Successful Blog

Why Hire the Blog When You Can Hire the the Brain Behind It?

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A Photograph or a Photographer?

This week, I sat with a client who sings with an elite choir. The quality of what they do is outstanding. They’re known for loving attention to every detail. When they sing Russian opera, they study the deep meaning of the words, not merely clear pronunciation. It comes through in every blissful sound they blend, share, and offer. Their musical director is exceptional. Their production staff is to die for. Their board is prestigious and powerful.

The music they make is heavenly.

But aside from an occasional sale to a friend in Japan and the many CDs sold go to friends and supporters. The choir is hardly known outside of their personal and professional network.

That’s why my client was meeting with me.

“I was thinking we should use the Internet. I thought maybe a piece of your blog or some others,” he said.

I said, “What do you want for the choir? What’s your goal?

He told me without hesitation. “We should have a grammy — more than one.”

“You could do that. You’ll reach my audience and they’ll love you. But I’d like to suggest something more and more lasting. Why not build an audience of your own?”

Hire the Brain Behind the Blog

Often first conversations with clients start with how to get their information on many influential blogs. That leads to discussions of buying, renting, or borrowing bloggers’ influence, determining the right audiences, and how much information on the Internet is misstated, misdirected, or outright ignored.

Boring products need to be “pushed” or “seeded” into the market.
Compelling valuable resources don’t.
One look at Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, or FriendFeed shows that we like to share great things with our friends. Susan Boyle’s YouTube video is an example of great content that didn’t need to be pushed or seeded. It felt good to share it. It made us feel part of something bigger than ourselves.

Using those thoughts and basic strategy — start with the reachable and move out with purpose and logic — we scoped out the existing and realistic possibilities. The plan my choir friend and I started looked something like this one.

Great word of mouth depends on three things:

  1. The product has to be outstanding — and the vision has to be clear.
  2. The way to share it has to easy, growing from the community’s natural connections.
  3. People need to feel proud that they were part of the process.

It sure seemed that my choir client had step 1 — an outstanding product and vision — covered. We moved on to the strategy for building out the community and letting them enjoy the process. We set out to make it easy, meaningful, and about the folks who would help. We were building a movement more than a strategy.

  • Start at Home.. Identify the offline network the choir already reaches. Determine best ways to leverage and expand it — keep the offline connections strong and growing. Keep the offline community engaged and participating in fun, meaningful ways.
  • Learn from, Listen to and Engage the Energy. Find and have dinner with the champions of the choir in the offline community who are already engaged in online social endeavors related to music, the choir, and possible connections for the choir.
  • Let the Leaders Lead. Join and enlist their armies and networks. Let those champions lead their own initiatives in the name of the choir.
  • Momentum Drives Building. Using what we know of our network and their skills, now is finally the time to put up build and release that YouTube video of the choir. They’ll already be part of the endeavor and their armies will know about it when it goes up. Sharing will be fun.
  • Celebrating and Sharing Are Natural. Our friends on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and the music sites we’re already on will be delighted to hear about it too.
  • Reporting Results. At the end, what we about on our blogs will have the power of our community as well as the single event.

And we’ll be well on our way to a network, a community that loves the choir, not one that was borrowed from a network of blogs.

You can hire the blog or you can hire the brain behind it.

It’s a matter of short-term or longer-term thinking.

Do you look at your blogger relationships as a chance to tap into new strategic ideas?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Buy the ebook. Learn how conversation is changing the way business works.

SOB Business Cafe 05-08-09

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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

Sonia of Copyblogger
Naomi Dunford of Ittybiz is a genuinely remarkable voice in a sea of sameness. She’s a fantastic example of how content marketing can be used as the backbone of a real business that makes real money.

Seth’s Blog
Most marketers are organized around more. More share. More customers.

And if you want to do that fast, it means marketing to strangers. Strangers that don’t care about you, don’t trust you and aren’t listening to you.

The Fluent Self
So it kind of seemed like it might be time to a) pull back, b) add to the general knowledge base… and c) just try to give you a better sense of what these three methodologies/philosophies are. And why they aren’t really always that good for you.

iJump
One point from the Q&A roundup from Marketing Now bears deeper exploration: Online communities require investment in people.

Rick Mahn
That’s what lies before today’s C-Suite executives if they choose to explore it. What I’m talking about here, of course, is really about relationships. With the advent of social computing in the second half of this decade, the power has shifted from producers and marketers to people.

Related ala carte selections include

Being Five

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 SOBCon09 Edition!!

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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 SOBCon Speaker Specials this Week are

Chris Brogan
We face moments in our lives all the time when risk is the gating factor. Do we dive off the bridge like our friends, or just stay put? Do we seek out that mortgage we can’t exactly cover? Should you quit your job, even though you’re not sure where the next check will come from?

Confidence is about taking a risk and seeing it pay off, or taking a risk, failing, and moving on from the failure.

Brian Clark
Have you ever noticed when a new free report is announced online, it’s often pitched as “controversial” and “likely to upset people,” but mostly, it’s not controversial at all?

David Bullock
Face the facts. There is no way to manage time itself. You can’t move 2pm to 9am just because you want to. You can’t stretch an hour by 5 minutes. Oh, but I wish I could. And I bet that if you had the “magic power” you would manipulate time too.

Lorelle VanFossen
Isn’t that where everyone starts? Totally clueless. Everyone is talking blog this, blog that, social media, Twitter, Flickr, tweet, but really, until you dig in, you have little understand about what this bloggy thing is all about.

Terry Starbucker
As a “Baby Boomer”, I’m old enough to remember a world without computers, the Internet, blogging and social media – the days of pencils, paper, stamps, payphones, rotary dialing, social centers, happy hours, discos, and all the other “analog” ways we used to communicate and meet up with each other.

Chris Garrett
Social Media is not just a new bull horn for the loud and abrasive sales types to use to make our ears bleed some more. If you go against what people want and need then don’t expect to get great results.

Geoff Livingston
I know how human I am. And I fear that my personality while clearly me and not contrived, will in some way eclipse, or worse, harm a client or my company. Because, yeah, I do screw up just like everyone else.

Jason Falls
What this piece, and a lot of the accompanying statistics, might indicate is that our society is waking up from the self-indulgent bender of the last 50 years and shifting to a more sensible way of living. What that might mean to marketers is that premium is no longer chic.

KD Paine
Richard Stacy has written a great post about how all the people wringing their hands about Social Media Measurement are looking at the wrong thing.

I would take it one step further and argue that all of marketing is looking at the wrong things.

Related ala carte selections include

Give someone a hug today!
Two people will depart in a small prop plane, to fly 31,000 miles around the world, stopping in 50 locations on a 5-month tour to gather inspiration, deliver 100,000 hugs and share $1,000,000 with important causes…

Oh and..

Visit the SOBCon09 Blog to see what’s going on !

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

How Do Get You People to Stop Listening to Words and Start Hearing Ideas?

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Semantics Isn’t Conversation

In any conversation, a simple word I choose may have an unexpected effect on you. I have no way of knowing when you have “history” with ordinary words I regularly use.

A word such as curiosity, or money, or gorgeous might trigger a specific and negative response. I’ll have no clue that I’ve touched off feelings, negative feelings. I won’t suspect that one word has changed the tone of my presentation from neutral to negative.

It’s an accident because of something or someone in the past.

Looking for the Wrong Words

What folks encounter negative words it’s easy for them to have negative thoughts. They transfer their experience to the the person who said them, even when the words said aren’t thought of as hurtful, negative, or mean to most people. Communication breaks. Those listeners get distracted in that way.

It’s confusing when folks flinch at something we think is innocuous. We often feel misunderstood and try to explain that we meant no harm. It’s a defensive posture that rarely works. Rather than getting caught in explanation, looking for the tripwire word can be most helpful. If we ask about the message received, we avoid the risk putting our focus on our own intentions, but on the hearing the person who feels something wrong was said.

Here are some ways to bring the focus back to listening — when it seems that we’re getting distracted by words, and not hearing ideas.

  • Know what you want the outcome to be That means listening to the people — their tone, their pauses, their enthusiasm level — not just the words they’re saying.
  • The fear of negative comments — in person and on our blogs — is over-blown. Allowing people to play with language and to enjoy the conversation can be a conceptual collaboration.
  • Giving up the need for control — making room for tangents — can reap great benefits in involvement.
  • Look at faces when the eye contact is too intense.
  • Notice how your conversation partner sits and moves. Lean into the conversation, literally and figuratively.
  • Ask questions about points that interest you. Find many of them.

In other words, let the person talking know you value what he or she is saying. Signal everyone around that person’s importance to all who might be around. Listen actively. In other words, pay attention with the expectation that you will be asked to solve a problem with the very next question.

Conversations sometimes derail over words that we think about differently. When that happens how do you get people to stop listening to words and start hearing ideas?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

When Anything Is Nothing Next to Something … One Sentence that Will Keep You Stuck

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People Who Need Help

In my business and though my conference, I meet people and businesses who are looking to move forward. I love helping people be successful. I love building businesses. Some make easy to help them. It’s a pleasure to help them get what they need or want. Some think they they make it easy, but in reality they do not.

One sentence I’ve heard too often lately has made me realize that it has the opposite effect of its intent. The sentence is …

I’ll do anything.

That sentence doesn’t win clients, doesn’t gain partners, doesn’t attract friends of the very best sort.

When Anything Ix Nothing Next to Something

Attraction happens when we know who we are. Whether we’re an organization or an individual, we need to attract people. Nothing attracts like focus. Focus draw others to us in the same way our eyes will follow a shining light curving through the dark.

That focus says they know where they’re going. They’re predictable. They’re productive. They’re positively contributing. Even when they aren’t in our business, we can learn something from them while we’re helping them.

Focus drives people and organizations to know things. You can bet they’ll know what sort of help they need. They’ll also know what values and skills they have to offer. When they ask for assistance, they’ll make it a conversation about working together. You’ll meet on the same side of the table.

People with focus offer something — they offer best of what they’ve got.

Focused people and organizations are easy to work because they come with an offer, a package put together with some thought. They do the work before you meet, which shows a high possibility that they’ll deliver. If the offer doesn’t match perfectly, it’s a place to start.

“I’ll do anything” is nothing next to something.

“I’ll do anything” leaves it to you to decide the offer. It leaves it to you to think up what the package might be and how to construct the relationship. It’s your time and it’s your thought put to work guessing at their values and their skills. Not a good idea. How can you be sure that they will deliver? It’s like saying “Here’s a tool you’ve never seen. Use it for anything you want.” The anything offer is nothing, because you have to decide everything about it for it to work. You do the work of thinking. You take the risk. They’re delegating up.

Turning Anything Into Something Valuable

Anything might only seem like something to the person who is offering it. Anything is nothing if the person getting the offer doesn’t know what to do with it. To turn an anything into a something think it all the way through. Be able to say exactly how your finished work will make what they do

  • easier
  • faster
  • more valuable

Then you’ve got something valuable — something worth talking about.

Ever taken someone up on an “I’ll do anything” offer. How easy was it to figure out what that anything would be? Would you take the offer again?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

The Dangers of Old Think and the Dangers of Thinking New

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The stories on the top of Google Blog Search Business aren’t optimistic. They haven’t been for a while. Yet the predictions for social media, mobile and the growth of online advertising are huge. New jobs are being invented, described and defined, and invested in. New people are learning new skills to do them.

What happens to businesses that keep thinking “old think” when huge new opportunities are happening?

Saturday on Twitter, Dan Pancost offered these thoughts in response to my question.

@jazzlover: Those not willing to change with the times will still be hurting…. They’ll experience a lot of missed opportunities. Their businesses will probably begin a decline.

Adapting and changing to this new terrain is vital, thrilling, but not as simple as it seems.

Are You Trying to Fit Old Think into a Culture That’s New?

Past successes often inspire us to new things. It’s been said that “success breeds success.” But that isn’t always so. When we take on a new endeavor, we have to take on the new behaviors that will propel it up and forward. Yet, who hasn’t tried to use skills that made success in the past to build a future?

The old skills and perspectives don’t work when the culture and climate are new.

“Old think” businesses simply won’t prosper as much as the more flexible business thinkers and doers. Dan added later in the conversation. It would seem that most folks who read here would understand what Dan meant. I totally agree with what he said. We need to get out from under the burden of old thinking, to throw off old habits and thoughts to take on new ones.

But new thinking is dangerous too. I see signs of new thinking gone wrong every day. Here’s a few ways that thinking new can derail us just as horrendously.

  • It’s a good idea because it’s new. We act as if our fluency with the new culture ourshines our lack of experience. It’s still a new culture. We do foolish things and have unfortunate ideas.
  • Bye bathwater. Bye baby too! We turn our backs on what could still serve us well. Previous relationships and processes that have value get set aside. We take our new ideas out for a spin in our new environment, leaving safety nets and guideposts in a past life.
  • Everyone’s doing it! Our values become those of the new culture without thought. We do what everyone is doing. We accept everyone’s rules.

Whatever the economy, whether you’re solo or CEO of a huge enterprise, the challenge is continuous. How do we keep the best of what we know and throw off what is no longer true?

Old think or new think nothing beats thinking things through.

Depending on where you sit in the social business world, I’m thinking you see people in danger of old think or in danger of new think. What advice do you have to offer the thinking business folks you know?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!