Talking about becoming a blogging success. Her experience with moving forward, which is a very cool, exciting story about how she got started…. and a big goofy thing she did (submitting to the ProBlogger thing a while back, and her tenacity).

It is important to get outside of your comfort zone, to be tenacious!! Her most embarrassing moment:

She is a sr. coach and training with Anthony Robbins and associates… in their events they get people to stand up and dance.. so on one event they didnt’ have the normal music… the DJ put on her most favorite song and knew that she was going to go nuts, and she figured she would! (she is also a mom… and after 3 children things are a little stretched out)… and she started wetting her pants… and couldn’t stop… and she was in faded jeans wetting her pants in front of those people. She ran offstage… but the show went on… it had to.

How we all got here – we are all in this conference because of a link, a comment or something like that. We are all here because of someone else that is here.

It’s easy to see how many seeds are in an apple, but there is no way to know how many apples are in a seed.

She’s started from some pretty humble places and she’s overcome a lot to get here and where she is at today. The ProBlogger expo expanded her position so much that is why she is part of entrepreneur.com (and other stuff). Linking and commenting and e-mailing is a very strategic thing for her. She has definitely introduced herself through a link!

She wants to know how we’ve been able to leverage our relationships:

Muhammed Saleem – The Mu Life – if you leave a comment on his blog, he visits (so you can see him on MyBlogLog) and e-mails them. He tells about Brian from (CopyBlogger) about how their relationship grew. This is how Mu got to write for him. He keeps this up because this is not the only instance of this happening. He is here because Tony Hung blogged about this on the Blog Herald… and it turned out that Liz called him. Blogging is a SOCIAL medium … it doesn’t mean MySpace or whatever, it really is just the beginning of the conversation and ends in real relationships.

Ben Y – when you think of A-List bloggers, they are regular people that may be just a little ahead of the game. If they ignore you then screw them because they are not worth it anyway. What blogging has done for him is it helped him meet his partners for his new company… while you get to have an international audience you can also have a very local, tight audience (Jason: I’m seeing this with my Twitter stuff also).

Lorelle on WordPress -your blog is your resume, it is your letter of recommendation, they are networking. Because of her voice, and her “resume” which is her blog, she was selected to create this book – make your blog work so that people want todo business with you – so they come to you!

Robyn Tippins (MyBlogLog) – she is everywhere on the internet, she is the social networking queen. her blog is decent enough that it will speak for her. her advise is to TALK and TALK and TALK!!

now back to Wendy – there is a bigger “why” behind all of this. Her blog (work at home, marketing and blogging) is NOT her mission. Her mission is to find women who are also single and pregnant and in their twenties and went through hell and say YOU CAN DO IT — to provide inspiration and help to people in the situation she was in.

This is bigger than getting traffic. This is bigger than all the metrics and all that stuff – the bigger missions are for the people that she wants to reach in their hardest times. (jason: I totally relate – my mission is related to people who are getting screwed by their companies, laid off, undersized, and all that jazz and helping them through the lows of the lows, and the people that are scared out of their minds)

Wendy is awesome – this really hit home for me.

half of the blogs are spogs – realize that the blog is just the messenger, the bigger stuff is that THE MESSAGE behind the blog! She writes about SEO because she is the top result on married to an alcoholic — she knows SEO. She is also going to be doing PR and non-web stuff to reach more people, that aren’t online!

Frankie: about selling their car for environmental reason. And then what to do with the driveway?? There were too many bylaws in their community… and Frankie wanted to plant things there and not have a driveway! She read an article about how Toronto is such a great green city… and she called the reporter and told HER side of the story! This got picked up by the news station… and it really escalated. It was put in “tree hugger” … and lots of buzz around this story… it was blogged all over the place… and the city is wondering what’s going on? Her point is that WE CAN BE THE CATALYST FOR CHANGE.

Wendy says there is really really talented marketing folks here. How can we move outside the blogosphere to get our mission outside of the blog world?

• Offer articles to them
• Help schools, etc.
• WashingPost.com has a blogroll
• Have people at physical events
• 70% of reporters get their ideas from blogs – reach out to them
• Using article submission sites with out posts
• Connecting with mainstream journalist articles that may be blogging and write about your stuff – approach this more accidental than pitching them… if they link to you great, but work the real relationship after that.
• Follow up with reporters and send them interesting things, and let them know that we are linking to them
• Send Wendy an e-mail if we have ideas or suggestions and she is going to send out a post and link back to us.

Wendy ended with a visualization technique to help people imagine what they could do if they imagined what they could do without limitations: think about how yo can do that with your blogs, and your business and the purpose that you are put on this earth for.

Here is Chris Cree’s blog.

MyBlogLog: (Robyn) huge growth happened when the released the widget – their goal is to grow the size and depth of the community. Robyn is the community manager.

Evoca: (Diego) the vision is to help bloggers, and the intimate users post their actual voice online. Uses several tools, simplest is the telephone.

TheGoodBlogs: (Vernon) many in the room are already involved with TheGoodBlogs. Wanted to do this his way as opposed to the VC route, and he seems to understand the blog culture better than a funder would.

How do you create a community? Know who is reading your blog (this is why MyBlogLog is so cool) and then reach out to these people.

Evoca is providing tools to really allow you to bring more personality or another dimension into your blog. Also, it allows you to get feeback (with your reader’s voice) back to you (I think)

Robyn (what are the biggest challenges facing bloggers today): continuing to stay relevent (easy to go to TechMeme and get lots of traffic) but are you really going to stay important? And give “absolutely no value” to the rest of the community?

Diego (can you share some of the cool stuff we can look forward to): include working with the Barack Obama (sp?) campaign to strengthen their cause or message to allow voters (american people) to call in and tell them what they think (which is cool, compared to letters and all that stuff). Also looking at school relationships to reach out to their students, a relationship with Skype, and other stuff (TypePad) to make it easier to add voice to their blog.

Vernon (what keeps you up at night?): what is the next big thing… and where is the blogging industry headed? What is it going to look at in 5 years from now? Think about where blogger was at 5-6 years ago. It’s a place to put text and video now, but think about (wonder where) it’s headed. Are we going to become a MySpace, or are we all going to meet half way somewhere? he wants comments/e-mails on where this is headed.

Robyn (on what is the most important thing she can communicate to us?): 1. let us know what the problems are, we really really want to know!, 2. contact us whenever you want (right now she is customer service and responds very quickly) but the biggest thing to let us know is that MyBlogLog exists because of US, the bloggers that use the widget! They are very easy going, they are bloggers, geeks, and blog readers, shoot them an e-mail with any suggestions (they covet all suggestions) robyn@mybloglog.com.

Diego (same question): same thing, very impt to hear from the users, success stories (like the guy that recorded a conversation in an elevator), and please give the tool a try.

Vernon (same question): answer: You belong here. A lot of people treat blogsthe same way he treats planting – wants it to be planted one day and a tree the next! It really takes 18 months to get it up and thriving – for the avg person. Be more patient about what you, it will come and you are a terrific blogger (and cherish every one of you). There is this 18 month rule though, give yourself 18 months and you will know whether you succeed or not. And, you build communities one post at a time! 2 clicks a day (or 2 new people a day) is about 700 new people each year! And then you can get to the hockey-stick growth :p

— little bit of discussion on what happens after the politician is voted in (will they still use it)

Q: (from Tony nest) hug mybloglog fan – for business bloggers, they don’t like having the half-naked women on their… can we select categories of this? Or ratings… ?? A: they are figuring out how to do this, so you can filter on your blog AND people can rate/flag them. She said that she goes through every single picture (new pics?) to delete them out. They allow racy avatars but doesn’t want to see really bad stuff.

comment for vernon (tony nest) – you can actually test headlines, and then based on the traffic you get figure out if it is good or not.

Q: can we see a sneak peak of something over the next 6 months? Is there anything awesome? A: redesigning the site, rebranding the name. It’s not just for bloggers… lots of people come there don’t even have a blog. There are lots of ideas that people that have sent in that are on this list and there are great ideas that are being implemented now — there is a widget 2.0 that is coming out in the next couple of months.

No matter what kind of blog you have, how to be a better blogger.

IowaBlogs.net (also watch “MyFeedStream” (sp?))

What does a blog coach make his clients do? Laps, pushups, etc.

3 types of blogs: journal lifestyle blogging, business that have a blog or blogging as a business

Drew – talking about learning how to ride a bike. The first time, where was your vision? Where were you headed? Why were you on the bike? Who did you want to ride with (alone, so no one saw)? This is how bloggers start. No vision, no direction, didn’t want people reading his blogs

So now we have all learned how to ride the bike… so this is all about taking the training wheels off the blog.

Mike Wagner – branding and blogging.

1. A blog is a free sample of your brand.
2. There are at least two kinds of brands – a default brand and an intentional brand. (cool concept)
   1. To build an intentionally brand you nust need two basic skills (1) the concept of being unique, remarkable, etc.. Being creative. Allowing yourself to be CREATIVE.
   2. You have to CARE.

Brands have to be remarkable and useful.

— now we break out into groups… I’m in the one for those that have a company and blog.

What are the things that we’ve done to take the training wheels off our blogging?

• consistency
• Tony (nest guy) tracked through comments based on who was reading his blog… and found who his audience was and blogs now to them instead of what his original messages.
• link love, active blog marketing (going to the other bloggers), returning the love
• use the technorati value tracker tool to show what (set up as an RSS feed) so that you can know who links to the sites that are your core values… you can then comment on the new bloggers that are linking to your competition (or like blogs) – sounds like a cool tool to use. You can do it for yourself on technorati but this sounds like a sweet tool.
• wrote a web plan, with the blog as part of your dev capabilities.
• MyBlogLog … big wave of traffic and readers (pay attention to this means -> just be involved, engage with who’s new, etc. Just engage the people in your community).
• blog carnival (alternative services, and allow peole who don’t have a business to advertise/post on my blog
• creating diverse voices within a blog – team blog concept
• reaching out to traditional media (in a complimentary way) to engage them… perhaps they’ll talk about you in their print
• spend investment time in relationships – give first
• trackbacks, especially with news stuff

What’s not working?

• learning the mechanics – trying to figure out all the widgets and stuff that takes so much time!
• mistaking a business blog for a personal blog (using all the crap from personal blogs on your business blog, cluttered, messy, etc.)
• believing that just because I wrote it people will read it
• themes that need really good index tools for previous posts… should make it easy for people to find posts.
• maintaining enthusiasm for a topic that you have already covered
• it is really hard to write a good headline (copyblogger is a great resource for fixing this) and ogleby on advertising (from the Nest Guy)

Other groups came up with:

• produce e-books
• top 10 lists
• practical articles
• season of life stuff
• press releases
• — and then the “we do this for a living” team – stuff that works
• affiliate ads
• videos
• text link ads
• sponsored posts
• amazon
• — oops stuff
• adsense didn’t work
• have a print this button
• comments need to be easier
• clutter needs to go away
• — folks in business and blog as well – stuff that works
• having a small checklist of things that yo udo every day (the maintenance)
• MyBlogLog
• reaching out to traditional media
• — oops stuff
• overthinking, you HAVE TO pull the trigger and go (this is a wrong perception)
• too many widgets to figure out :/
• the whole linking just to link thing
• people have a written plan for their blog

Word of mouth marketing in 5 easy steps – wordofmouthbook.com

1 – put card in the thing for a surprise, and 2 – lower your expectations!

At Dreary Inn (sp – yes, pun intended) you get one free hour long distance. They are giving you a reason to spread the word and the tool to tell people about it!

RedEnvelope send nice gifts in gorgeous red box, bow, etc. It’s huge wrapping – no matter what the gift is, they are creating buzz about the box, and people ask “where did you get that!” instead of “what is the gift?”!!

WOMM is about little simple things that we can do… not HUGE things. Like the Purple cow thing, where people can’t help but tell their friends about you.

As americans, we talk all the time, but we specifically talk about products. Restaurants, type of food, shampoos, etc. We talk about things to buy, and brand mentions are woven through our chatter – so the brand is to get peopel to talk about our brand. It’s not about causing conversations, it’s about getting people to talk about our stuff.

Example, Krispy Kream – hot donuts.the neon sign would cause huge WOMM.

On the flip side you can blow it – if you don’t keep it special, people are going to stop talking about you. It has to be special! No one tells their friends about buying donuts in the gas station, where they are cold.

1. give people a reason to talk about you.

2. keep the message special. (KK donuts cold in the gas station was a no-no)

WOMM is (A) giving people a reason to talk about your stuff and (B) making it easy for people to talk about it.

YouTube has 7 diff spots on each page facilating sharing!! blog it, e-mail it, share it, etc. So there is B2B, B2C… but what about C2C (which is really B2C2C2C2C…..)

one of the greatest is the secret e-mail with the employee discount for the gap, etc. If they ran the same thing in the newspaper it would not spread – but on the e0mail (with employee discount) it did!

This is all about LOVE. Making people love your stuff – they want to tell people about you, your company, etc. Teenagers in love can’t stop talking about it! You’ve got to earn love, trust and respect and NEVER break that.

Love and money don’t mix. If people are going to tell their friends aboutyou, they will because they like what you are doing. (so I’m not going to do the crazy free affiliate thing) – this violates the trust!

“advertising is the price of being boring!” If you create cool, exciting stuff then everyone will write about you! If you are boring you have to pay them to write about you :p But it’s easier to buy the ads than it is to be interesting, remarkable or to get respect from them.

Why do the same people who skip through the ads on a magazine authorize ad purchases at their work??

1 New Reality – consumers control your reputation

People like me – I need tothink about selling to people like me (I think I missed this or didn’t get this point right, I don’t agree 100% (he’s rich and I’m not though, so listen to who you want t0)) – and people like me can stamp me out with a post or comment on CNET or something like that.

People like me UR the UE (UR: you are; UE: user experience) – your brand is not what your ads say they are. Your brand is the sum total of all the experiences when regular people call your company. The true user experience defines your brand. No amount of advertising fixes a broken car – no ad campaign connects you to a cell spot when you can’t connect! Example is Southwest airlines because they are the same as the rest (as far as rain, uncontrollables, etc.) but SW is nice about things!! JetBlue begged forgiveness – they are genuinely nice people! Guess who isn’t nice, but rather fake? Ted. It’s just not the same.

The permanent Record – everything lives forever in Google. So your job as a WOMM is to make sure the good stuff gets on the front page too – the great customer service moment, etc.

3 reasons why people talk about you:

You – because they love your company, products, stuff, etc. He can’t give a checklist of stuff for us to do – it comes down to just being a great company. Just do a good job, consistently, for a long time.

Me – personal, emotional reasons. Because it makes them look good. “I’m the car guy, everyone asks me about cars”. People love to be asked… Mac owners believe that if you own a Mac you’ll be better off… all companies should have a non-corporate blog, a “geeko” blog (example – Quickbooks developer blog). Give them more to talk about so they can look good, feel good about themselves.

Us – wewant to feel part of the group – the teenagrs that don’t want to be abused by marketers but they all where the gap hat and A&F shirts. Or, the saturn groupies (not ferrari, harley) — 60k people!! Maker’s Mark is another example of how to do this… you sign up and vow to save others from drinking bad whiskey, and they send you 30 cards to hand out… ! There are 500k ambassadors (sp) !! Huge power of thinking part of the group. Microsoft has on-site face2face meetings, even though they don’t have to — 3 every day! This builds the “us.” They had over 1M Vista beta testers! Make people feel part of your family.

5 Steps in WOMM

1. Talkers: find people who will talk — these are regular people, all of us, bloggers are talkers… it’s just people that volunteer to join the club!
2. Topics: give people a reason to talk –this is not the brand, or marketing material, this is just simple stuff that people can tell to others! Perhaps the best topic ever, about 10 yrs ago when Jobs went back to apple, it was “cute little computers – they are colorful (purple, pink, orange, etc.). The colors are irrelevent but guess what – it created buzz and talk – it was the topic that travelled that made it so successful.
3. Tools: help the message spread — sometimes you just have to ask them to. Also, the “tell a friend” button on every single page of your site, or an “e-mail this post” to someone else. This needs to be on EVERY page and EVERY post. Biggest tool is e-mail – because it is FORWARDABLE. This is HUGE. Or launch an e-mail newsletter (which is old school but travellable) – you have to think about what is it going to make it easier for people to share your topic?
4. Taking Part: join the conversation –marketing departments are all about outputs — customer service is all about input… we need to figure out how to have a conversation!! Two ways. Every business should put every employee in front of a computer… and respond to every single mention that you finally see. No matter what their role is… if they say something bad your response is “I’m sorry, we screwed up” — the response is another post that says “OMG, Dell reads my blog!” You get another post going, and it breaks down some barriers.
5. Tracking: measure and listen —

New phenomenon out there – making people happy makes you more money!

— The End

Q: what do you think about the question “would you recommend this to your friend?” A: (jason thinks: the ultimate question is “will you” ?) — Andy says there is a formula from some book he’s doing that shows a correlation between the number of promoters and profit. “Net Promoter Score” is what the hottest trend is to figure out now.

Comment: this dude put up a positive comment that he had on Dell and they didn’t know what to do, how to react.

Q: Should we really put the lowest paid employee on the internet making comments? do we blog so we can do change management (and have them blog), have it come from the strategic level? A: it’s not that simple. the CEO of Dell needs to make the computers better, not blog. There can be a team that handles this. (jason thinks: getting the lower level involved in this will help form/change the company structure).

Comment: Frankie James mentions the power of nice book (should take 40 minutes to read)

Q: he is saying that he requested us to make any comment, good or bad. Does he really want the bad? A: It’s all about honesty, and authenticity. It’s about being human, being real, sharing what we think! Not everyone is going to like it but readers are intelligent, and they will understand when we have a bad comment or whateer, that is what conversation is about. No one believes 100% of positive reviews.

http://darmano.typepad.com (I didn’t realize who this was – for me this guy is a bloggers superstar and has an incredible following and for good reason!) He writes for business week – is this one article or is this multiple columns??

One word to focus on in his presentation: experience.

His blog came out of nowhere, but wants to share what has worked for him.

Starting at the beginning – we are all unique. We’re all individuals. Are our blogs as unique as we are, and the voice, and the experience and the brand. When we talk about 75M blogs, does our blog really stand apart? If your blog is your business you need to focus on this.

He say 34 reasons why peole unsubscribe from your blog, reason #5: too many posts that I see elsewhere. SO your blog does not stand out.

how do we define success? We all have to ask ourselves this question. (he defined it but I didn’t get it -I heard it but it didn’t click)

Blogs + brands – some have it (google, ipod, etc.) and others have lost it (burger king, kmart, kodak (all have red, all have big K).

Q: do you have a blog brand?? Seth has it, Guy has it, Kathy had it (but it will likely change)… any successful blog has blog brand.

Q: are you blogging or representing your personal brand? He uses blogs as an extension of his personal brand. A brand is a gut feeling about products, services, etc. how do you convey this GUT FEELING?

I’t not any one thing (community, voice, message) … it’s all of the things together to give a GUT FEELING.

Q: can you design a better blog experience? YES – and it’s not just in the asthetics, but the complete experience. You want them to have had such a great experience so they come back.

4 Cs of blogging:

• COMMUNITY
  • invest in the community, get involved;
  • Listen and facilitate,
  • Cultivate, ask their opinions
• CONTENT
  • frame our subjects, don’t just report but have opinions and seek opinions of others;
  • share – people are hungry for knowledge, don’t worry about your ideas being stolen because everyone is stealing from one another;
  • serve – we are 100% in the service industry – if you are not providing value then stop blogging!
• CLARITY
  • See where you are going, vision is everything;
  • communicate, be clear and articulate – rambling doesn’t make for good conversation;
  • vision IS NOT visionary – don’t let this word scare you off – you don’t need ot be a genious, you just need to “keep your eyes on the road”
• CONSISTENCY
  • Find your voice – speak up;
  • write about things you care about and be true to yourself (this is better than saying “be authentic”;
  • experiment, evolve and do it consistently.

This is his framework and it is working…he never writes about something that he doesn’t want to write about – no one is forcing him (perhaps in a business setting)

Clarity combines vision with agility. No matter how much planning we do we’ll have to improvise… we have to be flexible. We still have to plan but we have to roll with what life gives us – and same with the blog. He didn’t know his blog was going to take off like is has… so “have a plan butbe really good at improvising!”

Technology recommendation – SLIDESHARE. need to check that out. “it almost makes the content 3D in one single post”…

STOP calling yourself a blogger. As a brand, it has a lot of baggage. When we are thinking about our audience be empathetic (I need to incorporate this into my personal branding stuff ‘it’s not “be a blogger” it’s “develop your brand with tools”) — this is more of a change in mindset – we need to be (1) unique individuals that have interests that (2) use tools to do self-publishing. When you stop thinking of yourself as a blogger your blog will be effected by that !! very cool idea.

Bloggers are one-dimentional, but people are multi-dimensional (because we can be users, and all kinds of other things (producers, customers, etc.). There is nothing wrong with calling a person a customer but that is not the core of what/who they are. Ashley Cecil says that when we do this it expands our audience (as opposed to getting the blank stare (what is a blog)?

David: blogging is a commodity. Wow, that’s profound, but think about it, there are 75M out there… this is a COMMODITY.

a lot of readers don’t know they are reading a blog, just that it’s a website.

Really, this is less about what we call ourselves but more about what our core passion is. Many people go through life never figuring out what the core passion is… if we figure out what it is then we need to harness the passion, pinpoint it, analyize it and then harness it. He has figured out his own. And all the blogs that we admire have figured out their passions.

Let your passion shape your blog, above anything else. What is your cause? Engagement, conversation and all that jazz is cool and impt but it’s not the cause – his cause is that design is in everything… he is passionate about it to the core.

Start with YOU, then what is your PASSION, which then leads to CONVERSATION, which leads to RELATIONSHIPS, and that leads to AFFINITY (feeling good about the experience that they just had – and it keeps people coming back). So then we become not bloggers but conversation architects…

Cycle –> Visit -> engage -> share -> (and back to visit again) .. this is not buzz marketing (when the are happy), this is the best word of mouth marketing there is. Succes is when people feel like they are PART of the content and experience… (jason: and this gives them ownership)

Has anyone talked to a seven year old that has just come back from a Disney vacation? They have a great experience and they’ll talk your ear off… Disney delivers this to an almost-lethal fashion — why can’t we do this on our blogs?? Provide a great experience and this is what’s going to happen.

****** the end – this was awesome… I’m jealous of artists anyway – this guy is over-the-edge.

Wendy eMom comment: 2% believe what we tell them, 20% believe what their friends tell them, and 100% believe what they tell themselves.

Q: what is the conversion rate (on getting people to visit to engage to share and back again) – she looks at her blog, sees that a whole bunch of people come, and to see who comes back it’s a real low %. A: you can’t look at just traffic… although he has 2000 RSS, 400 e-mail, 1200 referrals (those that click on a link to get to him)… and his mainstream traffic from magazines… (they aren’t talking about how many posts are spawned by your post (on other’s blogs) – another thing to look at is, how many peope IN YOUR TARGET (or industry) are looking at your blog? That’s huge,

Q: Christine Kane, says lots of musicians think that bloggers are just geeks. She is interested in knowing how to market this stuff to people who don’t get what blogs are? You can’t say Link Love … A: you have to do a lot more doing and a lot less talking. He says the idea of “tell them” “have them repeat” and then “have them teach” … the idea that you put it back in their court with more responsibility to teach others or us is more impt.

Q: how do we share the experience and passion that we have, we can’t do body language and all that. he thinks design is “incredibly valuable” to replace the body language stuff. (jason’s thought: I’d rather read excellent writing than care for excellent design – go back to the classic books – it’s about the excellent writing). A: you have to look at what’s out there – and you can mimick all of this “gesticulation” (sp) – look at Seth Godin – he doesn’t use images or anything like that – he is a master communicator. So the question is, what are the tools to accomplish? Words? Images? What else? (Jason: perhaps videos?)

Q: Ashley Cecil – she really downplays the “blogging thing” with her community — her q is: she feels baffled by all the advice about building communities, follows it, but wonders why she isn’t getting it as big as she wants it to be. She is wondering what the missing link is!! Huge question. A: if you really have something amazing it will find it’s way to the top. If it is different, provides value, it WILL find it’s way to the top. (from the audience: Audiences has different sizes. A community starts with 2.)

She is a publisher and first grade teacher and it’s an evil combination :p

she says it’s all about having fun – that’s what comment night is… that’s what it’s all about!

Lots of times blog posts are all about me, me, me me. What my cat had for lunch, all the boring, self-centric stuff. She wants to make one thing clear: When I tell people I have 160 articles of leadership on the web they get very impressed. When i tell people I’m a blogger they think I’m weird” This is from Kent Blumberg.

Think of yourself as a publisher – and publishing is a business. No matter what your publishing about. Because you are doing everything a business person is doing.

We find out how things work,

get to know the numbers and stats,

we have a vision (anything relevant has been started by a person with a vision – hold on to that),

connections – links fall away, companies go bankrupt, but relationships with people stay!!

Choose your customers, don’t just have them choose you – and then get to knwo them intimately. The biggest mistake of marketers and bloggers make is to just look at the numbers. Instead, talk to the people, to each person, know them by name.

Do what you love and service the people who love what you do

everything changes when you publish to the web (notice when you submit a blog post the button says “Publish”) — and the internet has no erasor – you are publishing for everyone, your descendents, internet archeologists, people going through google cache … that is a huge thing! “that’s a pretty big deal” VERY COOL – when she started blogging there were only 12M blogs (when I started there were about 50-55M). When magazine is printed it become inventory, and it’s done. When you publish on the blog that’s when the conversation starts.

Tom Peters has a story about the steel mills in the 70’s, in Ohio, that wasn’t going down the tubes with all the others, there were 1,200 people, no job descriptions, and it was going great. The pres said “we talk to eachother” when asked by Tom about the success. And that is what happens on theblogs – we talk to eachother like we are people – and if you do it the right way you get COMMUNITY. Relationship business lasts longer and is more fun (as opposed to business business)

Community is built on authentic relationships with people who like you. How do you build community? She tells the dating story about a girl who always whined about not having dates, but she never met new people! We build community by meeting more people. If you stay on your blog all night and never go out, you’ll never build a community.

Liz’ mistake was to stand at the podium and instruct. She says we have to get down from the podium! When she wrote all the great posts before, the comments where “good blog post liz, you are an excellent writer”… so she turned around and asked what was going wrong – she had a friend that basically said “leave us room to talk”… so she changed her post style and “came off the podium”… she said she is a pendulum (sp) learner and got too far into people’s faces, sometimes you have to back off and let people talk to eachother (by commenting in your post)… awesome

don’t buy into your own PR and take a look at how other people see you…

“we really can’t talk without talking about ourselves”… every word we say reveals something about us…

WE CAN LISTEN – that is the key. Like last night, with the open mic – we were talking, we were having conversations,

her question is, how can we turn a comment into a conversation?

(1) by asking a question

(2) by adding the “top commentator” thing on (and changing it to “comment” not “commentator”, but then changed it back because commentators are people that are contributing to the conversation… he wants contributors…

(3) let the comment go where it goes (without slapping hands)

(4) he really cares, about each person that comments – if someone comments on his blog then he reaches out and extends the conversation offline

(5) commenting is about enrichment, richness he gets from what others say -he is looking for the gem in what others share with him, how it touches or enriches them, etc.

(6) Genuineness – bloggers and commentors are genuine… he is not surprised to see exactly what he sees in this room because we’re all genuine

(7) Easton (businessblogwire) question is, isn’t it a waste of time to go back and “talk” – is it really worth it? Wendy eMom says that she has a ton of competition in the blogosphere, but the you have to have a mission behind the message… your business is what’s on the surface, the mission is what’s going to get you clients, etc. The mission is bigger than the business. The mission will bring you money, etc. The message behind it all is going to draw people to you and wnat to do business to you.

(8) Kent Blumberg is struggling with a transition to get off the podium, how do you do it??… liz says she had tohave some visual clues to make it more conversational , hence the image “I’ve been thinking…” when you right in a converstational style it’s not like you speak, it’s like you think. If you use the language that you think with it will trigger their conversational thoughts… like “chocolate vs. the tax code” as long as it’s written in conversational style – which tells their brain that at the end they have to answer. Cool – I didn’t think about the style thing.

(9) part of your responsibility as a blogger is to not say it all on other’s blogs… make a comment to encourage others to comment, perhaps ask questions,

(10) it’s about the relationship, never lose site of that, business does business with people –

(11) commentors develop a bond of trust, that relationship, and that’s who you do business with…

(12) comment on: why should a business care about blogging – she asks “do you remember 1996?” – she thinks going forward, it will be the same thing with resisting voice mail… you need to have a blog because eventually eeryone isgoing to be there, we aren’t even early adopters right now, we are more mainstream

(13) ann michael, manage to change, when she goes into a business she doesn’t go in to talk about blogging, she talks about what their problems are… and figures out how to solve those problems. She isn’t a blog evangelist, she is a “do you want to change or die” evangelist. And then figure out where the tools fit in to help solve the issues.

(14) Peter from BlogStudio – you can now point out success stories to illustrate the phenominal way to show how businesses are using blogging

(15) tammy “I can’t say that” – she sees herself as having learning conversations… that is what she does all day long. We have to be willing to learn… and willing to change.

Liz – 5 minutes left, on community stuff. How do you build a community. If you make laws then you are inviting people to circumvent the laws. Tom Peters – an environment can either support the overachievers or the underachievers, but supporting one will make the others alienated (because they are not supported/appreciated).

This premise works on the blog… we support people who are highly accepting of other people… and we don’t appreciate people who are not. Liz has only one rule there “BE NICE”

What jason wanted to say but couldn’t – if you don’t have the “send me an e-mail when someone comments on this” pluggin then you won’t be able to sustain an awesome conversation. I don’t have it here, but it’s on the JibberJobber blog.