Liz Strauss.com

Talk to Me

Recently, working with a client, I was asked the question,

What will make a blog compelling to a user?

It’s a favorite question. Getting people to come and stay is what I do, and talking about it is almost as much fun. I might have said it in a slightly more corporate way, but what I answered was basically this.

Humanity is what’s compelling. We’re all hungry for a connection that makes us feel real.

Quality content, a real human being, the combination of three things: head, heart, and practical meaning in my life make a person feel that they are wholly alive.

People recognize the real deal. When they come, visitors figure out quickly whether they get to be who they really are, and if that’s okay with everyone there. When authenticity happens, they tell their own truth and feel valued for it.

When that happens, we give back — in attention, participation, and loyalty. When we’re invested, we don’t walk away.

That’s the heart of compelling.

A compelling blog is human in every way.

Liz Strauss
Find out about working with Liz.

RESPECT

You’re sitting in Customer Service, miles from your office. A fire is requiring your best PR efforts — you’re not trained for this — but you’re the one who best understands the information. You’re fielding questions and carefully wording answers, because leaders speak with concern that their message is understood.

You make it through. You’re exhausted when you return to “normally scheduled programming.” When you reach your desk, you find a deluge of voice mail and your inbox is overflowing. The easiest thing to do would be to imagine you are still over in Customer Service handling the PR accident you had been handling.

Then you think, well really you’ve never left customer service.

Your job is a customer service job as much as the one you were just doing.

Do you return phone calls when you get them?

Service is sticky.

Liz Strauss
Find out about working with Liz.

Staying Close to the People We Serve

When we developed an international strategy, I made an agreement with my boss about the kind of relationships I would forge with the publishing partners we would work with around the world. It involved three basic points.

• People at our own company would refer to the companies that we worked with as “partners,” not vendors, not licensees, not other publishers.
• We would adjust our process to meet theirs as well as we could.
• I would visit their companies at least once a year.

Could we have completed our business by not doing any or all of the three? Most certainly we might have. Other publishers did just that.

However, by keeping to these three “rules of conduct,” our company became the first partner of choice. We enjoyed special access to content, and we were the only company in the US that was given files rather than required to share the first print run of books with the smaller publisher to help their bottom line.

Because I visited the companies every year . . . I was also a person to them and a true relationship formed. That relationship, and the access it afforded us, allowed us to save $1000s and to control the timing of our inventory at every product launch.

Companies are buildings with people inside.

Liz Strauss
Find out about working with Liz.

What’s Usually Missing

Almost always when I speak with new product developers, they’ve done the thinking about what it is they’re trying to make. Most folks who are serious about bringing a product to market know that it has to be researched and “thought through thoroughly.”

They usually know:

• who has a similar offering
• how their offering is different
• what is a competitive price or package

These concerns are all of the head.

The product developers might even have a fairly detailed description of who will buy and use the product or maybe not. . . .

Folks making new product are less likely to be able to articulate.

• why the new customer will fall in love with the new product
• how that product will fit in that customer’s life
• What the customer might have to do or give up to incorporate the new product into his or her life.

I can truly admire the elegance of a product that I will never buy or use.

Those last three points are what makes the difference in whether I do.

Liz Strauss