Successful Blog

Social Media Road Trip

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I’m going on a road trip in the next few weeks. I’ll be traveling around on roads and paths that many have been traveled on by many others before. I will be on the same road but not for the same reasons. My reasons, my path, will differ from anyone else taking the same road.

I will, no doubt, meet many others traveling the very same roads I am taking. Those I meet may not be able to help with the path but they can help me with the road.

Along the way I will stop at cafes, rest stops, garage stations, shops and wonderful places to sleep. Each of those places will provide me with opportunities to meet others and engage in conversations. These people that I meet probably won’t be aware of the path I’m taking but they will know the road.
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The road they just came down might be the road I need to be on. More importantly, I can give them tips, (destinations, distances to places to see etc.) about the road I just traveled.

These roads I will travel are very much like social media tools.

We all have different reasons, approaches and things we wish to accomplish on our path, but we all use the same tools – road, to get there. Each of us, on our own individual path, has something to offer others traveling the same roads, or using the same tools, as we are. No matter what path you’re on, or even if you get stuck, there will always be someone coming along that can help you.

Have you stopped and helped someone lately?

from Kathryn Jennex aka northernchick

Thanks Joel Kelly for offering to drive.

SOB Business Cafe 05-29-09

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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

Art of Nonconformity
The title of this post is deliberately provocative. First of all, I know that marketers are people too, and most people are marketers of one kind or another.

But when I talk about hating marketers, you probably know what kind of marketers I’m talking about. I’m talking about car salesmen marketers who play on our emotions to get our money.

Riding Dragons
A small middle-aged woman wearing a white sleeveless shirt and khaki cargo pants appeared a few yards to my right. She raised a point-and-shoot camera to a foot or so in front of her face, aimed it at the mountain, snapped a photo, then retreated to her car and left.

IttyBiz
“Win-win” is one of those annoying buzzwords that you hear over and over and over again until you just get so mad that you want to punch Ashton Kutcher repeatedly in the face. But as I’m building these new little businesses of mine, I’m coming to realize why people say “win-win” so often.

Unconventional Thinking
In business, when we peel away all of the code, the rules, the myths, the jargon, the Harvard case studies, all we have to do is to find a code breaker: which is a single thing that if we do it over and over again, it will always be profitable.

The Fluent Self
Okay, so when people ask me about business-ey things, and — more specifically — how my own thing has gotten all biggified, I have to talk about the weird magical power of being yourself.

And not just being yourself, but being yourself out loud.

Even if that means that people know that I am a total mess talk to ducks, have monsters and completely fall apart sometimes.

Related ala carte selections include

From the Mind of Neenz
As I type this, I can hear my Mother’s voice as she delivered the news to me over the phone. As I type this, I recall the words of my dear friend Jan in an email, “Oh Neen, I almost want to ask…are you sure?” As I type this, I can hear his laughter as if he’s only down the hall in his bedroom. As I type this I am reminded, remembering is part of healing.

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

Got a Halo or Horns? First Minutes Last

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Showing Up for the First Test

When I was in college, I was struck with massive migraine on the day of an important class final. As I picked up my pen, the words on the page moved before my eyes as I tried to write. I brought this to the attention of the professor, who moved me into his office for the “lovely” experience.

I have to say I must have done dismally — at least not stellar — on that written exam. But I still Aced the class.

The most important test in that class was the first one, not the final. That was when the professor decided whether I was intelligent, whether I was a serious student, invested in learning. That first test left an indelible impression about who I am.

From that day forward, I always studied hardest for the first test in every class.

Halo or Horns

It’s called the “halo effect.” It’s a cognitive bias we all have toward what we decide from the start. Interviewers and clients, customers, … all of us … decide almost immediately from an initial trait or perception whether something is “good” or “bad.”
Research abounds on the topic … Wikipedia describes it well.

Physically attractive people are perceived to have an array of attractive qualities.

A bracelet in a Tiffany catalogue is perceived as more valuable than one in craft shop.

We make those assumptions in seconds on as little as a single trait generalized over an entire subject area. It makes sense in sorting the world on a global scale, but is error ridden in the specific instance.

The problem is that one we decide, we support our instant diagnosis by interpretting information in favor of our bias. We even work toward proving the premise. We’ll give the attractive person benefit for great qualities we’ve never seen or experienced. We’ll ask the “less impressive” interview candidate harder questions and be more critical of the answers. We’ll underscore the reasons that a craft jeweler can’t produce Tiffany quality.

If we love you, your faux pas was an accident. If we don’t, it was surely evil intent.

According to the research, even when we know that we’re biased by our first impressions and perceptions, we still can’t stop our halo effect response. It shows up in

  • brands we buy
  • candidates we hire
  • friends we defend
  • music we like
  • people we admire
  • politicians we elect
  • social media platforms we stay with
  • the insults we perceive or forgive
  • the causes we support

And Byron Kalies of training zone made a pointed out a fundamental flaw in this characteristic of human perception. .

It seems sensible and strikes a chord with us because we’ve all done it. We’ve all made an instant decision and found out it was true in the face of all the evidence. However, I wonder how often we’ve made an instant decision and found it to be wrong? I guess we don’t remember those occasions. There’s a phrase for this in psychological jargon – ‘bottom drawer evidence’. This concerns the mass of evidence gathered that doesn’t fit the theory and is conveniently hidden in the bottom drawer.

It takes serious energy and time to reverse thinking like that. Makes more sense to get the first minutes right. Invest, relate, and establish credibility that lasts.

Halo or horns. No person or product is all good or all bad. Yet the product lesson is clear. The “halo effect” makes fiercely loyal fans who evangelize and argue for the validity of their perceptions.

Got a good example of the halo effect in your life?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.

Ask Letterman … What's Not to Love About a List?

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Lists

Have you noticed how much of our information has become lists — TV, magazines, the interwebs love lists? The ten most amazing, most marvelous, most something this or that . . . is ingrained in every media. Even children’s learn-to-read books have started to favor lists. David Letterman has the best of them … click the image to check them out.

Here’s a list that lists why lists have taken center stage in the world of content.

  • Lists are easy to build.
  • They don’t require segues or transitional phrasing.
  • They don’t require deep research or extensive fact checking.
  • Most lists match the average attention span of a bus ride, coffee break, or other infosnack.
  • Lists can be built in a fraction of the time a piece of depth might take.
  • Lists are very bottom-line oriented.
  • A quality list is . . . what you see is what you get.

Lists are the sound bytes of print. They’re easy, quick, and often useful. The writer makes a point and readers move on feeling satisfied that they’ve heard something complete and whole — without too much work.

What’s not to love about that? Hmmmmm.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.

SOB Business Cafe 05-22-09

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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

Dosh Dosh
Experts have talked about this before. How many times have you read about the importance of ‘adding value’ for your audience? How many times have you read about ‘building trust’ with your readers/prospects?

TwitTip
Now that Twitter has several million active users, it’s no surprise to see such a variety of people discussing a wide range of topics. But while the content of all those tweets may be so different, they ultimately fall roughly into five categories.

Less Ordinary
Most Tuesdays I pay my grandparents a visit, and while I’m there I tend to take quite a few pics in my grandad’s garden. When I was there last week, as well as taking lots more photos of the beautiful flowers growing in the borders, pots and window boxes, I also took some shots in the greenhouse:

ChrisG
The way that UsefulTools is differentiating is through focus. By sacrificing the news, gossip and editorial, and aiming just for the review slice of the pie, they will stand out. Also, and this is just my hope, they will avoid the echo-chamber and TechMeme chasing behavior of some of the other blogs out there!

Related ala carte selections include

White Trash Mom
Mikwright Cards & Gifts is sponsoring a weekly contest every Thursday here on whitetrashmom.com!

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

SOB Business Cafe 05-15-09

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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

The Buzz Bin
Dale Carnegie’s principles have stood the test of time because they are about fostering better relations amongst people. And the classic mistake with social media is to treat it like a mass communications vehicle, when it’s a conversational form that builds relationships. Social media is about a larger community and its concerns, as opposed to a litany of messages. There is no better set of guidelines for this then “Friends.”

A VC
The WSJ gave its journalists some rules about conduct in social media this week according to Editor and Publisher.

Most of them are good common sense rules for everyone using social media. But there are several that I think are wrong and should be rethought. Here are four “rules” that I think should be reconsidered and why.

Mashable
But there’s so much info and chatter coming in through social media that it can overwhelm you, eat up your time, and ruin your productivity.

Simplifying will help you stay in touch, and continue to participate in the conversation, without losing sight of your mission and the important work you need to get done.

Social Media Explorer
Last week, David and I got the opportunity to hear Geno Church of Brains on Fire speak about word of mouth marketing and social media, courtesy the Louisville AMA and Social Media Club Louisville. He ended the presentation with the story of the role social media played in a pivotal, scary event in his own life as a parent. It got the gears turning in my head.

Marketing Pilgrim
Fizzle in 2009
If you’ve not stopped popping champagne since we published Forrester’s predictions for social media marketing, you might need the Alka-Seltzer after you see eMarketer’s contrary estimates.

Related ala carte selections include

Chrisg
All around the world people are very excited about Social Media Success Summit 2009 — the first major online event dedicated to helping you successfully market your business with sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. More than 500 people have already registered. Now you have the exclusive chance to win two valuable seats to the event for no cost!

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