Today’s post is more “business-y” than most of the ones prior. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve recently attended SOBCon and my brain is still processing the technology side of what I do for many hours of my day, but my mind keeps ruminating on the mechanics/motivations we use when operating in the digital sphere. Increasingly, I am called to define who Women With Drive Foundation is through the lens of how we appear in the space. As we add more communities to those we serve, we must replicate ourselves across strata in a cohesive manner. The line between brand identity and personal identity gets blurrier every day. In addition, as a whole, brands are morphing into “people,” and individuals are becoming “brands.”

Knowledge of the tools and methods for spreading a message is central to reaching people in the current paradigm of social media. But more than the traditional “push” model of broadcast from an All Knowing and Monolithic Company, understanding the dynamism and reality of a response from The Consumers With Opposable Thumbs and An Opinion is a sticky wicket for most.

Second only to “how much is a social media campaign going to cost?” the question of how to control their brand ranks high on most companies’ list of priorities when it comes to the social space.

The short answer? You can’t.

Just ask McDonald’s. Or Nestlé. Or the unfortunately named BBQ joint, Boners (the last is an amazing deconstruction by Scott Stratten @unmarketing on twitter. NOTE: Some swearing in the screenshots from facebook).

Control also seems to be at the fore of my awareness lately. Perhaps it’s something I need to hear. Regardless, I find that when I write about something, I learn more about the topic at hand through the act of distilling my thoughts and committing them to words.

Control of a brand has increasingly occupied the collective consciousness of companies and businesses everywhere with the advent of social media. Paramount on the list of concerns from companies hesitant to enter the space: “What if someone says something negative about me on my facebook page/on twitter?”

Then they will.

The conversation is happening whether or not you are part of it. Better to understand what is being said and to engage based on where your public is than to remain on the dialogue sidelines. By addressing any comment in a transparent, honest manner, your brand is strengthened and your effectiveness is heightened as a result.

Control always comes back to one thing: we cannot control that which goes on around us. We, as individuals or as brands, can only control that which is within. A common response from me in regards to controlling your brand? “The best defense is a good offense.”

More than just flooding the space with positive information about your brand, the “best offense” in this case is to be crystal clear about who you are as a brand. …Listen to what’s going on before you enter the fray. Are you relevant? Can you add to the discussion? Would you listen to you?

Further, from the janitor to the CEO, your brand has to be saturated with “you-ness.” What do you stand for? If you were a person, who would you be? Can your brand identity be communicated clearly, concisely and with emotion?

The answers to these questions form the foundation of why people buy what you have to sell. They identify with you. They transfer their emotions to your product or service. Your essence is a representative component of who they are as an individual, to a certain extent.

If you, as a business, are secure about your brand, then detractors won’t have any power against it. Anything that shows up in the space that conflicts with what you’ve established your brand to be will fall on deaf ears. The power of social media is about the network. Your public/fans will act as brand advocates against any naysayer.

The control of your brand is within your hands. Tend your own garden. Know thyself. Be secure enough to relinquish control and the power of that confidence transcends detractors. That’s how you control your brand.

What has been successful for you? What have you learned in the social space?

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Molly Cantrell-Kraig is a woman with drive. Possessing an innate sense of purpose and a pragmatic, solution-based approach to empowering people, she fused these two traits in order to establish Women With Drive Foundation. Based upon its founder’s personal history, Women With Drive Foundation is a means through which Cantrell-Kraig may effect change on both a micro and macro level. By providing women with something as essential as personal transportation in order to transition them from poverty to prosperity, she, through Women With Drive Foundation, seeks to empower women to help them help themselves. Through this action, the individual applicant benefits, as does society as a whole. Follow Molly on twitter as @mckra1g or @WWDr1ve (Women With Drive Foundation) or “Like” them on facebook.

and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

You’ve created a blog, made a few posts, maybe even installed some ads for the extra income. You’re locked and loaded to take the Internet by storm. But where are all the comments? Where is the dedicated audience breathlessly hanging on your every word?

Don’t worry, you don’t have to succumb to the tumbleweeds just yet. If you’re eager for more fans, here are five steps to increasing your blog comments.

1. Comment On Other Blogs

Before anything else, you need to establish your presence in your field. This is most easily achieved by commenting on other blogs and making a name for yourself as someone worth listening to. By making smart, funny and helpful comments on other blogs, readers will be interested enough to follow you back to your own.

2: Respond To Comments

No one likes to be ignored, and if your commenters feel like they’re shouting into an empty void, they become much less likely to comment in the future. To gain (and keep) an active community of followers, you’ll need to make a habit of responding to their comments. Answer their questions. Suggest new tech. Outsource their problems if you have to. Regardless of the content, just make sure their comments don’t go unnoticed. They’ve taken time out of their lives to comment on your blog; the least you can do is offer them the same courtesy.

3. Create A Community

It’s basic psychology: people like to belong. Take advantage of this by turning your commenting pool into a community – a place with its own language and lingo, a place where people can build friendships and swap stories without feeling out of place. If something happens to one of your followers, spotlight it. If you think two people would really get along, mention it. Make introductions among your followers. Create memes. Reference inside jokes in your updates. When new visitors feel the urge to “fit in,” you’ll know you’re doing it right.

4. Ask For Opinions

The best thing that can happen to any blog is a lively debate, so inspire some passion by soliciting the opinions of your followers. Make polls, ask leading questions (“what do you guys think?”) and encourage the most vocal of your readers. Don’t be afraid to touch on scandalous topics, because those often create the most heated (and long-running) exchanges.

5. Be Interesting

What makes you comment on a blog? What pushes you from a mere reader to an active participant in an exchange of ideas? It wouldn’t have happened if the blog wasn’t interesting or engaging enough to merit your response.

To this extent, if you want comments, you just have to be a good blogger. You need to be active, interesting, and well-informed in your field. Your post should be entertaining and relevant. Your comments should be smart and useful.

Simply put, if you want more comments on your blog, make your blog worth commenting on.
—-

Thank you, Virginia! Engagement is always a noble quest.

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

When I was in fifth grade, my mom sent me to school with my lunch in one of those silver ice cream bags from the grocery store. I was already “the new kid,” so this cemented me as “Silver Bag.” It started as a put-down, but grew into a term of endearment. I was weird, but weird-good.

As a new person encounters you and your business, do they think you’re weird? Do you allow them to see your weirdness?

It can be a secret weapon that throws people off-guard, especially in a purchasing situation. When people approach a new company, or new business contact, they try to put it in a bucket they’re familiar with. If you refuse to be categorized easily, their brains will keep processing you, trying to put a button in you.

Seth Godin’s book “We Are All Weird,” seems almost contradictory…if everyone’s weird, how does weirdness get recognized? And yet we are in a time now where off-beat is celebrated. How else to explain the rise of Nyan Cat?

One of the defining characteristics of Instagram is that you can do odd things to your photographs. They are also weird because they don’t have a web component—it is strictly a mobile application (we’ll see if Facebook removes some of that weirdness, I hope not).

Most businesses actively try to suppress their weirdness; I say “let it out!” Your target audience will have a much easier time finding you if they can see and relate to your particular brand of strange.

_____

_____

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

In my experience, having bouts of sadness during tough times has become a learning experience, providing me with wisdom and strength. Life can take you in different directions and the end game isn’t always certain even when we feel that we are in control. The important thing to realize is that there is always a choice, to stand up and fight through another day instead of letting the adversities to pin you down and drowning in sorrow and despair.

So, how to overcome these challenges in life and stay resilient? For me, two things have helped me a great deal i.e. Exercising and Writing (AKA Blogging).

Mental and Emotional Toughness:

You might have heard of the expression “life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we respond to it”. It’s true that “how we manage our lives” can make a huge difference to our lives. It is how we perceive problems that dictate the outcome in the end. Avoiding the feeling of being victimized can help you overcome adversity and triumph against your problems, when you feel strong both mentally and physically you will be able to view your situation with a sense of power and confidence.

Working out to lose weight can help overcome negative feelings

Staying in shape or losing weight through training can help you become more agile and in control of your physical well-being. When you are out of shape you might end up with a lot of habits that can hinder your wellness and make you feel weak and helpless. By becoming active and engaging in active lifestyle, you can start to empower yourself and gain the resolution that you may have lost.

How blogging can help overcome negative feelings

You have to understand that even at a standstill, life continues to progress, and you have to treat your body and mind as such, even when you are facing hundreds of problems, you’ve got to keep going. Writing can help take the edge off negative thoughts and creates an outlet for expression and problem solving. When you blog, you can let off some steam and help you gain a clear perspective of challenges that you may be facing.

Writing and Exercising to empower yourself

Writing and exercise is a means of caring for your inner being. Exercise and fitness encourage you to become stronger in life by honing your physicality. When you start working out, you are actually making the decision to do something good for yourself and nurturing your spirit by improving your overall physical state. The same can be said when you express yourself through writing. Sharing your positive (or negative) thoughts with others and getting their response can inspire you to maintain a good outlook towards your life and seek the solutions that may have evaded you in the past.

Getting involved in positive activities like writing or exercising will result in a healthy mental paradigm. Taking responsibility of your physical and mental well-being is imperative, so that you can perform better in life and develop a sense of self that is empowered and understands your true worth. Regular exercise is not just a bid to stay fit; it is a step towards more control and empowerment in your life. These are the principles that you will see getting highlighted at diet or weight loss programs like Medifast and Nutrisystem.

When you are taking good care of your mind and body, and spending time taking care of your personal well-being you will notice that everything else in your life will start to fall into place.

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Arba Hana is a young online entrepreneur, she writes for a discount websites sharing medifast coupons and nutrisystem discount code. There are other coupon codes like medifast or nutrisystem as well.

So, stop what you are doing for a minute at work and ask yourself a very simple question, is my company doing all it can to promote itself? If the answer is no, now is the time to speak up.

One of the first things you may hear from upper management is that we’re promoting the company within our budgetary means, aka we are spending as little money as possible to get our brand out there.

While it is understandable in a troubling economy that small businesses especially will want to refrain from large promotional expenditures, this would actually be a good time to be using promotional items in order to improve the company’s brand recognition.

Keep in mind that many other businesses are also probably thinking that everyone else is not spending money, so why should we? The simple response to that line of thinking is that while other businesses are holding back on promoting their companies, now is the time to strike.

Whether you are an administrative assistant, an upper management employee or even a company intern, don’t be afraid to offer your two cents as to how your employer can better promote the business.

Among the simple ways to do this include:

• Social media – I’m still amazed when I peruse various sites on Facebook and Twitter,the two biggest venues for social media, and see that companies are missing the boat. I often hear that management feels it cannot get a true reading of return on investment (ROI) on its social media efforts, so the decision is made to bail on any additional SM work. The bottom line is that social media is essentially free, a great way to promote one’s company, allowing companies to appear as an authority in their respective industry by sharing worthwhile information for current and potential customers. Whether you are active or not in your company’s social media efforts, visit the company Facebook, Twitter, Google+ pages and any other sites your employer is on. Question the individual or individuals in charge of such sites if the pages are not updated regularly;
• Community events – Getting involved in the local community is a great way with which to promote your business. Such opportunities are not only a way to build up goodwill within the community, but also to network with other local businesses. In the event you run a local cell phone business, get together with your area realtor, florist, eateries etc. to promote each others businesses. The old adage of scratching one’s back while they scratch yours is very true. Before you know it, you will have community members coming to you for business; hopefully you are returning the favor. Small businesses in a local community tend to stick together and patronize one another in order to keep the bigger corporations out, so be a leader in this area;
• Use bumper stickers, buttons, business cards, T-shirts, etc. – These are great means by which to spread the word about your company. Imagine the potential response rate your small business could get around town if just your employees alone were sporting bumper stickers on their cars promoting your Web site, wearing T-shirts to the local stores and more. It may sound hokey to some, but making up such items is relatively cheap and can be very beneficial to those not aware of what your company does;
• Buy local air or print time – This means to promote your company obviously involves some funding, but it can be money well spent. Even though many people tune out radio/TV commercials, and even though many newspapers are finding their numbers down these days, there still is a sizable audience that turns to these venues for news and information. Target the most effective times to promote your business, such as radio ads in drive time and coupons in the Sunday paper.

There are a variety of other ways you can employ in order to promote your small business, some of which may or may not get the owner’s approval. Remember too to never overlook your community’s Chamber of Commerce.

The bottom line is ALL employees need to be thinking about ways to better promote the companies they work for.

Remember, each and every employee has a vested interest in the company doing well, so promotion is everyone’s job.

Dave Thomas, who discusses subjects such as online marketing, writes extensively for San Diego-based Business.com.

Video marketing has become an extremely popular approach for generating interest in services or products offered online. With so many affordable tools in the marketplace, videos can be easily produced and distributed online for less than what other mediums (like TV) would cost.

Consequently, utilizing the ever-so-popular video testimonial has become a common approach to connecting with prospective customers. And the proliferation of video cameras installed on most computers manufactured within the last few years has made it easy for people to record their own videos. Businesses are starting to leverage this recent technology trend to gather raw video submissions from customers – without the enormous costs of doing an on-site or commercial production.

But preparing your customers to record a proper video is critical for gathering useful video clips that can be displayed as effective testimonials on your website, blog, etc. Here are some tips to ensure you get the most out of your customers when they hit that record button.

Don’t be afraid to give them some direction

A good testimonial doesn’t have to rely on fancy scripts to get the point across. But it can be to your company’s benefit to provide customers with some direction.

• Consider giving them talking points, however broad they may be;
• Encourage them to focus on their overall customer satisfaction, the ease of working with your business, or whatever other angle you want your testimonial video to take;
• Encourage them to talk about any unique experiences or stories that reflect well on your company;
• Don’t be afraid to ask them to talk about certain aspects of their experience that other customers aren’t likely to share.

Explain the real value of their testimonial

You’re probably seeking testimonials for one reason: they’re valuable to your business and can lead to more sales. Don’t sidestep this goal – let your customers know up-front how integral their relationship is to your business, and explain that their testimonial can be a big boost to your business’s future.

You don’t have to encourage them to exaggerate or lie for your benefit, but by understanding the value they have within your company, they will feel empowered to help – particularly if they are satisfied.

Strike while the iron is still hot

Timing is everything. The best time to approach your customers about recording a video testimonial is while they’re enjoying the benefits provided by your product or service.

If they’re actively enjoying your product or using your service, you have a better chance of getting them to agree to record a quick video than you will if you wait until their customer experience is weeks or months old.

—-

Thank you, Sean, for adding to the conversation! Killer testimonials do so much.

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

I don’t play with every new social media tool. In fact, I ignore most of them. I’ve decided my view is that tools are vehicles for problem solving or uniquely rare opportunities for new learning. The former I go looking for when I need them. The latter show up without warning, but are few and far between.

Once the decision is made to participate, I’m in with “both feet.” I’m a saturation learner, always have been. It shows in my 14+ years of dance training, my 8 years of theater, my 35 years of education and educational publishing … even in the way I took on blogging.

I’ve been exploring EmpireAvenue for one year now. The game and the sociology caught my attention and offered me something new worth exploring.

The premise of Empire Avenue is that a player buys shares in other players’ participation on social media platforms across the Internet. So at first what fascinated me was the idea of getting a more rounded picture of the people who were playing the game and what was driving them — and also what would drive me.

Soon enough the game pushed the question of reciprocity.

The way the game is engineered, the currency I spend to purchase shares in your activity doesn’t flows through to you at much less. Basically, if I buy 100 shares in you, you’ll get a deposit worth about 10 of your shares. So complete reciprocity — for you to buy 100 shares back — is nearly impossible, even if my share price is WAY less than yours.

Yet some folks hold an unrealistic expectation of reciprocity — one that hurts their own success.
Their expectations seem to me out of balance with their best interests.

The reason I invest in your activity is because your shares earn value and deliver daily dividends. If I buy you I grow and pass on that growth to my shareholders. It’s a perk if you buy my shares too.

If I wait for every winner in the game to come back to buy equal shares in me — some never will. Their share price will get higher as they grow. I’ll lose the dividends I could have been earned while I waited for some transactional reciprocity.

Who loses in that scenario?
Me … not the winners I believe are ignoring me.

It works that way in everything. If I invest in you as a person, it’s because you’re growing, you add value by who you are and what you’re doing. By investing in you I grow too!

Reciprocity is relational. Not transactional.

Plant a seed.
Watch it grow.
Enjoy the flower.

Reciprocity is the flower — color, beauty, fragrance.
It’s not “I cared for the seed. Now the seed cares for me.”
The act of helping the seed grow provided a far more powerful payoff.

It’s the same with people.

An unforgiving belief in transactional reciprocity is a skewed form of not seeing the whole picture.
When we close our eyes to seeing all point of view, we defeat ourselves — or as my mom would say “Cut off own nose to spite our face.”

BigStock: Girl smelling Flower

And you can’t smell the flowers without a nose.

So if you’ve been hoarding your attention because someone’s not paying attention to you … could be you’re at the losing end of that idea. Look for the flower in the attention you’re giving. Not the seed of attention that you think you’re owed.

Build relational reciprocity by investing in what you’re willing to grow.

Choose your winners wisely and invest in them unconditionally.
Value the resources you’re investing dearly. Then offer them without fear.
For the more important, don’t hold back the blood, sweat, and tears.

See the flowers in the seeds even before you start helping them grow.
And keep your nose.

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

by
Ann Smarty

click photo for source

A System to Save Time

When you run a blog, there are some things you can’t help but spend a ton of time and energy on. Coming up with new posts, fiddling with the template, talking to readers, publishing videos of funny cats you found on YouTube and just had to share…these are the important elements in the life of the average blogger.

Certainly, the last thing you want to waste time on is organization. Yet every time most of us set out to organize things, we tend to spend all day on the process. Getting sorted turns out to be more of a hassle and hour eater than remaining in a frazzles state of chaos!

This is one of the biggest traps that bloggers tend to fall into. What you need a system in place for organizing things in a timely matter. Here are some tips to help you do just that.

1. Create a List - When you have a list to follow, you will be less tempted to veer off into unnecessary or unimportant areas in the name of organization. This will keep you from wasting time you don’t have where it isn’t needed. Try to keep your list of goals sorted from most to least important, and never move from one item to the next until you have completed that goal.
2. Set A Timer – Calculate how much time you can dedicated to fulfilling that list, and stick to that time. If there is too much to do, break it up over the course of several days or even weeks, and follow by that schedule. You don’t have to get everything done at once, after all.
3. Don’t Allow Distractions – I am a huge procrastinator. I can’t help it, as I tend to have the attention span of a fruit fly. Sometimes I start doing something else without even realizing I have taken my eyes off my work. A simple way to avoid this while organizing is by using a program like LeechBlock or StayFocused. This will keep you from surfing the web and getting distracted while you work.
4. Have Background Noise – This might sound a little silly, but I have always found it much easier to remain focused if I have the right kind of background music playing while I do my task. Whether it is better for most to have something classical in the background for its gentle tones and lack of lyrics, anything that motivates you and lets you think can work. Try a playlist site, like 8Tracks or Last.fm.
   

   
   

5. Keep Things Organized – The easiest way to keep from wasting time on organization is by keeping things organized. Spending a few minutes here and there making sure everything is as it should be has the same effect as spending fifteen minutes cleaning an area a day. It keeps it from getting overwhelming.

Three Tools For Organization

• Evernote – Keep track of clippings from anywhere on the web, and view it in your browser, on your desktop or on your phone. Easy to use, and it can save small bits of text, pictures, links or full pages.
• HootSuite – Monitor all of your social media accounts, stats and followers in one place. This is a social media dashboard that can save a lot of time and effort.
• Pocket – Originally called Read It Later, this is a plugin that works by saving pages you wanted to read for when you aren’t busy. You can access it through your browser, on your phone or any media device connected to the web.

You don’t have to spend a whole lot of time organizing your blog. It just takes a bit of planning and thought, and you will be done quicker than you thought possible.

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

Every morning for almost a year, I’ve been publishing photos of the sunrise over Lake Michigan. Sometimes when the afternoon is worth a photo graph I also publish a photo of the sunset too. On Twitter I greet my friends with a “Good morning, Twitterville” and a kind word. I try to check in with them via Facebook and Linkedin too.

Many of my online social interactions help me keep my day moving … as I transition from one task to another, it helps me to stop by Twitter to give my friends a shout out or to take time for a short read and a retweet. Being social online is a natural part of how my day goes by when it’s just me and the keys.

But when I’m with people, I like to be with people.
I find it hard to be where I am, if I’m looking at at screen.

What I Learned, Lost, and Earned by Being Off Social Media for 10 Days

The theme of #SOBCon this year was Creating and Leveraging Opportunity. I challenged myself to do what I believed.

• Be balanced. In this case, have my head and heart in the same place as my mind and my feet.
• Go deep. Be a saturation learner. Meet people where they “live and think.”
• Build a business not a birthday cake. Allow for the fact that a business is not a closed system — that flexibility is a key component to strategy.
• People ARE the opportunity. Buildings, companies, products, technology do not have the stability or the reach of human-to-human relationships.

Last Wed., May 2, I left home with a suitcase to head downtown in preparation for our annual #SOBCon event in Chicago from there I would be speaking at CMSExpo in Evanston to arrive back home on May 10th. But things being what they are it ended up that I was hardly around on social sites until the 12th.

Before I left, I loaded up my blog with the blog posts that I had planned for the week. I also loaded up my Twitter account with some great posts I’d been reading on other blogs — articles on small business, strategy, weird science, and cool brain stuff — my favorite information to share via tweets.

When I got down to the hotel, I did some last minute planning. I went over to the event center to check a few things and pick an HP Folio Ultrabook that the Small Biz Folks at Hewlett Packard had sent for me, thinking maybe if I set up, I’d be able to Tweet some, or post some, or connect some like a good social media do-bee. I got the computer up and rolling in no time. It’s light, intuitive, and has a huge battery life — can’t say how long it lasts yet, because, well, once I got it going, I kept turning it on and then getting involved in other things.

And in the course of 10 days, here’s what I about social media, the Internet, and me.

• The social is more important than the media. When the choice comes to talking to the people live and in person, take it! Be where you are. Look them in the eyes. Listen actively. What I saw and experienced in the richness of a hug, a tone of voice, smiles shared, and glasses clinked is something I carry back to the Internet. I hear the voices of those same people when I see them again this week on Twitter.
• Being in the story is faster, easier, and more meaningful than reporting it. I can only speak for my experience, but seconds I spend trying to share something with people online turn me into a reporter. When I shed the reporter’s role, I see, hear, and feel so much more. I am mindful and present. I am also calmer, more flexible, and more fluent because I can attend to and respond to the world I’m in rather than trying to translate to the world I can’t see.
• The Internet got along fine without me. As far as I know, no one suffered greatly by my absence. The world didn’t stop turning. I had no more than 3 “must respond to” emails daily – I’m just not THAT important.

What I lost is easy to measure …

Yes, my blog traffic went down a bit. I didn’t attract as many Twitter followers as I had in the previous 10 days. My stock price on Empire Avenue dropped. My stats on Facebook now need some attention. My email inbox took about two hours to get back in order.

What I earned was more lasting …

Deep real connections.
Deep real memories.
A whole lot of learning and fun.

The actual business directly attributable to these particular 10 days outpace ANY 10 days ever.

Working or playing, showing up is most important.
How can they see you, if you don’t stop long enough to be you?

#justsayin’

Be irresistible.

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