Andrew Garrett’s Outboard Brain

In business, it’s all too easy to be overly business like, to submerge your personality beneath your ‘professional face’.  As Steve Pavlina says:

Formality is boring and tedious.  People want to enjoy their work.  If someone address me like a computer, I’ll respond in kind [...].  But if someone demonstrates they have a real personality and a good sense of humor, a connection is far more likely.

This blog, and various other sites I host are all on a server at one of The Planet’s hosting centres.  For years (I’ve had this server for a while now), The Planet has been this pretty much faceless entity from whom I got adequate service (I don’t mean adequate in a negative way – they were perfectly fine.  Faceless, but fine).

Recently, The Planet kicked off a blog – as far as I can tell, purely to put a human face on their operation.  All of their posts are about their business in some way, but written by real people, and showing a real sense of fun.  (That particular post is probably mostly of interest to geeks who like to know that their hardware is in an appropriate environment, but still, there’s some real personality shown amongst that).

From an old-school business sense, it’s hard to see where the business gets value from this.

Before they started blogging, I didn’t care about The Planet or its people.  While I recommended them to friends and business contacts who were looking for tele-housing, I did so because it would benefit the friends (or business contacts).

To put it another way before the blog, I felt like this about them:  :-|  No real emotion, just… nothing.  Now, I’m more :-).

Because of this blog, I’m starting to care about The Planet as a company.  They’ve put a bunch of human faces, some real personality out there.

What does this mean in terms of my business relationship with them?  I’m probably more likely to cut them some slack if things aren’t going well (not that that’s happened).  I’m likely to point friends at their blog (particularly posts like that one) as well as at their main page, and give them a chance to sell themselves to someone else…

(As a side note, I’m well aware that the subject of this post is ‘A Human Face’ and I then go and completely avoid putting a photo of a human from that post here… but frankly, those photos were *awful*)

Bonus example: from Silent Bob Speaks

Andrew Uncategorized Blogging, Business, Opinion