Successful Blog

How to Listen Your Way to the Best 30-Second Pitch Ever

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Social Media Doesn’t Connect People Do

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Welcome to the social web where everyone and everything is connected. Just build a profile and you are too! Right?

Well, maybe technologically, but it takes more than a few links to build a relationship with a person that makes a difference to building your brand or moving your business forward.

Social media tools work so much more effectively when we decide a few things before we use them.

What to Do Before You Go Social

Every now and then a event like the social web disrupts things and we need to figure out new ways of relating and connecting with the people who help us grow. Leaders reach out listen and learn from the best and invite those folks in to participate and be part of what they’re doing.

The social web has made it easier and faster to reach out further to find the ideal clients and customers we might want to work with. It’s foolish not to have a plan to use the social tools available to us to that in the best ways we possibly can.

Here are six ways to be effective at social business.

  1. Know what business you’re in. Sounds simple, but it’s not about what you make or what you sell. We need to be seriously sure of what we do for our customers.
  2. Choose the ideal customer you want to work with. The whole game changed when the world became our marketplace. We can’t do everything for everyone in the world. Draw a picture. Make a prototype of the customer you’ve just identified. What do you offer that makes that customer’s life faster, easier, or more meaningful? Choose those who are going to love what you do and build your website, your content, and your offers all around them so that they recognize you.
  3. Now that you think you know that. Go find people who meet that description and ask them what they care about … and listen. Find them where they meet online and where they meet offline. We can’t grow if we only talk to the people we already know and only visit the places we always go to.
  4. Use the social tools to talk to them about what they like to talk about. Then keep listening — build relationships and get to know your potential customers better. When you talk about what you do, talk the way you tell friends what’s going on in your life.
  5. When it’s natural talk about how you might align your goals with theirs and build something together … something you might not be able to build alone.
  6. Make it easy for your online and offline customers to meet you and each other. And encourage them to meet and talk with each other as often as they can.

And keep doing all six steps over and over again.

The generational nature of the social culture means that our base of customers is always shifting, growing, learning. Bringing our offline customers online and meeting our online customers offline will only deepen our relationships with all of them.

When we’re authentically listening, we can hear who actually needs our help. The best 30-second pitch is when when we can answer, “By the way, that’s what I do.”

Have you tried listening to find out who needs what you have to offer?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your web presence!!

Winning at Social Media in an International Market

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A Guest Post by Christian Arno

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Marketing, in one form or another, has been helping the cause since time immemorial and now it just got personal. Market savvy entrepreneurs are using social media websites like Facebook and Twitter and their online communities to target customers and listen to exactly what they say.

Social Media websites give both producer and consumer a voice and offer the transparency and sense of community that are now charming customers across the world into parting with large amounts of money. Here are some things to remember:

Marketing, the Differences

Traditional marketing, like press releases and advertising can be likened to throwing your advertising budget up in the air and saying ‘I hope these lands on someone interested.’ Tapping social media opens up a dialogue with your customers and usefully corrals all of your cash-cows in a few, easy to find, on-line fields. People can then say what they specifically like or loathe about your product and you, through careful monitoring, can act accordingly.

Marketing, the Similarities

You need not think that you can set up a group on Facebook and Lo! Your product has created an on-line community of well-wishers and unpaid market researchers. You still need to put the advertisements out there. Pay Per Click advertising campaigns (PPCs), for example, allow you to see which adverts the fish have been nibbling at and allow you to tailor your approach. Targeted audiences have always been at the heart of marketing, social media just takes it a step further.

Get Community Going

People will work for free. The happy sense of bonhomie and camaraderie that web groups and chat forums engender brings out the best in human nature and offers entrepreneurs a splendid opportunity to profit from this.

Translating is one way of doing this. Any international marketing scheme has to face the thorny question of translation. Keywords for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and subtle nuances must all be carefully interpreted and adapted to suit new target audiences, but a team of professional, native-speaker translators can be a serious drain on the purses.

Crowdsourcing is one way round this — when you invite the community of web-users out there to come and do the spadework for you. People always like showing off their bright ideas and this increasingly popular practice is the perfect forum for doing so. It also allows people to get directly involved in your brand. Wikipedia is one such example.

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival ran an extremely successful crowdsourcing project on Twitter for their 2010 program cover. Festival lovers were encouraged to tweet their ideas for illustrations, which were then heaped with praise and/or criticism by everyone else before the successful ones were drawn by a professional illustrator, whose work was streamlined live online. The festival hype this built up created a strong sense of community and beat all but the most ambitious advertising campaigns.

The Misguided Public

The problem with People Power is that people can get it wrong and this is particularly true of translation and technical material. Take, for example the case of Chicken entrepreneur Frank Purdue. His slogan was ‘It Takes a Tough Man to Make a Tender Chicken!’ Taking his campaign into Spanish this became, ‘It Takes a Tough Man to Make a Chicken Aroused!’

If you do not invite a professional to translate your material from the start then you should strongly consider getting one to check what the well-meaning public have submitted.

Wit Goes a Long Way

Burger King put Facebook to good use with its whoppervirgins.com campaign. It offered the ‘sacrifice ten friends’ application which caught people’s imaginations to the tune of over 20 000 users, who ‘sacrificed’ 200 000 friends for free whoppers. The campaign was memorable, unusual and had just enough humour to make it a real hit.

An Honest Embrace

Social media encourages a culture of transparency and honesty that can create great interest in your company. Sun Microsystems’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz set up a blog that received about 400 000 hits a month and attracted positive, negative and downright insane comments. This kind of transparency, at the highest level, increased trust among consumers and therefore interest in the product.

Likewise, Graco have managed to hugely personalise their brand by building a community on Flickr. They promote it heavily on the Graco blog and in doing so encourage people to submit pictures. The pictures highlight the people behind Graco and the people who use their products. They have introduced offline community gatherings and the pictures from these are also posted on the Flickr page. This takes the concept of social media beyond the blogosphere and combines it with offline marketing, humanising the community around the product. Something that TV advertising campaigns struggle to do at a much higher cost.

Who Does All This Reach?

Lots of people. Young, geeky men are not the only people who use the simple to use and highly gregarious social media sites. You have only to take a look at Facebook to see the number of middle aged users has risen dramatically in recent years. A survey by Insidefacebook.com reports that 22 percent of registered users are between 35 and 65, and that the fastest growing group is women over the age of 55.

But this is just one site. The international marketer must look beyond Twitter and Facebook et al, to capitalize on the opportunities social media offer. In Japan, for example, 80% of social media users are signed onto Mixi.jp, while Orkut predominates in Brazil, Xanga in Hong Kong.

Wherever you launch, social media marketing is a source to be reckoned with.

What do you think it takes to win in social media?

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About the author: Christian Arno is the founder and managing director of Lingo24, an international translation company which provides language translation services to and from all the major languages in the world. Follow him as @lingo24chr on Twitter.

Thanks, Christian! The whole thing changes when we realize the world is our community!

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

I’m a proud affiliate of

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I’m a proud affiliate of

third-tribe-marketing

Problogger – Second Edition Is Here!

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Go Darren and Chris!

Two of the best probloggers on the web have just released the second edition of their bestselling book, ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income and it’s available today.

I’m very partial to this book because

  • Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett are both personal friends and heroes.
  • it’s filled with honesty and wisdom … much like the guys who wrote it.
  • Wiley shared a copy of the first edition with everyone at SOBCon08.

Can’t wait to read this second edition. I hear it has a few significant updates including:

  • New examples, screenshots, updates of new tools, a few deletions of references to old tools, an update to Darren and Chris’ stories in the intro.
  • Chris has added a fairly significant chapter on social media and how it impacts and can be used by bloggers.
  • Darren has added a case study chapter that goes through the first 4 years of his main blog – Digital Photography School. He works through how he launched it, what he focused upon in years 1-2 and then in years 3-4, how he monetizes it and he shares the secrets to how I drive significant traffic and income through email newsletters, social media and other ways.
  • Bonuses come with it – Anyone who buys the book is offered a series of bonuses (some interviews with successful bloggers, some extra teaching … check it out)

Hope Chris is bringing a bunch to SOBCon2010 this week!!

Congratulations Darren and Chris!

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

See you at sobcon-vmc

SOB Business Cafe 04-23-10

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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

ConflictZen
A conflict’s greatest opportunity for collaborative resolution is usually near the time it first occurred (if such a time can be known) or at least nearer the time it first entered your awareness.

Sometimes, the triggering event is clear and memorable. Sometimes it’s elusive, building under the radar over time, brick by brick, small frustration by small frustration.

Small Business United
In the many discussions I’ve had with aspiring entrepreneurs over the past 15 years, one of the top ten reasons that they give for wanting to start a business is that they dream of pursuing their hobby full time.

Linzstar
It just makes me wonder what gives someone the right to say such things. For anyone who thinks they’re holier than thou when it comes to social media and how it should be done, I really think it’s time to consider whether or not you’re on a high horse.

Reiki Help Blog
In its most general sense, spirituality is a way of contemplating and understanding the invisible aspects of life and to transcend the personal, tangible and finite details of this world.

Make It Happen
Are you surrounded with people who accept you just the way you are?

Related ala carte selections include

Johnny Goldstein
Graphic record of 140conf talk

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

Hate PowerPoint? Try Prezi!

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Todd Hoskins Reviews Tools for Small Business

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Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools and products that could belong in a small 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.

Refresh Your Presentation Skills (and Tool)
A Review by Todd Hoskins

I hate PowerPoint.

The tool itself is not the primary problem – it’s all the bad habits that have proliferated in business including too much text, too many slides, and the worst of all, reading a deck verbatim to an audience.

But, sometimes PowerPoint is necessary. If you must use it, I recommend absorbing Garr Reynolds‘ work at Presentation Zen.

For the rest of us who are free to be creative and experiment with new tools, I enthusiastically encourage you to check out Prezi. It’s well designed, simple, and will make any presentation not only more tolerable, but more memorable and enjoyable.

With PowerPoint, you use a template and create slides. Then you proceed through the slides (often with snazzy or annoying effects) in a linear fashion. With Prezi, you create a map populated with words, images, charts, video, etc. Don’t let that intimidate you. Really, you take all the stuff that you may want to use, get it out there, and then create groupings and a path.

Once you figure out the “zebra” navigation, it’s very easy. The flash technology animates the path you create within the map. Here’s an example:

About perspective… on Prezi

Prezi highlights its “zoom” for good reason. The spatial relationships and animation allow the presenter to capture the big picture, drill into details, and show the connections between concepts. It’s not just theater, it’s effective.

It’s free, as long as you don’t mind the Prezi watermark and keeping your presentations public. Premium subscriptions start at $59/year and allow you to work offline and have increased storage capacity.

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 5/5 – worth the 15 minute investment to learn

Entrepreneur Value: 5/5 – look sharper, break the bad habits

Personal Value: 1/5 – make a movie, not a presentation

The Single Best Way To Build A Love For Blogging

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By Terez Howard

Love Is a Natural Thing

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I blog because I love to write.

That makes blogging as natural as breathing for people like me who enjoy feeling a computer keyboard underneath their fingertips. But even for bloggers having an affair with writing, blogging can become a chore. How?

A freelance writer who blogs for a business owner does not particularly relish the idea of writing about chicken coops week after week. A business tips blogger might find she has to include financial advice in some of her posts since finances are a top priority among many businesspeople when numbers are one of her worst enemies. Incorporating financial anything would be drudgery for me.

So what can a girl do to build a love for blogging?

Write what you know.

It’s not a secret. It’s not earth shattering. It’s the truth. You write about what you know. Take your life experiences and everyday happenings and regurgitate them on a blog post.

I’m not saying to give a play-by-play account of what you do during the day:

This morning, I woke up and made the bed. Then, I went into the bathroom to shower.

No. Don’t do that, and don’t do this:

After I got into the bathroom to take a shower, the toilet seat was up again! My husband still doesn’t know how to put the seat down. We argued for hours, and I left the house for the rest of the day. I might not go back.

The first example is boring. The second example is too personal. Strike a balance. Be entertaining enough and personal enough, while sharing helpful information. Like this:

After another marital disagreement (we all have them, right?), I considered what it would mean to the female population if our men actually followed our advice. So I asked myself, ‘How would I best respond to an unwanted suggestion?’ Presentation is everything.

Apply what you know

You must research your topic if you’re writing in foreign territory. Use experts and authorities for your sources. When appropriate, cite your these specialists as your sources. And remember, you are producing your own distinctive work, not a copy cat article.

Then comes the fun part. Make your blog your own. There are hundreds of blogs about cooking. I recently saw an ad about a woman who blogs about cooking and doesn’t cook. She writes super simple snack recipes. She is unique.

Your blog might not be so one-of-a-kind, but each post can stand on its own as original if you parallel what you know with what you write.

“But I don’t know anything.”

That’s just lazy. Either you are not thinking, or you are not working to know anything. Look around. Literally, look around. Go ahead.

I see a computer. I could blog about which computers offer programs that cater to writers. I see various piles of papers. I could blog about organizing these papers or why these piles are already organized. I see an enormous bookshelf. I could write a blog comparing the writings of my favorite author, Langston Hughes, with my own writing or get tips from this multi-talented writer.

Those ideas are the ones that are in front of my face. Walk through your house. Think about your family and friends and their interests. Recall your everyday activities to mind and apply them to your blog.

Maybe blogging isn’t love at first sight for you. Look at blogging through a mirrored lens to cultivate a love that could grow into a lifelong relationship.

What one thing about blogging could make you fall in love with it?

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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!!

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