Morgul Marketing

    Social media for HVAC companies working the District, Maryland and Virginia

    Most advice about contractor social media assumes a driveway, a front lawn and a homeowner who owns the whole building. Very little of that describes the District. The work happens down alleys the truck cannot enter, in converted flats where the basement belongs to two households, and on federal sites where the phone stays in the truck. So the useful question for a Washington HVAC company is not what to post. It is what this city will let you record, who has to agree before you record it, and what stands in for the proof shot every suburban contractor gets for free. Answer those three and the posting part gets much easier.

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    Whoever walks down the alley is the one holding the phone

    A rowhouse condenser is reached through an alley a truck cannot enter, so the camera gets decided at the shop rather than at the gate.

    The lot behind a Capitol Hill rowhouse is narrow, the gate is narrow, and the alley is the only way to it. Two people carry the lineset, the recovery machine and the gauges down that alley, which means the phone stays in a pocket unless somebody was told to keep a hand free.

    Decide it before the truck rolls. One technician works, the other films, and the one filming shoots one handed from about arm's length, because there is nowhere to stand back to.

    Get the constraint while it is still visible. The old unit wedged against a fence, the gate the new one has to come through, the clearance somebody has to live with afterward. Once the pad is set and the panel is back on, none of that reads on video.

    Duct work inside is a flashlight and a forearm. Vertical framing and a headlamp beat any tripod you own, and the technician should say out loud what he is looking at while the light is already on it, because there is no second take once the wall closes.

    You will not film every job on a rowhouse block, and you do not need to. Weight the queue toward the hard ones anyway. An alley job costs more to shoot than a Fairfax County driveway and it answers a question the driveway never raises.

    In a converted flat, the owner who called you cannot say yes to the basement

    One rowhouse cut into two households puts your camera in space held by somebody who never hired you.

    A converted flat shares a wall, a stair, a hallway and almost always a mechanical space. The owner upstairs called you. The owner downstairs did not, and the equipment you want to film sits in a basement the two of them hold between them.

    Get a written yes from the person whose space appears before anything is recorded. A verbal yes in a stairwell from the wrong owner is not permission, and the argument that follows lands on a neighbor your customer has to live beside.

    Condominium and cooperative conversions add a board. Some buildings want notice before a contractor works in common areas at all, and a camera in a shared hallway is exactly the kind of thing a board remembers at the next meeting. Ask the building's manager what the house rules say instead of carrying over an assumption from the last building you worked in.

    The shared mechanical room is worth the paperwork. Two systems, two owners and one chase is a interesting problem, and an owner in Shaw or Petworth looking at the same layout will watch every second of it.

    Keep the household that did not agree out of the frame completely. Their door, their storage, their bicycle. They consented to a technician in the basement, not to an audience.

    On a federal site the phone stays in the truck

    A large share of the commercial work in this region happens where a camera is not welcome, which decides what your account can ever show.

    Agencies, contractor offices and cleared spaces generally do not allow a phone camera past the lobby, and the escort walking you back to the mechanical room will say so before you get a chance to ask.

    Assume the answer is no and ask in advance anyway, because the person who can actually answer is not the facilities contact who booked the call. Being told no on site costs you nothing. Posting something you were not supposed to record can cost you the account.

    So the commercial half of a Washington HVAC company is close to invisible on social, and a shop with a strong federal book of business often looks smaller online than the residential competitor a few blocks away.

    Prove it a different way. Talk about the kind of building and the kind of equipment without naming a tenant, film your own shop floor, your fabrication, your test gear and your training, and let the residential work carry the pictures.

    The same caution belongs in front of your technicians. A photograph of a badge, a lobby or a parking pass is a small thing that ends a relationship, and it is worth saying out loud once a year rather than assuming everybody already knows.

    There is no driveway to park the shot every other contractor uses

    A wrapped van in front of the house is the standard proof image in this trade, and most of the streets you work will not hand it to you.

    On a rowhouse block the van is in a residential permit space around the corner, in the alley behind the house, or sitting with the flashers on while somebody watches for a ticket. The photograph that says a real company came to a real address is simply not available to you.

    Find the substitutes and use them steadily. The shop with the name on it. The crew loading in the morning. The truck in an alley with the doors open and the parts laid out. A view from a roof deck that somebody in Navy Yard will recognize in half a second.

    Name the block and let the neighborhood do the identifying. A reader in Columbia Heights knows what a Columbia Heights alley looks like better than a caption can explain it, and that recognition is the thing the driveway shot was buying elsewhere.

    The suburban jobs will give you the conventional picture and there is no reason to refuse it. Just do not let a run of Bethesda and Falls Church driveways be the only evidence a District owner has of what you can do inside a house like theirs.

    Everything on this page is about what this city allows you to record. The rest of the job, from who should hold the camera to how often any of it should go out and what deserves money behind it, does not change at the Beltway, and we have written that part up on our HVAC social media page.

    Questions we get

    Can we film in the alley behind a rowhouse without asking anybody?
    You are allowed to be there, and everybody's back door, back window and trash pad is in the shot with you. Keep the lens on your own work and the equipment you came for, and check with your customer before you film anything that takes in a neighbor's yard. The person you irritated on a Capitol Hill block is somebody your customer sees every morning.
    A customer asked us to take a video down after we posted it. What do we do?
    Take it down that day and do not negotiate about it. Plenty of households in this region have professional reasons for keeping an address, a car or a front door off a public account, and they will not always explain what those reasons are. Ask for a written yes before the next one, say where it will be posted, and treat a no as ordinary rather than as a problem to solve.
    We hold licensing in more than one of the three jurisdictions. How should that show up?
    As a plain list on the profile, one line per jurisdiction, rather than one line about being licensed and insured. A reader in Silver Spring is working out whether you can legally do the work at their address, which is a different question in the District, in suburban Maryland and in Northern Virginia. A single blended claim makes them go check somewhere else.
    Does footage from a Fairfax County subdivision do anything for our District customers?
    It helps the suburban half of your map and says almost nothing to a Georgetown or Shaw owner who wants to know whether a lineset can get down an alley. Both belong in the mix. The suburban jobs are easy to film and can fill the gaps, and the rowhouse jobs answer the question your District customers actually arrived with.
    We service a federal building. Can we post any of it?
    Ask before the phone comes out, and expect to be told no. Publicity terms often sit inside the contract itself, the escort is not the person who can waive them, and the safe version is to describe the type of building and the type of equipment without naming the tenant or showing the space. If you want that work visible, say what your commercial crews do rather than showing where they did it.

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing. Updated .

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