Successful Blog

SOB Business Cafe 12-05-08

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SB Cafe

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

We offer the best in thinking–articles on the business of blogging written by the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the titles to enjoy each selection.

The Specials this Week are

MZinga’s Jim Storer and Colin Browning talk with Liz.
In this podcast, Liz does what she does best, discussing strategies on how to become a better blogger and attract fiercely loyal fans.

The Buzz Bin talks about elegant communication.
It occurs to me that whether it’s in person, using traditional tools, or here in the echo chamber (a.k.a. social media) that great communications remain difficult. Why? Because it’s not the toolset; it’s not the ability to be friendly; and it’s definitely not a personal brand. On the contrary, simplicity matters more …

The Harte of Marketing talks what’s important as we grow.
But how about when the conversation is no longer touched by the person/company that created it? It could be because they just don’t have the time to engage in the conversation or that they just chose not to.

Biz Coach Deb talks about customer service as the “new marketing.”
Ordinarily when a business drops the ball, we’re not really surprised any more, and it appears to be the general sentiment with American consumers, especially in certain industries.

Train for Humanity talks marathons … again!
After approximately twelve weeks of Train for Humanity and with two events down (read about Dan’s race and Mark’s race), we have one more endurance event to go before closing out phase one.

Related ala carte selections include

Crowdspring hopes you’ll lend some support with a vote!

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 to Share the Vision and the Plan with a Business-Building Community

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Goals, Dreams, Visions, and Plans

Raising a barn is a spectacular goal. Getting a community to help makes it easier and harder. It’s important not to confuse goals with dreams.

A goal without a plan is just a wish.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery,
author of The Little Prince, said that.

Char Polanosky explains what that means.

To raise a barn or build a business with a community is a social collaboration. It competes with all of the other wonderful and pressing things in their lives. To capture their time and attention, we have to offer something that is smart, compelling, and easily fit into their lives — irresistible.

Share the Vision and the Plan

When the time comes to build, we’re not going to find a community who magically knows what to build and where to put their skills to work. A critical stage in social leadership is being ready for the community when they’re ready to help.

We have to be able to explain — what we’re building and what roles they might play.

Share the Vision

We gotta know the vision before we can share it. The vision has to be clear from the minute they arrive. We need to be able to articulate

  • what we’re building — what the parts are
    and how the parts fit together to make a whole.
  • how that whole will be useful and who will use it.
  • how that whole with make that real people’s lives
    better, faster, and more meaningful.
  • how you’ll reach the people who will use it.
  • how you know they will.

Seeing the vision gives a community a reason to do the work.

Share the Plan

We gotta have a plan before the work can start. The value of the work also needs to be shiningly apparent. We need to be able to communicate without hesitation a clear business plan that offers:

  • easily understood standards of quality
  • simple budget rules or a stated source of materials
  • a realistic schedule with an end date for their commitment
  • a clear description of job roles for volunteers

Knowing the plan offers security that the work will be time well spent.

The vision and the plan let the community see what we will be creating. The vision and the plan give us the confidence on which a community can plant their trust, energy, thought, and emotion. On the vision and the plan, we align our ideas and ideals — we agree on the work to be done.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery also said,
Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.

Have you ever helped someone build a dream? What did you need before you invested?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Want to build barn? Work with Liz!!
Image: NASA Image Exchange

How Do You Get a Community to Help Build Your Business?

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Why Would Social Media Folks Help?

Raising a barn needs a leader, a plan, and a community of people with skills.

The beauty of enlisting a social media community from the start is that communities only have time for ideas that will work.

When we reach out — talk to people — about our compelling idea, the social media community responds. They let us know what works for them and what doesn’t.

If the idea we have to offer is truly compelling, the folks we’ve formed relationships with can offer us help more than we’d ever imagine. Why? Social media folks participate for many reasons. Here are just a few.

How does that happen?

How do we get a community to be inspired, to want to work with us, to want the experience our project has to offer, to want to teach what they know, to want to save us from the mistakes they’ve suffered, and to want to help us succeed?

Bring a plan their minds can buy into. Bring a dream their hearts can hold. Bring a reason each one of them will make a particular difference.

Be a leader who’s a learner.

Reach out with head, heart, all the meaning behind what you’re building.
Don’t be afraid to them how and why their part is important to the whole.

Bricks and mortar don’t make a business. Code and design only hold attention for so long. People make a business happen.

We’ve got all the tools. We’ve had ’em. Can you see how to bring the people in we from the start?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Want to build barn? Work with Liz!!
Image: Haussler Cluster Raising in CA

How Social Media Can Help You Build a Better Business

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Why Didn’t the People Come?

When people ask my help, it’s often to avoid or to remedy a situation like this one.

He had a dream, an idea, for a new business. It was a product and a service. He saw it in its glory. It was part store, part community bustling with transactions. He saw the people coming — they knew they couldnn’t wait for it.

So he got busy building that dream. He invested time, money, and enthusiasm in something …

  • that he thought was cool.
  • that was costly, but “worth” it.
  • that was harder to use than he realized.
  • that he didn’t know how to sell.
  • that he imagined would get people change how they do what they do
  • that someone else had already built — better, faster, less expensively.

Nothing happened. No one lined us. No bustling community developed. The dream was built and no one lined up. No one has noticed it. Why?

He didn’t remember to talk to the people who were supposed to come.

Get the People to Come Before You Build It

Suppose, instead of building that business and offering it to them, we invited the people we want to serve build the business with us? The culture of social media and social networking offer huge opportunities to build a business with a community rather than for them.

In the 18th and 19th rural North America, building a barn — the most important structure of farm — required many hands and many skills. Time was often short and funds could be tight. Barn raising was the work of an interdependent community that saw barns as an important part of life.

A barn raising used to be a one- or two-day event. Materials were purchased and plans were finished ahead. When the community came able-bodied and quick-minded members could start right in. Barn raisings were lead a barn raiser who with a well-thought plan who was paid to identify and manage crew chiefs, specialists, and volunteers for “pitching in.” New barn raisers were expected to watch before they took up their work.

A barn raising is the ultimate community collaboration to complete a common, organized goal.

Barn raising a business in the social media culture offers the business and the community members who participate clear benefits. Here’s why your social media business building should be a barn raising.

  • A community needs a plan and organization to build. We can’t fool a community by building parts that don’t work together. We can’t get stuck or be moved to fall in love with our own ideas.
  • Enlisting a barn raiser and crew chiefs keeps your plan organized and on schedule.
  • Ideas and costs get questioned.
  • We have to be able to explain how things will work, what makes them useful, and why they’re worth building
  • We all gain skills and relationships from participating in the process.
  • The final business reflects the needs and values of the community that built it.
  • Participants showcase their best work in a short-term commitment
  • The process provides a product or service has proven its worth by the community support.

Barn raising builds the community at the same time that it builds the business that will serve us. Everyone who has participated is invested in its success. Don’t just think … do.

Ever been part of a project that worked like a barn raising?

What would be the first step in helping some get a social media barn raising started for their business idea?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Want to build barn? Work with Liz!!
Image: Haussler Cluster Raising in CA

SOB Business Cafe 11-28-08

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SB Cafe

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

We offer the best in thinking–articles on the business of blogging written by the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the titles to enjoy each selection.

The Specials this Week are

Chris Brogan points out the power of Batman available to all of us.
Batman, no matter how amazing, is only one man. Crime is a large and amorphous thing, and it requires lots of people to fight. It requires a better Gotham Police Department, a more capable Commissioner Gordon, a Robin, a Batgirl, and more and more help from others. Oh, and let’s not forget Alfred.

Geek Mommy points out the silent gift that reaches out.
Sometimes, because I’m so chatty (or noisy as some would say) people make the mistake of thinking I’m not listening. Then I end up repeating something back to them they said a few hours or weeks earlier and they seem stunned. You see, as much as I love to talk, share and inform, well… I love learning even more. You learn from listening, observing, and paying attention.

Levite Chronicles points out that we can ask for a gift.
I love the idea, but I started to laugh. I thought, “if everyone is listening, who is going to talk?” And then I realized that this is a day addressed to those of us who always talk. It probably should be a doubly-named day, called both, “national day of shut up and let someone else talk already why don’t you.” and “national day of please, you, in the back, arranging the chairs, would you tell us a story? Please?”

Beth’s Blog points out that giving starts early.
When I was a kid, Lucy the Elephant, was in a state of disrepair. A community group worked hard to get her placed on the historic register and raise money to restore her to her mid-century glory. How? Bake sales organized by my third grade teacher, Josephine Harron, nicknamed “Cupcake.” Sitting by next to my mom in the kitchen, I mixed up a lot of cupcake batter and icing with my mom for those bake sales.

Related ala carte selections include

The Jeff Pulver Blog highlights giving that happened in near record time.
Tweetsgiving is a Twitter celebration of gratitude and giving created by Epic Change, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. The project aims to demonstrate the power of the social web by raising $10,000 in 48 hours to build a classroom in Tanzania.

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

Responsible Social Media … Respecting Real People One at a Time

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I've been thinking . . .

about responsible social media.

Sounds like safe sex, doesn’t it? I know you can get past that.

What I’ve been thinking about is a conversation I had with a dear friend, Jon Swanson, about 3 weeks ago. I had called Jon because I didn’t understand changes I saw happening among my friends. Jon, in his wisdom, pointed out something that keeps returning to me still.

What Jon said recalled this image to my mind and sounded something like this …

What makes social media business different is it’s twofold nature. We have to manage for the business and the brand, but we can’t lose sight that we make personal relationships with real human beings.

That’s the difference, isn’t it?

Most customer relationships stay in the head. Good ones make us feel smart, but the personal touch of a social media champion gets us to invest with more than our thoughts. Isn’t that what makes social media so powerful, so collaborative? Isn’t that what gets us to think we can change the world or at least how business works?

Folks looking on might think that starting out in social media is the hardest part.

But the longer I watch the more I know that holding dear the investments that people make in us as we grow is the tough nut to crack. Anyone who’s gone from ten friends to a hundred knows that time doesn’t stretch to accommodate the same level of giving back.

It’s the choices we make as we grow that determine whether social media stays centered on personal relationships or turns into a “Hollywood” sort of community of friends.

Real people understand that as we grow we have less time to sit with them. Who doesn’t get that? Who doesn’t wish the best for their friends? They want to enjoy the ride with us, not be left behind and wondering where we went.

Responsible social media respects that real people are investing back one at time.

Real people want to know that a good “friend” doesn’t change when “he, she, or the business” gets bigger than life. It’s not hard to show that. Just keep acting the same to real individuals one at a time and core fans will know that when it’s their turn again, you’ll still be there for them.

The key understanding is that real people come in ones.

Could you add your ideas about responsible social media and would you pass this on, please?

Liz's Signature

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Image: WendyPiersall photo: SOBCon08
Want to be successful in social media? Work with Liz.