Successful Blog

Bloggy Question 84: Social Networking and Reputation — What Should Doostang Do?

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Reputation Management

For those who come looking for a short, thoughtful read, a blogging life discussion, or a way to gradually ease back into the week. I offer this bloggy life question. . . .

It’s a real-life question tonight. . . .

In March, I wrote a post in response to a bad experience at an “elite” social networking site. I’ll wait while you check it out. . . .

In a day or so, two things happened.

  1. My post made the first page of Google for the keyword doostang.

  2. My LinkedIn account showed that someone from Doostang had visited my profile. No one attempted to contact me.

Mid-May that post started to draw 5% to 10% of my daily search traffic. As you can see by the comments there, it can’t be helping Doostang’s elite self-defined profile as social network for top tier talent.

This week, I saw traffic from The New York Times article by Andrew Ross Sorkin, called Social Networking on Wall Street. The comments were less than favorable. Someone named John had left a link to my original article there.

I’ll wait while you take a look.

Doostang just launched a new look targeted at college elite.

If Doostang asked for your advice, what would you tell them to do?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

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Social Networking: Make It Imperfectly Human for Me

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New York City, Seth Godin, Ann Michael, and a Paper Flower

Favorite Paper Flower by Liz Strauss

In August 1998, I was wandering the streets in New York City. Later that evening our company sales conference would start. As I turned the corner somewhere near 33rd and Park, I was enjoying the view in a florist window. I walked two stores past. Stopped. Something I’d noticed had taken me. I literally backed up ten paces and went into that flower store. I came out grinning.

What had stopped me were handmade paper flowers — taller than I am. I had found a new friend for my presentation the next day. I left the florist with giant flower with a stem down to my ankles and greeted New York like a giant kid with a huge balloon. The flower has shared my office ever since. On occasion, it even sits in my desk chair.

In 2006, I returned to that same New York neighborhood for a Seth Godin seminar. I met Ann Michael. there for the first time. As we walked around the city, I’m sure I told her the story of that flower and the people who opened doors for me — the strange tall woman with a bag in one hand and unhelpful flower friend in the other.

I keep a white silk flower in a blue glass vase on a shelf in my living room. I bought the vase from a catalog. Then I bought the flower. They look stunning together, but they have no story.

This morning at Seth’s Blog something he said in May made me stop, like I did that day in New York City.

If you want to get noticed, don’t be so polished. . . . When in doubt, scrawl make it human.

White rose in a blue vase by Liz Strauss

I looked around for examples in my life — and I found two flowers . . .

That white rose in the blue vase is elegant, but that that paper flower connects me to people — people who’ve seen it in my office or heard the tale of how it got bought. That paper flower calls up so many stories, it could fuel a blog.

When you make a blog, a social network, or product for me, could you make it imperfectly human? It’s human touch that lingers and connects.

What do you have that’s like my paper flower?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
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Images: Liz Strauss

Social Networking: Do You Need a Memory Upgrad . . . ?

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What Was the Question, Again?

Personal Identity logo

Someone writes a comment, sends you IM, or walks up to you at a trade show and makes it clear he’s met you before. He’s acting like you’re the best of friends. But you have no clue who the guy is.

Been there . . .

Do You Need a Memory Upgrade?

Does that mean we’re losing our memory? It’s probably not memory loss, but it could be sure sign that we need a memory upgrade. Forgetting people and information can be a seriously liability to success these days.

Relationships are build on experiences that went before. We have to remember the experiences for the relationships to move forward in a good way.

Here are three ways we forget . . .

  1. Fading: We meet someone and forget his or her name seconds later. That’s called fading. We didn’t move the name from short-term memory into “working memory.”

  2. Interference: New information can interfere with old information. Old information can also mix up with new information.

  3. Distortion: When we have vivid recollections of events only to find later that the events happened differently.

Ten Ways to Upgrade Your Personal Memory Bank

We all have the power to rebuild our memories by doing simple things when we’re learning new information.

  1. Think about what you’re learning and be sure you’re clear on it. Try to restate when you know in other words

  2. Associate new information with something you already know. “Oh Joe, you’re a friend of Joanna Young! So is Bob Hruzek!”

  3. Being fully present when you lrarn new things to keep old information separate from what you’re learning. Don’t be playing on Twitter the first time you use Plurk.

  4. Break big blocks of information into smaller chunks. Practice one point on this list until you have it as a habit.

  5. Involve as many modalities — visual, auditory, kinesthetic — as you can. See things. Talk about them. Touch them while you’re at it.

  6. Overlearn things by teaching someone else.

  7. Apply the information quickly. When you’re introduced, use the person’s name immediately.

  8. Repeat things that you think you might forget. 2+3=5, 2+3=5, 2+3=5 . . .

  9. Debrief and retell important events with people who were part of them as soon as you are able. That was a fabulous podcast! Let’s debrief on what happened!

  10. Blog your experience. Last night I met Eric Benderoff at the blogger meetup hosted by Gas Pedal.

Doing what you can to “defrag” your brain is also a great idea.

First impressions are important as ever, but they sure lose their glow if on the second go we can’t place the person we met.

Having a great memory is powerful way to demonstrate we value relationships. Everyone likes to be remembered. Nothing beats a second meeting that easily moves the first meeting forward. People respond when we invest in them — they invest back.

How do you keep your memory fast and functioning?

Click for more information on Memory and Information Processing.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
Buy the ebook and find out the secret.

Social Networking: It's Not Who You Know — It's Whether You Know Yourself

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The Living Web

Networking, social networking, friending, and making connections, the time it takes to keep up with such things can be tremendous and exhausting. It’s hard to reply to every bit of conversation and get some work done. I’m also left wondering about Stever Robbins’ question “Social media confuses relationships and databases.” He draws a possible life scenario based on just such connections.

“I have over 1,000 Facebook friends!” one Twitterer proudly exclaimed.

Why is that a good thing? Well, when your car breaks down, you can call 1,000 people who you know nothing about and cry “Help! I’m stranded by the side of the road all alone.”

One of those 1,000 people is George. George “friended” you because you remind him so much of his first romance. The romance ended badly, but George is determined to recapture the love of his life. “I’ll be glad to pick you up,” e-mails George. “What kind of flowers are your favorite?”

1000 friends who don’t really know me, but I can say that I know them.

Is that worth something? Not usually.

We have to know each other for the “friend” part to work or network like it’s supposed to.

It’s not who knows our names or the bits we write in our profile. That’s not enough for someone to know what we need or how to refer us. It’s who knows us, who knows what unique and valuable things each one of us offers that no other one of us does. It’s who knows how something, everything, will be different — better — because we were a part of it.

For someone to know our unique value, we have to know that ourselves.

So you see, it’s not who know, but whether you know yourself.

What different and unique things do you bring to the table?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
The first eBook is coming . . .

Lasting Relationships and 15-Second Friends — Are You a Solo in a Social Media World?

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15 Days, 15 Seconds

relationships button

At dinner last Friday with Beth Kanter, the scholar of social media and tech for nonprofits, used the phrase “a solo in a social media world.” That phrase has stuck with me. I wonder whether social media is changing the relationships I have with my friends?

Beth’s statement came at about the same time that Maki sent me to a study that explains the nature of relationships.

Some friendships are short and fleeting, while others may last years. Although a wide variety of factors go into determining the strength of our relationships, the long-lasting ones seem to share a number of the same characteristics, according to a recent study of a cell phone network.

Lasting relationships have these things in common. The most important of these is reciprocity.

  • The more often we connect with friends in a 15-day period, the stronger our relationship will be.
  • Most strong ties between two people lasted for just one 15-day interval. Only 20% of relationships lasted longer than a year.
  • The strongest factor in lasting relationships is reciprocity — returning a phone call.

It’s a simple thing. When someone calls, writes, comments, links, or asks for help, do we respond or do we let it ride? Lasting relationships last because we are persistent in nurturing them.

By knowing the characteristics of persistence, the researchers could look at the features of the network for the first 15 days, and predict what the network would look like in the future.

Now we have access to a world of online and offline relationships, but we still only have so much time for reciprocity. Does social networking put us in danger of making vast communities of fast 15-day friends — folks we meet today and hardly know in a year? Is social networking causing us to neglect the reciprocity that made our relationships last?

Social networking offers us access to start and spark incredible new relationships. People connect, relate, and do business, who would otherwise never have met. Together we accomplish, build, create, innovate, solve, fix, and nurture. Some of us even fall in love and get married. Social media can have powerful, important, and lasting effects.

BUT, a 140 character touch within 15 seconds isn’t the same as a conversation within 15 days.

Friday, Rick Wolff said, “Someday, somebody’s REALLY going to plead for help on Twitter. . . . ”

Will that tweet be recognized?

Lasting Relationships in a Social Networking World — is that the new balance we have to find?

I don’t want to be a solo in a social media world.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
Check out Models and Masterminds too

Drafting – Do Your Social Media Profiles Raise Your Net Worth?

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Introductions in Person and in Text

The Living Web

I’m on a quest to organize my social networking. I don’t want a model — one that balances relationship and connection to ensure high return on the time I invest — not a dashboard that tracks everywhere I’ve been. To that end, a modified version of the writing process is working well.

In a recent discussion about networking, we talked about how to introduce ourselves. We agreed that it helps to know about the person or the situation that brought us to the introduction. It seems obvious I would introduce myself in one way to a client and in another way to my son’s newest friend. Introductions are relational and situational.

We know to adapt our personal introductions when we’re face to face, but forget online. Text looks like text.

Do Your Social Media Profiles Raise Your Net Worth?

What’s the first thing we do when someone we don’t know asks us to connect? It makes sense to go to their page to find out who they are. Unfortunately, most of us wrote our profiles before we knew anything about the people on the site. Have your read your profile the day you signed up? Have you thought about the people who have?

The second step in the writing process is Drafting. I’m using this stage to define settting up our presence on a social site. Possibly the most important thing we do in developing a successful presence is define who we are on our profile page. The profile pages serves as an introduction for anyone who wants to know who they’re about to meet or who they’ve just met. Does your profile raise your profile

Use these tips to get more mileage from your social media profile pages.

  1. Research the culture of site.
    • Form a description of the primary group and secondary groups who use the site.
    • Make note of the groups they form and the kind of activities and information they share.
    • Most importantly, read their profile pages to learn the customs and language of the site. Read how your heroes and friends describe themselves and decide whether what they’re doing works.
  2. Write an authentic, but targeted profile for that social group. Think about how you would introduce yourself if you were in the same room.
    • Choose a picture that reflects the spirit of the social group. Including a picture makes your profile more memorable. Including the right picture makes that memory good.
    • Write formally or informally to match the culture and your goals. If you could only say one thing to this group, what would it be? Underscore that idea in the information you choose. Limit the extraneous details that might distract someone from seeing your most important thought.
    • Check the amount and type of information you share against the profiles that impressed you most. It naturally follows that the folks you want to connect with will find the same things important.
  3. Check back often to review your profile to be sure it’s still relevant and up-to-date.

A great social media profile can open doors and make connections that we might have missed had we done less. Like the about page on a blog, it represents us when we’re not there. Time spent to communicate with the audience who visits is a high-return investment.

Have you checked whether your social media profiles add to your net worth?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Need help with your profile? Ask Liz!!
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