When a customer has to tell you how to do your job…

…you probably aren’t doing it right to begin with.

Let me hit the highlights of a story before I say what I really mean to say:

I wrote a blog post for my wedding planning blog through Wedding Wire about how important contracts are. We’d been encountering vendors who seem to not understand what a contract is even though they wrote them! I didn’t name anyone, but I used our DJ’s most recent communication as an example.

If anyone wanted to find out who our DJ was, they could but for the basic purpose of the post, it was about contracts not the DJ and it was important for other people to understand.

The DJ called me and yelled at me for “bad-mouthing” their company on the internet. Then she bombarded the post with comments bad-mouthing me and successfully attaching the company name to my blog and bringing to light the fact that they aren’t concerned about customer satisfaction. Some back and forth took place on the blog and someone said that vendors have a right to know if their customers will blog about them.

This ticked me off. I don’t tell them that I’m going talk with my friends about them. I don’t have to tell them if I’m a guest speaker at a bridal event. So I don’t have to tell them that I’m going to blog. Freedom of speech!

I was already pretty upset that they tracked me down (not extremely hard) since I blog under a “garden name.” Chances are, I don’t want to be called and scolded when a vendor doesn’t like what I say, especially if I go under a pseudonym.

What should have happened:

The DJ should not have called me. And if they were going to call, they should have kissed my butt about the issue and tried to satisfy me. They didn’t like the shadow of a possibility that I said something bad about them online, so poking the bear is a bad idea. I wanted to say, “I blog lady! You earned yourself a post with this call too!”

The takeaway:

I said it to “Lisa” in the comments and it works overall: every vendor should act like their customers will blog about them.

Every business should conduct itself like their customers will talk about them.

You don’t treat people with a bigger voice better than people without. Word-of-mouth is one of the best ways to earn new business so treat your clients well (and follow the law!). It doesn’t matter that I blog, it matters that I talk about you whether it’s on a blog or with a room full of people.

If you’re itching to read the controversial blog post and my response in the comments you can find it here.