Starting a Photography Business: Part 33 – Foot in Mouth

With social media only too eager to broadcast the ramblings that we have and let’s face it; a lot of us use social media for keeping a hand in for our business, without constantly tweeting business messages and links, maybe sometimes we don’t necessarily think too much about what we say when we stick a message out there. However that lack of thought can cause enormous problems at times.

Here in the UK on Friday, I’m sure that most of you will be aware that there was a royal wedding. Someone that I follow on Facebook made a comment about the wedding, it was on the anti-side of the royal wedding and though English, they completely misjudged the feeling of people in this country and amazingly, around the world. The torrent of messages disagreeing with her and some quite strongly worded ones flooded in from people worldwide.

Social media makes it so easy to put your thoughts out there without a filter; your filter becomes the people that react. The person I’m talking about is an author, and I was curious as to how many people she lost as followers and how many people just shrugged their shoulders.

Social media and blogs have given us a soapbox to stand on and we tend to forget at times that everything we say reflects on us personally because they are our views, they are our thoughts. What we also have to remember is we are expressing those views to customers and potential business partners who are going to store away these little nuggets of messages, and make opinions about us rightly or wrongly. Search engines don’t forget the throw away comments we make either, they dutifully log them and when you do a Google search for your name or log in name on Twitter or Facebook, up will come your posted comments.

Potential customers and partners may well do a search on search engines to find out more about you. Do you want something inflammatory, sexist or maybe bigoted to come up next to your company name?

How we represent ourselves online is just as important as how we present ourselves when we meet people in public. Would we march up to a stranger/customer and tell them our political views before even saying hello? A few years ago I worked as a holiday rep and at the training they drummed into you that a person makes a first impression about you within 30 seconds of meeting you. 30 seconds is an incredibly short time to make an impression, on social media convert those 30 seconds to one message for people to decide whether they follow or deselect you.

You know that old football analogy; you are only ever as good as your last game? I always apply the same philosophy to social media; you are only ever as good as your last message.

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