Successful Blog

7 Tweaks to Your Social Presence to Reflect Your Expertise

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Does Your Presence Look Expert to You?

The Living Web

People speak and write a lot about personal branding. Online that breaks down to presence which in simple terms is reputation and focus. Both become enhanced when we highlight our expertise in a strategic and consistent fashion.

7 Tweaks to Your Social Presence to Reflect Your Expertise

Experts have authentic skills, knowledge, and experience. But some of us with those exact traits have more insight to making sure those traits shine through. Here are 7 ways to manage your online presence to be seen as the expert you are.

  • Walk your own path. Be the expert you are, not the expert someone else is. You can’t be compared. You’re not a fanboy or a fangirl. Differentiate what you offer from the start. Play to your strengths. Check your social networking profiles — at Facebook, SU, Twitter, etc. –to see that they underscore the same differentiated traits.
  • Focus on ONE thing Make that one thing particularly suited to you. Be a “go to” person for a specific problem. Then find a way to meet that need that no one else can do the same way you do.
  • Write expert answers and content — LinkedIn question and answers are a great place to do this. Seek out questions about your chosen point of expertise throughout the Internet and write thought, precise, actionable answers to them. Give information, examples, AND analysis. Occasionally offer evaluation, synthesis, or predictions.
  • Always know what’s happening with folks who need what you do. Join the sites and the offline groups where your potential customers and clients hang out. Refer and promote customers and clients whenever you can. Sometimes they’ll need a helping hand and they’ll remember the expert who helped them out.
  • Know your niche in detail. Get to be friends with Google Alerts and discovery services. Follow key terms around the Internet.
  • Be an expert at helping colleagues. Don’t be shy about sharing information. Talk with them. Visit and comment on their blogs. Ask them for an interview. Guest post now and then. Help others in visible ways — on your blog, on Twitter, through Facebook groups.
  • Go deep. (Don’t be shallow.) Find out what researchers are thinking so that you can offer the highest quality, relevant information and analysis. Add information to the conversation that no one has found.

An expert to most people is someone who more knowledge, skills, and experience than we do . . . never discount how much expertise you’ve gained or it’s value.

What else might we do to let our expertise show through?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Social Bookmarking to Manage Your Online Presence

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Are Your Bookmarks Working for You?

The Living Web

Are you reading more and enjoying it less? Are you voting up links that you haven’t read as a favor to a friend? Has the social part of social networking overtaken the information exchange that once was there? Do you race to read headlines and never finish the post that they name?

How many thousands of links do you suppose are recommended on SU, Digg, Reddit, and Delicious? After you put one there how often do you go back?

Chris Miller brought up a great point . . . Social Bookmarking: The Race to Be Famous or a Useful Tool?

Did you / will you go read Chris’ post or just take my word?

We don’t try to see every movie. We don’t try to read every book. We know that life isn’t long enough for that. But for some reason, many of us seem to think that we need 700 feeds and to bookmark them all for thousands of friends.

I’m learning that the best use of bookmarking sites — to manage my reputation and focus my efforts — is to capture information I want to keep.

I’m only capturing to a specific list of criteria.

  • I capture information that I know will be useful for a project or a proposal that I’m working on or about to write.
  • I capture blog posts that I hear myself quote in conversation, because I know I’ll want to find them again.
  • I capture well-written articles that change the way I think about my work or my life.
  • I capture anything that makes me think, “I wish I (wrote / thought of) that.”

You might note, I didn’t say that I capture things because they were written by a friend.

This change in my bookmarking behavior has made a significant difference in two critical aspects of my online presence.

Reputation Online reputation is made of everything we put under our name. Now what I bookmark naturally reflects me. When potential friends and clients visit my page they see something that is consistent with who I am, what I do, and what I’m working on.

But even more . . .

Focus I’m more focused on my business goals. I don’t spend time on information I don’t need. I find that I read more carefully what I choose to read. I also stop to think about why I bookmark what I capture and keep. Sometimes I only clip a quote. Sometimes I keep an entire piece. I even think about where I put things based on the people who use that list.

I’ll still vote up your work, if you call to my attention things that match my goals, values, and who I am.

What do your bookmarks say about you? How might you use them to manage your online presence more successfully?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

The Evolution of Dance — Bet You Laugh!

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Welcome to Saturday Night at the Movie on a Friday Night

I’d be so surprised if this doesn’t make you laugh!

Common experience is a social thing.

Social media takes many forms. When it’s done well it reminds us of our humanity. This one combines music and memories with laughter — combined in right measure you get viral.

We want to share great experiences.

Did you see yourself and people you know in this video?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Stopping Time

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No Crowds of People, No Streams of Words

Glasses-in-the-tree_by_Liz_Strauss

Early in the morning on Twitter yesterday, I wished I could stop time for an hour. Marc Pitman asked if I did, how I would know the hour was done. We didn’t explore the conversation much further. Networking with social media takes time.

Two hours later, I met up with Melissa Pierce and her camera woman, Sarah. We walked over to Belmont Harbor together. We were out to do an interview for Melissa’s movie, “Life in Perpetual Beta.” The walk to the scouted location took longer than we’d projected. We were still 100 yards away, when already we were discussing the time would need to leave.

I stood by a tree and talked to Melissa while Sarah worked on setting up the camera in the right spot. I took off my glasses and placed then in a nook that seemed carved out of the tree just for that. Unfortunately the sun hadn’t waited our delay in arriving. We decided that the location had to be rethought. We ended up some 30 yards closer to the water, facing the opposite direction to meet the sunlight at that time of day.

The delays and the extra time might have compressed our dispositions as they might have compressed our time line. But out by the harbor we were drowning in a luxury of space — beautiful views of trees, city, and sky . . . and so much green, green grass with no crowds of people and no relentless streams of words.

As I look back it seemed we had all of the time in the world.

Walking back from the location, a guy on a bike turned a corner and almost hurt himself and us . . . He wasn’t really nice.

I guess we knew then that time wasn’t stopped any longer.
But it sure had been fine when it was.

This weekend, I’m going to stop time again.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Social Networking: Online Tridimensional Conversation

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Focus and Consistency

My days are spent talking and writing about how conversations work to build relationships. I look for similaries and differences between conversations online and offline, so that folks I work with can communicate more effectively. When we talk an analogy I often use is the Star Trek Tridimensional chessboard. It’s the multi-level nature of online talk that’s so powerful and easy to overlook.

Online Tridimensional Conversation

In an office in the offline world, the only audience is limited, visible, and apparent — much like only one level on the 3-d chess set. Online, we might direct our words to a small group, but the potential audience crosses to people who who only watch, people who have keyword alerts, and people who check in at other points in time. Our words go much further.

A whole Internet of people over a whole future could eavesdrop. What’s the impact of that? Here are three ways to focus your Online Tridimensional Conversation so that your relationship building is successful.

  • Think about the one idea or image you want folks to have of you. What’s the focus of your online brand? Make sure that’s the center of your profiles on social networking sites.
  • Review your recent comments and entries at blogs you visit and your Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk, and other accounts as if you’re looking at someone you don’t know. Do your answers support the brand you’re building? Not every word needs to push your brand, but none should discount it.
  • Link to people who value what you do. Does your network reflect both your counterparts and your clients?

To test what I mean, try this. List three people whose work you know. Consider what each person is about. Then visit their Twitter profile page. Look down the conversational stream. Does it show what you thought it would? Is the difference good? Imagine if the profile page was all you knew of each person.

It’s the multi-dimensional nature of online communication that makes apps like Twitter so powerful. Be authentic, interested, and interesting, but also look to be consistent. If everywhere I look, I see the same you. My picture of you will form more quickly and be far more clear. When someone asks if I know anyone who does what you do, you’re likely to get a referral.

Are you making the most of your conversation? Do you know more ways to do so?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
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Learn more about online conversation.

Social Media: Great Marketing Is . . .

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Tuesday Open Comments Night, The Virtual Conference, and The Blog-to Show

The Living Web

This weekend we had an event that some folks have been calling a success and a few have written me to say what a great marketing idea was. Other things I do have been called masterful marketing too. None of them started out as such.

We all know that promoting an event or a blog looks easier than it is to do. Word of Mouth only works when folks want to talk. I learned that the same way everyone does by inventing great marketing ideas that didn’t take off.

I quit trying to market. Here’s what I recommend instead:

  • Get to know people who stick around and who pass on the word when something cool is going on.
  • Find ways to invest more in the folks who invest more in you and your blog.
  • Make a stage where your readers can connect and show everyone what they know.
  • Celebrate all of the above with as much creativity, fun, and dignity as you can think up!

Open Comment Night started because, on a Tuesday afternoon, I thought it would be fun if we all could just talk. The Virtual Conference for SOBCon07 was invented as a way to include folks who couldn’t come to the first SOBCon. The 25-Words project was a way to share the experience of how limiting our words can change how we think. The Blog-to Show happened because folks said they needed a way to talk about their blogs.

All of those got called “great marketing.” If that’s so then,

Great marketing is connecting and celebrating readers and customers.

Let’s talk about how to help readers and customers connect with each other.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!