I recently experienced some rather public growing pains in my business - my home business blog outgrew it’s shared hosting plan and the site was up and down (mostly down) for a week. Email communications were interrupted, deadlines were missed, and I needed a very large glass of wine by the end of it all.
Were advertisers and clients upset? Did I lose readers? Did my numbers go down?
In fact, no.
- My advertisers and clients are thrilled that I have this problem.
- My readers offered their expensive technical expertise for free.
- And both traffic and advertising revenue stayed even for the week.
To be honest, I was a little surprised by this myself. But I have set a tone on my site in which I have been very transparent about how I build my business and how I manage and overcome my mistakes. I do this to help other entrepreneurs understand that running a business can get messy sometimes - and rather than getting upset about it and letting it slow you down, we must learn to take it in stride and turn it into an asset.
By setting this tone, my business and site visitors were able to take this technical problem in stride - and it even added to the experience as I shared information with site visitors to help them prevent their own server mishaps in the future.
Why should you care about being transparent with your business mistakes?
You may be thinking that this scenario doesn’t apply to your business - you probably don’t run a blog that is an educational resource for entrepreneurs. But the fact of the matter is that I could have still run this same business and covered up my past mistakes - and then when public mistake occurred, I could have risked losing credibility.
Web 2.0 isn’t just about social media and user-generated content. Web 2.0 is a paradigm shift in how businesses interact with consumers online.
ConAgra is currently in a bit of a mess due to salmonella being found in Peter Pan Peanut Butter. For a time, consumers visiting their web site for more information simply couldn’t find it. Can you imagine being a frightened parent and finding that the company who put your child at risk isn’t even offering any information on the mistake they made?
Today there is a press relase in the middle of their home page - does it change the mistake? Of course not, but it does begin to break down the wall between the corporate giant and the consumers affected by the mishap.
Consumers are demanding to interact with companies and brands online on their own terms. They have been empowered, and they now both demand and expect to be communicated with as human beings, not as ‘Mid-Atlantic Soccer Moms with a household income of $75K’.
Probably the best analogy is one in a marraige - if you owed an apology to your spouse, what do you think would be the best approach: to ignore the problem and sweep it under the rug, or to offer an appology and work to solve the problem?
It’s an obvious answer in our personal relationships - it must also now be an obvious answer for our customer relationships.
This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 11:29 am and is filed under Innovative Thinking, Growth Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.13 Responses to “How Transparent Should You Be With Your Business Mistakes?”
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June 15th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
this is so true. i’m finding that while some people are suspicious of doing things online and reveling themselves, i embrace it. 2.0 is changing so many things: from the way artists look at copyrights to what customers expect/demand from services. if they don’t receive something personal, they can just go elsewhere where they can.
it’s a huge leap for artists who can tap into that longtail and have the audience that we used to “starve” for, :D.
and even though my jewelry design is tiny in scale compared to other businesses run online, i love the open connection and feedback that i receive from the wonderful relationships developed from the web. being an open book helps me in so many ways.
June 19th, 2007 at 12:56 am
Wendy,
I think that when you have a website that caters to entrepreneurs - all you can hope for is for them to feel inspired and fascinated enough by you to help you in a time of need - or in this case a time of Internet Help! I think this is amazing that you have provided your readers and your audience with such a feeling of trust and friendship - all by the way of a blog! Congrats!
Lauren
June 19th, 2007 at 9:19 am
Honesty is always the best policy. And by being “transparent” you are helping others. Helping them to understand what is going on with you and helping them to deal with similar issues of their own.
June 20th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
HI Wendy!
Wanted to stop by and say “HI!” The new blog looks great here. Congratulations!
I have to say, we had a similar problem with a site. It out grew the server one week, we were shut down, had to move. We were afraid of losing all the readers and clients. But at least a dozen people, whom we had never even met, stepped forward with help and suggestions. There has been a shift. Consumers, or readers, typically like the site and the persona behind the site, that they are reading. They feel like part of a family. And they want to help if something goes wrong.
A lot of companies don’t get this yet! Blogs can put a human face on their company. And consumers love the interaction.
Keep up the good work Wendy!
Derrick Sorles
Michael Snell
June 22nd, 2007 at 2:42 pm
[…] asks How Transparent Should You Be With Your Business Mistakes and shares how telling the story of some of her blog’s growing pains actually has helped her […]
June 23rd, 2007 at 12:37 am
[…] of her three blogs, Inspired Business Growth, Wendy reported on the experience and the outcome in How Transparent Should You Be With Your Business Mistakes? Were advertisers and clients upset? Did I lose readers? Did my numbers go […]
June 23rd, 2007 at 1:10 am
That’s what’s so wonderful about blogs, they are personal so the loyal readership tends to be understanding or even helpful if something goes wrong.
June 23rd, 2007 at 2:16 am
Well you know what they say its better to have a continually growing site and be loosing money then to have a continually shrinking site and be making money.
The analogy of that might sound a little bit backwards but when your blog is growing in stride your advertisers and readers appreciate the information you are providing them, most people don’t trust what they read the first times around but once they see a blog getting more and more comments and as the subscriber base grows they trust it more, read more, and become part of the community, I think in any future mis-haps talking to your community is much more powerful then hiding what had happened.
June 23rd, 2007 at 1:05 pm
I hope we’re lucky enough to have our blog experience the same problems. Congratulations on the success.
June 23rd, 2007 at 7:54 pm
Mmm good points and the point about web 2.0 was a good one which most people do not realise..
I think you need transparency but I also think you can have too much ‘transparency’ and it takes balance to get a good level.
June 24th, 2007 at 9:51 am
I think transparency/mistakes in such a visible arena make the author appear more real. When you are real people tend to feel they are getting to know you. I don’t see any downsides.
June 25th, 2007 at 11:54 am
I read some words like “credibility”, “honesty” and “mistakes” trying to judge the “transparency”… I think it´s wrong.
Because I can be credible, honest, and make or not mistakes… and none of these words can define if I´m or not transparent… but I can decide if I want to be transparent and show my credibility, my honesty, my success like my mistakes.
Now, we can judge if is good or not for us to be transparent or we prefer have something away from other people (customers, friends, provider, etc.) the most of the time it’s depend of “the thing”.
The customers dont want that we show all that we do but I know it is really funny, we can not see when we want inside of a company; the customer wants that we show them what inside a company are people working and doing the best thing for them.
Long time ago I learned that the credibility from our customers to us, is the culture that we created, and the culture is the distance between what we say that will do and what we really do, be transparent with this will make that the people believe in our honesty. Like more shorter is this distance more credible for our customers we will be.
I think…
If I do what I promise you, yo will be happy.
If I do more than I promise you, you will be even happier, But if I do less than I promise you, I will lose credibility.
July 25th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
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