Successful Blog

Ever Been in a Community on the Same Frequency?

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My SOBCon09 ROI

relationships button

Long before there was a SOBCon, I fell in love with a character in a book Radical Edge by Steve Farber.The character was so humanly written, the first question I asked Steve when I met him was whether Agnes is a real person. He said, “No,” and looked off at a vision. To this day, I’m thinking he got off on a technicality. Not important. What matters is her message. Here’s a dialogue between the character Agnes and Steve (also a character in the story.)

“I don’t know how much of that I could have accomplished if I hadn’t found my frequency.”

Steve questioned the idea, “Human beings are more complicated than than that.”

He got this answer.

“Yes they are, But it’s not about finding your frequency by ruling out everything else; on the contrary, it’s about finding the frequency that includes all those other important values and ideals. The very act of trying to wrap it all up is what’s really important, because in order to do so, you have . . . define them, think them through, understand them to their core, and evaluate your life against each one.”

A bit of challenge to say the least. Every year SOBCon brings that conversation back to me.

A Community on the Same Frequency?

Putting on an event that is not the usual has its downside. How do you explain to sponsors, speakers, attendees what they’ve never experienced? Ever tried to explain Cirq du Soleil to someone who doesn’t know it? I have such respect for the street team who first launched it.

Words alone aren’t adequate. Images are ambiguous. Even the passionate vision of an evangelist drawing details and answering questions is only a promise of a future reality. I can talk about what happens. I can talk about the value propositions and the offers. But until people experience it, I have to believe that a big part of their investment is trust.

In business you can contract schedule and budget. You can write specs and standards, but you can’t define human experience. The quality of experience is a function of how people invest their time, energy, and trust. I saw trust in every step of SOBCon

  • Trust with the planning. I trust myself. I trust my integrity. I trust my advisors who get relentless phone calls about the content ideas that change, evolve, grow, mutate like living organisms. I trust their honesty, patience, and good will for the conference.
  • Trust in my partner. Trust in Terry means I never think about whether he’s there to support me, whether I’ll need to defend my ideas. I trust that he’ll tell me when I’m off my rocker. I trust that he’ll be there in the dark of night when everyone else is sleeping.

  • Trust in the folks who offer the time to the project. It’s more than delegation when your house payment counts on it. It’s more than getting help when your name is on the letterhead. Trust is a big word when it’s possible that people could be making more work not less. It’s even bigger when some volunteers disappear or soon show they want the benefits of participating without much investment.

  • The mutual trust with the sponsors, speakers, and attendees. We all trusted that we all would deliver.

  • Trust that serious work can be fun. Being in a room where we can finally ask unabashed questions and get solid answers … or create new solutions is invigorativing and reminds us that we can do things we forgot we knew how. Our minds release different chemicals when we play with ideas.

  • Trust in ourselves. Letting go, asking unabashed questions to get solid answers … and creating new solutions … is invigorativing. How cool is it to be reminded that we can do things we forgot we knew how.

SOBCon runs on trust and produces actionable ideas.

It was 130 people all set on learning this new world of ours, all set on helping each other out. That kind of energy is electric, spontaenous, and self-generating. In a high trust environment, we talk and think faster and laugh more. The ideas come at the speed of the Internet with humanity and just don’t stop.

Trust doesn’t rule out everything else. It wraps up the other values … competence, integrity, generosity, comaradeship, and so many others. But trust is the fuel and the frequency of SOBCon.

Ever been part of a community on the same frequency?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Beach Notes: Waiting For A Wave

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by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

The sea’s been wonderfully warm for Autumn (Fall) and this week the sea has been crystal clear. But for the board riders the waves have been modest in size and frequency. So the surfers have had to practise patience and be ready to spring into action when a good wave comes.

We notice that experienced surfers do a lot of stretching before they actually go into the surf, so when the moment comes for action they are less likely to pull a muscle. We met one of our board riding friends the other day limping, he had done just that the day before.

In business as in surfing there are times you have to wait, just make sure you have done your "stretching exercises" so you are prepared to spring into action when the opportunity arises.

The old saying comes to mind:

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
-Seneca .

How do you stretch while you’re waiting for the wave?

Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh

Happy Mother’s Day!
From Liz, Suzie, and Des!

Thanks to Week 185 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

SOB Business Cafe 05-08-09

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SB Cafe

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

We offer the best in thinking — articles, books, podcasts, and videos about business online written by the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the titles to enjoy each selection.

The Specials this Week are

Sonia of Copyblogger
Naomi Dunford of Ittybiz is a genuinely remarkable voice in a sea of sameness. She’s a fantastic example of how content marketing can be used as the backbone of a real business that makes real money.

Seth’s Blog
Most marketers are organized around more. More share. More customers.

And if you want to do that fast, it means marketing to strangers. Strangers that don’t care about you, don’t trust you and aren’t listening to you.

The Fluent Self
So it kind of seemed like it might be time to a) pull back, b) add to the general knowledge base… and c) just try to give you a better sense of what these three methodologies/philosophies are. And why they aren’t really always that good for you.

iJump
One point from the Q&A roundup from Marketing Now bears deeper exploration: Online communities require investment in people.

Rick Mahn
That’s what lies before today’s C-Suite executives if they choose to explore it. What I’m talking about here, of course, is really about relationships. With the advent of social computing in the second half of this decade, the power has shifted from producers and marketers to people.

Related ala carte selections include

Being Five

Sit back. Enjoy your read. Nachos and drinks will be right over. Stay as long as you like. No tips required. Comments appreciated.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

SOBCon 2009 Link Roundup

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Hello everybody! SOBCon 2009 is over. I know that many of you are sad, but guess what? There is a ton of content out there for you to re-live and re-learn some of the experience. While David Griffith is busy compiling all of the video content, I have grabbed a few of the links to posts that our amazing attendees have put together.

Thank you again to our sponsors and all of the attendees who made this conference the best yet.

Please take a look at what these folks have put together and share your thoughts in the comments:

Well that should keep you busy for a while! As an added bonus, here is a short video from Denise Wakeman at Build a Better Blog,

(Turn on flash to see it)

If you have a SOBCon post link that you would like to share in this post, please let me know in the comments.

My ROI – SOBCon 09

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The theme for SOBCon last weekend in Chicago was the Return on Investment (ROI) of Relationships. As we learned from KD Paine’s presentation there are many ways to measure ROI, and in a successful business model that is the goal – to measure output in relation to input. It’s a difficult issue because, first, there has to be a clear definition of relationship and then what does the return actually mean? Are we dealing with dollar and cents as our measure or are we calculating visits to a website as our return? The answer to the question is situation specific and, having said that, I can really only talk about my ROI as it pertains to my weekend in Chicago. 

I must admit I was very nervous about going to the conference. Although I have made lots of great connections online I am new to this and attending a “biz school” for bloggers was a little daunting. My take aways:
 
– Meeting people face-to-face strengthened relationships and took them to a new level of trust and support. And oh how we laughed! 
-I learned things about the business of blogging: how to make money, practical skills, new techniques, and of many new services out there. 
– I learned that having a lot of connections, investing in relationships with many different people from many different backgrounds and areas of interest’s leads to an incredible arsenal of resources. Putting these people in a room together created energy you could actually feel and almost see.  
– I made connections, which will lead to future projects that may provide
employment. 
–  Days later I learned that the best take away was the feeling of being revitalized and knowing of all the support available in the SOB community. 
– I learned that the conversation generated by the presenters, as with Brian Clark’s presentation, was even more valuable than the presentation itself.
 

I measured my ROI and am extremely happy with my return. The most valuable item? Definitely conversation. In the end isn’t that what we’re all trying to create?  A conversation around our post, service, blog, product, idea, or self? ? 

from: Kathryn Jennex aka northernchick