Successful Blog

Going Bankrupt in the Relationship Economy

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A Guest Post by Linda M. Lopeke

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Running a successful business comes down to how well you manage your numbers. Social media enthusiasts often rave about the new medium as an expressway for growing higher revenue. But building successful networks and communities is not about numbers, it’s about creating and sustaining high-trust relationships. Building relationships takes time and energy in both real life, business, and social media. Your statistics, as in “number of friends”, “number of social engagements attended”, and “number of followers” are not an indicator of your success in the relationship economy.

Businesses and marketers will spend over $350 billion on slick campaigns designed to attract you into entering into a relationship with them in the coming year. They want you to spend your conversational currency interacting with and responding to their ever growing number of advertising messages.

Some will produce meaningful and worthy content to seduce you into engagement. A few will respect and perhaps even admire you for the unique person/prospect/customer you are. Many will only add to the noise and clutter that bloat Twitter and every other social networking site in the universe; to them you’ll just be one of a number. Even fewer will get it right (after all Liz Strauss, Chris Brogan and others like them can only help so many people understand how to use social media properly at a time).

If you talk to everyone, how long will it be before your time and energy are exhausted, leaving you emotionally bankrupt, with nothing left to share with those with whom you once had a meaningful relationship?

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The SMARTSTART Coach, Linda M. Lopeke, writes at SmartStartCoach.com Her twitter name is @smartstartcoach

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Thank you, Linda!
–ME “Liz” Strauss

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World Business Forum: A View from the 3rd Mezzanine

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Up here the front row of the third mezzanine of Radio City Music Hall, world leaders speaking on the stage look like miniatures. On the video screen behind them, they appear larger than life.

I can’t help but notice the lovely irony that to us invited to blog about this event, the video version is easier to see and identify with.

rWe stepped out of the online culture to listen in here and report back. We’re tweeting, writing, and making opinions … listening to statements from a world of experience.

Most profoundly I see some connections that only we online might see. From Bill George challenged us Who’s going to step up today and make a difference?
Bill Conaty spoke of CEOs who need to support truth and candor. Patrick Lencioni said, We spend a lot of time making an organization smart, but not a lot of time making them health.

and Kevin Roberts brought it home with these statements …

reason leads to conclusions
emotion leads to action
inform … inspire …
do one thing

The chance to listen to outstanding people speaking about what they know has been huge and hugely thrilling. I’m sure many will detail the report of what was said.

What I notice is how, when we meet at the core of the matter we’re not so different online or off.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
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SOB Business Cafe: 10 Posts that Inspired My IZEAFest Talk

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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.

IZEAFest Edition

This weekend I get the pleasure of speaking at IZEAFest at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida. What an awesome experience that was and how cool to be among so many Internet friends. You can out more about the experience and how to be part of it at IZEAFest.com

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My conversation, Navigating and Networking in the Seamless Concrete-Virtual Universe, is about the question How can you leverage relationships to become successful in business? Naturally personal identity, an irresistible offer, conversation, and community online and offline will be important and featured throughout.

The Specials this Week are

Ten posts that inspired my IZEAFest talk.

Internet famous isn’t “Oprah famous” . . . not even close . . . and the Internet forgets quickly.

When I asked Internet Rockstar, Guy Kawasaki, about what bloggers should know about blogging as business, he said. …

I call him up. He answers.
I say, “Hi, Eddie, how am I?”
He replies, “Oh, you’re fine. What do you think of me?”

I heard them talk and laugh. They were talking “cool talk” about how cool they were and how cool I was not.

Barn Raisers avoid the risk by building the community as they build the site. They believe that people will help build a powerful idea. 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.

I was in the game, but I wasn’t playing with all that was in me.

I looked around and saw I wasn’t the only one that was holding back.

He was instant community. He was kind of like Tom Sawyer. He could smile around a corner.

Strategy isn’t a plan, a decision, a goal, a destination.
It’s a tool for leveraging who you are, what you know, where you are, the environment, and how people think and respond to each other. Strategy is a system for improving your position.

The Traffic Game, Auditioning Ants, and How Communities Grow

… by the time I came along, the neighborhood wasn’t much more than a huge space that people came to eat and sleep.

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

Because deeply knowing where you’re going is irresistibly attractive.

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

Rules, Negative Data, and Incurable Idealists

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What If Everything We Believed In Isn’t True?

Change the World!

I’m no computer. My operating system was developed at home, versioned at school, and beat up some through the decades and detours I’ve experienced.

Don’t run in the house. Use your indoor voice. Do your work before you play. Color inside the lines. Sit up straight. Be polite. Each basic command was entered in my head. If I do these things, I will operate properly — so they told me.

I also captured information about family and fairy tales, heroes and angels, creativity and planets, inventors and imagination, and artists, and poetry, fairness and ideals. In my life I’ve talked about and witnessed awe-inspiring and wonder-full things. These concepts are in my hidden system files — read-only, undeletable files.

I’m bombarded daily with data. But she is supposed to be your friend. Data. He lost his job. Data. There have been more bombings. Data. Want to make $4000/day online? Data miner. Still data. That’s all it is — data. I don’t have unlimited memory, so unnecessary negative data doesn’t get saved —period.

Some days the data causes my mind to fragment in unfamiliar and unproductive ways.

Bits and bytes of negative data chip away at my world view and therefore at me. The Tigger in me finds myself quoting Eeyore. “Pathetic, that’s what it is. Pathetic.”

What if the world is the awful place that keeps presenting itself to me?

But try as I might, I can’t—still won’t—give up on the world. I still believe in family, and fairy tales, and heroes, and angels, and creativity, and planets, and fairness, and inventors, and imagination, and artists, and poetry, and ideals, and so many awe-inspiring and wonder-full things. They were written on my soul as a child. I can’t delete them, lucky for me. I might have wanted to once, but not now, not again, not ever.

The world needs incurable idealists. We balance out the hardcore cynics. It has to do with joy, and hope, and possibility.

The world needs people who believe in it as much as we need people who believe in us.

As we believe so we become.

Are you willing to believe in a world that works?

We can change the world just like that.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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3 Simple Ways Passionate Problem Solving Attracts Clients

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When Passion is Sound Business

Creativity at Work

People say “do what you love.” Passion — a deep-seated desire to be doing what we’re doing — is key to keeping our interest through the pain it takes to transform an idea into business. But is passion enough? Not really.

It’s no surprise that passion needs to be directed toward solving a real problem that people need solved. If our passion is simply self-serving … well, I’m nice, but who really cares what makes me tick? Everyone is doing their own ticking and no one has a rewindable clock.

3 Ways Passionate Problem Solving Can Attract More Clients

As passionate problem solvers, what and how we present to clients and customers changes.

  1. Be an Advisor. Do the thinking. Builders offer products and services. Problem solvers listen, assess, and offer sound-thinking solutions that meet customer needs and desires. Demonstrate how you can focus on one bit of the business so that the client or customer can work on the rest.

  2. Be a Value. Demonstrate with numbers how investing in you will make more time or more money.

  3. Be Easy. Choose a tiny shared goal that can test the relationship. Make it something small and something easy.

When we’re talking about our passion, we don’t worry about whether we’re selling. When we frame our offers as opportunities that are easy and worth investing in, we no longer get caught in the idea of self-promotion or worry about personal rejection. We’re fully engaged in the ideas. People see our strengths. Relationships happen by attraction.

Clients who want to grow with us see the logic in our reasoning.

Have you got enough passionate problem solving into your work?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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If I Don't Trust Me, Can I Trust You?

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I've been thinking . . .

about trust again.

Is trust confidence in me, confidence in you, or confidence in both of us?

Some say trust is entirely internal, and only confidence is observable. If I trust in myself, then I can trust in the world. I trust the person who stated that fact in Wikipedia. Or is it the person who edited the fact to read correctly?

Trust is influence. People who trust are easily persuaded. People who don’t trust don’t listen long enough to hear the argument.

Do I trust because I agree? Maybe.
Do I agree because I trust? I don’t think so.

My dad used to say, Only believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.”

Do I trust you because I know you? I think so.
Do I know you because I trust you? That seems so too.

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If I don’t trust me, can I trust you?

It’s an interesting thought.

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