Something I am very passionate about is making maintenance of your online presence and community quick, easy and dare I say…fun! I also advocate the use of automation in some areas in order to save time (No Twitter Auto DMs – Please!). Recently, I wrote…
Would your customers recognise your brand if you were not managing it?
…where I delved into maintaining tone, style and general feeling of your online presence. All of this does require quite a bit of initial planning (which does save you time in the long run!) but as you grow and you pass on more control to your new employees, there is something you need to be careful of. In fact, even if you choose to stay small, this can happen:
You could lose your business personality!
and what is a person (business) without personality – Yup! You got it! A Robot and let’s be honest, how many of us actually like to do business with robots?
[Tweet “How many of us actually like to do business with robots? #smallbiz #personality”]
Why does this happen?
This can happen for a number of reasons and it can happen to any business. Some reasons it may occur are:
- You haven’t shared the vision with your employees.
- Work has become boring…which it does from time to time…and/or you have lost your passion.
- You are too busy implementing systems and you are not connecting enough with your community.
- You haven’t taken time to review the effectiveness of the systems you have put into place.
What can we do to turn things around?
- Get out there, doing something fun or charitable and get the camera ready so your online community can join in the fun. Get them involved. Issue a challenge!
- Change your routine or throw out your system for the day. I am not saying throw it away completely, I am just saying kick it out the office for a day and review tomorrow.
- Allow different authors (your employees) to put their name, face and voice on your blog, they can add their personality and flair while still keeping the general tone. They can also make it a little less formal and they can approach it from their area of expertise.
- Use appropriate humour – laughter is a universal language and brings people together. You may even inspire yourself in the process.
- Share your everyday office culture. Perhaps your office has interesting looking chairs or a funny machine in the break room. Maybe your brainstorming meetings entail everyone sitting in a circle with their shoes off, whatever makes your business different, share it!
And lastly, remember, the best business personality in the world can’t make up for poor content so make sure you put in the time to prepare something of value and add a little punch to it!
What do you enjoy about brands that you follow? Share it in the comments below.