Expertise Marketplace - Professional Service Firm Marketing Blog

Going viral

One of the pleasures of Internet marketing is the incredible uptake of even the most simple new marketing message.  Sure, we've all been jealous when we hear from our professional services bretheren that a snippet of Internet video has gotten picked up broadly and favorably.   

But what about the pain from the unwelcome spread of a rogue communique about your firm?  Of course, the more controversial it is, the wider and faster it will spread!  I'm mindful about the rampant downloads of Stephen Colbert's speech at the White House Correspondent's dinner.   I was away when Colbert made this speech, and it's a doozy.   It was laughably easy to get it up on my computer screen.  I'll bet it would be laughably easy for a disgruntled practitioner within any number of professional service firms to create and distribute a simple and deeply damaging Internet clip.

Astute, seasoned professional service marketers have sophisticated crisis communications plans in place whose parameters could likely address this scenario.  Right? 

Or, do we all need to revisit our crisis communication plans to address the viral spread of Internet clips that could do our firms serious harm? 

How much ahead should you be?

It's hard to not be deafened by the cacophony about blogging, podcasts, wikis, and you-name-it Internet marketing communications channels.  Every professional services marketing leader I know is taking a hard look at these new media avenues. 

The eventual "winner," of course, will be the firm that manages to strike just the right balance of old methods and new, before any other competitor does.  Being a little bit "ahead" makes the most sense. 

Let's take blogging as an example.  It's easy to be intimidated by the breathtaking statistics about how fast this medium is growing.  I just finished reading a post from Fast Company's blog about the incredible growth of traffic on a select number of popular sites.  The post states "Clearly the popularity of blogging is on the rise."  Geez, it's enough to make any professional services marketer feel like a toad for not having urged every single one of his firm's professionals to jump on this bandwagon immediately! 

And yet, it pays to apply some critical thinking before leaping.  Take a look at Steve Rubel's post about the slow uptake on comments on a variety of blogs.  I urge my professional services marketing readers to take a look at this post!  In a nutshell, it appears that there are lots of bloggers out there, "talking amongst themselves," with hardly any real dialog occurring.  Sure enough, even my own casual review of comments on blogs that I respect reveals a less-than-robust two-way conversation. 

But Rubel cautions us, and I agree with him, that this is simply an indication of the relatively young life cycle of blogging as a marketing medium.   In fact, there are active endeavors underway to measure and quantify the influence of blogs according to their comment level.  Someone, Rubel says, will "crack this nut."  And, folks, as soon as that happens, blogging as a marketing medium will start to mature. 

Professional services marketers must be prepared to take advantage of this situation -- to think ahead of your competitors' professional services practitioners who are rushing to debut their new blogs, and to ensure that your professionals' new blogs are as interactive as they can be, as soon as they can be.

Getting zingy

Most of you know that my blog is more about the "why" of professional services marketing rather than the "how."   An inevitable question for Marketing leaders has got to be:  "Why should we care about the explosion of 'electronic connectivity' communication vehicles?  Most of our firms' client decision makers are soon-to-retire baby boomers who wouldn't know a Podcast if it bit them." 

Why care, indeed?  In my previous post on trust, I urged professional service firms to do more than they do now to monitor the word-of-mouth about their firms.  I made a big deal that there is a lot of information exchanged "out there" that marketers should know about, manage, and inevitably utilize for their firms' strategic purposes.  This is where trust starts, I said.

Watch what you ask for, they say.  I ended up spending the next two hours finding out just how much more is "out there" than I guessed.  Take a look at the Zing Index, mentioned in a post on Peter Davidson's Be Connected blog.  It's about Podzinger, a search engine that allows you to search for and monitor the podcasts that are available on the Internet.  Just for fun, take a look at what came up from my search on "pricewaterhousecoopers." 

From there, I learned that I can subscribe to a feed of on-demand Internet radio podcasts on a variety of topics.  Here's a source called Landed FM, sponsored by Deloitte.   

I'm one of those baby boomers that's just been bitten, I guess.  Now I'm even more convinced that marketers in firms smaller than the Big 4 (and this means YOU) have to get a grasp on this arena.  I'd love to hear examples of how others are exploring this new marketing arena. 

Trust begins with you and me

The Guerrilla Consulting blog just posted a link to Edelman's 2006 annual "Trust Barometer."  Here's a slightly altered version of the post I made in reply:

The findings verify much of what many of us already understand ("offer quality services, attend to clients' needs, price fairly, etc.").

But there's a nugget buried about 3/4 of the way through the report that should be of particular interest to professional service marketers. It's the graph about change in the relative importance in how people are influenced in their trust for a company: traditional media is becoming less influential than comments from "people like you and me."

It appears to me that professional service marketers are still overly focused on getting their firms' names favorably covered in the media; the majority have yet to clear their heads for some bandwidth about the tremendous importance of managing their messages in more informal networking situations.

I'm not talking here about PSFs beginning to utilize new "communication vehicles" like blogging and podcasting (which is appropriate, nevertheless). But I'd wager that PSFs' rush to embrace of these "new media" still leaves the question of TRUST too far off their radar screen.  Kudos to the folks at Edelman for finding a way to remind us that trust starts with the individual.

We're jamming!

Here's a copy of a  post made by Larry Bodine, the editor of the LawMarketing portal www.lawmarketing.com, on a conference he attended called "Beyond Blogs and Social Networks."  While he was there, he heard a speech about an amazing technique called "jamming."  Even though I had never heard the term before, I'm convinced that "jamming" will be the next wave of internal marketing and interactive communication. Even the brief description below should make it clear the amazing potential of this two-way communication approach.   

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Jamming is a genuine way that professional service firms can get valid internal input when trying to:

• Define the firm’s brand.
• Pick new industries and companies to target.
• Create new services for clients to buy.
• Define what the firm’s values are.

IBM is using a new collaborative online medium to capture best practices, solve urgent company issues, get ideas to change company agendas, and explore the company’s values and beliefs. It’s called “Jamming,” according to Michael Wing, Vice President of Strategic Communications at IBM’s Madison Avenue offices in Manhattan. AND it replaces knowledge management, which he said is a “30-year failure.”

Getting consensus is tough at a company with 175 locations and 369,000 employees. It’s no easier at any size professional service firm.

Wing spoke at the recent Strategic Research Institute conference "Blogs and Social Networks." A Jam is a global online brainstorming event -- “a threaded discussion in a Web environment.” Here’s how it works: an employee goes to the company intranet and clicks on the topic of the Jam. Then they type in their thoughts in a message, using their real names. They have a 48 to 96-hour time period to make a comment, and then the Jam closes. No comment is deleted, even negative ones or, for example, calls to unionize IBM.

To make sense of the thousands of messages, IBM uses eClassifier, JamAlyzer and SurfAid to sort them into topics, spot emerging patterns and put structure on all the comments. Then they use the ideas to run the $96 billion company.

Here are some of the questions IBM posed to its entire workforce, and the results they got:

WorldJam (May 2001): Urgent IBM issues:

• 52,595 participants (unique users)
• 6,000+ ideas
• 268,000+ views of posted ideas

ManagerJam (July 2002): The changing workforce and the role of the manager

• 8,123 participants (unique users)
• 4,500 ideas
• Framed agenda for two-year program

ConsultantJam (Feb. 2003) - helped accelerate the acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC)

• 8,560 participants (unique users)
• 2,960 ideas

According to Wing, a jam is not:

§ An announcement vehicle

§ A top-down communications tool

§ A community creator / definer: it’s a population, not a community

§ A personal soapbox

§ A chat room: no one is anonymous

A jam is:

§ Best-practice capture – an idea socialization vehicle

§ Global collaboration – find people you otherwise would never meet

§ Democratic – equal access and freedom-of-action for all

§ Pragmatic – participants rate actionable ideas and behaviors

§ Organizational research tool – a population snapshot, a barometer of culture change

§ An event – an organizational intervention that begins and ends 

Imagine the marketing and business development uses for a Jam at a professional service firm!  Look for an upcoming article on the LawMarketing portal www.lawmarketing.com.

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I am also very intrigued by Wing's comments that "knowledge management is a 30-year failure."  This is a huge issue in the professional services arena.  Could "jamming" be the next iteration of knowledge management, with a special spin on marketplace listening? 

Frame it!

During the summer of 2005, I was intrigued by a spate of articles regarding Karl Rove's acumen at "framing issues" for the Bush administration.  In addition to the politically oriented newspaper editorials and op-ed columns, I also noticed the work of Melissa Raffoni, who wrote an article in July 2005 for Harvard Management Update, "Framing: Position your Messages for Maximum Impact."  (It's available as a for-fee reprint.)

Notwithstanding Rove's recent troubles, this topic has great relevance for professional services marketers.  How can our firms frame an issue such that the communication of that issue effectively influences others to see it a particular way?  It seems to me that "framing" is not done well by many professional service firms, and that we could all improve our skill with this important concept.   

The marketing of intellectual capital

The Economist's October 13, 2005 edition featured a review of a new book by Thomas Davenport, Thinking for a Living (2005, Harvard Business School Press). 

It got me thinking about the professional service marketer's conundrum:  communicating with the marketplace about your firm's intellectual capital (its amazing benefits over the intellectual capital of the competitors!), usually without being able influence the growth of that intellectual capital.  More often than we'd all like, I'll bet, we become like Dilbert -- touting a solution when we know it's inferior to the alternatives.  Communicating in these circumstances can become painful! 

It's refreshing then, to see the topic of Davenport's book, which outlines the ways that companies are trying to improve their knowledge workers' productivity and trying to improve the dissemination of knowledge throughout their organizations. 

I suspect that most professional service marketers, when and if they ever become integrated into the innovation-building fabric of their firms, will celebrate anything that can be done to build their professionals' intellectual capital and its dissemination throughout their firms.  Now that's worth communicating about! 

Learning from Wal-Mart's War Room

I've been reading a lot of bad news about Wal-Mart lately. It's been hard to miss the offensive and counteroffensive moves regarding Wal-Mart in the press. I thought, "Sure looks like a carefully orchestrated conversation to me!"  Turns out it is. 

Take a look at a recent New York Times piece "A New Weapon for Wal-Mart:  A War Room" (Abstract: http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60A13F6345B0C728CDDA80994DD404482) (Full article for registered readers: http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?)res=F60A13F6345B0C728CDDA80994DD404482.) It's about Wal-Mart's use of political campaign-style "war-rooms" to combat growing attacks from organizations that are critical to the company's image.  The article describes how Wal-Mart is using modern political campaign tactics to improve its image with both current consumers and "swing voters," those consumers who have not yet been tainted by the bad press. 

Certainly, Wal-Mart's "political counteroffensives" may be called for in such highly negative circumstances -- defensive press releases; rapid-response PR messaging with highly trained leader-communicators or surrogates; instant web-postings; outreach to reporters, and the like.  I couldn't help wondering how a professional service firm would respond to such a highly coordinated barrage of anti-company sentiment.  I see many challenges:

• Increasingly, managing the company's image requires constant attention to negative public opinion. I wonder whether professional service firms have as a sophisticated a "market-listening" machine as Wal-Mart undoubtedly has now.  We need only remember how Arthur Andersen lost control of the public's positive image.  I can't help but think that too many professional service firms are still under-prepared to appropriately "frame" their image.  In Wal-Mart's case, the negative public opinion is well organized and well funded. This certainly represents a new chapter in managing a company's corporate image! 
• This whole notion of "framing" an issue would require professional service firms to have a better grasp of the impact of their services on the political and social arenas in which their clients operate.  I still think professional service firms are too narrowly focused in this regard. Like Wal-Mart, many are vulnerable to being "called on the carpet" regarding the broader impact of their services.
• The article describes many of Wal-Mart's defensive activities as directly responding to individuals and groups of people.  How many professional service firms think about the broader "consumer" -- the employees of their client companies, or the firm's suppliers -- in their day-to-day business?  It's far too easy for professional service firms to forget that the opinions of individual people are also part of their client communication efforts -- even if they're not the direct decision makers. 
• One of the most powerful aspects of political campaign-style communication is the high degree of sophistication in targeting and segmentation for the purposes of shaping an image.  Professional service firms could learn a lot from these war-room professionals.  A heightened sensitivity to targets can mean the difference between a positive image and a negative one.