Faceless vs. Faced

Lately I have been observing a few companies where changes actually happening and I could broadly classify the companies as being faceless vs faced.

A faced company is where the leader of the company is actively participating in a dialogue with the community. For example Elon Musk at Tesla Motors is really a good example of a company that is led by a leader who is ready to put his face and name in front of the media and to vouch for what he believes.

There are numerous companies where the communications are happening through a PRO rather than the CEO

One of the biggest problems with a company that doesn’t have a face is that every single message that needs to go out of the company has to follow a process and a channel that is way too slow and way too expensive.

If Elon wants to send out a message, he could simply post it on Twitter or appear in front of the media and present it himself. This is extremely direct and open and has the added benefit of coming from the source itself.

Now a days it is extremely easy for individuals to become personal brands by using social media platforms

Another classic example of a company that was led by a leader who put himself on the front is Apple and the leader is none other than Steve Jobs. What’s interesting about Jobs was that, he did it in an age where social media wasn’t prevalent. In spite of that he was able to assemble a large audience and was able to communicate effectively with them.

I think the message is clear, for someone to make a change in this age, he has to put himself in front of the camera and be able to effectively communicate his thoughts freely and openly.

I am sure that the first few videos are going to suck but it has to start somewhere and there is no other alternative

We have been planning to post videos ourselves but I should admit that the initial barrier to entry to putting oneself in front of the camera and speaking out is actually huge.

I am sure in the days to come you will see a lot more engagement via. videos rather than blog posts. Given the access to mobile phones for the vast majority of the population, the effectiveness of blogs are going down.

It is also worth mentioning that the choice of the medium greatly depends upon the choice of the target audience. If you are targeting a group that spends most of their time in front of the computer, for example developers, then perhaps blogs could be effective. But in our case we are targeting restaurant owners who spend little or no time in front of a computer and occasionally spends a few hours on the mobile phones checking Facebook, in this case it is extremely safe to say that videos are the way to go.

Coming back to the original point of the difference between being faceless and faced, if videos are the medium, then there is absolutely no way that a faceless company/movement could survive.

We tried to create animated videos to communicate a message, but it is extremely expensive and time consuming even to create a simple 3 to 4 minute video, so extrapolating this to hundreds of messages that needs to be sent across to the community, animated videos are totally out of question.

This information leave us with a simple choice, to be faced or faceless, and I think the answer is clear

Photo by sebastiaan stam on Unsplash