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Connecting with Customers: Mack Collier SRO

July 21, 2008 by Liz

A SERIES in the quest to know more about the offline world

Part 3 in (what is now) a 4-Part Interview with Mack Collier

Last Wednesday we continued the a conversation with Mack Collier about connecting with new customers. The interview has been so popular that I’ve asked Mack to return for a few more questions and answers.

Hi Mack! Thanks for agreeing to talk some more!
Could you bring us back to a description of your typical client?

Right now it’s mainly small businesses. But have also noticed some corporations aren’t ready to put plans in action, but want to get some general Social Media 101 advice. Am also noticing that now most of the clients I come in contact with already have blogs and need help with them, instead of needing to know how to get started blogging.

Many people get a mindset that the Internet is one thing and offline is another. How do you fit social media into the whole of a marketing mix?

Here’s an example I use alot; if you sell anything online, then why wouldn’t you want to better connect with and communicate with your online customers? Social media can help you do that. Now if you run a auto repair shop, you might not even have a website. But if you do any business online, then you have customers online that you can better connect with via social media.

What is the most natural first small step for most companies to take? If you’re getting someone to ramp up slowly, what’s the first thing you suggest they do to learn the culture and why that?

I always advise clients to start monitoring the existing conversations. Figure out first what is being said online about your business. And I will show companies conversations that happened maybe last year, and ask them to think about how that exchange (especially if it was negative) could have been different if the company would have responded. When you know what is being said about your business online, then you can respond. Doing so makes you more comfortable with the space as a whole. Which makes it easier to start blogging and using other social sites/tools.

. . . More on Wednesday — We’ll talk tools, timelines, and clear results!

Thanks, Mack!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Hear the social web. Have a voice!

Filed Under: Interviews, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, interview, Mack Collier, social-media, Viral Garden

Connecting with Customers: More Talk with Mack Collier

July 16, 2008 by Liz

A SERIES in the quest to know more about the offline world

Part 2 in A 2-Part Interview with Mack Collier

Monday, I shared the beginning of a conversation with Mack Collier about connecting with new customers. This is part two of that interview with Mack.

What do you do when your potential client needs to sell him or her company on the idea of social media?

Make sure they understand how social media can improve their businesses. Many cos/organizations want the ‘monetization’ part built from the start. Social media is often viewed as a potential monetization channel, instead of being a communication channel. What I try to do is make sure the potential client understands that money can be made with social media, but that it comes as a byproduct of using the tools to facilitate connections with current and potential customers, and build those connections into relationships.

It’s very counterintuitive at first because many cos don’t want to enter into a space unless they can see direct monetary benefits. It takes time and much hand-holding in some cases to help businesses realize that successful social media initiatives are based on creating value for others. As you create more value, an INDIRECT benefit is that you can see sales increase, positive equity/awareness grow, etc.

What do most new clients ask for your help with? What misconceptions do they bring?

When the questions start to shift from ‘what do I get out of this?’ to ‘what do my readers/friends/customers get out of this?’ And I think that’s a normal progression for anyone that’s using social media, I was the same way with my blogging and Twittering at first. But after a while I began to understand that the more value I created for others, the more value came back to me. We need to remember that companies need time to learn these same lessons.

. . . It seems that we — you and I — have more questions, and I’ve confirmed that Mack has more answers. So Mack and I have agreed to extend the interview. Watch for parts three and four next week!

Thanks, Mack!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Hear the social web. Have a voice!

Filed Under: Interviews, Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, interview, Mack Collier, social-media, Viral Garden

Connecting with Customers: A Conversation with Mack Collier

July 14, 2008 by Liz

A SERIES in the quest to know more about the offline world

Part 1 in A 2-Part Interview with Mack Collier

Recently, I asked Mack Collier. if he’d talk about connecting with new customers. He was more than generous in sharing how the clients he looks for and how he interacts with them. This is part one of that interview with Mack.

Hi Mack, I can tell by what you write that you meet many folks who are just figuring out that the web has something going on. How would you describe the most likely candidate to move toward the Internet these days?

I think the people that are successful in social media moving forward will be the ones that remain curious. This space is just changing so quickly that you have to keep an open mind and be receptive to the changing landscape. The people that write social media off as a ‘fad’ and refuse to learn more about how these tools work are the ones that are really going to be at a disadvantage in the coming years.

What do most new clients ask for your help with? What misconceptions do they bring?

Most are wanting help with blogging. And many are viewing a blog as a more frequently updated website. They want to use the blog to make ‘announcements’ and even view it as something to be search-optimized, as they would a website. Many can tell me what keywords they want targeted in their blog posts, but haven’t given any thoughts to a comment policy. But this is just a byproduct of unfamiliarity with the space.

Where do you usually start them out?

Usually a potential client will start off with “Well I know I need to be blogging…”, and I’ll ask them to back up and explain how they know that. They usually offer that they just assumed that blogging is the logical starting point. So what we’ll do is examine their business goals and see if blogging, or any other social tools, make sense for them. But before they launch any type of social media strategy, I want to get them started monitoring online conversations about their company. To me, monitoring and properly responding to what current and potential customers are saying online about your company, is the natural foundation of any social media strategy.

As companies begin to do this, they become more familiar with social media tools, and how to interact with customers online. All of this results in greater success for any social media initiatives they later launch.

. . . Tune in Wednesday. We’ll be discussing what happens when folks back in the office aren’t as keen as the client who connects.

Thanks, Mack!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Hear the social web. Have a voice!

Filed Under: Interviews Tagged With: bc, interview, Mack Collier, Viral Garden

18.5 Getting Free of Success Mythology

January 18, 2008 by Liz

The Secret of a Lifetime

Bounce! The Path to True Business Confidence

Are we at the end of the week already? In this five-day series, we’re talking with Barry Moltz about five key facets of his book, Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success, which goes on sale January 28, 2008.

Barry has explained what he means by the idea of Bounce! He’s shown us the three paths we’re told lead to success and why we should honor our failures. Then he’s explained how to enjoy a one-hit wonder. With this last question, we explore the mythology of success.

Barry, You talk in the book about ways to free ourselves from success myths that strangle us by “Downsizing our Dreams” and “Striving For Minimal Achievement.” People search a lifetime to find this type of secret. Can we really do that?

We are constantly told to conquer that next mountain. To grow our businesses and our careers as big as possible. To get richer, bigger better faster, Achievement has become our addiction. If so, why can’t we just lower the bar a bit. Get in touch with that inner laziness that up to this point has eluded us.

That is why I want all of you to commit to me that after this meeting that you will downsize our dreams and begin too define our own brand of success – not someone elses. Forget the grand vision. Besides there is always someone that is going to be richer, smarter or better looking than you- I know, not you but for the most of us.

First, we need to set patient, interim goals…get small!. I remember when I asked my Zen master when I first began mediating, how long I should mediate for- 15 minutes, half hour or an hour each day? He said that I should try it for a minute for each day for the next few months. If I was successful, I should go to two minutes. He always taught me to strive for minimal achievement by focusing on one small goal at a time This is where I learned when striving for new goals, what we important in the climb was not even to get a foothold. Get a toehold…if you can get some progress toward your goal, you have a better chance of achieving it in the long run.

..

Who won the race, the tortoise or the hare? And who lives longer. Hares live to 4 years old and tortoises, well the can live to 100

After downsizing our dreams and getting that toehold, we next figure out what will make us happily successful. Most of us will immediately say is to make a lot of money. Money is an important measure of success. It is how we keep score. But if we never get to that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, will our life trip be for nothing. However, we can all take solace that many people that have a lot of money are really unhappy!

Thanks, Barry, for five days of great conversation!
And thanks for lunch yesterday too.

Find more great information about Bounce! and advice on success and failure at BarryMoltz.com And buy his book Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success !!! I’ve read it. You should too!

–ME “Liz” Strauss

If you’d like Barry to do a guest post or an interview at your blog during his virtual book tour, email me at lizsun2 at gmail.com

Filed Under: Business Book, Interviews, Successful Blog Tagged With: Barry-J.-Moltz, bc, Bounce, interview

18.4 Good Things about One-Hit Wonders

January 17, 2008 by Liz

Getting to Success

Barry J. Moltz

This week, Barry Moltz, author of Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success. has been telling us how to view our success and failures so that we learn how to Bounce! along the path of a business career. He’s shown us how we can let go of false ideas about success and pointed out that some failures offer us no lesson at all. Letting go of the “joy of victory and the agony of defeat” can free us up to move forward with confidence, enthusiasm and passion.

Sometimes we succeed brilliantly, but it’s just not something that we can repeat.

In Chapter 2, you talk about your fascination with One-Hit Wonders. Isn’t being a One-Hit Wonder a bad thing? Where do One-Hit Wonders fit in a successful career?

What happens if you go out there and only hit that big success one time like those one hit wonders? Remember, it doesn’t matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All that matters in business is that you get it right once. Wayne Gretzky said that “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” We can’t get caught up in the failures. It only matters that we met our success requirements that one time. When things go bad, we can think back to perhaps that one time where the planets aligned, and we got to the goal line.

With true business confidence, we can look back a single success and enjoy it for what it was. Maybe there is only one success on a particular path. We may need to bounce to an entirely different path to get another success. The complete answer to this puzzle can’t be known until the end of our lives. The order of successes and failures does not diminish the high point. Hitting it once can help root a sense of business confidence that will carry through whether the rest of the path is filled with failure, success, or a mix of both. It will give us the resiliency spring to bounce through the rest of our business lives

Thanks, Barry!

Tomorrow Barry explains how to break free of the success mythology. Find more great information about Bounce! and advice on success and failure at BarryMoltz.com

–ME “Liz” Strauss

If you’d like Barry to do a guest post or an interview at your blog during his virtual book tour, email me at lizsun2 at gmail.com

Filed Under: Business Book, Interviews, Successful Blog Tagged With: Barry-J.-Moltz, bc, Bounce, interview

18.3 Honoring Our Failures

January 16, 2008 by Liz

Failure as an Ingredient

Bounce! The Path to True Business Confidence

Yesterday we talked about how people say the road to success follows three archetypes. Barry names and exposes them as myths in Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success.

But what about our failures?

Hi, Barry. I like that you find it important to take a moment to stop talking about our success in order to honor our failures. What do you mean by that? How do we honor a failure?

Well the first thing we need to do is stop letting our egos brag about our successes but instead Honor Our Failures. A year after leaving a 9 year career at IBM, I was fired from my new job. Then I was kicked out of business in my second company by my two partners. This was the first place where I learned I could actually fail in a huge way. This is the first place I diverged from the master plan of success my mother had for me.

Now unfortunately in our culture, business wisdom tell us that when we fail there is always something to learn

We are continually reminded by those around us that failure is an important ingredient in the next success, possibly even a prerequisite. We tell ourselves that failure “happened to us” so that we could learn some important lesson that would later propel us to even more success.

Let me tell you the truth, when we fail. Sometimes it just sucks. There is absolutely nothing to learn. When I lost my largest client because they were indicted by the SEC, what did I learn? That I wasn’t suppose to do business with criminals? I knew this… When my best employee left my company because her husband got a job in another state, what was I to learn? Not to hire people who are married?

Failure is valuable only when we realize it is a normal part of the business process even when there always isn’t something to learn.

And there can be a lot of fear involved in this whole failing process. We have all heard about being afraid of failure and more recently, we are supposed to be now be afraid of success.

The fear in this process is not brought on by our competitors or other outside people. It mostly originates within us. The biggest fear we have is that someone in our position would have done better than us, made better decisions than us and would have built it faster and more profitably than we did. We believe that that we should be in a different place than where we are right now, and that we would be, if only we had made better decisions. Nonsense. You can’t be anywhere except right here right now. Zen Philosophy says that we need to start from where we are.

Thanks, Barry!

Tomorrow Barry explains the upside of One-Hit Wonders. Find more great information about Bounce! and advice on success and failure at BarryMoltz.com

–ME “Liz” Strauss

If you’d like Barry to do a guest post or an interview at your blog during his virtual book tour, email me at lizsun2 at gmail.com

Filed Under: Business Book, Interviews, Successful Blog Tagged With: Barry-J.-Moltz, bc, Bounce, interview

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