I received this message from Andrew Dechellis on my contact form this week:

Hey man I have a question, I was wondering if you could help me out with. I am going to be interviewing Jordan Romero (youngest person to ever climb Mt Everest – 13yrs old, completed in May 2010). I have writing in my past but never really have interviewed anyone before. Any tips or pointers you could shed light on would be great, or any articles you’ve read would be awesome. Thanks.

Andrew

Tips for Doing Killer Interviews

It seems like the skill of interviewing is becoming more and more important now that every human and business can publish content online.  Do you interview people?  If so (or if no), what would you add?

I have the pleasure of lending NateRiggs.com to Cheryl Harrison for this guest post.  Cheryl has over 10 years of experience using social media tools, going way back to the days of AIM chat rooms, LiveJournal and GeoCities.

Cheryl is an agency-reared marketer, a member of the Columbus Yelp Elite (where she has written over 2oo reviews of local hotspots).  She has been an active blogger at BeingCheryl.com since early 2008, and works as the Tactical Lead at Social Business Strategies.

Would you like to be a guest blogger on NateRiggs.com?  If so, go ahead and submit your post idea here.  I’ll be in touch.
………………………………………………………….

If you’re on Twitter, you’ve likely got an agenda.

“I want to sell more products or services.”

“I want to make people laugh.”

“I want to look smart.”

“I want to meet new people.”

While the motives are very different, accomplishing any of them requires some level of influence – people paying attention to what you’re saying.

Here are a few ways you can gauge your current Twitter influence:

1) Number of followers
Yeah, yeah, I know. This number can be spammed, scammed, faked and forged about a million different ways. However, this number still needs to be taken into consideration, because sheer reach does effect how influential your content can become (to some degree).

2) Number of lists
I give this Twitter metric a bit more weight, the reason being that you can safely assume that most of the people who have listed you are actually paying attention to you. Personally, I have 7 lists, 5 public and 2 private, all of which I am significantly more likely to check than the general stream of all tweets. In addition to analyzing the NUMBER of lists you are on, the name and description of the lists you are on can show you how your peers view you and for what you are influential.

3) Klout
Klout is a service that measures a Twitter profile’s influence, using an in-depth algorithm. Klout tells you what type of Twitter user you are (based on how often you share, have conversations, etc.), what users you influence the most (and who influences you), which topics you discuss most, how engaged your network is with you, how often your posts are retweeted, and a few other factors.

4) Tweet Level
Another service that analyzes a Twitter profile, Tweet Level gives users a numeric ranking to influence, popularity, engagement and trust (in addition to pretty good explanations of what the numbers mean). It also stacks you next to a few of your followers, both those ranking higher and lower than you, for comparison.

5) Tweet Stats
Tweet Stats allows you to view what day of the week and what time of the day you post the most often. What does that have to do with influence? Let’s say most of your posts occur early in the morning (EST). It’s safe to say that your influence in other time zones is virtually nonexistent. These are just numbers to give you a starting point from which to benchmark. A low score or list count does not necessarily mean you are not influential.

The best way to increase and maintain your influence on Twitter is to have real conversations with people and create value for them. Even if you only have 10 followers, be influential to those 10 people.

Who are some of the people you think are influential on Twitter?

LinkedIn is still gaining momentum in the B2B world.

With over 70 million professionals holding profiles, it makes good business sense for companies to start looking at how to use LinkedIn as an everyday business solution.

I thought it was interesting that even Chris Brogan would check in on LinkedIn, if there was a location-based component.  His target audience of clients lives there and check-ins in that context might result in new opportunities.

It’s important that company leaders realize that it will take a coordinated and dedicated human effort over time to see any results from tapping in to LinkedIn.  Your company may even consider assigning a group of personnel to spend a portion of their time monitoring, researching and actively participating in the many groups and subgroups available.

If you’re ready to dedicate more time and effort, you can always build your own group and subgroups inside the network.  This is appealing because there is literally no cost involved, outside of time and energy.  But make no mistake, the amount of time and energy that goes into successfully facilitating a group is high.

Be prepared.

How To Build a Customer-Centric LinkedIn Group

One approach companies can use to leverage LinkedIn Groups is to focus on customer centricity.  These groups are essential hubs of conversation.  If executed wisely, facilitating the right conversations (that provide value to members) works to build deeper relationships with customers.  The end result is increased customer retention and a greater potential for referrals.

There are a few important things you need to consider before your pull the trigger:

• Who is your niche audience for the group?
• Does that specific group already exist?
• What type of conversation will help them do their job better?

Once you’ve answered those questions, begin mapping out the objectives of your conversation.  A good way to start is by solidifying what you want the members to take away from the conversation.  Work from the desired result and build backwards.

While you are working through this, also begin familiarize yourself with the recently updated LinkedIn Group features.  It’s a good idea to visit other groups and look at what they are having success with.  In most cases, you might even be able to connect with other group managers who can share experience and give you insider tips.

Case Study: Let’s Talk Blood Donor Recruitment

Incept is a conversational marketing firm that helps blood centers recruit and maintain blood donors to keep blood supplies on shelves.  They are a client of my firm, Social Business Strategies.

Blood donor recruiting has its challenges, and most of the blood donation groups on LinkedIn today offer a hub of conversations between professionals who donate blood.  While that’s great and folks from Incept do participate in those groups, they do little to help Incept’s customer base of blood center professionals.

In building out a new customer-centric group, where Incept can bring together blood center pros, our conversation goals are simple:

• Connect niche LinkedIn users who work in blood centers across the country and have a focus on donor recruitment
• Build a resource to uncover real issues that blood center personnel are facing today, and share “how to” knowledge to help the members solve problems
• Create opportunities for relationships between blood center personnel, industry providers and the team at Incept

LinkedIn Search Optimization

In setting up the group, we knew we wanted to rank highly in LinkedIn’s Group search results for phrases like blood donor recruitment, blood centers, and even donor recruiting.  Using correct keyword placement and density in the title, summary and description is helping to get the Group indexed highly by LinkedIn’s unique crawlers.

With that, one of the challenges we needed to overcome was to maintain Incept’s branding (developed by Next Level Thinking) while making sure that the most prominent keywords were placed towards the front of group titles.

To get there, NLT created a group logo that called out the “Let’s Talk” portion of the brand theme, placing “blood donor recruitment” towards the front of the Group title in LinkedIn.

The Incept brand tie-in was deliberately minimal, with only the type font and colors being used in the logo.  We made this decision to visually combat the potential perception that the group is sales-focused.  The critical factor is delivering on that promise by staying mindful of how Incept’s team participates.

How To Use Auto Response Messages in LinkedIn Groups

Meet Timothy Johnson.  He’s on the human business team at Incept, as the lead content engineer.

In this video, Tim discusses how he’s using some of the automated response messages in the LinkedIn Group to make it easier to respond to each person interested in joining the conversation.

(Side note: This video was shot and uploaded directly to YouTube from my Sprint EVO 4G.)

What else would you suggest, related to building a customer-centric LinkedIn Group?

Here are two questions to think about:

1. If social media and blogging were popular when you were a student, and there was a program to teach you how to use these tools, would that have signed up?
2. Do you think it would have had an impact on your career path?

The Social Learning Lab at Hi-Point

My friend, Shane Haggerty, believes that the impact would have been exponential.

That’s why he’s doing it right now.  At the Ohio Hi-Point Career Center, Shane is teaching a select group of students how to proactively and responsibly use the social web to build their individual presence, and with it, build a presence for the center itself.  Shane is building a human business team.

The student bloggers at Hi-Point Journeys are worth your attention.  The program itself and the students, led by Shane, are challenging the status quo in education.  They’ve built a laboratory to help them experiment with education strategies that leverage social media and the Interwebz.

This video is just over 16 minutes in length, which (by my own standards) is way too long for a single blog post.  However, the trouble is that every time I try to edit it down, I feel like I take away from Shane’s story of this amazing project.

To make it manageable, I can simply suggest the following:

• Make sure your speakers are turned up
• Pretend this is a podcast
• Push play
• Listen and go about doing what you need to get done

I also want to tip my hat at Oxiem Marketing Technology, as well as Tom Williams and Innogage.

As Shane mentioned, Oxiem is the development partner behind building the web platforms on which these students operate to produce their content.  In my opinion, they are one of the best firms at integrating social media, SEO and web design in Ohio.

Tom comes in with his product, Innoblogs, which plugs into WordPress to create a back-end workflow system to manage collaborative blog teams.  I like it a lot, and accordingly, use it with a few of my own clients.

(I’m writing about these folks because they are doing great work.  For the record, I’m not affiliated with either Oxiem or Innogage, but we do sometimes work on projects together, openly.  Also, Hi-Point is not a client.  Shane is simply leading educators towards social media adoption in the classroom.  And that’s worth talking about.)

What do you think?  Should social media education be taught at the high school level?

I feel like I haven’t really been keeping you up-to-date on what’s happening at Social Business Strategies.

For the sake of time, I’ll just let the video do the talking.  Okay?

I often struggle with what I write here.  On one hand, I feel like what I’m working on – from a business standpoint, in building out SBS - might not be that interesting to you.  But on the other side, I sometimes feel like there are lessons I’m learning as I go that might be helpful.  Either way, the enveloped is being pushed.  And that won’t change any time soon.

What do you think?  Do you want to hear more stories about Social Business Strategies and what’s happening as this business grows?

This Saturday, I’m going to limp my way through a 13.1 mile race for Lifeline of Ohio’s Dash for Donation.  Things have been busy for me lately and it seems that my training always falls to the bottom of the priority list during such times.

That’s okay.  This isn’t a race for a time.  It’s a race for something much more important: raising awareness about the importance of organ donation in Ohio (and any other state, for that matter). This is something that simply needs support.

I’ve never had to make the decision to give life, and frankly, I feel very fortunate.  I have, however, had the chance to hear the stories of people who’ve been faced with such a difficult and untimely decision.

One of those stories came from Kathy Harrington.  On Saturday, I’ll be running as a member of Team Lindsay to honor her, her family and the lives that Lindsay was able to save.

Closer Than I Thought

In helping to share these stories, I never thought one of them would come from a personal friend.

Most of you Columbus locals who read my blog will probably know Rocky VanBrimmer.  He’s a power social media user, a community activist and has had his hand in founding initiatives like the Central Ohio Network, the Connector podcast and a variety of other events, groups and businesses.  Simply put, Rocky is everywhere.

But, here’s something you may have not known about Rocky.

Rocky, for the record, you’re brave as hell and I thank you.  Shooting this video took some serious guts and was obviously not easy for you.  I appreciate that you are willing to share such a personal story with an unparalleled message.

Listen to Rocky’s Message

I want to make sure that we reiterate the main point Rocky is trying to teach all of us.

Whatever your choice is regarding organ and tissue donation, please make sure that your loved ones are absolutely clear on the choice you’ve made.  Should something happen to you, it will at the very least give them the piece of mind that they are making the best decision to respect your wishes.

Like Rocky mentioned, Lifeline of Ohio provides a variety of resources and facts on organ donation in Ohio, as well as detailed steps on the process to become an organ donor.

And if you want to run with me on Saturday to help raise awareness in the Dash for Donation, you can still register here.

As a blogger, sometimes new ideas for posts flow like a river.  At other times, however, your brain can run dry for days.

Part of blogging is realizing and accepting the fact that, on occasion, you will get stuck.  Another part of being a blogger is finding ways to get yourself unstuck and continuing to feed the system with your content.

Stuck or not, your audience awaits.  They read and subscribe and tell other people because they want to read what you will type next.  Attention spans, however, keep shrinking. If you keep them waiting too long, they will simply move on.

One of the tricks I use to get unstuck revolves around LinkedIn.  As a community and a communication tool, LinkedIn allows me to get directly to the humans that make up my target readers.  LinkedIn is now up to 70 million members across the globe, and is typically used by professionals of all shapes and sizes.  In terms of finding my audience, it’s a pretty safe bet that they are users.  Here are some of the things I do when I get stuck:

5 Tips for Using LinkedIn to Develop Blog Content Ideas

• Ask questions and get answers to seed questions around your topic areas and gather qualitative feedback.  Pay attention to the comments that folks leave.  There’s oftentimes golden-nugget ideas that can easily be turned into entire posts.
• Build and launch polls for more targeted questions, or for current topics of debate, around your focus area.  Not only does this give you a good feel for where potential readers stand on any given issue, but it will also deliver you a list of new readers to send your finished post.  The graphics that LinkedIn produces (with results) also make great images to include in your post.
• Launch a discussion on specific groups around the topic you want to write about.  In doing this you will be the facilitator of that conversation.  This approach will take some time, but also give you the chance to connect one-on-one with new, potential readers.
• Send InMail or use Introductions to connect with people who might make interesting interviewees for your blog.  This is also a great way to get the ball rolling in relationship development with interesting people by using the social graph.
• Use TripIt to set up video interviews with interesting people who will be within a cab ride of your next distance meeting.  This also doubles as a great way to build relationships with the folks who fit your business’s customer profile.  Why?  Most people will say yes to giving you 30 minutes to interview them on their business and what’s important to them, before they will give you time to pitch them on what’s important to yours.  Don’t ever cheat this one.  Get the first meeting for the interview and a relationship.  Ask for the pitch well after you’ve had time to get to know the human.

How else do you use LinkedIn to come up blog content ideas?

Photocredit: the talented Becky Johns

In the past two days, I’ve been a part of two very powerful hugs.

The first was with a childhood friend when she and her husband came for a visit to Columbus and Community Fest.  At the end of a wonderful (and much needed) evening, one final hug goodbye reminded me of how and why we’ve stayed friends after all these years.  The second hug was with my mom.  Just before dinner one evening, I could tell by the expression on her face that some of the health issues she’s been facing recently were wearing on her spirits.  Without knowing what else to do, I hugged her.

Both of these hugs were real hugs – not simply the “pat on the back” type of hugs that we have all become so used to giving and receiving.  In that moment of real hug, a small chemical reaction occurs in the brain of each human involved.  The chemical emitted produces certain emotions and, with it, a sense of behavior.

Powerful Hugs

One of the most fascinating things I’ve read yet this year was a Fast Company story documenting the work of  Neuroeconomist Paul J. Zak, a professor at Claremont Graduate University.  Paul so believes in power of a hug that he makes a point to hug just about everyone he meets.  That behavior is one of the many things that has led to his Claremont campus nickname, Dr. Love.

Zak is responsible for popularizing the term “neuroeconomics,” an emerging field that combines economics with biology, neuroscience and psychology.

With an eloquent writing style and a good sense of storytelling, Fast Company’s contributing writer Adam Penenberg details his time working as one of Zak’s test subjects in three-part experiments.  Why is this important?  Dr. Zak has discovered, for the first time, that social networking triggers the release of the hormone Oxytocin, the chemical present in our brains that produces emotions of generosity and trust.

This is a video clip from the article, but I also suggest you go back and read it for yourself.  It’s truly amazing thinking and research to follow.

Future of Social Media

I believe that Zak is on to something bigger than we can fully see right now.

Decades ago, the media of the time (television, radio, and print) changed the way that we humans consumed information.  With that, the way we processed information also changed.  Our paradigms, our culture and maybe even our sense of societal norms shifted, as humans spent more and more time in front of the TV, or with the car stereo tuned to to their favorite station.  Over time, the business landscape, and how humans conducted business, changed too.

In the early 1980s, primitive computers and BOD modems started that shift yet again.  Humans started using more technology to communicate.  Communication led to the formation and maintenance of mass amounts of human relationships, developed across geographic and socioeconomic boundaries.

Is This Evolution?

Zak’s work, and maybe even others like Dan Zarella, always leave me with this one question on my mind:

As humans continue to evolve the interwebz, are the interwebz also evolving us as human beings?

What’s your take?

I’ve subscribed to SurveyGizmo for about three weeks now.

It’s an online survey and polling tool that has a bit more meat on its bones than PollDaddy.  And in my mind, it also has a much nicer user interface than SurveyMonkey.  I’ve used all three and landed here from my own projects.

What’s interesting – from a marketing angle – is that I never saw an ad, read an article or blog post, or even received a tweet from the company.  Nope. Nothing.  I found SurveyGizmo while taking a recent survey that Dan Harris included me on.  It just so happened that, at the time of Dan’s Q&A, I was about to start looking at survey tool options.  Serendipity, yes?

I was so impressed with how clean Dan’s survey was designed, I decided to try SurveyGizmo on for size.

I currently have three client surveys out and I’ve been impressed with how easy they have been to set up.  There’s also a good amount of pre-build logic for questions.  I’m planning some more surveys and polls for research for a few eBooks in process over the next few weeks.

Then on Friday afternoon, SurveyGizmo did something VERY important, in terms of growing a business.  With a heartfelt, creative, and highly humanized piece of direct mail, the folks at SurveyGizmo converted me from a happy customer into a raving fan.

Guess what else happened?  I’m now telling you the story.  See the connection, friends?

Here’s what I mean:

Let’s Review What SurveyGizmo Just Did

• Focus on Making a Great Product – SurveyGizmo invested in developing a product that delivers and is impressive.  It’s not just a shiny marketing campaign.
• Go Viral by Making it Easy to Spread – SurveyGizmo’s customers spread the word virally by using the product to conduct surveys, such as how I learned about it from Dan.  Genius.
• Get More Personal with Customers – New customers are immediately embraced and thanked in a very personal offline way that is rather unexpected.
• Humanize Your Company – Rather than send a catalog with more products (like some companies still do), the team at SurveyGizmo sends a creative mailer with introductions to the humans who make up the company.

While I don’t have any access to the data to prove this, I’m willing to bet that a possible outcome of SurveyGizmo’s efforts is an extremely high customer retention rate.  (Folks at SurveyGizmo, please feel free to share that in the comments if you’re willing and able…)

Being Reminded of Little Things
I used to be really good about taking time for the little, personal human touches.  Treating people like human beings is how I built my network of friends, as well as professional connections.  Yet, somewhere along the path, I’ve gotten away from things like handwritten notes and simple, personal phone calls to say “congrats!” or “happy birthday.”  I use Facebook for that now, along with almost 500 million other users and hundreds of thousands of companies who, like me, buy into that machine and set of norms and processes.

As I type, I find it ironic that a single customer experience with SurveyGizmo and the humans behind their business has reminded me about the foundation upon which my own business has its roots.

What have I learned?  I need to readjust.  I need to do better at getting back to my roots.  Stay tuned…

What about you? Where are your business roots?  Are they still important or have the been buried under overgrowth?

It’s been interesting to see how the economy of the past two years has caused paradigm shifts in the way business is working.

Even two years ago, companies seemed focused on merely surviving in the sandbox, full of staunch competitors.  Entrepreneurs, account folks and business developers were forced to wear smiles, sign NDAs and keep secrets from one another, all the while planning how they would capitalize on the first failure of their sandbox playmates.  Some of us called these business folks “opportunists.” Others called them “back-stabbers.”

Enter the idea of the Happy Sandbox.

Driven by limited client budgets, fallen shingles and the pressures of a race-paced, complex, adaptive business environment, learning how to play nicely together in the Happy Sandbox has become a crucial element of business survival.  Simply put, the Happy Sandbox is synergy defined: a group of entrepreneurs all realizing that the sum of the whole will always be greater than the value of each individual part.

Synergistic and friendly relationships that produce real mutual benefit is what I believe to be one of the core foundations in this whole Human Business movement.

I like it this way.  Are you with me?

A Happy Sandbox Example to Watch

If you’ve read this blog for a while, you probably know I’m into SaaS tools.  As an independent consultant, I have to be.  Without good-working and cheap tools, my overhead goes up and available time goes down.  Both ends of that equation lead directly to my bottom line.  It’s a mission-critical situation.

Now, thinking about that, take a look at this:

What you see is a screenshot from inside my BatchBook SCRM account.  I’ve written about some of these tools before, but what’s most impressive to me is how well each SaaS company plays together with each other in the partners in same Sandbox.  Playing nice equals a Happy Sandbox.

From the customer end, open API’s allow me select the services I need, click a few times and enter a few passwords.  The Happy Sandbox destroys any information silos that limit my productivity.  And guess what?  Each individual SaaS makes their fair cut, with my monthly cost staying relatively low.

Advantages of Playing in a Happy Sandbox

The advantages of playing nice in the Happy Sandbox are so simple that the explanation only requires a couple brief bullet points:

• Increased lead generation opportunities through complimentary partnerships
• Each business stays focused on their core niche
• Each business becomes more valuable in terms of offering
• Very happy customers stay on board and tell their friends
• Strategically-combined marketing platforms generate greater audience and community reach

Neal Roberts can see this type of application in co-working spaces.  I agree with him.  What complimentary services could inhabit a co-working space, play nice and offer compliments to the members?

Some of my clients and a few other folks in Columbus can see how the Happy Sandbox might apply to our work.  It’s worth looking into a bit deeper.

What about your business?  Who could play in your Happy Sandbox?