Growing The Biz

I started this blog toward the end of last year. I have heard about blogging since I was in high school, but never really got into it much. I just thought it was something that writers did to share their work. As I have gotten into starting and building businesses, I realize that blogging is a great way to get feedback and share your ideas. Blogging is a form of social media that can net followers and excite people about business.  It can also give them some insight into who you are and why you run a business the way that you do. If you have investors, blogs are a great way for them to feel and stay connected to you. It allows them to know what is going through your head more often than their yearly update or call.  It provides the confidence they want with the instant information update that our society now craves.

At first, blogging was foreign to me. I did my research and realized it is a great tool for business growth. However, there was another reason I decided to take the leap into the blogosphere: I am an extreme extravert. I have never been good at internalizing ideas and thinking about options, outcomes, positions, etc.  Blogging has provided me the opportunity to do this. It gives me the outlet to sit down and bounce my ideas off of someone else…my computer. I have always done better at decision making with I have someone else to run ideas by.  But now, if someone else isn’t around, I have my computer, my blog to run ideas off of. And feedback can come in the form of other peoples comments occasionally which is great because you can find out what people are passionate about. This plays directly into business growth.

When a post goes up on a blog, it is available to anyone who navigates to your page. Anyone who reads the post now has an opinion about what you just wrote. Depending on the content, some of the readers might just move on. But others will feel passionate about the subject and comment, or send you a message. Based on this response, you are able to determine what people’s hot buttons are. You can determine whether a change you are thinking about making in the business is a good idea, or a bad one. You can figure out what your customers want and tailor your marketing, sales, and services to them.

For example, my reader base is not huge yet. When I publish a new post, I usually get around 15-20 hits (not bad for just starting out, but i’m always looking to grow that. If you like it, pass it on!). I think I have only had two posts have comments posted. However, I recently wrote about etiquette on airplanes in my post I Would Hate to Be a Flight Attendent. This post received 2 comments on the blog, 1 comment on Facebook, and 7 people that liked it. About half of the people that viewed that particular post liked what I had to say and obviously had an opinion about it.  This could potentially be useful information for someone in the correct industry.  Now this is a small scenario, but the same principles apply to a more well-known blog that is written.  If you get comments on your posts all the time, then you have to be able to decipher between a normal day of 50 comments, and a post that people are truly passionate about with 125 comments.

Do you have a blog? Do you get comments? When do you see the spike in comments and how do you try to promote comments to get feedback from people on your ideas? 

One thing I have learned very quickly at my new job is that you cannot count on anybody to call you back.  It’s amazing how the common courtesy of returning a phone call has become so scarce that people don’t even think they are doing something wrong by not calling someone back.  And the crazy part is that this isn’t only happening in business, it is creeping into our personal lives as well.  Think about it – when was the last time someone called you and you just texted them back with no specific reason for not calling? I would be willing to bet recently. I remember, before the explosion of cell phones, when I used to take down phone messages on the home land line if someone called for a family member who wasn’t home.  I used to get in so much trouble if I didn’t write it down because my parents needed to call them back, and always did. That is just what you did. If someone called you, you called them back.

Does it really take that much effort to call someone back? In my current line of work, this problem is even worse because people don’t want to face the reality of having to tell someone no(which is what I often have to hear in sales), or declining something. Amazingly enough though, my brother made a call last week to PURCHASE something off of a guy. Left three messages over about 6 days.  We have yet to hear from the guy! I mean we were going to put money in this guys pocket – why wouldn’t he call us back?  The only thing I can think of is that he sold what we wanted and he didn’t want to tell us he had done that. Has our society become so impersonal that we cannot even own up to things in person anymore? Has technology emotionally deprived people so that they cannot face-up to the emotional “burden” of such an interaction? I find it sad and severely detrimental to business and to our personal lives.

I contact anywhere between 15-30 people a week working for Blue Apple and I maybe receive 1 phone call back on a good week. ONE!  That isn’t even 5%! Do people think that by not calling back, they are saying no, or telling me they don’t want to hear from me? If so, then just pick up the phone and tell me that so I don’t waste my time calling you 2 more times and leaving more messages. That is disrespectful and rude to me. I know you have more important things to do with your time, but you know what? I have more important things to do with my time than chase down someone who doesn’t want anything anyway. I could be using that time to be with my family, or out with my friends, or even doing all of the OTHER work I actually have to do.

I think that this distancing has been caused a great deal by the social technological progression. People are almost afraid of the phone now. It’s much easier to hide behind their written words. Why would I call my friend to see what he is doing when I can just look on Twitter and see what he has been up to every 10 minutes for the past 2 hours! No human interaction necessary there.  Why would I meet up with my friend who just got back from Greece to look at her pictures when she has uploaded them all to Facebook? No human interaction necessary there. These new “social” interactions are not social at all. They are hiding spots that people use as a front for not having to deal with real life. I actually have started hating the term “social network” as it is not social at all. It simply has the idea of social aspects.

So do me a favor – make the awkward phone calls that you don’t want to make, but know you should. Otherwise, you are just being rude. Trust me it will help you in the long run and I will tell you how in an upcoming post.

What do you think? Why are people so much less likely to pick up the phone these days and call someone? Why do people not call people back?

Recently I created a Facebook page and a Twitter account for Blue Apple Productions.  I’m still trying to figure out exactly how to use these accounts to help grow an event coordination business, but I feel there is definite potential with each account.  Social media is one of the biggest communities that exists today even though it is not a face to face community.  The biggest power a business has is being able to reach mass amounts of customers for the least amount of effort.  Facebook and Twitter do just that for businesses, but in very different ways.

Facebook is a great way to meet potential clients and allow people to connect to you. They can find out more information about your business, “Like” certain parts of your business or the whole business, and even look at pictures and write to your company.  It is a great way to drum up more business and allow people to explore what you are all about. They can post comments as well, but you just have to be careful that you don’t get disgruntled customers that post comments you don’t want up on your wall if you are allowing comments.

Facebook is also a great way to check up on your competition.  Market research is much easier now with Facebook and you don’t have to go too far if you know your way around the platform.  By no means am I suggesting that Facebook takes the place of in depth research and digging around to find competition and information, but it is a great place to start!

Twitter is similar, but instead of giving potential customers a lot of good information about your business, Twitter is more of a real time check in between your potential customers or current customers and the company.  Twitter can be used in two main ways;  First if your business is popular enough to have followers already, you can use Twitter to post deals, coupons, or different goings on that are occurring within your business.  If your business is not well known yet, then this won’t be much of a help since you probably don’t have followers and therefore no one will see those posts.  Secondly Twitter can be used to check up on the happiness of your customers.  No matter if you have a big following on Twitter or not, you can do a quick search for your company name and find out if anyone has Tweeted about your company.  Hopefully they are all saying good things, but it is an easy way to find out if anyone was an unhappy customer.  You can contact them and follow up to ensure they get the attention they need.  However, don’t neglect the positive comments as well.  It is just important to let happy customers know that you are watching so if they ever do feel like they have a problem, they will get a response from you.

I can definitely see a point in my lifetime where the ratio of phone customer service representatives to social media customer service representatives is far less than 1.