Before the Internet, things were different. We didn’t realize it but we were confined by geography. Geography organized us into narrow niches. People found us by proximity. The limits of transportation were the niche boundaries. We put our stores at the corner of State and Main where the traffic would be sure to see us.

But the Internet blew those niches apart. People no longer need to walk, drive, or take a bus pass the corner of State and Main. We’re now competing with businesses and attracting customers from Alabama to Zimbabwe. Without the geography to define us, we look like everyone else who does what we do.

Those geographic niche that focused and limited our market gave us an advantage. We could be “the only” or “the best” book store in town. But now “the town” is the world. Were unlikely to be the only book store. Who’s to decide what’s “the best” book store? The way to stand out at the new State and Main — the front page of Google — is to replace that old narrow geographic niche with a new one. A narrow niche takes back that one-of-a-kind wider opportunity.

Why Customers Love Narrow Niche-Brand Marketers

Narrowing your niche is about quality over quantity. As you narrow in on a smaller group of people to serve, the job of serving that group becomes easier. We see the same problems played out over a variety of situations, so we get to become expert on those problems. We can design our work and our place of business to better serve them. They recognize that we know what makes them tick.

Nothing beats that.
Here’s how to build a narrow niche brand.

• Define a niche for your business. Choose a niche you truly care about. Find a place to stand. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Do one or two things that play to your strengths and passions. Do those things better than anyone else.
• Find out everything about the customers in your chosen niche. First and foremost, make sure that said customers exist. Then don’t just get information. Fall in love with everyone of them. Figure out how to crawl into their skin and feel their pain. Know their loves and their wishes. Find their needs and desires. Learn to read what they’re not saying.
• Define your brand through your customers’ world view. In reality, you don’t define your brand, your customers do. When you understand your customers intimately, find a way to state your brand–what you and your customers stand for–in less than one sentence. Write those words everywhere your customer will see your name, your blog’s name, or your business name. Let them know you mean it.
• Use your brand to test every decision you make–large or small. Be your brand. Live it. Make your brand show in every detail, every action, every move you make. If you live your brand, and test every decision against it by asking, Will this help my customers see my brand? your customers are more likely to buy into the brand you’ve chosen on their behalf.
• Be authentic; never skimp on quality; never go against your brand; and you will set the standard. You won’t just be different; you will be unique, irreplaceable. Authenticity cannot be “knocked off and done more cheaply.” Attempts to copy you will only be poor facsimiles. Quality and authenticity are the birthplace of brand loyalty. Customers will know where to find the real thing. Once they find it. They stick with it.
• When your customers recognize that you care about their needs, value the relationship that you have with them. Relationships will always be everything in any human endeavor. Relationships are the connections that build our businesses.
• Never lose sight of the fact that you and those you serve are people. Businesses serve people — not users, not clients, not eyeballs, not numbers — but people with thoughts, feelings, and ideas that make our businesses better. Talk to them one person at a time. Listen to them the same way. When we find someone who tries to solve our problems and who values us. We’ll go out of our way to do business with you. It’s just not that often that we get that kind of service.

That’s how small niche-brand marketers get to be great niche marketers one customer at a time. That’s how to make relationships with other really great people.

We think that people who think the same way we do are smarter than other people. So when you choose a niche that we care about, we think that you’re highly intelligent. We trust your judgment in other things too.

We are a fascinating species. When we don’t know where to go, we’ll go where everyone else goes. But give us a meaningful reason to come to you, and you’ve made a customer–a reader–possibly a friend forever.

How will you narrow your niche to widen your opportunity?

Be irresistible.

Liz

Do the Mighty Ones Have to Crash and Burn?

The bigger they are, the harder they fall … what makes them that way?

We’ve all the rise and fall of “that guy.” He was intelligent, savvy, and a leader in anyone’s book. He also cared about things like integrity. People invested in him with their hearts, mind, time, and money. He was a great leader until … he wasn’t. At some point it quit being about the cause and became about him.

The rise and fall story isn’t always about a “he.” Many a mighty “she” has made the same fall.

What Happens When the Mighty Fall?

According to the Harvard Business Review, 2 out of 5 new CEOs fail in their first 18 months on the job. It appears that the major reason for the failure has nothing to do with competence, or knowledge, or experience, but rather with hubris and ego and a leadership style out of touch with modern times.

Why is this leadership crisis happening? One reason may be the gaps between how leaders see themselves and how others see them. –Why Do CEOs Fail and What Can We Do about it? Psychology Today

Jim Collins, author of the bestselling books, “Good to Great” and “Built to Last” is a knowledgeable compelling speaker who offers the learning from thousands of hours of research on the best companies and what separated them from the “almost best.”
If you’ve read Collins’ books, you know that leaders of great companies are humble, willing to do the hard work, and willing to make the unpopular, painful decisions to do whatever it takes to support the cause of the business.

Collins pointed to five stages of decline in a great business. The same five stages also could be named the state of decline in individual leadership career.

• Hubris born of success – the belief that the business or the leader can’t fail; the arrogance of acting as if all of our decisions are good.
• Undisciplined pursuit of more – too much growth, too much adventure, too much big risk.
• Denial of Risk and Peril – disregard for warning signs or reality checks.
• Grasping for Salvation — when things begin to crumble, rather than going back to discipline, the leader looks for a savior. He or she wants someone to put things back – to fix what went wrong.
• Irrelevance – the business or the leader bites the dust. No cares what happens to them.

Leaders are people who want to build something they cannot build alone.
The sheer ability to be mission critical to a bigger mission than oneself is at the core of leadership.

It’s good to celebrate success, to claim our rewards and leverage them. It’s even better to understand how much of our success is dependent on skills and influence of those around us. Choosing people who hold us to our best values is important. Doing that for ourselves is characteristic of leadership.

How do you know when a leader has lost sight of his or her best leadership?

Be irresistible.

Liz

It’s always confused me.
Why is it that we ignore the people who love us while we go chasing after the people who ignore us?
That’s not great strategy.

Look right next to you.
People with your values, who value what you do, are investing in you and your business. They have a unique point of view. They can see what you do from outside the system and they’re already on your team.

You can’t be inside a system and outside at the same.

Don’t overlook that rich resource.
Build on it.
Let those people be smart for you.
Ask them what see.
Invite their ideas.
Give them a reason to talk about you!

I’ll be talking about this in the Learning Lounge at the PCMA National Convention this week.

Be irresistible.
Liz

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!!

Do It For the Folks Who Love You

With the advent of social media, it’s easy to lose focus and find ourselves building our marketing initiatives around the newest, biggest, or most popular tools and the coolest, hottest, most talked-about venues. Yet, in a moment of clear thinking, we all know that any message we send is only as strong as the number of right people it reaches at the time that they’re most ready to listen. in fact the goal is not only reaching those ideal people in a way that they’re listening but also willing to act and delighted to share that they did.

Before you fire that great idea, before you tell folks about that perfect offer, use these questions to check that it’s whole, complete and totally about the people you want to listen and pass it one. Use these questions to connect your message with the social media sweetest spot — the heads, hearts, and perfect timing of the ideal customers and fans who can help your resonate through the Internet.

1. 1. Who are you talking to? Did you make a decision to talk to your most loyal fans? If you want folks to listen, they need to know the message is for them. Talking to everyone is like talking to no one. Every great message is specifically tailored to the listener.
2. 2. Where are they? If you’re reaching out to your most loyal fans, you know where they are. Those are the places, tools, and the venues where your message will most resonate. If your fans text all day, don’t be tweeting them.
3. 3. What one thing do you want them to know? We often get so interested in the details of our message that we cover it up with too many marketing words. Trust your fans to appreciate your most simple message delivered in your most authentic way. Talking about what we love to do with enthusiasm is natural — trying to sell our friends is not. Are you saying what you want to say as simply as you can?
4. 4.What do you want your fans to do? Information is wonderful. Are you telling me to keep me in the loop or do you want me to act in some way? Don’t forget to tell me what you want me to do. Ask.
5. 5.Why should your most loyal fans care? Take a minute to see things from your fans point of view. People ask us to do things every day and as much as we care about those people, we can’t do all of them and do our own stuff too. Give me a reason to care and to be proud to act on your behalf. Let me know how I’ll live a better life, have more fun, or be a hero if I do what you ask.
6. 6.How easy did you make it to do what you asked? Package up the action you want so that all it involves is a quick thought and something simple — a click, a shoutout, a retweet, perhaps — that’s filled with tons of satisfaction for sharing it with my friends. The easier and more satisfying you make it to share, the more like it is that folks will.

Building the message is only the first step. Making sure that the message is perfectly tailored and routed to your fans is what makes up all of the rest. I dare to say that if we do the work that would add one more quality step …

Be fun, entertaining, interesting, compelling, creative, surprising, or amazing enough to talk about.

… we might even reach that mysterious inexplicable traction called viral. Do everything for the folks who love what you do. They’ll do the rest.

Can you answer these questions for the next message or promotion that you want to send?

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

I Think I’m in Love for the Very First Time

I just finished cleaning out my in box. I won’t mention the number of strange pitches that show up there daily, except to that if you’re someone who sent one, you might get the idea that I don’t want to work with PR people. You would be totally mistaken.

I love my friend Charlene Blohm who is a consummate professional in the PR field. She knows what I do and what I’m good at. Now and then she sends me something that fits what I’m doing. It’s a pleasure to pitch in and work on it. Then too, she’ll send a release of an accomplishment her company has achieved I’m thrilled to pass it along so that folks know what her work is about.

And that Gini Dietrich, one might wonder, whether she only plays a PR person and really works as a marketer. I’ve never received a real pitch from her. But when it’s been appropriate and mutually beneficial she’s asked if I might help. We’ve even discussed where our skill sets meet up.

Whenever I meet a new PR person who thinks like those two I get the same feeling. I think I’m in love … for the very first time – again.

Dear PR Person Can I Tempt You By Saying How Much I Want to Work With YOU?

I’ve learned a lot from great PR people. I’ve learned the importance of having a clear message and remembering to repeat whenever people see me. I’ve learned how to talk with the media and how to answer with confidence and clarity. I’ve also learned that I don’t necessarily have to tell my whole life story every time people say, “Liz, tell me about you.”

I love working with good PR people because great PR people don’t just see my name on a list, my Twitter follower count, or my blogs, you see me and I see this about you …

• you work hard for your clients
• you’re relational
• you’re smart and creative
• you’re aware of who’s doing what’s interesting
• you’re connected to other smart people
• you’re often the first to know about new things
• you also have clients who might want to learn the strategies at SOBCon, meet the entrepreneurs in my network, and find out about the other things I do.

What I’ve found is a great PR person makes a great partner and understands the value of strategic relationships. If you’re one of those, email me anytime you want to about something more than your latest book or speaker pitch.

I want a relationship not a blog post offer.

I be we could make “beautiful music” together.

Music, strategy, and relationships come in many forms, but in a form letter.

Want to try a real conversation instead?

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

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.

What will grow your business garden today? Would you start with an acre of social media listening and conversation?

Liz Strauss

Want a strategy to be irresistible to your core audience? See the Work with Liz.

Narrow Your Niche, Widen Your Opportunity

On the last night of SOBCon Colorado I spoke with someone about a project she’s working on. She was having trouble naming it. The project, in her mind was almost done. I asked a few questions. They made her nervous — certainly not my intent. I slowed myself down.

“Who will find you irresistible?” I asked.

She didn’t want to answer. Then I realized what was going on. Well, actually she told me.

“I don’t like to make decisions. Who an I to think I’m an expert?”

Boy I know that problem. But let’s turn it around.

Who wants to use a product from someone who’s not?

It’s Hard to Be the Expert of Everything for Everyone

As we delved further into her concept, what I found was that the territory she was trying to cover was way too wide for a first step. Because the content base was so huge the audience would include almost every kind of person from 21 to 65 who might step out their door to meet another one around the idea of business, social media, or tech in any place in the world. It’s no wonder she didn’t feel qualified to be an expert. Who would?

Here’s where narrowing your niche becomes more than a great idea and turns into strategy. Consider these points:

• When we choose a narrow niche, we can go deeply vertical. We get to know one certain group of people very well. We know who were talking to. That lets us know which words are in their vocabularly, which metaphors are theirs, which sorts of ideas get them to move.
• When we choose a narrow niche, we get the world of that specific customer group. We can more easily imagine and think about the ways they make decisions and what they worry about. We more easily decide ourselves what features and benefits serve them well and what will be just so much more noise to what they’re doing.
• When we choose a narrow niche, we can closely study the specific problems of that singular customer group. We get to know what frustrates them, what they yearn for, wish for, and which they never saw again. We have special insight into their view.

And as a result of narrowing our niche, they quickly recognize that we “get” them, that we’ve built a product or service that was made for them, and they become our fans and tell they friends that they should too.

It starts with a decision to be irresistible to one specific group. Then we can move out slowly to the group that stands right next to them.

Which group will you serve first?

Be irresistible.
Liz Strauss
How can I help you be irresistible?

Buy the Insider’s Guide and Get your best voice in the conversation.

It Hasn’t Changed

In 2002, Seth Godin defined remarkable as companies who created new ways of being highly successful at traditional businesses. That same year, Malcolm Gladwell’s classic “The Tipping Point” underscored how little things can make a BIG difference, but most everyone missed the huge point on page 98 – which explained why remarkable isn’t enough. In subsequent years, Godin, Gladwell, Joe Calloway, Keith McFarland, Michael Garber have all taken on the idea of what makes an extraordinary business. Tom Peters is re-releasing his wisdom on the subject.

Being irresistible is a decision. Done well, it’s a complete strategy.

Irresistible businesses are those who build great relationships. They constantly

• Remove what customers don’t want.
• Enhance what customers love.
• Add something unexpected customers would die for.

Irresistible is the only option. The opposite of irresistible is irrelevance and invisibility.

What makes you irresistible?

Liz Strauss
Find out about working with Liz.

Buy the Insider’s Guide and Get your best voice in the conversation.

It Hasn’t Changed

What you need to know is simple …

• Know who you are.
• Know what you you value.
• Know who values that too.
• Know the language to communicate the nuance of what you’re saying.
• Know the culture into which you are reaching.
• Know the tests you expect people to pass and how you pass them.
• Know the difference between numbers that are growing and numbers that are inflating.

It’s that easy.

Liz Strauss
Find out about working with Liz.

Buy the Insider’s Guide and Get your best voice in the conversation.