Successful Blog

SOB Business Cafe 06-04-10

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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

WorkLifeNation
But there is swelling support to help you achieve what social media expert Chris Brogan calls “escape velocity.” “The ability to leave a situation that isn’t helpful or desired.” It’s the path less traveled where you’ve got your feet planted in the financial security of a steady job, while igniting the journey toward doing work that you’re passionate about.

Chris Brogan
Yesterday, my blog was not my job, so I didn’t write one. Today? I have two speeches over the next few days. That was my job first, and then this post.

America’s Best Business Practices
I have written many articles on this blog about the huge benefits of using social media in marketing. So please don’t mistake this article as some type of put-down for social media. It is not. I believe that social media has leveled the playing field to some degree between big business and small business. Nonetheless, as with many great things, it can sometimes go wrong.

Shamable
Web traffic for the sake of traffic is meaningless. This is why I don’t advocate always targeting a “top blogger” in any vertical. It makes zero sense to chase big numbers, just as shotgun marketing did — just ask our friend, the banner ad.

Operation Safe
I have been looking at a few blog posts that share what kind of tweets someone should make, and wondering what the right balance for a non-profit like us should be. I won’t claim any magic formula but this is what is working for us.

JR’s Internet Marketing Strategies
Overall, dofollow is obviously the best type of backlink because it passes link juice from one site to another and counts the anchor text for keyword relevance, but, do not discount the nofollow completely!

Related ala carte selections include

Oatmeal.com
via @ChrisGuillebeau

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

I’m a proud affiliate of

third-tribe-marketing

Follow The Leaders and Be Your Own

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By Terez Howard

A blogger is not just a blogger, not just a writer. Sure, the basic nuts and bolts of blogging includes stringing words together to make an entertaining, informative blend of copy. A truly great blogger also is a follower.

What? A follower? That’s what I said. And you thought that a major part of blogging was uniqueness. You’re not incorrect. That one-of-a-kind feel is necessary. You see, top bloggers make it to the top because they learn from other top bloggers.

It’s starting to make sense, huh? We bloggers learning the ropes (I include myself) can benefit greatly from regularly checking out what the bloggers who know their way around the web have to say.

But who are these great leaders?

I have my favorites, which I will share. But first, let me say that this will be different for everyone, depending on your niche, style and goals. In addition, there are business professionals that you might discover that have nothing to do with your specific niche, style or goals. You just like what they say and see the benefit from their words of wisdom. Let’s examine each of these.

1. Niche. What is your niche? If you are a fashion blogger, you should read well-established fashion blogs. Emulate what they do, while making your blog your blog. Do not be a copy cat.

I haven’t yet found a blogger who exactly does what I do. If you know any bloggers for businesses that willingly share their knowledge, please let me know.

2. Style. If you are looking to improve your writing skills, visit a blog that helps you become a more prolific writer. I believe a multitude of these blogs exist. If you’re like me, you don’t have the time to follow everyone; so find the person who blogs in a way that makes sense to you.

As for style, my absolute favorite blogger is Jennifer Mattern. I found her blog allfreelancewriting.com about six months ago, and I’ve been following her advice on writing and building a business, tailoring it to make it work for me. If you follow what she says, you will not fail.

3. Goals. What goals do you hope to achieve with blogging? If you want to make money selling your own product, you should visit blogs that tell you how to do this.

Hint: Look for ones that offer tons of free advice and don’t reek of sales copy. These are the bloggers that will truly have a desire to help you.

One of my goals is to make a modest living by blogging. I look to Chris Brogan on chrisbrogan.com to help me see how I can get my name out there. I notice that he primarily focuses on helping people. While I want to make money (I’m being honest!), I sincerely want to help people. I refuse to use fraudulence for material gain.

4. I like it. I ran across successful-blog.com when I was looking for leaders. I enjoyed what Liz Strauss had to say and how she got her point across. She’s the businesswoman who makes you think and motivates you to do something. I’m very grateful for the time she has taken with me.

You have your leaders. Now what?

Now you be you. Be unique. Take what leading bloggers say, apply it to your blog and make it your own. This isn’t a mindless game of follow the leader. The blogger does a dance, and you attempt to imitate the routine precisely. No. You dance to the beat of your own drum.

Who are some of your favorite bloggers and why?

 

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Terez Howard operates TheWriteBloggers, a professional blogging service which builds clients’ authority status and net visibility. She regularly blogs at Freelance Writing Mamas . You’ll find her on Twitter @thewriteblogger

Thanks, Terez!

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

Five Critical Pitfalls that Can Disable Any Social Media Team

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A Team Needs Power to Work

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As you consider and hire the people for your social media team, think through the responsibilities you’ll be handing over. Because if you don’t hand over responsibility, accountability and the corresponding power, you’ll be be setting the team up for failure.

Now, if that’s your purpose – to ensure failure. You can do that by first setting aside any leadership skills you’ve learned and tapping into your own insecurity. Get closer to your fear of change and cling tight to what used to work. Repeat after me

If this social media thing works, I might have to change how I do things or worse they might take my job.

If you read that without a smile, then maybe it’s time to click away, because this is really is about how to make your life easier by building a powerful social media team who will take work and worries off your desk.

Yes, the worries too … because if you can avoid these five critical pitfalls they’ll on your team and be making the same great choices you would make in the social media situations they face.

  • Pitfall 1: Change your team’s priorities randomly and often. Make each day a moving target. As soon as they start to look good at one thing, place your focus on a different aspect of the job.
  • Pitfall 2: Don’t allow them time to develop a realistic social strategy. Ask for a schedule that will have them up and using every tool you can name before they have enough time to learn it’s nuances and relational value. Just pull out a calendar. Then hold them to dates they can’t control.
  • Pitfall 3: Develop a plan for resources and budget, but don’t share it. That way they’ll have to ask permission for every paperclip they need to use. They won’t be able to have a viable idea, let alone respond to someone on social site.
  • Pitfall 4: Focus heavily on a quality and communication standard that requires every word to be vetted by 14 approval stages before it can go live. Remove all sense of trust in the people you hire. Train them to fear failure, mistakes, and problems. Then complain about the lack of response to customers.
  • Pitfall 5: Constantly point to misbehavior of customers that have spoken out against other companies. Live by a defensive motto of us versus the “users.” Never allow or invite customers to offer input or reach out to build relationships with the people who buy or use your company’s products.

The pleasures of the pitfalls are that they will keep a team “on their toes” and so busy trying to make something happen, they won’t have a chance to do something that will build anything.

On the other hand, if you want a peak-performing social media team let them onto the field.

  • Hire people who love serving people and give them clear goals and priorities.
  • Choose the people who love the company’s mission and let them build a practical strategy to achieve it. Give them time to move slowly onto the social web as they know the tools.
  • Give them the resources — people and tools — they need to perform well.
  • Train them how mature online relationships work and trust them to ask when things get critical or need legal counsel.
  • Encourage them to advocate for customers and ways for customers to build relationships with the company and each other.

The pleasures of opening the door to peak performance is a team that grows, keeps learning, and turns customers into fiercely loyal fans.

What are the pitfalls of social media management you’ve discovered? What do you see that leads a team to peak performance?

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

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A Dozen $100,000 Brand Ideas for Celebrating Our Heroes Through Social Media

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poppy

I’ve been reading about the history of Memorial Day, before it became about blow-out sales and backyard bar-b-ques.

And the words I’ve found take me back to when my mom still called it “Decoration Day.” She’d buy a paper poppy from the man at the VFW to put in the button hole of my coat. Then she’d take me with her to put flowers on the graves of those we love who lay sleeping while we could still stand, reflect, kneel to say, “thank you.”

Memorial Day is about gratitude, reconciliation, and honoring heroes who paid the ultimate price. They gave and we got.

Rebranding Memorial Day

In his series for Fast Company, Steve McCallion says:

So far we’ve explored how Memorial Day lost its meaning, but how can we get it back? How can we remember Memorial Day in a way that is authentic and relevant today? In this era of instant gratification, can we come together as a nation to recognize the sacrifices that have been made for our freedoms?

memorial-day-branding-fast_company

Click through on the image for his marvelous ideas on how to rebrand to remind us what Memorial Day means.

A Dozen $100,000 Brand Ideas for Celebrating Our Heroes Through Social Media

Social media is about honoring our heroes and connecting people, isn’t it? If anyone knows how to do that we do … big companies, little companies, individuals don’t need to do much to put the celebrating and gratitude back into remembering those who sacrificed for our freedom.

Here are a few ideas …

  1. Apple might sell a limited yellow version of the iPhone — or simply choose any yellow iPod product — to donate a portion of sales to hire a social media team to help the White House Commission on Remembrance or The Memorial Day Foundation get their message out next year.
  2. 3M might build a Post-it Note Quote Community by inviting friends and families to publish quotes of their fallen heroes.

    My son would always smile and say, “There’s lots of apple pies, but I’ve only got one mother.”

  3. Berskshire Hathaway might find a volunteer team of social media mavens among their thousands of employees. If that team put out a penny-match challenge, I bet they could pitch a penny campaign that would travel across Twitter and fire through Facebook. Perhaps the collected money go toward health insurance or college scholarships for children of fallen soldiers.
  4. Johnson & Johnson already has communities of nurses and caregivers. They could send out a call via their site, Twitter, and Facebook. They could connect with nurses and caregivers who have shared the final hours with fallen soldiers. Imagine the wealth of history in those stories. If they partnered with the VFW or the Military Channel, that content could make an incredible interview series.
  5. Kodak or Polaroid could build a YouTube channel or a flickr collection for customers and employees to retell the stories of fallen soldiers. With the help of Scholastic, they package them as primary source materials with lesson plans for teachers to share with kids studying history. Teachers could upload comments, videos, and new ideas to add to the community.
  6. Kraft Foods or ConAgra could build the recipe book of heroes. How hard would be to use social media to ask the families of fallen soldiers to share the favorite recipes of loved ones who served our country? Imagine if the Food Channel cooked each recipe and shared the videos on YouTube?
  7. Hallmark Cards or American Greetings could invite the families of fallen soldiers to share cards they received from our heroes and tell the stories behind the cards. Suppose they tweeted a new free Hero ECard for a year?
  8. Starbucks or Panera Bread might print the pictures and a simple memorial statement on the cups that hold their coffee and tea. Folks could Tweet and Facebook their nominations.
  9. Lands End or L.L.Bean could offer a yellow ribbon discount to honor fallen soldiers. Instead of a promo code they might ask for 140 characters in tribute to our heroes. The promo codes could forward to Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook.
  10. Sony Music or Universal might put together a collection of songs for heroes by celebrity artists and donate the proceeds to HireHeroes. The songs could be on blip.fm and tweeted. We could DJ a Friday night hero Twitter party.
  11. Netflix could partner with the major studios to sponsor a $1 day of movies and documentaries about our heroes. Ambassadors from families could help chose the appropriate titles and be featured as recommending them. MailOurMilitary.com and milblogging.com might help promote a cause like this one. Netflix might challenge corporations and foundations to add matching funds to support grants to families of fallen heroes.
  12. Southwest Airlines, Marriott, and CNN might partner to offer veterans incredible deals to gather together in D.C. on Memorial Day 2011 to share the stories of fallen heroes.

What would the companies and brands get? They’d get the respect and loyalty of employees and customers who honor our heroes. People remember generosity that connects them to authentic, relevant meaning.

Any nation that does not honor its heroes will not long endure. – Abraham Lincoln

Isn’t that also true of our businesses?

I know you probably see a thousand ways to expand on each of these ideas — ways that each could be tweaked or twisted to fit another business. Take ’em and use ’em. I’d love to hear how you might re-invent an idea or what new ideas came to mind while you were reading.

How will you remember our heroes?

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

I’m a proud affiliate of

third-tribe-marketing

SOB Business Cafe 05-28-10

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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

ChrisG
I nearly called this article “Everything I know about blogging I learned from comic books” but I was afraid too many people would take it literally, ha. In fact, there might be an element of truth to it. My formative reading material was dominated by muscly, spandex-clad guys and gals fighting crime and shooting laser beams out of their eyes.

Ramblings from a Glass Half Full
It seemed a bit silly to me when I first got this suggestion, but in this moment of despair I figured writing something down might just be that little step that Tom Peters was urging me to take in his column.

So I picked up my pen, and started to write. I outlined my dream -to be a leader, making a real difference for a business. I also noted the kind of leader I wanted to be.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, within a year I had a new job, and not too long after that, that dream I had put on paper came true. Every bit of it.

CIO Update
The real conundrum facing business today is not which tools to use but whether to work within an existing social network or build one central to the brand. With few exceptions, success usually lies in doing both or in creating a hybrid of the two.

McCurry’s Corner
So my question is what makes an educational presentation excellent? Is it the quality of the education content? Is it in the presenter’s delivery? Or, is there some special formula that really contributes to getting audiences engaged? What do you think? Here are some of my thoughts…

Adventures in Philanthrophy
You are influencing the people who read your blog posts religiously. You are informing the decisions of the people who have you on twitter lists. You are shaping the people who interact with you on facebook. Just because that’s not your intention doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Authentic Path
The truth? Building a successful online presence takes time and work. It also takes a willingness to get real, to become authentic.

Related ala carte selections include

Congratulations to WGN and Nancy Loo!
So, after nine years of competing against “WGN Morning News”, I’ll be helping the team to keep beating my former station. I admire the show and everyone on it (hello Larry, Robin, Pat, Paul, Valerie and Ana) and I am proud to become one of “Chicago’s Very Own”.

A Skilling Snuggie wrapped the deal!
Contract negotiations are always a fascinating process to me. I’ve been through a few now. Salary numbers are thrown back and forth between agents and news managers. My demand for a Tom Skilling Snuggie nearly quashed the deal.

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

I’m a proud affiliate of

third-tribe-marketing

Cool Tool Review: Google Alerts

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Todd Hoskins Reviews Tools for Business

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Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools and products that could belong in an entrepreneurial business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks who would be their customers in a form that’s consistent and relevant.

Cool Tool Review: Google Alerts
A Review by Todd Hoskins

Do you know the people, posts, and sites that are influencing your brand and industry?
Are you engaging in the most relevant conversations?

Google Alerts is one of the most valuable free services on the web. With Google’s indexing power, you get immediate or regular notification in your inbox or reader on topics or keywords of interest.

With the advent of the real-time web, you no longer need to wait a few days or even a week to learn that you’ve been praised or defamed on some obscure site. Alerts represent an early advancement from search-based tools to discovery on the web. Alerts is rather infantile in this sense – you have to tell Google exactly what you’re looking for. So, the key is determining:

What’s important to YOU and YOUR business?

Here’s a simple way to think about what alerts you should create:

1) Companies
2) People
3) Products
4) Issues

The first alert someone sets up (other than their own name), is usually your company. Make sure to also add alerts for competitors. Google lets you determine the frequency at which you get alerts. So, for a primary competitor, you may want immediate alerts. For others, daily or weekly may be fine. As the notifications are sent to your inbox or reader, you want to manage how much volume you get on an ongoing basis.

For the people category, monitoring executives, analysts, and industry luminaries allows you to stay up to date on what is being said about whom. Whether or not you choose to set up alerts for your employees is up to you. I would question anyone who spends a good portion of their week monitoring what their people are saying. If alerts are set up for the other three categories, you should get any post that is relevant without playing big brother to your employees.

Products is a no-brainer. My only caution here is, if you are setting up alerts for more than a dozen products, you may want to consider a social media monitoring solution. Nathan Gilliat watches the industry closely. There is value in getting the additional analysis and tracking, but you pay for what you get.

Finally, the category that most people miss: issues. Too many companies are jumping into blog and Twitter conversations only when their company is mentioned. Consider the values, objectives, and challenges your company is pursuing and facing. Listening and participating in conversations about “financial transparency,” “deregulation,” “surfing,” or “single payer health insurance” will both enliven your content creation and allow you to highlight what is important to you as an individual or a company.

Setting up Google Alerts takes less than five minutes. But thinking about the keywords and themes you want to monitor should be an ongoing process.

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 2/5 – more sophisticated tools with graphs, charts, and sentiment analysis exist for a cost

Entrepreneur Value: 5/5 – if you know of a more simple way to quickly get the info you need, please let me know

Personal Value: 4/5 – tracking your favorite band, athlete, or ex-boyfriend provides some balance to the more professional alerts