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Thursday, September 22, 2011

Five Undeniable Truths about Janitorial Blogging

A blog (a blend of the term web log) is the primary way for you to engage your prospects, your clients, and your community in this Web 2.0 age. There are 156 million blogs and if you are in the cleaning industry, you had better get yours and you had better make it good.

I look at janitorial web sites almost continuously. Few in our industry have figured out how to maintain a presence on the web and janitorial web sites are not much more than electronic brochures. How much time do you spend reading any brochure after your purchase? How can you use the web to interact with all those you seek to influence (both before and after the sale)?

Yes, we all know you vacuum and dust and polish along with the other 127,000 cleaning services in the U.S. that want that very same dollar that you do. Frankly, everyone with money to spend for cleaning is tired of hearing it. The question is, what makes you special and why should you get that cleaning dollar? I want to be very clear about this and make sure you understand that you are NOT special in today’s marketplace. (Your mom still thinks you are special but other than her, it is a very short list).

The answer is as it always has been, to build a relationship. The foundation of a relationship is engagement. For a whole generation of buyers and clients today engagement is something that happens on the web. A blog is one key piece of your internet presence that you cannot afford to ignore.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Who gets the last word?

I went to the funeral of an old friend. We have not been very, close over the last few years but he was a friend who taught me much that I have taken with me for several decades. We were fierce competitors for many years and then one day after he left a top position in a global company, he bought my company.

My friend cleaned buildings like many of my other friends but this one cleaned what equaled entire cities. You could measure what he cleaned not in square feet or even in how many buildings but in square blocks of downtown business corridors. People stood at my friend’s funeral because there were no seats left.

So much current conventional wisdom was shattered at the funeral; I had trouble deciding which nuggets of nonsense to disassemble for you. I decided to disassemble just a few here now.