Liz Strauss thinks about how to connect people and businesses. Today, that means blogging. Liz runs SOBCon, a business school for bloggers, and writes a blog about successful blogging. If you want to know how your business could use blogging, she is the person to ask. To start you off, I asked Liz 4 questions.
4 Questions with Liz Strauss
Josh Klein: What’s the first thing that attracted you to blogging?
Liz Strauss: The first answer is that a publishing friend called me one day to say that her company, one I knew well, was thinking about starting a a blog, and would I be interested in writing it? I figured I’d better do some blogging to know what it took, because I had no idea what to charge . . .
The second answer is that I’ve always been fascinated with words, and a career in publishing made me think that I might be able to do it well enough. Ironically, I made the same mistakes everyone seems to make. I thought it was about writing. I thought it was about having something to say.
Josh Klein: As an individual blogger, making mistakes along the way does seem to be widely accepted, and can even endear you to your readers. For businesses thinking about getting into the blogging game, do the same rules apply? And if blogging isn’t about having something to say, what is blogging about?
Liz Strauss: Wow! Is it the same for business? Imagine if I offered you a job and said, “Josh, the one rule is you can’t ever make a mistake.” Not a great place to work, or feel like you offer much, is it? Businesses trust their people to interact publicly in so many ways: answering emails and phone calls, talking at trade shows, talking to the press, making sales presentations worth millions of dollars. If a business can trust an employee to do those things, blogging seems like a natural fit in much the same way.
Blogging is about two-way connections around ideas. Talking is only one-way, a presentation. Blogging is more like a conversation. Great conversationalists listen and ask questions more often than they say things. Blogging links people by content and context – we share ideas and we share who we are.
On a business blog, the best bloggers offer help and advice. They write helpful advice, answer questions, and make it easy to connect around the topics that are important to their industry. They become a trusted source, so naturally people want to do business with them.
As people connect on blogs, they get to work with, and buy from, people they know, like, and trust. People like to do business with people. That’s what blogging, business blogging, is really about.
Josh Klein: It seems like the two-way connection scares a lot of businesses. In the good old days, you’d run a TV commercial or print an ad in the yellow pages, and the only response you could get would be positive – someone coming to your business. Now, you can go out there, start this two-way conversation, and hear all the nasty things people have to say. Of course, in my experience, the nasty conversations are happening anyway – you just don’t know about them because your head is buried in the ground like you’re an ostrich.
Do you think the conversation is always worth it? What does a business do if something goes wrong?
Liz Strauss: There are friends, enemies, and the people who don’t know you. Suppose the last group is with the other two and your name comes up. You might want to know what is being said about you, especially whether it’s the truth.
Imagine some of your friends are unhappy because you’ve disappointed them in some way. Would you want to know?
It’s true that some folks are just not going to like you no matter how hard you try or what you do. Those aren’t the folks you want as customers, anyway. They take too much time. BUT the folks who are your friends that you might disappoint and not even know it, if they go away that’s a loss.
If the conversation is happening with or without you, wouldn’t you want to be able to add your say, tell your story, and do what you can to make things right when it’s the right thing to do?
What if a business does something wrong? People like to do business with people.
I’d tell the business to do what a responsible, compassionate, authentic person would do. Own the mistake. Apologize. Do what can be done to fix it — plus ten percent more — as soon as they find that a problem has occurred. Show, without question, where their values are.
Josh Klein: That seems to be the trend; successful businesses are acting more like people. It’s the only way to cut through the clutter of the thousands of marketing messages pummeling us every day. The very best conversationalists don’t just listen and talk, they listen and talk a lot.
Have you always been an extrovert?
Liz Strauss: Actually, I don’t think I’m an extrovert. I just play one on my blog.
A Lesson in Business Relationships
There is an important lesson we can boil out of this: your brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s defined by the relationships you have.
Liz said something interesting to me during our correspondence. She isn’t just Liz; she is also her mother’s daughter and her brother’s sister. She is partially defined by each of the individual relationships she has, and no two people see her the same way.
This is true for all of us, and our businesses.
The relationships you have with people are individually important, because how your next customer will view you is only partly yours to define.
Look at Noah Brier’s Brand Tags. The third and fourth most popular phrases associated with Best Buy are “overpriced” and “crap”. Says who? As many as 1.1 million people.
A blog isn’t the answer, but it is an answer, and the first one you should implement. Need help? Just ask Liz.
Do you buy this? Is a blog necessary to define and build your brand? Is it sufficient?
