As you may have forgotten by now, I am still writing posts for the facebook page of Kyotogram, a local business with the aim of bringing foreign tourists to Kyoto and Japan. By now, there is also a website, essentially a daily blog talking about Japan, but I am not involved in this one. Our group of four people meets once a week for two hours to talk, and most of the times, the meetings are nice and productive.
Although, the last two weeks, they weren’t. The reason is that Kyotogram will soon celebrate its first birthday and the big boss is starting to want to see results, obviously. In this case, the results essentially are the number of likes per post, and for some reason or other, this number has been going down the last month or two. It’s hard to say why because facebook doesn’t reveal the algorithms with which they provide people with our posts – and the more people we reach, the more likes we get, obviously.
So, two weeks ago, the team leader (let’s call him Junior because he’s a recent uni graduate, 23 years of age, with zero experience in anything) has started to search for reasons why the numbers are down, and, lo and behold, he has made it out: all the posts that are not scenery. Since those are all my posts, he was more or less attacking me and saying something that “we need better content” (not that he explained what that would be, of course). I let that go – until last week Junior attacked me again in the same way, and I couldn’t quite let that go twice in a row…
Fast forward to this week’s meeting: I was prepared to tell him I’d take a week off in case he attacked me again today. And I was definitely planning to ask the big boss for a meeting to talk about Junior and his attitude in depth. None of that happened, since there were preemptive strikes by both of them:
First of all, Junior apologised for his behaviour last week and the week before, right at the beginning of the meeting, which was totally unexpected. (I accepted.) And then the usual meeting was cut short because we two writers had an extra “review meeting” with the big boss! The three of us went to a cafe nearby where the big boss bought drinks, and then we were … what’s the term … airing our grievances. For one and a half hours. I don’t want to go into details here, but I feel that it was a constructive meeting, that the big boss was listening to what we had to say, and that he will try to solve the current problems.
I trust the big boss to come up with something we all can be happy with (even Junior). I wouldn’t want to leave because I still like the job (and I do learn a lot of things that can be applied to my own work), the people are nice (mostly), and I can definitely use the money… Let’s see where this is going.