Is Your Blog Lijit?

After working with the Louis Gray team of writers for the past month or two, I feel like I received a backstage pass to what goes into running a high profile blog. It’s all about the content – and lot’s of it. With all of that content rolling across the front page, valuable content quickly gets pushed down and ultimately to the back of the line. It’s simply the nature of the beast.

This presents a little issue with finding older, but still relevant content. In other words, if you can’t find the content, you won’t read it.

When Louis discussed Lijit, the service had been on my radar for some time as I had become an avid reader of Micah Baldwin’s blog. I had been skeptical of using the service as I already a well placed search tool and two stat packages running in the background.

I  had recently completed the migration to a new WordPress theme by Brian Gardner. I was very particular about choosing a theme with specific positioning of the RSS subscription link and search window, and I did not want to jeopardize the integrity of the site.

I reasoned that visitors to my blog would not adopt Lijit’s very slick tool, the Search Wijit, simply because many would naturally migrate to the search window placed within the masthead of the site.

Luckily, the Lijit development team had already thought about that. Lijit allows you to choose to install the Lijit Wijit or hijack your existing search bar. Given that I wanted to protect the integrity of the design, I chose to hijack my search bar. In other words, I allowed the Lijit code to embed behind the theme search bar.

But when I chose the hijack option, it hijacked more than my search bar!

I e-mailed Micah, and asked him what I should do. He immediately e-mailed back with some advice, and we eventually decided to e-mail support. A few days went by, and I received a wonderful e-mail from Jacqueline following up on my installation of Lijit.

I informed her the installation was quite easy, but I was still having some troubles with hijacking my search bar. I immediately received an e-mail back from Ben who informed me the issue had been addressed, and I simply had to uncheck a simple check box within the Wijit options. It worked like a dream! Lijit is now legit on ChangeForge.

The Take-Away:

An important lesson here could be learned from this experience. Even though it took a few days to have my overall issue resolved – and the support group themselves did not immediately address the issues, the consistent communication from Micah and Jacqueline kept me a happy customer the entire time.

While it might be nice to solve problems very quickly, this is often not feasible logistically. Instead, your customers will greatly appreciate the over-communication while you and your teams work to solve their issue. As the book Raving Fans states, it’s important to be consistent in delivering customer service. Lijit demonstrated this through the simple process of Jacqueline conducting a simple follow-up.

Lijit is not only focused on helping your audience search your content, Lijit is focused on helping their customers find great value and realizes that technology without great customer service just isn’t that great.

By the way, Micah, I won’t hold it against you that Jacqueline really wears the pants in the Lijit family!

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. To connect with Ken, you may visit him at DandyID.