Liz Strauss.com » Business Blogging

Does Your Web Presence Raise Your Credibility?

Liz Strauss — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:04:31 +0000

Is It Time to Get a New Look?

I’ve always been a bit frivolous and uninvolved with fashion. I like nice things, but I don’t like to spend time acquiring them, maintaining them, or thinking about the right thing to wear. Yet, I know that the right look in what I wear can send a message to a roomful of people who’ve never met me. What we wear can quietly and powerfully underscore our identity or lead folks to wonder whether we’re making a statement of some sort.
Some extremes of this might be …

A woman who regularly attends the jeans and t-shirt geek parties consistently choosing against her fashion jeans to wear a black dress and pearls makes me wonder she might be trying to point out her differences rather than find ways to connect with the people in the room.
When a guy’s hair is dyed a color so unusual that I have to fight to see the face beneath it, I wonder what he doesn’t want me to see.
When I’m in a room of highly fashion savvy people, I start shrinking a bit and wondering what other cool things they know that I don’t.

We have a way of knowing which group someone belongs to by checking their t-shirt against our own. If the way someone is dressed looks familiar and to our taste, we immediately credit that person with similar intelligence and like experiences. Those similarities lead us to listen and trust more.

We sort with our eyes before anyone even says a word. We assume a person’s visual presentation reflects his or her choices, values, and intelligence. We gravitate toward people who choose as we expect. People who look like who they are and what they’re saying get our trust more easily. When the clothes and the conversation don’t match, we go with what we see.

Blog Design Communication

Online, we project the same presence and gain or lose the same instant credibility in the way we “dress” and design our blog. A blog design can change the tone and meaning of what people take from our words.

Does a new blog design change my thinking? Of course not. But it does underscore my values before I even talk. In that way, I’m more likely to be seen, heard, and understood. The message people take is more likely to match the message I send.

When your look is working for you, you don’t have to work so hard.

Being congruent in that way makes it easier for folks to trust what we say.

Does your look make communication easier?

Liz Strauss
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How Do You Bring Yourself and Other People to Your Blog?

Liz Strauss — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 15:40:41 +0000

It’s about People and Experiences

This week in a lovely conversation with the Community Roundtable, I had the opportunity to ask questions about blogging and how blogs still fit into a serious social web presence. The question that came up often and in many ways was …

How do I get ideas to write about on my blog?
It used to be hard for me too. Then I realized that I was taking my own writing more seriously than I need to. A blog is a chance to share our expertise and our thinking, but it’s also an opportunity to show what we’re learning and exploring and that’s often easier that putting out there what we already “know.”

So when I’m looking for new ideas, I …

have conversations and really listen for other points of view. New points of view often get me thinking and pose ideas that I want to explore further … on my blog.
step outside the group of people I usually talk with to see what folks in other industries and verticals are doing. Looking at their best practices gives me a new way to look at what we’re doing. Often I walk away with a new view of where we’re going and how to solve a problem or how to rearrange an issue that I might want to share.
read my archives for things I’ve talked about in the past. Often I’ll find I still care about those subjects, but that my understanding has grown. I’ll bring out those ideas again and talk about what makes the difference now.
look for the heroes around me. So many people are doing great things I admire. I’ll write about them and what makes them worth raising up as a model of where I want to go.
write about a question that has been bothering me, take a stab at an answer then, reach out for folks who might be reading to help me out toward a stronger view.

These are just five ways that “blog my experience.” Writing gets tedious, if I just put information out there, because I know that information exists elsewhere and is probably packaged better. If I bring myself, other people and our experiences to my blog, I can involve my brain, my heart, and my vision of the world. The result is a unique combination and connection to the information that no one else can offer. And the folks who like it come back to see how I do it next.

How do you bring yourself and other people to your blog?

Liz Strauss
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What Do You Expect I’ll Say When Folks Ask Where To Host Their Blog?

Liz Strauss — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:44:55 +0000

Seven Days without My Blog

It’s been seven days since Successful-Blog.com went down. And it still doesn’t work now.

If you visit you’ll see what appears to be a working blog, but it’s not.

The issue isn’t nearly so much the code or the database as it is that folks reading the messages that explain what’s going on. The system they’re using is based in support tickets meant to keep conversation focused and to a minimum. Unfortunately, some things are not well explained in writing.

The fastservers.net team hosting my blog seems to have decided that because I opted for a managed account that I have minimal credibility. No one listened long enough to find out.

Instead they told me:

fill out a support ticket (I already had)
you can’t have access
we don’t service applications

As a result, attempts to locate and fix the issue have been more difficult because the support team draws lines around their job.

SEVEN DAYS and No action that says they want to be sure they’re not part of the reason my blog is still down.

Some folks go ballistic when a site is down for 7 minutes.
I’ve remained calm. Perhaps they’ve misinterpreted that to mean I don’t care. Hopefully this might correct that wrong assumption.

What do you expect I’ll say when folks ask me where they should host their blog?

Liz Strauss

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Social Media: Lurkers Might Ruin My Business

Liz Strauss — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:23:47 +0000

The Larger Audience

The overwhelming difference about online communication seems to be that folks worry about who might be listening in the shadows — the readers we affectionately call lurkers. It’s easy to endow that unseen audience with power and mystery that they may not seek or want.

The point we miss that most all of our communication is subject to “lurkers” in some form or another, and because we’ve learned to manage for them, we no longer think about the threat they also pose.
Examples include conversations and secrets that get repeated after we’re gone, emails that get passed on, and industry gossip in which people talk about us and at times, even claim to represent our view.

In any business communication, the point has always been to be sure that what we share is appropriate and useful — and offered with care. Online communication works the same way.

Liz Strauss
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Social Media: I Don’t Want to My Information on the Web!!

Liz Strauss — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:33:13 +0000

Bad Things Could Happen

When clients raise the issue of possible dangers of putting information in public, I’m right with them. I listen in actively to see where their concerns lie.

Some worry about danger to their reputation — people who might want tosay bad things about them — unhappy customers, unethical competitors

Some worry about danger to themselves — saying something they might regret later.

I’d never deny the possibilities. Instead I listen to understand the core issues.

Then I often find myself outlining that arrive every day to protect us online — comment moderation, blind contact forms, the ability to respond quickly online to damaging information — and quoting the simple rule Microsoft uses to guide their bloggers, “Don’t be stupid,” as I put the listed dangers in context.

It’s true that those situations listed are serious concerns. We deal with them daily in our interactions in the concrete world, the in world of email, at conventions and in sales presentations, and even on the telephone. We know how to handle information to an audience larger than one person.

We don’t need to leave behind the interaction skills we already know when we move to the Internet.

Liz Strauss
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Personal Development: Blogging Is a Way to Find a Voice

Liz Strauss — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:38:26 +0000

Reasons to Write Every Day

Everything we write has an audience. Even a private journal has the author to read it. The more we write, the more we get experience with words, learning what they mean in varied contexts. As we look back over what we have written, we listen, consider, and question its power and impact.

Blogging has an audience that responds and reacts. The comments let us know whether the message we send is received fully and intact. By blogging often we develop a voice that is consistent and more natural. As we learn our personal writing habits, we gain confidence that powers our message forward. As we listen to our readers, we more finely tune our message to communicate with them.

Blogging gets us closer to a clearer voice that people understand.

Liz Strauss
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Get your best voice in the conversation.

Professional Development: Blogging Makes Better Thinkers

Liz Strauss — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:10:28 +0000

Reasons to Write and Publish Every Day

When we have an unexpressed idea, it sits in our heads incomplete. We imagine we know it, and possibly even see it, but the test it when we have to explain it to another human being.

Writing every day makes us better thinkers. It moves us to take ideas from our minds and describe them with words. Publishing those words invites an audience to react and respond — we find out whether the message we sent is the one that they heard.

It’s a challenge to simply state the feelings, thoughts, and scope of an idea in precise and expressive ways. Unlike talking, which allows us to adjust and respond with tangents and corrections, writing and publishing come with an expectation that we’ll set out a thought clearly stated.

The commitment of words to written form draws that has an audience is a powerful incentive to think things through . . .

Liz Strauss
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When People Blogged in Person . . .

Liz Strauss — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:47:19 +0000

17th Century Blogging Experiences

In the 17th Century they called it a literary salon. . . .

A salon is a gathering of men and women to participate in formal and informal discussion centered around a specific topic. . . . which may include politics, literature, art, fashion or business. . . . The participants sought to increase their knowledge through conversation and readings, . . . the practice continues today in many cities around the world. Wikipedia

We gather on a blog to read and discuss in the same way.

Knowledge increases. So does trust.

Relationships happen.

People like to work with people they know, like, and trust.

Does your business blog?

Liz Strauss
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ROI of Trust: Problem Solving Isn’t Always Helpful

Liz Strauss — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 02:26:09 +0000

He Just Wasn’t Listening

I have a friend that is married to a very bright guy. His nature is friendly, helpful, and giving. He’s always solving problems — even when the problem is already gone.

I would often visit that friend after work, when we lived in the same city. As coworkers do, at times we’d debrief on problems to make sure they didn’t occur again. Every occasion that we got into an analysis of what happened. The friendly would start offering us possible solutions.

We would explain that he didn’t have all of the information.
We would point out that the problem had already been resolved.
We would continue to say that help wasn’t needed.

He would continue to suggest ideas.

You might think he was feeling left out of the conversation, but rest assured we asked about other point of information.

The young man in question was so busy solving our problems, that he didn’t listen to hear they were already solved.

Great bloggers listen. They understand when folks don’t need advice or their problems solved.

Liz Strauss
Blog confidently with Liz.

ROI of Trust: A Blog as a Human Face

Liz Strauss — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:43:32 +0000

Leaders Aren’t Always Right

I don’t know anyone who hasn’t made a mistake. It will happen on a blog, sure as the sun shines.

As mistakes in the workplace, a mistake on a blog is what we make of it. Leaders turn mistakes into opportunities. Leaders aren’t always right, but they do right when they find they’ve been wrong.

What better way to connect with a human face to your customers than to say, “Hey, that last thing I wrote wasn’t quite as it should be. Let me set it straight.” People, customers, don’t expect perfection. We expect respect and honesty in our transactions.

If I can trust you to correct a mistake you’ve made publicly, I can invest in a transaction with you with some security that you’ll back that up too.

People like to do business with other people. We know that other people are human.

Liz Strauss
Blog confidently with Liz.