Liz Strauss.com » Business Blogging

Why It’s Smart to Own Your Content URL, Publish at Home First, and Only Share on Facebook, Flickr, YouTube

Liz Strauss — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 12:52:47 +0000

Risk Mitigation

When I was small, people often called me a “natural born teacher.” At a young age, they gave me a class to teach the 5-year-olds who couldn’t “get” the hang of reading. By 13, I was delivering whole lessons to classrooms while supervisors sat in the back of the room. Eventually I grew up to become the VP of Product Development and Chief Strategist of a educational publishing company. Teaching has always been part of my personal success formula. Even at this very moment, teaching — sharing what I’ve learned — is critical to what I’m doing.

Yet of all of the advice that people have shared, offered, and pressed upon in my quest to reach the best that I might be. The sentence about teaching that keeps coming back to me lately is one that my dad said when I was still small.

“If you want to be a teacher, own the school.”
My father’s idea about owning the school was that a teacher needs to teach with competence and integrity and with the wrong person in charge the rules can change frivolously and issue irrelevant to great teaching can make the job difficult, if not if not impossible.

I would answer that school systems weren’t build for people like me to own them.
He would answer that I should find a way to make a system of my own.
I learned later that what he was talking about is called risk mitigation.

Facebook: Go Where the Fish Are, But Wear Boots and Know What the Risks Are

Facebook: it’s where the fish are … but before you put your houseboat in that water, know what what the risks are.

When Facebook first opened their doors to more than students, a lawyer friend wrote a deep and thorough blog post about the Facebook Terms of Service. One section made me decide to never put my blog posts on their platform. Last night discussion in the esteemed Twitter Chat #blogchat (held weekly on Sundays 9EST) the discussion was about Facebook versus blogs. This morning a NYTimes article describes a young man, Michale McDonald who used to post his videos on a blog, but now he uses Facebook.”

“I don’t use my blog anymore,” said Mr. McDonald, who lives in San Francisco. “All the people I’m trying to reach are on Facebook.”

And I want to say to him …

If you’re going to build and share online content, own the url where you house it. Put the link on Facebook, but the content on your own URL.

I understand that we need to go where the fish are. I also understand that we need to wear our boots and know what the risks are before we wade into the water.

Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Blogspot and other free platforms make it easy to build and share content so quickly. But what are we risking by building and sharing in places where we don’t own the “land” where we’re building? Free isn’t free when you think about it.

Some reasons to consider storing your content on your own url …

We don’t hold the keys. I first found out the problems with being a “renter” on someone else’s land in 2006 when blogspot went down and I couldn’t access my own content — Google Blogger–403 Forbidden–How Could You Let that Happen! I woke up one morning years ago unable to reach my “free” blog because Google owned the server. I wasn’t paying them to serve me. My content was at the mercy of their willingness to keep their tool working and accessible to my readers.

I realized last night that, as a Blogger blogger, I am a guest in your home or should I say a captive visitor. Darn, I thought I was a welcomed customer. What made this clear was when you locked me in my room and forbade me access to my stuff.
We give up our rights to part of what we own. We have to be. The sites couldn’t function without that sort of IP permission. Have you read the Facebook Terms of Service? It means anything you put there is no longer yours exclusively until you remove it and then …. Just this much of it means I find it dangerous – that I’ve turned over my right to who can use it.

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:

1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

2 When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).

I’m not sure I want Facebook to be able to use my intellectual property or to be able to transfer it whomever might buy Facebook next. I’m careful not to post what I love most and what I want to keep exclusive to my brand and my business on my own url.

Other sites — free blogs, Flickr, YouTube, SlideShare, have similar Terms of Service, know what you’re giving them them you put whole content on their sites. Sometimes the trade off is worth it in the circulation it generates. Sometimes you can achieve the same results in stronger ways. Knowing what we’re giving while we’re getting is always a great way to manage that risk.

Maybe you don’t want to do that with all of your Flickr images, but anyone who’s had they’re entire photo collection deleted bacause they labeled them wrong, knows the value of understanding the agreement before you start.
If we leave, our community can lose their identity as well as their home. It would be unreasonable for a landlord to take the names of all the people who visitor your home or business. It would be even more unreasonable for a landlord to offer to keep that list for you and refuse to share when you move … ever try to export a list from Yahoo groups, Facebook, or Linkedin?
We can’t design a space the same way as we might if the property is our own. LinkedIn pages decide how your content looks. Facebook decides how much you can bring your design into their space. Flickr and YouTube don’t allow much customization because they want your visitors to know you’re on their property.

Of course, every online tool has to have it’s own rules to protect itself and to maintain its identity. Some of those rules make it deliciously easy to do it their way rather than put in the work to build a “home” of our own. Even the power of their longevity can make the Search Engine listings seem stronger to stay with them.

But the pride and power of ownership allows us to tell our own story in our own way. We can use those other tools to support us in building a powerful presence that is truly our own. But relying on them alone they can become less support and more “just an easy way.”

And in a crisis we may find that we want a home base that is within our control.

Should a time comes that you might have to protect your reputation from a jealous sort or someone with a grudge, people will look for a response from you. You’ll want to have that url that you own to tell your story in the truthful, authentic voice that your friends and fans have come to respect. You’ll want the power of your own content to carry you to the top of the search listings when folks go looking for you.

Do you find it’s important to own your content url?

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

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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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.