Successful Blog

What Do You Want to Contribute as Social Media Community Member?

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Building a Community

The irony is that so many of us work alone, yet we build communities. That thought struck me boldly when this week I heard three people say how much they were looking forward to working in an office with people.

That got me thinking that an essential part of knowing how to built a community is understanding what it means to be a community member.

On Monday when we were talking about how social media can help us build a better business, Richard Reeve beautifully wrote this post for me. He described his contribution to a community “barn raising.” He said …

When asked to come and help raise these boards, it means:

    1. I realize that I need to bring along a team of five other folks I can count on to handle our given task. Wood is heavy.

    2. Ask clear questions not only of what our team will do, but how it will fit into the overall scheme of the raising, so as to maximize the remaining sunlight.

    3. While staying focused on the assigned task, realize that things seldom go as planned, so keep a flexible attitude and be willing to lend a hand when and where needed. The overall goal is more important than the parts.

    4. The only result that matters, that every participant can take pride in the resulting structure…

    oh…and:
    5. Bring your own tool belt. Who has fifty hammers?

Who wouldn’t want those values and motives in every community member … ?

When a business, a non-profit, or an organization builds a space for us and makes all of the decisions without us, it’s like moving into a house that doesn’t have any of our stuff. We don’t own it. We’ll always be visitors. If that business, non-profit, or organization lets us contribute as the house goes up, we become a part of the process and feel ownership. Of course we don’t have time to contribute building to every space in which we participate, but when we do, it changes the the way experience that community in profoundly personal way.

What do you want to contribute as a social media community member? What can we expect from community members before we start?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

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

The Mic Is On: We’re Talking About How to Get Blog Comments

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It’s Like Open Mic Only Different

The Mic Is On

Here’s how it works.

It’s like any rambling conversation. Don’t try to read it all. Jump in whenever you get here. Just go to the end and start talking. EVERYONE is WELCOME.
The rules are simple — be nice.

There are always first timers and new things to talk about. It’s sort of half “Cheers” part “Friends” and part video game. You don’t know how much fun it is until you try it.

How Do You Get People Talking on Your Blog?

Social media. Even the name means more than one. It’s about conversation. Of course we want people talking on our blogs. How do we get people talking on our blogs?

  • Is it the way we write?
  • Is it the length of the posts?
  • Is it the questions we ask?
  • Is it the topics we choose?
  • What’s the secret? Is there one?

And, whatever else comes up, including THE EVER POPULAR, Basil the code-writing donkey . . . and flamenco dancing (because we always get off topic, anyway.)

Oh, and bring example links.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
image: sxc.hu
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What is Tuesday Open Comment Night?

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