Okay, so it’s not that bad… but here is another case where time has proven Jay right again. Here’s a little story about building reputations with an example. As we mentioned earlier, we met Adam Lasnik: “search evangelist”, at SES Toronto, and were able to talk to him about our Classified Ad site problem. He had promised to get back to us re: trying to diagnose the problem and help us fix what Google didn’t like about the sites so that we could get indexed again.
He seemed so genuine at the time, that I was sure he would follow up… Jay, being his cynical self, disagreed…and it’s about three weeks after the show now and we haven’t heard from him, nor did he respond to the email I sent him to follow up. I hate to be wrong about this, but it looks like Jay was right.
All is not lost, as we are 90% sure we discovered the problem as a result of an SES panel that Jay attended. We had a programmer set up a page to block foreign users (who were mostly trying to scam our visitors) from visiting the site. The problem is, foreign visitors were redirected to a more or less dead Adsense page. I’m sure this looked a heckuva lot like cloaking to any spider that stopped by… so now that we’ve solved the issue (we think), and we’re hoping we’ll be added back to the index at some point in the future.
Did Adam owe us a response? No, certainly not… and it’s likely that there was nothing beyond him simply forgetting about us after the show (I’m sure he has a really busy schedule). However, the fact remains that regardless of industry, if you tell someone you are going to follow up with them, you should. Reputations are built one connection at a time, and instead of us viewing him as “Adam the awesome guy at Google who helped us track down the problems / confirm our suspicion of what the problem is with our website”, he’s “that guy at Google who we met at SES, but forgot about us.”
Will the fact he never followed up be negative for him in any way? I doubt it, but he missed out on one brick in the building of a stellar reputation. I hope this doesn’t come across as being too harsh, as I’m sure we’ve all made the exact same error at one point or another (myself included). People in the blogsphere are obsessed with PR, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I hear from him a day or two after this post goes up, but as the saying goes, “you only get to make a first impression once.”
Moral of the story, and this goes for anyone in business: your reputation is something you will build over time, and that cannot be easily or quickly changed. Make no mistake: You will reap what you sow. Every business dealing can result in one of three basic impressions of you: Negative, Neutral or Positive. Each new impression is a new block in the building known as your reputation. Keep this in mind as you build yours.
Good Profits.
July 2nd, 2007 at 11:01 am
I am still working through the tons of feedback and requests I received from both the SMX and SES Toronto conferences. Clearly, I should have done a better job to temper expectations, and for that, I apologize.
July 2nd, 2007 at 11:26 am
Hi Adam,
Thanks for commenting on our blog. I hope my post didn’t come across as slamming you, as that was really not the intention, but just to use the situation as an example for the point I was trying to make about building a reputation. Like I said in my post, I’m just as guilty and everyone else at failing to follow up on connections from time to time.
RE: The expectations, that would have completely changed the impression from our end. If my memory serves me correctly (and sometimes it doesn’t) you had mentioned that you were returning home the following week. I guess I incorrectly interpreted that as you indicating a response around that time.