Price supports rarely benefit small farmers.
The Last Word
Do you know a ‘last word’ person? No matter how trivial the text or email, they answer it.
Thanks.
No, thank you!
Ok.
Great.
Alright.
Sure, no problem.
Arghhh! This drives me crazy! But now I have new perspective. Maybe they picked up this habit while trying to retain their Very Responsive badge on Facebook.
Did you know that if you message a business page on FB, the business has to answer you within a set amount of time to be deemed ‘responsive’? No problem, because we want to respond to our customers quickly, but…there’s another wrinkle. If you write, ‘Do you have this product?’, I respond, ‘Yes’, and you say ‘Thank you’, I MUST respond again. If I don’t, our responsiveness rating goes down, and FB sends me constant reminders that I have an unanswered message. Ugh.
We also don’t love the ‘interested’ button. What does ‘interested’ mean? In this case, if you have invited 60 people to an event, and the day before said event, you have 2 ‘going’, and 47 ‘interested’, it means you could have nobody at all show up….or 80. How do you plan for this?
Social media has been VERY good for our business. We don’t do much formal advertising, so FB, Instagram, and Twitter have allowed us to connect with a large number of customers old and new about our products and events. It has been a learning process; I now know that every post needs a picture, that hashtags can work wonders, and how to write a ‘hook’. Most importantly, I’ve learned that most posts need to be kept short and sweet.
Keeping that in mind, how ironic is it to see Twitter doubling its famous 140 character limit? Will twice as many words allow people to express something deeper and more eloquent? Will it help them attract attention or change hearts and minds? Or will it be so much more noise, the antithesis of the silence we crave in order to hear what is truly important?
In an age when quantity often trumps quality, striving for the opposite is a worthy challenge. Quality is certainly our guide when selecting products. We’ll attempt the same in our communications.