When we put up our LogicalExpressions.com site, we included some personal information about our pets and us. Not surprisingly, our family enjoyed those pages. What was a surprise was discovering, through our site statistics, that those pages are popular with many other visitors as well. We've gotten all kinds of comments from customers about our vegetarian recipes and dog photographs.
Realistically, we probably shouldn't have been too surprised. We've read a lot of material about marketing businesses and Web sites, and we know that putting a human face on your business is important to making customers feel comfortable doing business with you. That was part of the inspiration for putting the information up on the site to begin with, but the response was still somewhat startling.
The fact is, people want to do business with someone they know. The whole point of advertising is to get people used to hearing your name so you seem more familiar to them when they have need of the kind of products or services you offer. Most advertising doesn't actually tell a potential customer anything about you, but the more they hear your name, the more they *think* they know you.
Your Web site gives you an excellent opportunity to really humanize your company. You can put up photographs to show your staff in action. You can provide personal profiles that demonstrate the expertise of your staff and put a face to the voice on the other end of the phone line. Customers love this stuff because they get the chance to know you, and they'd rather hand their money over to someone they know than to a total stranger.
Celebrity magazines are an example of this theory working in reverse. You see and hear a celebrity countless times on film and in television interviews. Then, when you later read a quote from that person, don't you mentally picture and hear that person saying the words? Connecting a face and a voice to written words makes them more interesting, and celebrity rags play that up big time.
Personalization particularly helps with first-time customer contacts. My wife frequently runs into people who recognize her from a photo that was run with the pet articles that she used to write for the local newspaper. These people instantly have common ground to begin a conversation, and they already know something about who she is from her writing. You can't BUY that initial level of comfort and confidence.
In this day of privacy concerns, there is a certain amount of risk with providing personal information. There are nefarious characters out there who might abuse it. Also, some of your employees may not feel comfortable displaying any personal information on the Internet because they see it as an invasion of privacy.
If you think about it, there is an inherent security risk as well. Statistics show that most people choose passwords based on the names of family members or pets. If you publish that information, you need to make sure your staff is well schooled in using safer, more cryptic, passwords. Most security experts will tell you that the real risk is not in the technology, it's in the people using the technology. It's the old weakest link problem.
So, find a happy medium. Give your company a friendly face, but keep it simple. Use personal information to build familiarity and confidence, but don't go overboard with details. The goal is to provide potential customers with just enough information to get them interested in talking with you. |
