Make Someone Smile Today

I was a restaurant manager for a long time. One of the biggest lessons I learned there was the art of the smile. At any restaurant company I worked for it was pounded into our heads that the guest experience is all about eliciting an emotional response. You will invariably have one of two basic responses, one good and one bad. How then, do we insure that we give more of the better experiences than the bad? The answer was simple: start and end with a smile.

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.

Leo Buscaglia (1925 – 1998)

This simple rule applies to marketing in the social media world, as well. One of the biggest challenges in a text based environment is to equate the feeling with the message. We want, or maybe I should say need, our guests, clients, customers, to have that great experience.

Don’t open a shop unless you like to smile.

Chinese Proverb

Business is no longer done at the conference table, it is done, more and more on the web. How do we convey that smile to prospective clients, that we may never meet face to face? Smile at your monitor. Seriously, smile at your monitor. Are you grinning yet? Do you feel like a mad grinning fool because you are silently smiling at your monitor, and those in your office are wondering what is wrong with you? I hope so, because soon they will start to smile as well.

The adage that a smile is contagious is very true, just as a frown is, equally so. Smile at your contacts as you talk to them across the digital landscape. It will translate. Use emoticons to convey any range of emotions, humor, or light sarcasm. Tell a joke. Don’t embroil yourself in controversy. If you are in a position to be marketing yourself, or your product on the net, stay away from all those horribly personal topics like politics and religion. I, for one am bad about this. I love to talks politics, but something as small as a statement of where I stand on an issue can be taken personally by another. Business is not about pissing people off, it’s about enriching their lives in one way or another. We are here because we care. We care about our product and we care about the people. We want to deliver our product to the people because we believe that our product will help make their lives easier. That won’t happen through frowns and religious arguments.

So smile. Smile a lot. Get someone else to smile. It will make your day easier, and it will pay off. Remember,

It is almost impossible to smile on the outside without feeling better on the inside.

Unknown