Sitting at the first Manic Street Preachers concert in Vancouver in 10 years, I began musing about all the people who came to the show so many years on, to show their continuing support of the band. We waited in line for the doors to open, then we waited for another two hours until 10pm for the band to get on stage, but when they started playing, it was a new flavour and it took many a song before any of the 90s classics were sung. This got me thinking.
Over the 10 year absence on the Vancouver stage, the band would not doubt have gone through an evolution. This is to be expected, but if their performance was so foreign to what they used to be, is that not forgetting about the people who supported them all those years ago? How many people walked out of that concert feeling bittersweet, going home to play some of those old records because their expectations were not met?
One for All, All for Me?
Remember those first few major clients that catapulted your company in the right direction with that major case study that featured your strengths or the solid reviews that drove more business?
How often in business are those first clients put into the legacy client pile and considered ‘small’, whereas once they were ‘the client to please’? I guess the key question here becomes whether your company is to your legacy clients what it once was or are they scratching their heads wondering whatever happened to that company they supported in the early days?
The same can be said for employees. Companies that uphold core values that have been developed upon fundamental principles are rare. Having said that, employees that work towards a common goal in which they believe, are arguably just as rare. Today it seems that to an increasingly large number of people, a job is just that, a job, work, a daily grind.
Are you recognising the people in your organisation that continue to oil the cogs and keep the machine running smoothly? Too quickly do we forget how intricately our success is interwoven with the support of our clients; the demand for our service offering and the service delivered by the people who deal directly with our clients. This can be said of a rock band that relies on its fans, as much as it applies to a company whose offering is built on the collective intellectual property of the people who work there.
So, no matter how much your company evolves and grows over the years, do not lose sight of the type of company you strove to be to your clients and your employees in those early days, when you had everything to lose. Financial success has this tendency to take the ‘we’ out of the achievement and focus solely on the ‘I’. Well, you didn’t get to the top alone and the faster you recognise this, the sooner you will be a better company, boss or colleague to the people around you.
Where sales and traditional marketing may make some headway, search marketing is completely out of the loop. Often it appears that search marketing and traditional marketing efforts are run by different departments and different people that barely know of the others’ existence.
Remember when all your friends were jumping on the Facebook bandwagon but you resolutely held your ground until the nagging became unbearable? With a sense of resignation and personal betrayal for losing the battle, you joined the hordes of millions and decided to “re-befriend” the long lost friends of school with whom you have had absolutely zero contact for years, in order not to look like the only loser on Facebook with 5 friends.