People Aren’t Mountains

There is a Scottish Gaelic proverb that reads, “Coinnichidh na daoine far nach coinnich na cnuic”, it translates as: The people meet each other but the hills do not.

It basically means that in life some things are impossible, for instance like two mountains meeting, but people can always meet.

I’ve always found it to be a nice hopeful phrase, particularly among today’s 24/7 Internet driven world, where often you could ring a customer service department for what you think is a local company, and be speaking to someone half the world away.

More and more we are becoming a faceless society, it started out in business as an easy way for multi-national companies to coordinate efforts across offices and regions. Then with the rise of social media, personal relationships started to become virtual, now at the end of 2017, we probably all have more friends on things like Facebook than we have in real life, but out of the new friends you made purely on these sites, how many have you actually met?

Relationships too have fallen foul of this move to the Internet, no one seems to meet in a pub, or at a café or just in the street anymore in the same way they used to. It all seems to be increasingly coordinated through dating apps and social media.

In many ways we are becoming mountains that never meet. The very nature of our businesses as Internet Marketers too is often very solitary, how often do we speak to our customers? Have you ever met any of them? The power we have available to us to generate revenue and communicate from across the world, for example, I am writing these very words in another country, propped up in a kitchen. I will (in all likelihood) only ever meet a few of the readers of this. I interact with other contacts and partners across the world daily, but again some I may never get the pleasure of meeting them more than a few times.

For example, I worked for a man for two years and never met him once, never even knew what he looked like!

As convenient as this makes things in our lives, it is sad in a way that these personal points of contact have been lost.

Customers still value the interaction with actual people, if not more so in a world where it is becoming a rare privilege, so in our businesses it’s important to find points that enable us to make actual contact, to put an actual face to our customers and for them to see us. Loyalty isn’t built around companies and products, but around people.

People are social, they need each other… the hills will take care of themselves.