The thing about companies is that they’re made up of individuals, and individuals have personalities. A company is the sum of its parts, and in the case of a service company those ‘parts’ are people. This is a good thing, unless one personality becomes too prominent in the overall mix.
This is a problem experienced by a website development company local to me recently – one I once worked at. The dominant personality there is the MD, a man with strongly held opinions. There’s nothing wrong with that of course – we’re all entitled to our own opinions. Sometimes though, it’s best just to keep your opinions to yourself. The aforementioned MD, thinking he was having a private email conversation, expressed some particularly strong opinions (in a somewhat unfortunate way), and sadly for him, the email correspondence found its way to a national newspaper and received copious amounts of negative press coverage.
Whilst I was working for this guy many years ago, I recall recommending that he kept his strongly held opinions to himself and desisted from publishing them on the company website. He ignored my advice, but I still stand by it, and am perhaps somewhat vindicated in light of recent events. Strongly held opinions, particularly those of a political or divisive nature, are best kept totally separate from a company website, lest a potential client’s opinion of your company be coloured by their distaste for your personal viewpoints.
However, I have worked with many clients who have enjoyed success by personalising their company websites to some extent. People like to deal with people, and the Internet hasn’t really changed that. When you make an order with an online shop, don’t you like to know that there are real human beings at the end of a phone line who can help you in case something goes wrong? What better way to humanise a company online than feature a staff blog, or some staff profiles? For single owner and small businesses, it’s really not worth trying to pretend your business is something else. I once worked for a very small company that advertised numerous regional phone numbers and tried to give the impression of a huge operation when it was anything but. I’m just not convinced this has any benefit. Why not embrace your small business status and advertise that fact by personalising your company website. Just don’t get too personal.
The moral of the story is to ensure that anything personal presented on your company website has been duly sanitised. If you’re not sure, seek the opinions of others or just don’t publish. And remember, email is one of the most insecure forms of communication, so never use it for really confidential messages, and never commit anything to writing that can be misconstrued, used against you, or cause offence if the wrong person saw it.
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