We’re going to a wedding this weekend.
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You know you’re getting up there in years when it’s no longer your friends that are getting married but their adult children, which is the case here. Having been married for 35 years my own wedding is a distant memory but I do recall a few things about the day that I think have some business implications as well. Pretty romantic, huh?
One thing I remember was a sense of great optimism. We were making a statement about our belief in our relationship and how we were better together than we would be as individuals. Attacking life together was going to advantage us and pooling our emotional and financial resources (which were pretty limited at that point) would give us a leg up. I don’t think we thought about it in those kind of terms exactly, but we knew it was the right thing to do.
What we didn’t know was the work involved. Anyone who tells you that a marriage is an easy walk in the park probably hasn’t been married or for very long. The stress of every day life can test not only the partnership bond but also the very concept of being together in the first place. Making it work can be hard but it’s been tremendously rewarding.
New businesses are the same. You have a great idea. You think you can add resources, gear up, and do something better than anyone else is doing it – solve a problem with a product or provide a service. You take on partners – investors, other workers, even the people who pay the bills – clients or customers. Easy right?
Ha! No sane business person will describe it as easy. It’s a lot of work and unfortunately the business failure rate is almost as high as the divorce rate. How the partnership deals with adversity and ever-changing conditions shows a lot. Is there honest dialog or a lot of shouting? Are you working on the problem together or are people retreating into their safe shells while things fail around them?
I love weddings, maybe because I’m an optimist at heart. I love young businesses too – I work with a few in my practice. The key to both is a commitment to work together to solve the mysteries that are life and business. So far, so good for me. You?
Consult Keith 
Comments
One of the best things about digital media is that it’s an open platform.
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Anyone can plug in and begin producing content or commenting on content that others have posted. Often those comments can be an interesting or insightful as the original article. They can also serve to provide balance when a “news” piece strays too far from the facts. I like reading comments most of the time and I appreciate those of you who take the time to add your thinking to mine here on the screed.
Unfortunately, there are those who use the ability to piggyback on the audiences good content attracts for other purposes. Here alone, spammers post dozens of fake comments with links back to their crap every day (WordPress has a built-in spam block that works exceptionally well). Elsewhere, trolls try to take over conversations, so the comments become a soapbox for rants against one party or politician or another no matter what the subject matter of the original story. It’s not just blog or news sites that suffer this – think about your own friends on Facebook or Twitter – seen any flame wars?
There are softwares that do moderation but they lack nuance and Im’ not sure they can fact-check a politely written bit of utter nonsense. Research has shown that an environment filled with negative comments can influence readers’ perceptions of the underlying subject matter negatively even when the piece is very neutral. What does one do? It’s not an easy answer. When we grappled with this issue many years ago as commenting became common, the solution my team went with involved, committed community members on a sort of neighborhood watch. We enabled certain folks who made insightful comments to alert us to issues and eventually even allowed some of them to block and edit to keep a safe, sane environment.
I think that’s about all we can do and still remain transparent while fostering conversation. People will have issues with your product or service and sometimes they’ll be very loud about their displeasure if it’s unwarranted. There’s not much one can do when that negativity is expressed via social shares that aren’t on your page but for the places under your control, encouraging polite, factual discourse can be a boost to readership as well as to your credibility and authenticity. That’s what I try to do here and what I try to get my clients to do as well. What do you do? Please comment (gulp!).
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