Behave, goddammit! Someone might be listening.

Everyone is on Facebook these days. And quite a few on Twitter. There’s virtually no limit as to how much people talk there, and in other social media. So naturally companies are there too. It is, however, very few of them that have a strategy. They are there, but why is unclear.

Clever people, people like you and me, would probably not turn up to a party to peddle…I don’t know. Home knit mittens, maybe. But companies do. They barge in and shout at the top of their lungs. They brag. They try to get you to put them in contact with your friends, without even the courtesy of pretending to be interested in getting to know you. They try to f*ck you, but they won’t buy you a meal. They are, in short, being right bastards.

Now, some companies are smarter than that. Some are even genuinely nicer than that. And being nice is clever. Good salesmen know this. Good salesmen will ask how your kids are doing. They will try to get to know you, and try to get you to like them. Because they want you to want to recommend them to your friends.

I had a discussion with the CEO of a company the other day. We were discussing whether this there should be a company blog or not. My idea was to have a blog where the thirty or so really talented, smart, funny people in the firm could write interesting things about…well, basically anything. Pieces like this one, but better. The idea (not a revolutionary one, I admit) was to show that this consulting company consists of a large number of really nice folks. You know, so that a customer to be would understand how nice it would be to hire a few of them.

It didn’t fly so well. In fact it crashed and burned. Instead there will be a new website, a corporate one. A fine website it will be, I’m sure. And they need one, no question about it. But here’s the thing:

It will tell you nothing about the people whose services this consulting firm sells. They have writers whose texts you’ll not get to see, unless you scrutinise a few pre-selected samples of their work. They have strategists whose thoughts about the work you won’t hear until you actually sit down with them. They have project managers whose personality you won’t get a feel for.

And it’s an active decision by the company’s CEO.

I find that very strange.