Successful Blog

Here is a good place for a call to action.

Top 5 Ways to Influence the Modern Social Media User

by

By Jessica Davis

Influence is a highly valued social currency.

Today, the influence factor is synonymous with television ratings or viewership, perhaps slightly more powerful because of the added specificity or targeting potential. That holds true if you define influence as the ability to drive desirable change in a specific niche.

As a brand on social media, the power to influence an audience is invaluable (to follow, interact and purchase), but dealing with the tech-savvy and instant-gratification-seeking members of today’s market is a challenge. That is why I’ve explored and listed the top five ways to influence the modern social media user.

1. Play to your strengths with social content

According to this Google trend, the interest in thought leadership is growing. Whether you’re blogging to convert readers into buyers, or you’re blogging for brand recognition, it is vital to establish yourself as an expert or a thought leader. The simplest way to do that is begin with areas you’re comfortable with, or have expertise in. As Ronell Smith says, write the post that you’re passionate about. To cover the rest of your niche you could curate content from around the internet. Tools like FlipBoard, DrumUp or Curata help source. Your social page in totality should showcase all of the important information in your niche.

2. Change the focus of your social media conversations

To impact social users, brands must learn to use social media from the perspective of their audience. According to this study, 55% people said they use social to connect with friends and family (the top reason for using social media), while 45% said they use it to keep in touch with news and trends. “To be pitched to” doesn’t show up on the list. Instead of talking about your brand, you could give people news and information to stay up-to-date. That would be a more powerful way of reaching out to them rather than outright selling them something. Trend identification tools like Google trends and BuzzSumo are great sources of the news that you should research and write about.

3. Target your readers against targeting your buyers

Most brands target their buyers by focusing on set buyer personas. What they don’t account for is the people who don’t purchase from the brand but read and share their content. Instead of targeting your buyer personas, if you focused on reader personas, you benefit by increasing your reach and earning the opportunity to convert more people into buyers. Create content that attracts an audience wider than your target market. Doing that will help build a better perception of your influence.

For instance, home décor and interior design brand The Chromologist often talks about design in general and shares great photographs of art in nature, in cities and the world. Using that approach, the brand not only attracts people who want to redo their homes, but also people who are interested in design and appreciate beauty in general – an audience much larger than their intended target audience.

chromologist

4. Acknowledge mentions and responses to drive more interaction

According to a study conducted by Search Engine Watch, 70% people who tweet brands expect a response, and 53% of them want one within the hour. The longer you take to respond, the more likely your audience is to switch to another social page, brand or product even if the tweet is a complaint or a trouble-shoot request. To stay truly real-time, you require notifications to warn you of social mentions. There are a host of listening tools like Mention and Brand24 that offer real-time desktop and mobile notifications for social mentions making them easy for you to track and respond to.

Whether the mention is positive or negative, it is a potential opportunity for PR and brand building.

5. Leverage the influence of your social media network

According to global market research firm Nielsen, 92% today’s social media users trust recommendations made by people like them over ‘brand content’. By connecting with people within your network and in your niche and enabling them to promote your content, you can impact your audience and even drive sales.

Brands as big as BMW have successfully done it, and so have medium sized set-ups like SpinGo. You simply need to find the right influencers to advocate your brand. One of social media’s biggest advantages is the fact that it puts power in the hands of ordinary people. Influencers needn’t be celebrities. They could simply be employees, partners, happy customers or well-wishers – anyone who is in contact with your market. These are sometimes referred to as micro-influencers. Here’s a look at one of SpinGo’s employee advocacy posts.

screenshot

To organize and manage your advocacy efforts you could use an employee advocacy platform like LinkedIn Elevate, Kredible, Circulate.It or DrumUp Employee Advocacy Platform. Make sure that any employees who Tweet corporate information are clearly identified as employees in their profiles or bios, to be in compliance with FTC rules on influencer marketing.

Influence is simply about increasing your reach and impact on social media. With the right content, targeting and distribution channels you can drive maximum impact and conversions.

Author Bio: Jessica Davis is a Content Writer with Godot Media – a leading Content Management company. She has years of experience in working closely with online businesses, helping them refine their marketing strategy through optimum use of content. Her other interests, besides online content strategy, copywriting and search engine optimization, are technology, sports and even fashion.

Featured image via Flickr cc: Little Calpurnia!

Q&A with Ian Greenleigh, author of The Social Media Side Door

by

As a small business owner, I’m always hustling to make the most of limited resources. The techniques presented in Ian Greenleigh’s new book, The Social Media Side Door (McGraw Hill, October 2013), are designed to help us take advantage of the seismic shifts that have happened in recent years regarding access and influence.

Ian Greenleigh: The Social Media Side Door

Enjoy this Q&A with Ian, as he offers some great insights from the book.

1. What is the social media side door?

We’re living through an extraordinary time. Social media is decimating the human and technological gatekeepers that have historically prevented non-elites from accessing and influencing powerful people and institutions. The barriers are crumbling all around us, and so many people haven’t even noticed, or they’re simply not yet equipped to take advantage of these massive opportunities, what I call “social media side doors.”

2. How did you discover it?

I really struggled to get a decent job during the recession. I had just graduated with a degree in political science, even though it was a field I didn’t want to pursue. I was in sales, and I wasn’t very good at it. It was pretty bleak. None of the things our society teaches about getting great jobs were working. I thought I was bright, hardworking and creative, but I couldn’t find a way to convey that to the professional gatekeepers in recruiting.

I needed to try something radically different, so I scraped the bottom of my dwindling savings account to attempt something I had seen on a blog. I took out a Facebook ad, pointed it at a special “hire me” page on my blog, pointed the ad at decision-makers at the top companies in Austin, and saw the clicks roll in. Within a few weeks, I had a nice array of options for my next career step.

It wasn’t an anomaly. Once I started looking for them, I realized that social media side doors existed almost everywhere barriers seem to exist. I also realized that no one had written a guidebook to help people spot and take advantage of these new opportunities, so I decided to write it myself.

3. How can people find and open their own side doors in social media?

Realize that side doors often open gradually. For example, every time you leave a comment on a CEO’s blog, or tweet a piece of intelligent feedback to an influencer, you’re opening that side door up an inch or two more.

Think about the goals of the person whom you’re trying to reach, and reflect on how you can help them get there faster. You can do things like introduce them to other influential people via Twitter, interview them on your blog about a project they’re promoting, or help them find information they’re after.

Relationships are still the basis for almost all of the value created in social media. Social media makes it really easy to answer the question, “what has this person done for me lately?” As such, you’ll hear “yes” far more often when you’ve provided value before an ask, or in conjunction with it.

4. Why should we try to open these side doors sooner rather than later?

Imagine it’s the dawn of the 20th century, and you’re a salesperson, marketer or jobseeker. Telephones are expensive and rare, but somehow you’ve acquired one for free. There are no gatekeepers to screen the calls of the rich and powerful, and you can reach any of these fellow telephone owners simply by asking a switchboard operator to put you in touch. If you wait too long to take advantage of this situation, your competition will beat you to the punch, your approach will no longer be unique, and access now seems like more of a liability than an opportunity to those being accessed.

We’re not quite there yet with social media. We see rising adoption among powerful people, but the human and technological gatekeepers haven’t caught up yet. And innovation happens so rapidly, that the arrival of each new social network brings with it a new set of access and influence opportunities.

Author’s Bio: Ian Greenleigh is a social media and content strategist, and author of The Social Media Side Door: How to Bypass the Gatekeepers to Gain Greater Access and Influence. He helps companies turn data, ideas, and relationships into true thought leadership. His words and ideas have been featured in Harvard Business Review, Ad Age, Adweek, Digiday, Ragan, Seth Godin’s The Domino Project, and elsewhere. He writes and speaks on a wide range of topics, including changing consumer-brand relationships, the convergence of personal identities, and the radically shifting landscapes of access and influence. You can connect with Ian on Twitter: @be3d

What’s the WHY of Your Business?

by

Influence and Attraction

Purpose, Mission, and Vision

cooltext443809602_strategy

Whether we’re working with a new businesses, a project, or a team that needs rebuilding, it’s typical to start with purpose, mission, and vision.

You have to choose your future before you can make it happen.

Though we might not fully agree on the exact definition of those terms, a true strategy will investigate, establish, and articulate these foundational ideas of mission, vision, and purpose before …

  • before auditing market share and position;
  • before studying current trends, cycles, and conditions;
  • before making product or customer service decisions,
  • before choosing a core community;
  • before considering processes and systems.

This list represents the “who” “how” and “what” of a business.

What’s the WHY of Your Business?

Making any key decisions without agreeing on mission, vision, and purpose is dangerous. It’s an invitation to hidden assumptions, shallow thinking, and miscommunication. Without clarity, everyone who might help you, your team, or your business — employees, vendors, partners, customers, friends — will construct their own definition of your mission, vision, and purpose.

Next time you want to influence people to support your idea, project, or business venture, next time you want to attract people to participate with you, answer these four basic question sets:

  1. Who are we? / What do we value?
  2. Where are we going / what are we building?
  3. How will we get there / how will we build it?
  4. Why is this quest important? / Why are we uniquely suited to meet this call better than any other?

These foundational questions require priority attention because they build they WHY of your business.
They underpin your best true, compelling story — the calling and commitment — that fuels your business and the people who want to help it grow. Yet, the last of these, the “WHY” fuels is of what moves us and the people we serve to action.

The WHY of your business is the bedrock of influence and attraction.
The WHY attracts people who share your values and believe in what you’re building.
The WHY calls the ideal employees, customers, vendors and partners to pitch in to help you build it.
The WHY is irresistible reason to join you in making something you can’t build alone.

What’s the WHY of Your business?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

How to Attract and Influence Real Fans, Friends, and Followers

by

by
Buddy Hodges

cooltext443809602_strategy

Friendship and Influence

The inestimable value of friendship and influence is taken as a given here. This post assumes that you already know the “why.” It addresses the “how” in terms of timeless psychological principles which are fundamental to building personal relationships. Of course, commerce and business alliances are also based on personal relationships. We are talking about how to get people to know, like and trust you.

You may have heard these principles in some form before, but they are so important, in my opinion as a social psychologist, that they are worth repeating until we remember to act on them.

Attract Others Like You

Meeting the people you want to connect with involves exposure. If you want to be in the right place at the right time, be in a lot of places. However, it is wise to choose which places are most likely to put you in front of the kind of people you want to know. “Stack the deck” to improve the odds that synchronicity and serendipity will work in your favor. In addition to finding the “right” people, you will be seen in the right context. The mere fact that you belong to a group or a specific social network causes you to be perceived as “one of us.”

Friendship begins with being seen and being noticed. Psychologists know that the old myth, “familiarity breeds contempt,” is false. In fact just the opposite is true. Why do you think politicians invest so much on yard signs? On the internet your personal brand is enhanced by repeated exposure. Post, comment, tweet, like, link, etc. Get your name out there for starters.

Attract and Influence by Investing Attention

To win friends it is more effective to be interested than to be interesting. The best way to motivate people is to find out what they already want and give it to them. Among the things people want most (and don’t already have) is attention. They crave recognition and respect. I suggest that you consider paying, or rather investing, attention.

In a free market economy good listeners are in big demand and short supply. Listening is a technique that is more easily said than done, because we also want to be heard. On social media we “listen” by reading with comprehension and commenting appropriately to show our understanding and interest. We invest attention by re-tweeting and linking.

Recommending or endorsing people (or their content) makes them like you. Sincere compliments are always appreciated, and your recommendation is valuable to them as well. Be authentic. Sincerity is one of the most likeable traits.

Influence Starts with Trust in Them and in You

Trust
BigStock: Trust

Stephen M.R. Covey wrote a book called, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything in which he calls trust the very basis of the new global economy and the essential ingredient for any high–performance, successful organization.

Greg Ferenstein wrote a post on the Mashable.com blog called, The Science of Building Trust with Social Media. Ferenstein quotes Professor Judith Olson of U.C. Irvine, who conducted research on internet trust. Professor Olson notes that “lacking traditional markers of trust, such as voice intonation and body language, when only text is available, participants judge trustworthiness based on how quickly others respond.”

Consider how you feel when someone fails to reply to your email or return your phone call after you leave a voicemail message. You build trust when you reply quickly to comments on your Facebook posts or on your blog. Commentators get frustrated when their comment is “awaiting moderation” for too long. It is risky to leave a “Drive-by” comment on another blog without waiting for a reply to engage in conversation. Although it is essential to be authentic, showing respect for another’s point of view in an online dialog helps create trust.

—-

Author’s Bio:
Buddy Hodges writes about Social Media Relationships and Social Media for Business at RelatingOnline.com and SocialMediaForBusiness.US Buddy’s Social Media Management business website is at: ProActionTeam You can find him on Twitter as @internetworker

Thank you, Buddy! Great insights on how fuels attraction and influence.

— ME “Liz” Strauss

Influence: 5 Ways to Check Whether Your Online Business Relevance Is Eroding

by

Offering Value and Meaning

As more tools and algorithms surface for the purpose of rating influence, across each measure and metric the hardest factor to isolate and measure is topical relevance. I may be influential to the SOBCon on the subject of strategy, small business, start ups, and entrepreneurship, because I’ve established expertise in the area of starting and growing a business. However, I wouldn’t have the same influential relevance on the topic of gourmet cooking or restaurant management.

Without relevance, there is no influence.

5 Ways to Check Whether Your Business Relevance Is Eroding

Eight to ten years ago, the social business Internet was centered in the blogosphere. Blogs were the most common vehicle by which online business people established their identities, connected, and conversed. Individuals picked up the tools and learned the culture from the people they met while using them. Now, this Insane Infographic-of-the-day: Social Media shows the complicated space the social business web has become. …


Click the image to view a larger format.

Blogging platforms have become one unit on a hugely varied landscape for sharing content.
Blogs were once a highly relevant main idea in a chart like that.
Now they are more of a secondary detail in relevance.

Keep up with the changing landscape or lose relevance. Keeping up requires participating and adding unique value to channel and enhance opportunities as the environment changes. Here are 5 ways to check whether your online business relevance is eroding.

  1. You (your brand or your business) spend more time sharing content than reading it. Strategic sharing can enhance relevance. Through focus and filtering, a business can underscore brand identity, values, expertise, and a service ethic. All of which builds trust and attracts a self-sorting group of ideal customers or clients.

    Oversharing without filtering, such as retweeting without reading first, adds noise not value and erodes relevance. Promiscuous sharing destroys relevance.

  2. You (your brand or your business) value social scores and metrics, such as Klout and follower counts, MORE than conversations with the people who help your business thrive. We can use metrics to fine tune our relevance. Metrics can reveal “who, what, how, when, and how many”.

    All metrics and algorithms carry the bias of assumptions about what is being measured. Beware of how metrics flatten data by removing individual particularities. To stay relevant, keep a continuous dialogue with individuals represented by the data. Balance in the people-data equation is foundational to relevance.

  3. You (your brand or your business) make decisions and develop expertise based on 2nd-hand experiences. Research and reading focused on current cases, predictions, trends, cycles, and conditions can increase relevance. Understanding the breadth of an industry environment extends our ability to recognize and leverage opportunity. Still vicarious knowledge is shallow, fades quickly, and lacks insight.

    Turning acquired knowledge into experience by applying it, trying it, testing, and measuring our outcomes increases relevance exponentially. Through application we develop the intuitive detail of experience and the ability to recognize nuance. In that way it erodes relevance.

  4. You (your brand or your business) have more answers than questions. Sharing answers and solutions is highly relevant. Doing so in the spaces where customers meet to talk — in their language — makes those answers even more relevant.

    More powerful than answers are the compelling questions that keep us connecting and searching. Working out and working on deep questions that are critical to our customers’ mission — how they will raise their families, how they can grow their business — offer the people we serve the most relevant connection to our business.

  5. You (your brand or your business) develop social marketing plans around “online and offline channels” rather than using connect more deeply with the people who build your business. A well-designed outreach strategy can spark relevant human connections.

    Reframing social business as customer connections rather than channels, we can build true “other-centered” intimacy into the way we reach out, A view to why people meet in each space changes the way we talk and the topics we talk about. Relevance online and off starts with caring about people.

As information and technology change at the speed of the Internet, staying relevant is a constant and always current criteria of true influence. Focused attention to the new problems, new solutions, and new opportunities that surround them is essential. Without that focus and a clear intention to acquire new competencies, internalize current culture, and cultivate new thinking, that same speed of the Internet can erode, as we continue to do what once made us successful but is no longer needed.

How do you stay irresitibly relevant to the people who help you thrive?

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

Influence Yourself

by

Who Influences You?

cooltext443809558_authenticity

I’m proud of you. You inspire me. You’re a treasure.

Have you ever heard those words?

How nice it is to know that in some life you’ve been a treasure, a thing of beauty or inspiration. I never cease to wonder what prompts such a feeling, what someone saw in me. What does it mean to make another person proud?

Words like that influence me.
They change how I think, how I act, what I believe and what I do next.
They make me stop, think, and wonder what I did to earn them.
A powerful statement can change doubt into confidence.

When I get a response that says I’m valued, I’m influenced to do things that will earn that feeling again.

But …

Some folks think I’m brilliant and creative and other folks, well, think I’m … um … not.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

And on that idea, I figured out something when I was looking at the the stars.

When stars die they leave behind space debris. Space debris is gorgeous colors and shines with its own bright light. The wispy, windy patterns and reflections energize filmy fibers in the endless space night.

What (hu)man named it trash?
It’s a treasure for the heart and the eyes.

People and stars are made of the same stuff.
The carbon that makes cell in our bodies came from the same stuff that makes stars.

It’s true about stars.
It’s true about people too.

Stars shine no matter who is looking.
No one has to call them a treasure.
They shine because that’s what stars do.

Influence Yourself

This week …

Be a treasure.
Start a quest. Create and conspire.
Be a mentor, a leader, a teacher. Inspire.
Be a beginner, a learner, an adventurer. Aspire.
Shine at being you.
Shine because being brilliant is what you do.
Do it because YOU have decided you’re living up to being a treasure.

Influence yourself.

Be irresistible.
— ME “Liz” Strauss

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.