Don’t Read Your PR, Read Your Marketing Copy

May 29, 2006 by Liz

Diverse Portfolio

A high-power company in educational publishing, bought three smaller companies and put them together. They think they offer a diverse portfolio. I think they offer a menu of bacon, ice-cream, tofu, and cognac. They are quite equipped to make the district-wide, state-wide sale. But rare is the sales rep who has the time or experience to speak to the details and nuances of the four individual product lines that they offer.

The Emperor has clothes bought by the bean counters. The bean counters think in BIG NUMBERS. The PR says that’s wonderful. The enterprise doesn’t see the world becoming niches and moving online. [Read more…]

Customer Solve Your Own Problem

May 24, 2006 by Liz

That’s Customer Centered

I still keep my personal blog at two click exchanges. I do that for lots of reasons. I feel a little sentimental. My little blog found it’s first friends in such places and I still like exploring them. I also like to watch how such things work. The business models interest me. I want to watch as they introduce new features. I want to see how each community reacts to them.

Brand You and Me

Over the last year, I got to be good friends with a tech at one click exchange. Rachel was like me, a nice one. They had a problem for a few weeks with a spell of trojans. It seems everyone tried to crawl onto my computer I caught four or five in three weeks. [Read more…]

Feeling a Customer’s First Response

May 8, 2006 by Liz

An Opportunity

A customer’s first response runs deep and lasts long. One way I keep myself close to customers is to monitor my first response to new information whenever I can — you know, that initial response that occurs without thinking. I’ve made habit of looking for such responses as I move through my life.

Information has no positive or negative value until I respond to it.

This morning I encountered information that you might use in the same way. Ready? [Read more…]

Don’t Pay Attention — Are You Curious?

April 27, 2006 by Liz

Pay Attention!

Pay attention.

How many times have you heard those two words?

What did they really mean?

To me they meant sit up straight; fold your hands; and be quiet. Look and listen?

I used to think life was all about paying attention. I don’t think that anymore.

Paying attention is passive. I don’t wait for things to come to me.

Are You Curious?

The world moves faster than waiting allows. If you want to know things, you have to do more than pay attention. Observing only provides half of the story. You have to get out there and find out things. That means you have to be active–get curious. Ask questions. Get interested in everything. Don’t leave an idea uncovered.

Pick a block of time today. Question everything you do. Use curious questions like these to build your business.

Do I always do this task this way?
Is this a habit or do I have a reason?
Is there another way to do it?
Do other people do it the same way? Get curious. Don’t just take your own word for it. Check it out.

We have this way of fooling ourselves into believing that everyone thinks as we do.

After you’ve gotten curious about how you do things, check out whether other people do things the same way as you. That’s the whole point, you see.

Curiosity As Influence

I need curiosity to know my customers, my readers. I’m lucky. I’m weird enough that people have made it clear that I’m not focus group material in any way — but my curiosity is influence. It changes how I think and how people see my business. Curiosity connects. It forges links. My curious questions establish my interests and seal my one-of-a-kind value.

Still, you’re one of a kind too. Things you do in your own way or in a way that’s different from many of your customers, deep curious questions you ask establish that. Sharing your curiosity adds value to a business.

As a customer, I value a brand that’s curious about what I like. It makes me curious about the people behind the brand. I want to get to know them and once that happens, I want to do business with them too.

How might you use curiosity to promote your brand?

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

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Cow- . . . Er . . . Blogtipping

April 26, 2006 by Liz

I Know Cowtipping

Where I grew up, some kids would go out cowtipping in the summer. They would drive out to 1-Mile Road or 2-Mile Road to find a farm where cows were sleeping, sneak up on a cow, and push it over. Then they’d run back to their cars laughing.

I didn’t do it. I’d like to say that was because I am a humane soul. I am a humane soul. That’s true, but that’s not the reason I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it, because I make a habit of not disturbing sleeping beings, especially those that are larger than I am. The risk is more than I care to take on.

But Blogtipping?

This morning when I went to check my links at Technorati, I saw one from Easton Ellsworth at KnowMoreMedia called It’s A Great Day For Blogtipping. Needless to say I was a bit concerned.

I stood up to look at my computer to make certain it was upright. Then I viewed my homepage to be sure that it wasn’t sideways. Whew! What a relief to see it looked fine. Those two things out of the way, I could then click the link without fear to find out what Easton had in store for me.

Blogtipping Easton Ellsworth Style is a great example of showing readers that you value them.

He’s right. It is a great for blogtipping. Will you tip a blog today?

–ME Strauss

Customer Think: I’m Not a Kid, I’m a Person

April 12, 2006 by Liz

Grouping People Doesn’t Work

Each year when my son started school with a new teacher, I would wait about three weeks. Then I would make an appointment to see her. I would bring along a few cool books I had carefully selected for her classroom as a gift. I gave her the three weeks because I wanted my son’s teacher to have a chance to get to know this rare and brilliant child on his own–we needed a common place to speak from. I brought the books because I wanted my child to move from being a “boy in class” to being a person–a child with a name, whose mother knows about books and cares about him.

I did those things because I was a teacher once. I know how easy it is to think of those faces as “the kids in my class,” not as individual people. Teachers are human beings and when you’re faced with 20-30 small people to get to know, it doesn’t happen very fast. The sad news is that extreme cases get center stage. Think of the names you remember from your early school days–they’re the extremes: the kids who were really smart, really bad, or really good friends with you. The rest become a blur. We’re human we make groups and unfortunately, we like to group people too.

Grouping people doesn’t work for getting to know them as individuals.

My son taught me that when he was all of three. I said, “Hey kid, let’s go.”
He stopped cold in his tracks, looked at me, and said, “I’m not a kid. I’m a people.”

We Have Relationships with People

We don’t have relationships with customers, or with users, or with eyeballs. We have relationships with people. It may sound like semantics, but it’s more than that. How we use words points to how we think and how we value ideas. If we think customer first and then person, we’re thinking backwards. Humanity wins out every time. Take care of the person and the personal relationship, and the work will take care of itself. Try it. It’s true. When we show people that we value them, they hardly ever let us down.

The reason that humanity wins is because real customer relationships are built around customer needs and desires. Needs and desires are individual human things, packed with individual human quirks and nuances. Sure there are patterns in any human group. You can even pile those patterns into demographics if you want. Stay at that level, and you’ll be skating on the surface where there’s only information and no heart.

I can’t begin to know my customers, if I don’t know what’s in their hearts.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Customers, visitors, and readers are people, not users, traffic, stats, or any other word that steals their humanity and steals our own humanity as well. It’s brand YOU and ME–together. My three-year-old customer-son was right to set me straight when he said, “I’m a people, not a kid.”

Who doesn’t want to walk into a restaurant where everybody knows your name? Who wouldn’t rather work with someone who knows who you are and cares about the things you care about? Who hasn’t had the experience of being treated like less than a person by a clerk, a doctor, or a boss? Didn’t that make you want to say, “Hey, I’m a person I have a name.”?

Do something small today to show a reader, a customer, or a visitor–someone who’s just met you–that you know that he or she is a person of value. See what happens. Then see how many times today people treat you–a customer–in that same personal way.

A business that values me as a person has my business and my brand loyalty from minute one. By week three, they’ll have the business of all my friends as well. There is no better promotion than valuing customers as the people that they are.

–ME “Liz” Strauss