SoMaFusion :: travelogue

Company Lunch !!!
Uploaded by convexstyle on 15 Feb 09, 10.42PM GMT.

I couldn’t agree more with David Meerman Scott’s post today (‘Who the hell are these people?’ on Web Ink now) – highly recommended reading for anyone that deals with a company’s online presence.

David has a relatively simple question:

Who are these young, happy, pretty, multi-cultural people with great teeth and even better hair who hang out with notebook computers in sleek and modern conference rooms on B2B company Web sites all over the world?
(via)

What David is saying is that it’s high time we chose to display photographs of real people on our websites rather than stock photography

I couldn’t agree more. We had that discussion the other day about a company we like and I was insisting that their website is not taking advantage of their greatest assets. Their location and their people. Instead of proudly displaying that they are in a lovely town, contributing to its development and giving back to the community somehow they manage to hide it . At the same time they employ lovely and talented people and I know the accounts they get are also pretty exciting accounts ayet I never see their faces. Why not?

What is it that makes us try to appear to be something different than we are, subscribing to some sort of prevailing ‘one true way’ logic that dictates how the photographs should look like.

I say ditch all that and find what works best for you – not for everybody else. It’s the only way to be happy with the result and to make a difference.

this entry on Friendfeed

From the first moment we started talking about SoMaFusion and where we would like the company to go we realised that we shared some common values. One of them is our insistence on transparency and disclosure.

I have more complicated examples in mind but I think our position on disclosing our names sums up where we stand pretty neatly.

This is more or less how we see it – and I’ve got Manolis dropping in little comments as I write this.

SoMaFusion is effectively a service provider. We will tailor each product to the needs of the client and judge what is needed depending on the situation. Looking into some of the things we’ve done a client might not see something that is exactly what they are looking for. This is of course normal.

So, we sat down and we considered this. What would help a client decide if they would be willing to take a chance with us? And this is the list we came up with.

• Past projects (examples, examples, examples) (we uploaded some examples on flickr and more is coming on the website)
• Values and what we’re about (we blogged on this)
• Expertise
• Experience
• Reputation
• Visibility / tangibility

Obviously the four last ones are the hardest. If we haven’t worked together how can you tell? Well, it turns out you can up to a point. That’s why our names are right there. That’s why our LinkedIn profiles are right there. That’s why we sign our blog posts depending on who is writing them (even though admittedly we always agree on everything we write on here).

The decision was a no-brainer to us but we asked clients, and we asked people we trust as well. Everybody came back with the same thing: A name means you can search for us, our work, ask around. A name means that we actually stand by our work. A name means that we like what we do and we’re willing to put our name under it. But the best line came from a long standing client.

Seeing your names and your thoughts on the blog makes me think we share something, I know what you think and I can see how you work. From an uknown quantity you become less of a risk as time goes by.

We couldn’t have said it better if we tried.