle of the night. The wind is blowing. The moon is high. Creaking noises are sounding. Memories of comments are running through your head, and you’re thinking of emails you sent that went unanswered.

You had such hope when you started in social media. It was daytime. You were always laughing then. Now you’re just shell of yourself in despair, dejected, and broken. Your socmed fears have taken over with the things that go bump in the night.

Not to worry.
Wait, sorry.
Indeed with just a little more worry, you have the power to take those concerns beyond the social business world!!
Go for it. . . . give in to it … become a mess on the floor.

The Top 10 Social Media Fears and How to Make Them Worse

As you read, remember, the more you buy into these, the better you’ll be at crippling yourself. Here’s your chance to prove you’re good at something besides misspelling words online and making social goofs.

If you’re faint of heart, read no further. Jumping without a parachute and shooting yourself in the foot require a certain dedication to being . . . hopeless.

    10. Fear of Looking Like a Fool Don’t go near the comment box on any blog. Stay away from posting on Facebook. If you make a remark on Twitter or ask question on LikedIn, folks might find out about you. If you find you’re having trouble keep silent, translate your thoughts into a language you don’t understand. You need this fear in your repertoire — Fear the clueless, pest that everyone knows you are.

    9. Fear of Content See how much better every other person’s content is. Count the ways that you’ll never be half that good. Write the reasons. Frame them. Put them on a wall in your line of vision. Feel the fear of an undisciplined wimp who is inept when you do your best work.

    8. Fear of To-Do Lists Think up at least 5.000 urgent things you MUST do — blog tweaks, promotion spots, Twitter updates, Facebook posts, shares to buy and sell on Empire Avenue, LinkedIn status updates, blogs to read and not comment on. Don’t stop until the list could only be done by 83.479 people. (Get the math right, not 84,000 or 83,479. Be precise.) You’ve moved up a level on the fear chart. Fear how lazy and shiftless you are. [What does shiftless mean?]

    7. Fear of Code Tweak your website template for hours to fix minute details. Then copy and paste the original stylesheet back onto the site, throwing your own work away. Changing the code should fill you with fear that you are an egotistical and anal-retentive rat.

    6. Fear of the Numbers Check your stats. Hit refresh every 30 seconds for an hour. If your page views don’t rise by 100,000 or more between clicks, start reading every blog post you can about how to improve your social media ROI. Write three blog posts. Publish them. Spam all of your social networks with their links as soon as you might. Then do the whole thing again. Fear being exposed as a woeful underachiever.

    5. Fear of Ideas Hunt down the perfect idea — the one that will get you tetweeted all day and on the front page of every social sharing site. (Great ideas have nothing to do with readers.) If you don’t find that perfect idea, you are ridiculously dimwitted and slow. Fear that everyone knows what an idealess idiot you are.

    4. Fear of Relationships Link out in every sentence of every post you write. Link to anyone who has ever said “hello.” Link to rocks, trees, and statues, if you can. DM your links to everyone you’ve connected to on all your social sites, whether you’ve said hello to them or not. It will take forever, but people will notice how desperate you are. Link promiscuously, while you fear people see you as an anti-social hermit and a prude.

    3. Fear of Saying “No” Answer all email, including spam. Always do what folks ask — buy, do, sign up, attend, subscribe. You’ll prove you’re needed. Fear that those you gently refuse will call you jerk or go higher and fear that no one would know who you are or care.

    2. Fear of the Written Word Get out your dictionary and Thesaurus. Be sure you have two grammar books near. Use words so large that you can’t say or spell them. Be sure that you write unintelligible mush. See every teacher you ever had finding out how much you forgot. Fear that you’re not only a slacker, but also a bottom-of-the-barrel communicator.

    1. Fear of Your Personal Worth All of your fears come together here. If you can’t get those first 9 right, then what could you possibly be good for? This the crown jewel. You have made it to the consummate fear of all . . . fear you are a worm.

On this deep, dark, dastardly night, you no longer have to be a shell of yourself in despair, dejected, and broken. You can be crippled and hopeless too — melted down into unrecoverable mess. Follow this Top Ten List, and you’ll show the world what fear is really for.

On the other hand, if you would rather get out of your funk, give up those fears, and come back to us. . . .

Definitely, positively, and for sure, surround yourself with positive people, because positive people make positive things happen. Wouldn’t you rather …

Build Opportunity into Your Life Right Now!

Find the Irresistible Rock Start in You.

Choose and Tell Your Best True Story

Grow With the Community Who Loves to Tell Your Story

Take on the Top 10 Ways to Start Living Your Life

Happy Halloween!

Be Irresistible!

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

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.

Thanks to Week 315 SOBs

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muddy teal strip A

Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

muddy teal strip A

They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

deep purple strip

Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Do You Rely on Analytics to Tell the Whole Story?

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A Guest Post by
Rosemary O’Neill

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The Tools Only Get You Halfway There

Many tools offer to help you analyze your customer community, so that you can capture the elusive “ROI.” These tools evaluate a multitude of data points, including number of followers, likes, blog comments, retweets, etc., to come up with the success equation. Small businesses can be overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of starting from zero in all of these social categories.

However, I propose that numbers only get you halfway there. The other half is composed of humanity. Information like, “dog’s name,” “has 3 kids,” “is insanely into photography.” The reason that is often left out in the cold is because it’s hard to automate that kind of connection. That type of information is only really gleaned from a steady stream of interactions over a long period of time. And many of us don’t invest the time to build up that data.

There’s an old-school sales trick that says when you walk into someone’s office, you look around and take note of the family pictures, fishing trophies, or other personal items on the desk. Those can be used to start conversations and begin building a connection…”hey, I went to UVa too!” If you want to build up your humanity data, you need to do the digital version of that; i.e., take note of the human information that is available online.

I’m not suggesting cyberstalking in a creepy way, but if your customer is sharing his/her interests publicly, it’s fairly easy to build on that. Here are some concrete ideas:

  • Build a web of connections, via Twitter, LinkedIn, or other networks
  • Promote your customers’ projects and content
  • Work on expanding the ways you connect—if it’s all digital, try the phone. If you’ve always emailed, try finding them elsewhere.
  • When you respond, try to read-up first. If your customer is reaching out to you on your FB page, why not show them you know them. Same with Twitter followbacks.
  • Find ways to allow your customers to be “whole people” in your community, include an area for off-topic socializing. And allow your reps to be human too.

The bonus is that, by including human data, you also build in “delight,” as people recognize that they’re being noticed. And that’s priceless.

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Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work on the Internet. Check out their blog. You can find her on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Thank you, Rosemary! People like you are easy to remember and fun to do business with! 🙂

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

Missed Deadlines…

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by Patty Azzarello

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Sometimes you find yourself in a situation where your gifts and skills don’t line up with the type of skills that are valued in your environment.

Does anybody care?

I am on a bit of a rampage lately about organizations not-addressing missed deadlines.

I see this a lot. The reason why so many organizations have so much trouble doing what they intend to do, on time, is because when they fail to meet a deadline, nothing happens.

Nothing happens…

The dates come and go and no one talks about it.

People who were on the hook either assume that they have been granted more time, or it wasn’t that important to begin with.

Then there is no new deadline established because no one is talking about it at all. So the strategic task takes an even lower priority over the more urgent tactical demands of the moment.

Strategic Progress

This simple failure to address missed deadlines is one of the biggest factors that keeps organizations from making strategic progress.

You can’t let the date come and go and leave the failure totally unacknowledged and unexamined.

This sends all the wrong messages and sets a very low standard of execution.
What you are communicating (by not communicating) is:

  • It wasn’t that important
  • It doesn’t matter that it didn’t get done
  • There are no consequences for missing a deadline
  • We’re not serious about meeting our commitments
  • Late is OK

Why people don’t follow up

I have observed four main reasons why executives fail to follow up on missed deadlines:

  1. Too busy to keep track?
  2. Not personally good at keeping track?
  3. Don’t like the conflict of keeping track?
  4. Don’t know what consequences to impose when something is off track.

The first two are really easy to fix. Get someone who’s naturally good at this to help you. Number 3 and 4 you can’t delegate.

As a leader, if these things make you uncomfortable you need to do them anyway.

Here are some suggestions:

How to deal with the conflict:

1. Be really clear up front about dates, owners, and measures, and communicate the status at the beginning of the project when everything is “green”.

2. Start communicating regularly about what is getting done before anything goes wrong.

3. Everyone can see their name on the chart with the due dates and measures. It is up to them to keep on track.

4. Then when something goes from green to yellow or red, it is not as much of a conflict to bring it up. At least it is not a surprise. Everyone saw it coming. The person who failed to deliver had the chance to avoid it, and knew before hand that it would be addressed, so the conflict is not personal.

What consequences to impose

You don’t need to fire someone every time a deadline is missed. So if you don’t fire the person for missing a deadline, what do you do?
There are so many options between termination and nothing!

You don’t need to be a tyrant.

But you do need to have a conversation.

Ask, “What happened? How to do you intend to recover?”.

The act of having this conversation sends the message that it is NOT OK to miss a deadline.

It should be uncomfortable

Sure it’s an uncomfortable conversation, but it should be! You missed a deadline. That should not be pleasant, comfortable news for anyone.

It’s not about coming down hard on someone or being disrespectful or nasty. It’s about moving the business forward.

Also, I find that strong performers take a lot of ownership in these conversations and put more pain on themselves then they get from you.

Many leaders struggle with the motivation factor. They feel like if they give someone a hard time the person may get de-motivated, be less committed or leave.

In reality, the impact of not having the conversation is that you are letting the person know that what they were working on wasn’t very important, which I think is always even more de-motivating.

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Patty Azzarello is an executive, author, speaker and CEO-advisor. She works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. Patty has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello. Also, check out her new book Rise…

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Can You Change a Difficult Co-Worker’s Attitude?

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We have all been there at one time or another in the working world.

You are thrust into a situation where you have to work with someone who either has a negative attitude towards their job, towards their employer, towards you or all three. So, what can you do to better the situation?

The worst case scenario is leaving the job due to the actions of a single person. Remember, you got the job for a reason and it is your career, not the other individual’s future, which is at stake here.

What Are the Issues with a Co-Worker?

In dealing with a difficult co-worker, take some time to run these items through your head:

  • Is the individual causing problems for you specifically or other staff too that is impacting your ability to do your job?
  • Has the co-worker been warned by management about their behavior before?
  • Have you had one-on-one discussions with the co-worker about their actions and how they are impacting you and others in the office?
  • What is the biggest thing you would like to change about a problem co-worker?

In cases where a difficult co-worker’s actions are directly impacting you and your ability to successfully do your job, it is important that you not just let things go. Remember, your professional success is on the line here, so don’t let someone else take you down with them.

Having worked for 22 years now in different fields, I’ve worked with some fantastic people, some okay people and some real jerks for lack of a better term.

In one situation, I had only been on the job at a company for a few months when a co-worker, who later was promoted to the head of the department I was in, became an issue.

As fate would have it, this individual loved to micromanage people, always point out the bad instead of the good in a person’s work, and always seemed to just want to make your eight hours a day on the job as unpleasant as possible.

After a few weeks of dealing with this situation, I went to the owner of the company to discuss the matter, even offering to resign. He stopped short of accepting my resignation and asked that I give him a few days to investigate the matter. After doing just that, my supervisor became a former employee of the company.

As it turns out, other individuals also had expressed concerns about working with this person, pointing out that they too sensed she was not only not good material for a supervisory position, but that she was creating an environment for an ineffective department.

Standing Up for Yourself on the Job

What I learned from this situation was that not only is everyone replaceable, but that you have to stand up for yourself not only outside the office, but inside too.

Even when I have worked over the years with people I didn’t necessarily like, I respected the fact that we were all brought together to do a job for our employer. I told myself that I did not have to be friends with these people outside the office, just do enough to make for a productive work environment.

Do I think bad co-workers can be changed?

Honestly, it depends on the environment you’re working in, what type of setting management has in place, and whether or not trying to change the individual is worth your time.

Most importantly, stand your ground at work if you’re dealing with a bad co-worker. While not putting your own job in jeopardy, work with management if necessary and keep them in the loop of any incidents that involve you and a bad co-worker.

In the event the difficult co-worker is the company’s owner, you might want to start polishing up that resume.

I can say I’ve been lucky to work under some good owners over time, something that you definitely should not take for granted.

As for all the co-workers I’ve had in four jobs over 22 years, do you have a few hours?

So, how have you handled dealing with problem co-workers?

Photo credit: blogs.villagevoice.com

Dave Thomas, who covers among other subjects’ corporate credit cards and business phone service, writes extensively for business.com an online resource destination for businesses of all sizes to research, find, and compare the products and services they need to run their businesses.

 

 

SOBCon NW In Two Words – Authentic and Powerful

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By Holly Duckworth, CAE, CMP

As a professional speaker and consultant I am fortunate to attend countless conferences each year on many current trends. The summer of 2011 alone I attended 6 from the National Speakers Association to The Body Language Institute. None of the big budget, big speaker, super parties can compare to the business results I have already generated from the lasting partnerships I forged as a result of SOBCon NW in Portland (held this past September 16-18).

If you are looking to authentically connect to passionate drivers of the future of business you cannot miss SOBCon. You will walk away with new ideas and the energy and network to implement them.

(Holly can be found at her website, Leadership Solutions International, and on Twitter as @hduckworth)