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PetCareRx Offers Advice for Online Success

July 8, 2011 by Guest Author

Guest Post
by Riley Kissel

The survival rate of any business is fairly low. Only 1 out of every 10 succeeds in the first five years. With the popularity of online businesses growing daily, the success rates of these types of businesses is even lower. However, one online giant, PetCareRx () has endured and continue to succeed in spite of the odds, and the company’s COO, Blake Brossman, is more than willing to offer 5 great tips for success in the online business world. In order for a business to succeed, Brossman believe every company needs:

Passion

Always choose to start a business that revolves around something that you are passionate about. When business becomes difficult, when the long hours and seemingly endless marketing becomes too much, it will be your passion that gets your through. Brossman became determined to offer great pharmacy services to pet owners after having to deal with his own Rottweiler’s expensive medications. “I looked around the vet office and saw all the helpless people spending astronomical sums of money to treat their pets,” Brossman recalls.” I wanted to give these people the opportunity to treat their pets without breaking the bank!”

A Great Business Plan

PetCareRx was started during the dot-com hype of the late 90s, and was able to survive when the bubble burst during the early 2000s, and they credit their success to the company’s solid business model. “The 2000 bubble was caused due to incessant hype, and weak business models with high investments,” stated Brossman. PetCareRx new the products and type of service it wanted to offer, wrote it down in their business plan with precise goals, and stuck to it. Now they are an industry leader.

Excellent Customer Service

PetCareRx reviews couldn’t be better. The online pet pharmacy has been a hot spot for pet owners for years, and has built incredible company loyalty. “At PetCareRX, the customer always comes first,” stated Brossman. “PetCareRx, built a strong foundation around every pet parent’s requirement, backed by a great product line and the highest level of service and convenience. This helped us survive and grow over the years.”

Social Media

Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are great ways to spread word about your online company, and a great way to allow patrons a way to create a community, without having to spend anything. They are also a great way to offer special discounts to Fans or Followers to add to increase company loyalty. PetCareRx can be found on both Facebook and Twitter, and frequently offers fans great discounts to use on a variety of store items.

Show Your Credentials

Many online businesses fail because they don’t convey that they are trustworthy. People don’t want to purchase a product or service from a website that doesn’t look secure or isn’t backed by prominent watch groups. PetCareRx has made it a top priority to be licensed in every state and to make sure their customers are aware of this. However, other less successful pet pharmacies don’t take the same precautions which can easily put a pet at risk. “Visitors should be skeptical of ordering medications or any products from any non Vet-VIPPS certified pharmacies,” stated Brossman.

Starting an online business is difficult. Succeeding with an online business is even more difficult and requires time, dedication, and perseverance. However, the rewards can easily prove to be worth the hours and energy poured into it.
————————————

Riley Kissel is a freelance writer who covers many industries with style. You can find out more about him at RileyKissel.com

Thanks, Riley, for simply showing how great thinking has built great success.

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

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Filed Under: Strategy/Analysis, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, LinkedIn, PetCareRX, Riley Kissel, success

3 Mistakes and 3 Essentials of Blog Marketing

July 7, 2011 by Guest Author

By Pawel Reszka

Still think blogging is the exclusive territory of hipsters and chronic over-sharers? Think again! Blogging is a money-making powerhouse – that is, assuming you monetize your blog correctly in the first place. To understand the right ways – and the wrong ways – to monetize your blog, let’s look at some of the most common mistakes beginning bloggers make when it comes to cashing in.

Mistake #1 – Not Investing Time in Your Blog

First of all, let’s get one thing straight. Blogging isn’t an “if you build it, they will come,” type of game. According to BlogPulse, there were nearly 156 million blogs online at the beginning of 2011 and that number continues to grow every day. Simply registering a domain name and installing WordPress isn’t enough to attract visitors and guarantee sales in this competitive marketplace.

So although this first mistake doesn’t specifically relate to the monetization models you implement on your blog, it’s worth remembering that it doesn’t matter how great your advertising strategy is if you don’t have any traffic coming to your site. Whether you decide to pursue guest blogging, blog commenting or a number of other traffic generation strategies, keep in mind that investing time in growing your blog and your audience is the first key to effective monetization.

Mistake #2 – Poorly Chosen Advertising Models

Of course, getting visitors to your site won’t guarantee sales – to do that, you need to choose the most effective monetization models for your blog.

One of the biggest mistakes new bloggers make is simply tossing up a few Adsense blocks and assuming that counts as a monetization strategy. It’s not that Adsense won’t earn you money, as there are certainly internet marketers out there earning six figures through this program. It’s that Adsense, in general, is the lowest possible form of income for most blogs. Here’s why…

First of all, it’s incredibly difficult to make Adsense ads look like they’re a part of your site and not just some tacky blocks of advertising scamming up your pages. Very few people manage to achieve this integration in a subtle, sophisticated way – for most bloggers, Adsense ads are always going to look like, well, ads. This detracts from your blog’s message and discourages people from returning to your site in the future.

Even more importantly, Adsense represents one of the lowest possible payouts in the blog monetization worlds. Assuming someone clicks through on one of your ads, you earn a few pennies – maybe a dollar or two, if you’re lucky. But then you’ve lost that visitor for good. There’s no way you can convert that visitor into a long-term, high-value customer since they’ve left your blog through the Adsense link. For these reasons, most bloggers would be well-advised to steer clear of Adsense entirely!

Simply placing affiliate banners indiscriminately throughout your site isn’t much more effective. If you decide to promote affiliate products, they should be integrated into your site in a holistic way. Maybe you recommend a particular product as a part of a tutorial, or maybe you demonstrate using a particular affiliate product in a video. By providing context for the sale, your visitor will be much more likely to purchase than if you simply paste a banner into the sidebar of your site.

Mistake #3 – Failing to Capture Visitors

But no matter how well you integrate affiliate promotions into your blog, they still aren’t the strongest way to monetize your site.

This is because Adsense ads and affiliate banners represent a “one off” relationship with your readers, where you’re essentially limiting the potential of each visitor to the value of one sale. For example, if you use Adsense banners on your site, you’re hoping to generate one clickthrough per visitor; or, if you place random affiliate advertisements throughout your blog, you’re hoping to generate one sale per person.

The secret to earning money through blogging is that the potential value of each visitor can be much, much higher if you take the time to set up your site as a complete sales funnel.

Rather than copy and paste the technical definitions of “sales funnel” and “back-end sales,” let me give you an example…

A visitor stops by your blog and likes what he sees. Your writing style is good and your free content is valuable, so he decides to subscribe to your email list. As a bonus, he receives a free report that you delivered as an incentive to sign up. Inside this bonus is an affiliate link or a sales message for your product or service, which results in the first sale for you.

But that isn’t the end of your relationship with this visitor. Because he’s now a part of your email list, he receives regular notifications about your newest blog posts, some of which promote other affiliate products or your own products/services.

He’s also notified whenever you launch a new product or service, and because you know he likes your work, he’s much more likely to buy your latest promotion (and their related upsells) than a cold lead who’s visiting your blog for the first time. Over time, this relationship can result in hundreds or thousands of dollars of product purchases and upsells.

Sure beats earning a few cents off of an Adsense clickthrough, doesn’t it?!

Of course, it’s one thing to say that a well-built sales funnel is the key to monetizing a blog correctly –it’s another thing entirely to actually do it! So let’s take a look at the most important features of a back-end sales funnel.

Sales Funnel Essential #1 – Email List

Although it’s possible to set up a simple funnel without an email list (in most cases, the sale of a product leads to one or more “one time offers” for higher priced products or services), maintaining a list of potential buyers and communicating with them regularly makes it easier to convert one-time blog visitors into buyers and to generate repeat sales from these customers.

Sales Funnel Essential #2 – Your Own Product

Generating affiliate sales can be a good way to earn money off your blog, but having your own product (whether that’s an ebook, video training course or coaching program) is where the real money lies. Yes, there are some greater administrative demands compared with simply promoting affiliate programs, but ultimately, you’ll earn more when you control the distribution of your product versus sending your visitors to someone else’s sales funnel.

Plus, considering how easy it is to outsource writing, video editing and other forms of product creation these days, there’s no excuse not to have your own product!

Sales Funnel Essential #3 – An Upsell

Once you’ve convinced someone to purchase your product, don’t drop the ball by ending the transaction there. You know that the buyer is interested in your products or services, so why not encourage them to spend more with a well-chosen, high-quality upsell?

If you sell an info product, consider offering a “premium” version of your product with more resources and tools. Or, if you sell a service, offer a package deal or complementary service to avoid leaving money on the table.

By taking the time to correctly build out your sales funnel, you ensure that the time you’ve invested into your blog hasn’t gone to waste. Just remember – you don’t have to implement all of these elements at once. You can add them over time, but the faster you complete your funnel, the faster you’ll start making more sales!

————————————
Pawel Reszka is an internet marketer who runs Affhelper.com, a blog where he shares some valuable tips about affiliate marketing and making money online. Check out his site for super affiliate techniques and strategies.

Thanks, Pawel. Useful information on affiliate marketing is always valuable.

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

Filed Under: Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog Tagged With: affiliate marketing, bc, essentials, LinkedIn, Mistakes, Pawel Reszka

How to Produce a Fireworks Display or Launch into Social Media Without Experience

July 5, 2011 by Liz

Our Customers Face Situations Like This All of the Time

As I uploaded the photos from this year’s fireworks show over the lighted North Bridge on the Chicago River, I began to think of the event. It’s quite a business to put on a 15-20 minute display of fireworks. As I considered the teams of people and the skills that were needed, a thought kept occurring, suppose that a client said to me …

Your charge, should you decide to keep working with us, is to pull off the best fireworks display the city has ever known!

The more I thought about the idea, the more I realized that the question I was pondering isn’t so different from what we ask new social media managers every day of the week.

5 Questions for Putting on a Fireworks Display or Launching into Social Media

A great fireworks display is the result of planning, preparation, resources, and timing. The pyrotechnical art of combining noise, light, smoke and floating materials into design that burns with colored flames and moving sparks is a display of teamwork, technique, strategy and tactics in action! And that’s just to get the display in the air!

Beyond that crowd control and the traffic are a consideration. At the event I attended, the show was visible from the lake, the river, the streets, the pier, and a double decker bridge. The distraction of fireworks while people are managing transportation could cause more than minor accidents.

No wonder the colorful, brilliant displays are symbols of celebration, which often lead to competition!

I don’t know a thing about putting on a fireworks display. I don’t know makes them work, what’s dangerous, and what’s just for show. I don’t know what things cost and don’t have pyrotechnical experts in my most intimate networks.

Yet I’m an intelligent person.I’ve run a business. I’m good at asking questions.

What follows are 5 questions I would ask to make sure that I would know I was making an intelligent, solid and outstanding investment to pull off the best fireworks display (or social media launch) the city (or the industry) has every known.

  1. The mission and the vision: What does “the best fireworks display” or “the best social media launch” look like” in it’s visible and measurable result? Before we set out on a quest, we have to know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. I might not know how to produce a great fireworks display, but I know how I define one. Leaders take the time to articulate the vision and the mission to ensure that everyone who joins the quest is moving toward the same destination and to ensure when we communicate our vocabulary means the same things.
  2. The team: Who will bring the expertise, commitment, and the thinking to share the risk and share the benefits? Leaders reach out to people who can contribute to the thinking, not just the building. We look for folks who “get” the seriousness of the work and the fun of being part of building something no one can build alone. Start with the question, “Have you ever held a job – run a business – where if you made the wrong decision many other people beyond yourself would be hurt?” People who know their business can explain the controls they put in place to ensure right decisions and mitigate the risk. Experienced candidates can give simple explanations that show solid thinking about where the possible problems in your exact situation.
  3. The resources and quality standards: What do we need to do the job right — what adds quality and what adds cost? A wise boss once said to me, “Spend as much as it takes to do the work well and not one penny more.” When we ask about tools and resources, we can’t separate out the definition of quality.

    Quality is the customer experience, not in the builder’s standards. If the customer cannot see, feel, hear, taste, touch, smell, understand, or perceive meaning from the difference, we are not adding quality — we are adding cost.

    Read that bold paragraph again. Quality is in the customer experience.

  4. The systems and logistics: Who will own which part of the process to achieve optimal results? It’s easy to get this one backwards. Any production process needs to be talked through considering both values — the big picture order in which the stages must occur and the flexibility within each stage that allows the highest performance from the team. In any complicated production, every step has different time-goal orientations. It takes longer to produce the art than the words that might go with it. When one person’s output relies on another person’s input, it’s important to talk through the way the work flow will travel, how we’ll track it, and who will report on things that break or jam up.
  5. The time-frame: What’s a realistic time frame to get the fireworks display (or social media launch) done right, allowing flexibility for unforeseen detours? Inside any discrete event or first-time project is a new decision, a problem, or a complication that we didn’t foresee at the outset. Making room for such adventures from the beginning builds strength into the infrastructure, allows us to under promise and over deliver.

It’s only natural when we’re working on something truly exciting, that we want to get up and running. Making things happen is thrilling! However, watching things break isn’t quite as much fun. To get more of the first and far less of the second, take the time to do the planning and ask the right questions. The right questions can lead to a production that moves as seamlessly as water flowing on a summer day.

Even if you don’t know a thing about putting on a fireworks display or running a social media launch, the right questions can get to you to a successful outcome far more quickly than hoping you’ve found the right expert to do it for you. After all, it’s about a unique and spectacular outcome that serves the customer.

Did I forget any questions that you use to keep your projects in the success column?

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

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Filed Under: Customer Think, Inside-Out Thinking, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, business, Customer Think, LinkedIn, Strategy/Analysis

30 Blog Posts to Get Strategy and Celebration Back into Your Business and Your Life

July 4, 2011 by Liz

That Fireworks Feeling of Celebration!

Remember when you first were going to see the fireworks? It wasn’t that different from the first day of school or the first day of that new fabulous job! And if you’ve ever started your own business, the first day you’ve got things in order to launch is certainly a time worth celebrating with fireworks!

Then come the days that follow that often get filled with more work and a little less of that brand-new feeling that made everything easy at that very first. I’ve been taken by the thought of how much fun it is when we get back with our heads, hearts and our hands in our business and everything once again works.

Here are 30 blog posts based on solid strategy — a realistic plan that moves you forward over time by taking advantage of the opportunities that are uniquely yours.

  • Stating your mission and sharing the vision
  • Seeing and levering your unique position
  • Finding opportunities in changing conditions
  • Bringing leadership to decisions
  • Building networks and systems to align your goals.

These five strategic steps and the blog posts that explain them are yours for building the kind of business that feels great every day when you walk into work. So get ready to strategize some, to make some plans, to explode your business and then once again you can celebrate!

Be of the Right Mind

  1. The Top 10 Ways to Start Living Your Life Life either happens to us, or we take hold of life and live it. Here are 10 Ways to get a life and start living it.
  2. 5 Ways to Take the Work Out of Work and Connect with Life Ever notice that some of us live, some of work to live, some of us live to work … and one or two of us seem to BE a piece of work?

Stating Your Mission and Sharing the Vision

  1. Why Play the Game, If We Aren’t Playing for Keeps? Why should anyone believe the shoemaker makes fabulous shoes if his own shoes are ratty?
  2. Is Your Strategy About Winning Opportunities?Tactics are interesting. The accomplishments they bring can be thrilling. But the bigger picture that a strategic mission lays out is powerful and amazing thinking.
  3. How to Make Your Dream Come True — Thought, Strategy, Action You can wonder. You can wish. You can wait for help. Say that you will, or say that you can’t right now. The most important key to a dream come true is personal investment
  4. How to Share the Vision and the Plan with a Business-Building Community We have to be able to explain — what we’re building and what roles others might play.
  5. WHY Doing What We Love Is Solid Business Thinking Because it’s how we’re wired as humans. We bring our best to whatever challenge we face. We’re better when we’re inspired by deep feeling.

Seeing and Leverage Your Unique Position

Position is the unique combination of where you stand in your field and what you bring to it.

  1. Are You Seeing So Much That You’re Blind? With or without a real itinerary, traveling too fast made see so much I was blind to the people around me.
  2. 8 Powerfully Subtle Ways to Let Your Work Show Your Expertise To be recognized as a expert requires communication skills and social skills as well as technical expertise.
  3. Marketing Strategy ala Mickey Mouse Eisner didn’t make random decisions. He followed solid business strategy. Anyone can use these strategic principles for success in any enterprise from a service business to a blog.
  4. Checklist: Opportunity Is Knowing Your Position on the Playing Field Think through where your brand and your business is right now.

  5. Personal Branding: Strengths Assessment Tool
    Here’s a tool to help you assess what you have to work with.

Find Opportunities in Changing Conditions

Every business faces change in cycles, climates, and shifts. That change holds opportunities that are fit our unique position and skills. Working with change grows a business.

  1. Change As Influence: How to Get the Attention of Deniers, Followers, Dreamers, and Leaders? Every now and then, something happens that pulls the rug out from under us …
  2. How to Claim Your Ground and Own It It was still the 20th Century when someone told me that I could count on these four words to always be true … This too will change.
  3. Do You Sleep in the Freeze or Invest in the Spring? The sailors who love sailing know just saw it as part of the yearly progress of the sailing “routine.”
  4. Stop Thinking Poor – Start Irresistibly Growing Your Business Something negative happens. People hit a wall with their business. They pull back, retreat to safer ground to protect what they have.
  5. The 5 Step Strategy that Saved a Company Can Also Get You to Your Dream Working with strategy of any kind, it comes with the territory to know that, the minute a strategy is worked out, it is outdated. That’s because the information on which the strategy is based has already moved and changed.

Bring Leadership to Decisions

Making command decisions is about understanding the role of a leader and the people who can help a business thrive.

  1. Leaders and Higher Ground There’s not a person on the planet
    who has not been a jerk.
  2. How Do You Recognize and Attract Heroes and Champions for Your Brand? Before you try to create evangelists why not reach out the ones you already know?
  3. Strategy: All of the Information Available Strategy is setting a vision, making a path, knowing what we can know, and planning for the variables. To know what we know . . . That means having command of the information available.
  4. Have You Tried the DO Strategy of Social Business Success? People who succeed DO what the work to get themselves where they want to be.

  5. Money Strategy, a Dead Horse, and Folks
    The key here is whether the new upgrade will pay for itself in productivity, quality of life, or other tangible or intangible benefits. In circumstances such as this, here are some of the “go or no go” questions.

Build Networks and Systems

Networks and communities are the people who help the business thrive. Systems and processes are the ways of doing things that support the work people are doing.

  1. The 5-Point Strategy to a Powerful Network Networks of people can be powerful influencers. A network of influencers expands our knowledge and our reach by engaging the power of “WE.” The problem is that networks take time to build and require attention.
  2. How Do You Get a Community to Help Build Your Business? The beauty of enlisting a social media community from the start is that communities only have time for ideas that will work.
  3. A Barn Raisers Guide: 7 Ways to Leave the Field of Dreams to Build a Thriving Reality Barn Raisers invite collaboration from the people they’ll be serving and so what they build is often a gathering place for people even before it’s fully finished.
  4. Where Would a 30-Minute Strike Force Strategy Increase Your Productivity? When the piles start to slow down progress try this 30-minute strategy to get back to a Command Center that works for you and your productivity.

  5. Building A Powerful Personal Developmental Network – Is Your Next Teacher on Twitter?
    Whether we’re a company or an individual, it’s easy to find reasons that we made our successes, but that our failures were due to other circumstances. That’s where a powerful personal developmental network can keep things real.

The Challenge

Leave hesitation behind. go for the win and claim your successes.

  1. Extreme Hesitation and Extreme Strategy: Are You Willing to Own Your Life? Because deeply knowing where you’re going is irresistibly attractive.
  2. How to Turn a #Fail Position into a #Win Then it struck me that how I was looking at the problem was what was keeping it a problem.
  3. Are You Ready to Claim the Right Things You’ve Done? We’re great about learning from our losses. We’re not so great a learning from our success.

It’s a true calling that allows to serve other people by providing a service that make’s other folks lives easier, faster, and more meaningful. That kind of calling is worth celebrating because it makes us all feel more alive. Other people find a living soul irresistible, fascinating, and attractive. They come to see what makes a person so engaged, directed, energetic, and calm. The best part of bringing that kind of true strategy to work is that it is contagious and explodes into that a fireworks feeling that we all can paint the sky with light!

It took a few years to write the blog posts I gathered here for my birthday. It took a lifetime to learn what they say … what will you do with them?

Be irresistible.

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

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Filed Under: Strategy/Analysis, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, business, LinkedIn, performance, Strategy/Analysis

What Is the Best True Story You Could Tell about You?

June 28, 2011 by Liz

Following or Finding a Path 2

2016 GeniusShared Read from Liz StraussLeaders Choose the Stories They Live

As we grow up, we hear stories about ourselves: how we learned to walk, how we learned to talk, how we behaved, how we treated our siblings and friends. The stories predate the ability of our brains to remember the events. So we rely on the people telling them.

In incremental ways that grow larger over time, the stories people tell and the stories we tell ourselves become the definition of the person we see in the mirror. And when we’re in doubt about who that is, we’ve learned to look outside — to the stories — to describe the person we are inside. … if we just listen, pay attention long enough, the people and the stories will tell us who we are and why we’re here.

How many stories in your head are told from someone else’s point of view?
How many stories in your head are told by a weaker, smaller, less experienced version of you?
How many stories in your head are untrue?

Leaders live up to their best truth.
Leaders choose which stories we live.

What Is the Best True Story You Could Tell about You?

Leadership is taking responsibility for who we are now and who we will be. If we want to know our uniqueness and own it, we have to evaluate the stories we’ve been living and believing to decide what we know is true. We need to think deeply on the stories we’ve been telling about ourselves.

Leaders know their uniqueness and own it. We don’t need to invent a new tale. We need to recognize the true story of who we are as the leader we’ve decided to be.

Our cells are genetically programmed to do some things better than others. Our brain needs to pay attention to what our cells know. We can see the answers throughout our history and in our experience. Here’s how to do that …

  • Collect the stories about yourself — true stories of your life.
  • Identify and share the stories that make you stronger. You’ll know them because you like what they say about you.
  • Stop telling and believing in the stories that hold you back. File them as historically true but irrelevant.
  • Recognize your values by seeing them in the true stories of your life you choose.
  • Use your values to keep your true story true and valuable for everyone you serve.

Reflect on the stories you tell about yourself and decide which are those that truthfully represent the best value and values in you. Decide which stories truly define you and which ones can be left behind as now meaningless. Claim the true story that is your uniqueness, your skills and your abilities, your image, your traits, and your potential.

When you do that, you’ll take command of who you are now. That’s when you’ll begin to see your fit and purpose — how you individually meet a need or solve a problem in a way that no other person can. You’ll attract people who share those values. You’ll find it easier to talk about what you do, because you’ll know that your life stands a proof.

You’re the only one qualified to identify your true story — you are the person who has been living it every minute of it. Take the idea seriously. Listen to what you know about yourself.

What is the best true story you could tell about you?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles:
The Only One
Business, Blogs, and Niche-Brand Marketing

Filed Under: Business Life, Inside-Out Thinking, management, Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, Leaderhsip, LinkedIn, sobcon, stories, value propostion

How Social Media Is Like Sex Education

June 27, 2011 by Liz

At First Blush …

The thought struck me as I was leaving an offsite meeting I spoke at not long ago. The presentation was about using social media to share your story. The group was all from the same company, but to a person their experience with social media was varied. Some were avid fans who logged onto Twitter daily. Some were curious and experimenting. Some were living in fear of the stories that if they tried anything horrible, unforgivable things would happen.

As I headed home after a fabulous conversation that got the group thinking, I found myself realizing that sharing information about how social media works is a lot like sex education.

5 Ways Social Media Is Like Sex Education

At first blush, it might seem a reach to you to connect these two topics. But as I look back on my experience in that corporate meeting and other meetings like that and compare them to my experiences as both a student and a teacher of sex education certain compelling similarities stand out. I’d like to share them.

  1. Beginners, experimenters, and the experienced In every group and every meeting, we have those who know nothing, who know some, and who have experience. To make it interesting for all of them, storytelling is still the best way to relate new information or give context to those who might need a refresher.
  2. Definitions and history The simple definitions are necessary, but deep explanations and history of best practices are only fascinating to folks who already know the basics.
  3. Pictures, diagrams, and conversation Powerpoints and pictures might underscore what the presenter is saying, but they’re not the same as hands on experience. No matter the room or the age group, the role of the presenter needs to be like a blog post — a short burst of information followed by comments, and questions. If the meeting becomes a guided conversation the participants ask their questions and follow their curiosity. The whole group learns more from each other than they could ever take from a presentation.
  4. Safety and reputation Frank talk about keeping ourselves safe from “malware” and viruses is crucially important. And in our enthusiasm for these new “fun” interactions, we all need to touch base with our values to decide how we will be appropriately social without being promiscuous or shameless in our relationships.
  5. Revisiting the information If you are, like I am, a student of social media, you know that scaffolding — returning and revisiting the information as we gather experience — is important. After we try a few things, it’s good to explore what we know, what want to learn, and what we didn’t understand the first time we tried what we’re doing.

And the test for success of great social media presentation can be likened to a test for a great talk on sex education …

If you

move the audience from fascination with the tools and the transaction,

steer them clear of harassing behavior and selfishness

show them the marvelous and meaningful relationships

that are enhanced through sincere concern for others,

then your social media class will be better because they knew you.

(and so will your class on sex education.)

Be irresistible.

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

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Filed Under: SOB Business, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, LinkedIn, sex education, social-media

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