PIF | PET GAZETTE | 11
VIEWPOINT
Nigel Baker, chief executive of the Pet Industry Federation, on dealing with people online
I
f you work in the pet
industry and like animals,
you still have to deal with
the owners. If you are in
any of the pet service type
of businesses such as dog walking, pet
grooming, boarding or day care then it will
be the owners who may make or break your
business. However much you say you went
into business because you like animals, it’s
still the people/owners that you will need to
have a good rapport with. Even if you run a
pet shop, what makes the difference is how
you effectively communicate with shoppers
and how you can go out of your way to make
them feel valued.
The pet industry is based very much on
relationships with people, building good
relationships will really help you grow your
business into a success. You only have to look
at the high street to see that the problems
occurring with retail there come down to
the fact that there was little interaction in the
companies that have failed.
Another issue is social media, I live in a
small village in Northamptonshire and my son
has a drone. He has a drone because first he
likes the experience of flying it and secondly
he enjoys the photos that you can capture
at height. The village has a Facebook ‘online
community’ group in-which one villager
posted that they had seen a drone flying and
it was an invasion of their privacy. The post
was followed by over 60 other posts about
drone flying, most were about the invasion
of privacy and featured people being spied
on in their gardens. My son flies his drone
responsibly and has no interest in taking
pictures of people in their gardens. I looked
through the Facebook descriptions of people
who had posted, and discovered I could find
out more about them from their Facebook
profiles than any drone could even if it took
a picture of them in their gardens. People
were publishing their age, their birthday,
where they went to school, their partner’s and
children’s names. In fact, there was so much
information on most of them that if I had been
www.petgazette.biz
bothered I could have fully profiled over 70
percent of them. Fortunately, I have better
things to do.
It was recently explained to me by an
internet expert that criminals use profiles
in Facebook for scams. For instance, if you
list your hobby as liking motorbikes and
you get a telephone call to say that ‘we are
ringing you to say you have been selected
to receive free membership to the local bike
club’, of course you would respond. Then the
scammer has you on a phone and it’s easy to
extract even more personal details. The moral
of this story is that if you use social media,
lock down your personal details so they can
only be seen by friends and not the whole
world.
Social media can, of course, be a great
communication platform for business. I
don’t mean that you need to publish and
photograph what you had for breakfast, but it
is a great way of telling your customers about
your business, and about the good staff
you have. But of course there is a downside
to social media as you can be much more
vulnerable to receiving negative or unwanted
posts on your site. Recently, I have become
embroiled in a direct Facebook attack on me
personally from the manager of another pet
trade association. As PIF CEO, I don’t mind
if people on Facebook want to attack PIF
policies but when it gets personal, I object
strongly. The attack on me related to assertion
that PIF was single-handedly responsible
for issues affecting certain parts of the pet
vending schedule within the new Animal
Activity Licensing Regulations. This of
course is a ludicrous suggestion,
as I know where my expertise
lies and if don’t know about
something we will always
enlist help from our
members or other experts.
In fact, this individual
had conveniently
forgotten that he too
was involved in the
consultations, but I
guess that because the final outcome was not
what he wanted, he chose to blame me. The
problem with this type of ‘keyboard warrior’
attack, is how do you stop the untruths that
someone is putting on Facebook. In this case
I decided that responding on Facebook was
not the answer as I didn’t want to end up in
a ‘he said, you said’ prolonged dialogue on
social media, so I chose not to respond. In the
end, I agreed to publish a counter argument
to what he was saying in a publication.
The point about both stories and
communication with customers, is that in
many ways people can praise or run down
your business (or you personally). Business
owners tend to be proud of their achievement
in setting up and running a business, the
ongoing trick is to successfully manage the
expectations of the public. If you receive bad
publicity, think before you react and work out
the likely outcome you wish to achieve. It’s a
mad fast-moving social world out there that
you need to navigate. Good luck!
October 2018