Liz Strauss.com

Any gardener will tell you that gardening takes strategy and tactics.

• long-term and short-term planning,
• resources,
• and daily maintenance.

Enter the Chief Executive Gardener

Here’s what Chief Executive Gardeners do. They

• check the location, the values of the soil, the sunlight, the weather, the intangibles.
• find the right plants to match those circumstances.
• plant the seeds and seedlings in the soil — different plants across the landscape — to match variations in conditions.
• keep watch on a regular basis.
• remove weeds and other competitive threats.
• amend the soil and keep plants cared for — pruned, fed, and strong — so that threats can’t harm them.
• know that some plants will only live so long; some will die in storms; some will be weak from the start but that those should be rare, if the gardener is good.
• watch the garden to see soil changes, to know what plants will continue to flourish and to know what new plants to introduce.

Every enterprise should have a Chief Executive Gardener. Without a Chief Executive Gardener, the Chief Executive Bean Counter has only luck to grow the beans to count.

To quote Joseph Jaffe

If you’re not busy growing, you’re busy dying

He could have been talking about a garden. He wasn’t.

Great gardens grow to fit the world. They don’t try to make the world fit them.

That’s the garden analogy. Apply it where you think it works.

Today’s garden should be blogging.

Liz Strauss

Want an hour of Liz’s personal consulting time? See the About Liz page.

Every blogger knows it. The word blog comes up and someone says, “Oh they’re nothing but online diaries.” I’ve even named an imaginary book over that occurrence it’s called

If You Think My Blogs Are Online Diaries, I Think Your Wine Comes From a Box.

I don’t often say it aloud, except to my closest friends and to folks who are bloggers. But the analogy is a true one.

Seth Godin Says It Better

Today I was rereading Seth Godin’s Book “Who’s There” on Blogs that Work, Seth defines three kinds of blogs.

• CAT BLOGS — These are the “online diaries,’ we hear people with candles chanting day and night about.These blogs don’t get many readers, nor should they. I can get the same kind of personal information from strangers in elevators and on airplanes when people take their cell phones out.
• BOSS BLOGS — This is the blog as a communication tool. One person keeps all of the information on a project archived in one place so that others can access it, keeping everyone on the proverbial same page.
• VIRAL BLOGS — These blogs, as Seth says (and I agree), are changing the fields of marketing and journalism. Viral blogs make everyone a publisher, give everyone a place to publish ideas and get them out to an audience who might bring the blog publisher work, respond to a cause, buy a product, interact with a writer, and most of all, be influenced. People are being influenced by viral blogs. Daily Kos: State of the Nation, Lifehacker, the Productivity and Software Guide, Michelle Malkin, Scobleizer Microsoft Geek Blogger, Signum sine tinnitu by Guy Kawasaki and Seth’s own Blog are a handful of the blogs that move mountains of audience attention around the internet on a word.

  Seth says it better.

  The math behind viral blogs is astonishing. One person, $20 a month and an audience of several hundred thosand people! Even better, a viral blog stuffed with good ideas is going to influence millions of people who never even read the original. For example, Chris Anderson, posted his “Long Tail” idea on a blog. There are now 1,040,000 Google matches for the expression he invented.

My point?

No CATS.

CAT-TAILS — long tails.

Seth says it better, but I say it PRETTY DARN WELL myself.

Liz Strauss

Once you realize that blogging might add something to your marketing strategy. The first step is to find out all you can and to learn from someone who’s already fallen off the bike so to speak, to learn from someone who knows.

Curious about What Blogging Adds

When you find that someone who knows blogging, be curious. Be curious about the benefits of blogging that can’t be met by other parts of your marketing and public relations plan. Blogging expands and amplifies what you’re doing. Blogging doesn’t replace anything.

• Blogging doesn’t inform customers on product detail. That’s what catalogues do.
• Blogging doesn’t close orders. That’s sales.
• Blogging doesn’t spend every word spinning the company story. That’s PR.
• Blogging doesn’t gather formal data and make sure the right words get to the right customers. That’s marketing.

Blogging is about conversation and community. Blogging is an everyday opportunity to interact with customers the way you do at a trade show – only longer, more relaxed, and without the backache that comes with standing on a concrete floor. A blog offers the ongoing discussion with customers and other bloggers from many industries about your business and theirs. It moves you closer to where your audience, or at least a part of them, thinks and lives.

A blog invites your customers to get to know you and your organization in the same way. It becomes hard to not like a company, when you can interact everyday with someone who works there and someone you like a lot.

Blogging stretches your investment dollars and adds new benefits that move toward the same goals. Blogging fills in what we’ve always tried to establish and what those avenues cannot reach — a sense of community, actually knowing what our customers think, need and desire, being in touch with what’s real.

A curious blogger can find out so much from his or her readers. They’re so glad to be asked. When was the last time a company cared about your opinion and talked to you like a human being?

Liz Strauss

Blogging attracts intelligent people — people who like to read and write, people who like to explore new ideas. One thing many intelligent people have in common is that we often have had an easy time of learning things as we grew up and so we’re not used to, or comfortable with, having others watch us learn.

Yet the best advice I can give a new blogger is to learn from someone who knows.

Almost every really successful new blogger learns how from someone who has blogged before — maybe we do it by watching from the sidelines, being the proverbial “lurker,” reading blogs without commenting. That is one way, but not the best.

The advantage of learning outright from a successful blogger — by meeting one and asking questions — is that it raises the speed at which you’ll connect with your audience, get ranked on search engines, and establish a positive blogging relationship with readers, making them part of your organization’s team. It’s worth investing a few hours to make your blog the human face that you want your customers to get to know. It’s an investment well made to spend some time with a professional blogger before you start a company blog.

As an enterprise with a marketing plan, you’re actually at an advantage. You can strategize where your blog fits in your company’s overall picture. Guy Kawasaki, the wunderkind of Apple, is now the wunderkind of blogging. He knew exactly what to do going in, before he started his blog, Signum sine tinnitu by Guy Kawasaki. His blog is in the top 40 of the more than 40 million blogs indexed by Technorati, the blog index and search engine.

How did he do that? He made it an integral part of his marketing plan. Thousands of press releases went out before his first blog post went up. Now his blog supports his company, his speaking engagements, and his brand. It also lets people feel that they know Guy Kawasaki as a person, almost as a personal friend.

That’s a powerful transformation. How could it happen without a blog?

Liz Strauss

Want an hour of Liz’s personal consulting time? See the About Liz page.