Social media for a plumbing company working the District's shared walls and alleys

One stack, three households, and only one of them called you

A rowhouse divided into flats runs its waste and its water through shared pipe, so a repair upstairs becomes an event for people who never hired you.

The owner on the second floor calls about a kitchen line that will not drain. The pipe it feeds passes through a basement belonging to somebody else, and the valve that has to be closed takes the water off for every unit in the building.

A repair like that is a building event rather than a household one. Before anything is recorded, the household whose space appears has to agree, and a yes from the owner who called you is not a yes from the neighbor whose basement your crew is standing in.

It also hands you an audience most plumbing jobs never get. The people whose water was off all day genuinely want to know what was wrong, and a short clip of the section that came out answers a question the whole building has been asking in the stairwell.

Keep the neighbor's half of the basement out of frame. Their storage, their door, their bicycle. They agreed to a technician in the room, not to an audience.

In the old core this is ordinary rather than unusual. Rowhouses in Shaw, Petworth and Columbia Heights were carved into flats decades ago, and the plumbing was divided long after the walls were.

A federal customer cannot put a title behind your work

Much of this region works for the government or for somebody under contract to it, and the part of a testimonial that would carry weight is the part those employers will not allow.

A happy customer offers to say something nice. In most cities that is a name, a job and maybe an employer. Here the name arrives attached to an agency, a rank or a clearance, and none of that can appear next to a vendor's logo without reading as an official endorsement of a private company.

So take the words and leave the credentials. A first name and a neighborhood is usable. An agency, a badge, a uniform, a recognizable building behind them or a parking pass on a dashboard is not, and the customer may not think to mention it themselves.

Expect the same answer about faces. A household with a clearance, or one that would rather not be connected publicly to an address, will decline the camera and will not always explain why. Take the no cheerfully, because arguing costs you a referral worth more than the clip was.

Your account will look quieter than a competitor's because of it. A shop with a strong book of work in cleared households and contractor neighborhoods will look quieter online than a competitor working Fairfax County subdivisions, and the answer is a library that never needs a face in it: the pipe, the cut section, the trench, the material coming out of a wall.

An open trench in the alley is everybody's back door for a day

Rowhouse sewer laterals run out to the alley, and that alley is the only vehicle access for every house on the block.

A lateral replacement behind a Capitol Hill rowhouse puts a machine, a spoil pile and a steel plate across the only way the neighbors reach their parking pads. Everyone on that block knows about your job whether or not anybody posts about it.

So publish for them. Say what the work is, roughly how long the alley is affected and what the plating looks like overnight. A block that was told what was happening remembers a competent company. A block that woke up to a closed alley remembers a plumber.

Film early, because the alley is the shot. A trench cut clean through old brick and fill, with the cast iron laid out beside it, explains the number on a neighbor's future estimate better than any bathroom before and after.

You will shoot the whole job from one position. There is no stepping back in an alley barely wider than the machine, so the footage that survives is close, vertical and taken over somebody's shoulder while the excavator works.

The restoration is the ending worth showing. New pavement, the plate gone, the alley open. That is the part the neighbors were actually waiting on.

On a historic block the finished job is supposed to show nothing

Facade review in the designated districts means the visible result of good work is a street that looks untouched, which removes the after photograph most contractor accounts are built on.

Replace a water service in Georgetown or on Capitol Hill and the point of the exercise is that a stranger walking past cannot tell anything happened. The brick went back, the areaway looks the same, the sidewalk matches. None of that photographs as an accomplishment.

So move the story into the middle of the job. The old line coming out, the material, the depth, the tight cut across a front areaway, the patch going back the way it came up. What you are proving is care, and care is only visible while the ground is open.

The interior carries the rest. A stack behind plaster, a branch line to a third floor kitchen that was never going to be adequate, a house built for one family and plumbed for three. That material sits in nearly every job you run in the old core and it belongs to this city.

Photograph the restoration the same day you finish it. A fresh patch in old brick is the one moment the work reads as work, and a week later the mortar has dulled and the picture is just a wall.

None of this is advice about posting. It is a description of what this city hands you to work with, and the habits that sit on top of it are the same in any market, which is why they are collected on our plumbing social media page at /industries/plumbing/social-media.