There is a blog post I cannot write. So without writing it, I thought I’d explain why, because that’s the reasoning behind keeping this project: to talk about everything.
The Jabberwocky Soliloquy has always floated along the line between the diary aspects of a personal blog, the informative parts of a blogger’s blog and the simple fact that technically, it’s a business blog. There are certain things I can’t talk about because the blog represents the company, but most of the time this involves not making fun of potential customers or letting posts spiral into whinging because I’m having a bad day.
At the same time I want to tell the story of the Jabberwocky, where both good and bad things happen, without making it seem like I’m censoring myself for fear of upsetting some random folks somewhere in the internet. As a business we have to try and please everyone, but as a story teller I want to be faithful to the plot.
Let me explain.
Sometimes, in every situation of every walk of life, someone will drop a spanner in your works. You can’t dodge it, you can’t fix it and every compromise leaves you worse off. As a consumer you take to the internet, you tell friends and you kick up a stink until that company sorts your problem the hell out. This is the social media age, they are idiots if they don’t. As a company, the balance of power is different.
We can’t take to the blog, the facebook and the twitter and demand that wrongs be righted, because it’s unprofessional. It’s that simple. Unprofessional conduct can’t be countered with unprofessional conduct on the internet; all you get is a public slagging match and nobody can win that one. It may soon be forgotten, but thanks to the web it can never be lost.
If I were to rant about a business, and there are many times when I have wanted to, it would end up looking like I was picking a fight, or having a go, or just causing trouble. Either way, I read it back and find it sounds like I’m setting us up as the underdog and trying to squeeze out your sympathy. I’m not a charity, so that’s not a legitimate way to operate.
Those are the things I can’t talk about. Not because they are not relevant, but because I will think less of myself for doing so. The times when events have been shockingly bad or organisers have misrepresented their events or screwed us out of money, or just changed their plans, minds or attitudes. We’re not going to pressure them on social media with inconvenient, public questions or blog about them here, but I don’t want to pretend that this never happens. As Sir Frances Drake once said: there are dicks in every walk of life.
Dicks. And garlic. The start of a delicious pasta bake.
Instead we will spread the information to other traders who need to be in the know and continue trying to keep the moral high ground for now. All we need, for all our sakes, is for people to remember not everything you read on the internet is necessarily true.
You could always just hope that a sympathetic customer does the dirty work for you.
For example
“Hi Felicity I saw you at the Mansfield Paperclip Festival. Your toasties are delicious, but gosh what a set of prunks the event organisers are”