Alister Cameron makes four solid points today in his blog post on Social Media. The strongest take away was his no holds barred approach to defining links.
- Links are only valuable because people click on them. But they are valuable because people DO click on them.
I would add to that. The value of a link that is not clicked on is a negative value. It takes space and is a missed opportunity for a link that might be useful to readers. A frivolous link also has negative value. Readers click and it wastes their time. So I recommend that you Think before you link.
- Comment numbers are a more accurate measure of you success than the number of visitors you receive.
I would add to that if you are engaging your readers to the point where they comment conversationally, i.e. interactively responding to what is said both in the post and within the comment box, then they are probably also talking about what they read after they leave your blog.
- . . . there is such a thing as Blog Rage. . . . And the real villain is probably an overabundance of testosterone combined with too many hours of inactivity sitting in a chair blogging!
One more case in which the solution is to breathe.
- Finally, building relationships is about trust. So determine to become an expert on how trust works online. People will trust you when you are credible, consistent, considerate and cooperative. They will trust you when they see other people trusting you.
I might add that people trust you when you’re willing to trust other people. Why not be first?
Relationships are the key to business and the business of blogging. They are the key to any social endeavor. Learning to communicate with fluency and comfort is as much a part of being comfortable with ourselves as it is with interacting with others — it’s from a base of self awareness that we know how to respond to the actions around with grace and respect.
Liz Strauss
Behind every Successful business is an Outstanding Manager. — PVM
See also Work with Liz! at Successful Blog
One of the problems I see and have seen in every organization at every level is a very human one. It’s the problem of delegation. Most folks don’t know when to do it. They don’t let go soon enough.
What seems to happen in most cases is that we get working so hard that we find ourselves entrenched in too much work and too much stress. Long before we realize,.we have started to work from one minute to the next. Forward thinking, planning into the future gives way to those critical tasks that must be accomplished each day.
We are in tactics mode. Strategy is gone completely by then. Our to-do lists are managing our time, not the other way around.
When someone says get some help, the reply often is “I don’t have time to teach a person what we’re doing.”
STOP! When you hear yourself say that, stop. Think. Will you have more time in three weeks to teach someone? If the answer is no, take the time to teach someone now. Then in the next two weeks after he or she knows what you’re doing, you’ll not only catch up, but you’ll have another trained person who can move the project along.
Seriously. Stop to do that now.
Behind every Successful business is an Outstanding Manager – Perfect Virtual Manager
Liz
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.
Synthesis and Evaluation in practice should lead to deep, sound strategy. That is, of course, if the folks involved understand the nature and process of strategic thinking as a process skill. I bring forward again the powerful words of Paul Lutus.
In the largest sense, American society is breaking into two classes:
The first class are people who know how to think. These people realize that most problems are open to examination and creative solution. If a problem appears in the lives of these people, their intellectual training will quickly lead them to a solution or an alternative statement of the problem. These people are the source of the most important product in today’s economy – ideas.
The second class, the vast majority of Americans, are people who cannot think for themselves. I call these people “idea consumers” – metaphorically speaking, they wander around in a gigantic open-air mall of facts and ideas. The content of their experience is provided by television, the Internet and other shallow data pools. These people believe collecting images and facts makes them educated and competent, and all their experiences reinforce this belief. The central, organizing principle of this class is that ideas come from somewhere else, from magical persons, geniuses, “them.”
. . . My purpose in this article is to undermine that belief.
–Paul Lutus,
Creative Problem Solving
Being at synthesis means having internalized ideas, having made them one’s own, being able to take them apart and put them together with ease and fluency and to evaluate the result. This ability is key to strategic thinking, without this ability what is happening isn’t stategy it is long-term planning based on information.
Strategy requires ideation, intellection, input, and vision. It can occur only at the highest level of Bloom’s taxonomy. It is not SWOT.
Strategy begins by fully evaluating where things are in the present. Moves forward by identifying goals for the future and seeking out ideas from which those goals might be realized. The ideas are seeds to a gardener. Seeds that might grow. Any gardener knows that the same seeds in the same yard five feet from each other can face different challenges, require different support strategies. That is why strategy has to be done by the highest level thinker with the deepest knowledge base.
Strategy is best performed by one or two people who are deep process thinkers who know the intricacies of the business they are working in. Then key stakeholders should be invited to question and critique the strategy. If too many people are part of the development, they already know the thought behind it and cannot serve as a thoughtful sounding board to find holes in the plan.
The reason most strategy fails is because
- too many people were involved in developing the strategy.
- the person or persons developing the strategy didn’t have the knowledge base, process skills, or vision to manage the task.
- the enterprise thwarted the strategy by continuously changing goals, making it impossible to set a strategy that would last.
A well-thought strategy is much like a garden, it is revisited with every new rainfall, sunrise, and heatwave. It changes and adapts with new information. Some seeds grow. Others do not.
In a knowledge enterprise, the strategy is under constant evaluation. The key shareholders can use the depth of their competencies to turn on a dime.
Moving with the life of the enterprise becomes worth going to work for. The new ideas take us back to the team blog to resketch new ideas. Bloom’s taxonomy begins again. The loop is closed and re-opened.
Liz Strauss
Want an hour of Liz’s personal consulting time? See the About Liz page.
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