When I stood up in Canberra a couple of weeks ago to deliver the keynote for the last day of the Hillross Financial Services annual conference 2012 I was a tad nervous. Not shaking nervous, but neither just the usual pre-presentation edginess I usually feel on the basis that I want to make sure I’m focused on my presentation being as helpful as possible.

The topic for my keynote was Practical Social Media Strategy and the bit of extra nervousness I put down to my being  aware that some of the audience might see the whole idea of social media engagement as just one more reason to feel pressured, rather than representing a great opportunity for business growth.

And from talking to some of the participants beforehand, as well as my own reading about the current state of play in the financial services industry, I understood quite clearly how some could very reasonably hold that point of view.

It was not my goal or intention to try and convince the sceptics – and I said so: I was focuse primarily on helping those who were keen to get moving with social media and if some of those were being held back by concerns I could address effectively, I wanted to be sure I did my best on that score.

Because just as we know it’s not easy being green I had become very aware in my research for this keynote that it is definitely not easy being a financial adviser in 2012.

As well as the usual day to day pressures of running a business, there is a lot of relatively new pressure on people in the financial advising/wealth management/financial planning sector. It appears some of that comes from public disillusionment triggered or exacerbated by GFC fallout and some from the reality or threat of more stringent government regulation of the industry. There may well be other factors.

I wrote about this in an earlier post just before I gave the keynote in Canberra – see Social Media Not an Easy Call for Financial Advisors

So while my presentation highlighted the benefits social media engagement could bring to the businesses of conference participants, it also gave attention to a range of challenges facing anyone who wanted to train their attention and energies on becoming effective players in the world of social business, challenges which  apply not just in financial advisory businesses but in a whole range of professional services businesses.

Tying all that together, the presentation was focused on providing a simple but powerful three-point takeaway:

1. social media provides an opportunity to get the edge on your competition
2. there is risk and it can be managed
3. each business needs a social media strategy aligned to its broader business strategy

The slide deck is here at Slideshare.

In future posts I will be going into more detail on specific items, such as the benefits of engaging with social media, the disincentives to doing so, issues of reputation management and other risk management aspects.

As mentioned in my previous post on this topic, I’m still keen to gather case studies of businesses in the financial services sector using social media effectively. So if you know of any I trust you will share, either by way of a comment here or via my Contact page.

Image credit: the very talented Simon Hewson

When I accepted the invitation to keynote the Hillross Annual Conference 2012 in Canberra, Australia, focusing on practical strategies for social media, I was pretty sure that one of my main challenges would be finding examples of successful engagement via social media by financial advisers.

Part of the problem is that financial advisers operate in a highly regulated environment and have a justifiable concern that engaging with clients and the general public via social media might bring problems in terms of reputational risk or even put their whole business at risk.

My presentation is in the national capital, Canberra, this coming Friday Jan 20th and I’m very much looking forward to that. Hillross Financial Services is one of Australia’s premier wealth adviser firms, with a network of over 300 advisers and over 100 firms across Australia, who help create and protect the wealth of affluent and high net worth Australians: I feel honoured to have been asked to work with this group and I’m confident I’ll learn from them as well as sharing what I know.

Global issues

It’s clear to me from my research so far that the challenges facing financial advisors engaging with and through social media are by no means confined to the Australian scene.

One of my US colleagues put it this way: “Because of strict laws and internal controls by large financial companies, it’s difficult for many financial advisers to use social media as freely as the rest of us.”

That response was part of one of twenty five answers to a question I posed on LinkedIn Answers, in these words:

Do you know of any success stories of licensed financial advisors using social media to grow their business?

I would like to have felt I could ask about “case studies” rather than the softer “success stories”. A case study worthy of the name should include a context, a specified problem or challenge, and should report on what went wrong, or not so well, not just on the success elements.

But from the searching and asking I had already done, I thought that would be drawing too long a bow. Even so, I was hoping to pull in a bigger haul of success stories than eventuated.

That experience has emphasized for me that there is a real dilemma for many businesses looking at engaging via social media, and not just for financial advisers. Lawyers, people in the pharmaceutical industry, other professionals, have various boundaries in terms of their use of social media.

I don’t believe the problem is insuperable.

Right now, as as I’ll be proposing in my presentation on Friday, the way through the dilemma is, as I see it, to develop a coherent social media strategy with strong risk management protocols and procedures built in.

To take an analogy from where I live, on Australia’s sunny Gold Coast, we have magnificent beaches but the surf can be very treacherous.  The answer for most of us is not to stop swimming but to swim in the area between the lifesavers’ or lifeguards’ flags. The presence of those flags doesn’t mean that nothing can go wrong, but it does give a reasonable assurance that the risk can be handled.

We have are used to having policies, including risk management, for our finances, our human resources management and other areas of business. We’re just not used to having social media policies as a normal part of doing business. But we need to. While that might seem obvious to people working professionally in the social media space, I am continually meeting business people for whom the idea that you could actually have a robust system of risk management that works for social media engagement seems to come as a surprise .

Getting the strategic framework right, incorporating good risk management processes, is a non-trivial exercise, but it can be done – and must be done by any business wanting to engage seriously and responsibly via social media. (To indulge for a moment in  a bit of shameless self-promotion, helping develop social media strategy is one of the things I do, as a social media strategist, for companies wanting to get the edge, not just follow along.)

In the meantime, I am still looking for great – or quite simple – success stories from licensed financial advisers and wealth managers to help me tell the story.

This morning I updated my free downloadable guide, 5 Simple Steps for Getting Started on LinkedIn.

The biggest challenge of the updating process was restricting myself to the basics of getting started.

There is so much more to LinkedIn than is in this brief guide but I am convinced that those of us who have been using LinkedIn for a long time can easily underestimate how complex the platform can appear to people who have not had that experience.

Apart from anything else, LinkedIn does not have the most intuitive of user interfaces.

So the guide provides just five basic steps for getting up and running.

For those who want to explore further, the guide also has links to blog posts I’ve written about different aspects of operating on LinkedIn, such as how to use LinkedIn Groups.

Here is the link again to download a copy of the guide. I hope some people will find it helpful.

Georges Clemenceau

I make no claim to be good, let alone excellent, at blog design or the more general field of web design. And I have great respect for good and great designers.

But what I know is that, as a business owner, the design of my blog or other web site is my responsibility and not one to be passed completely on to others, no matter how brilliant the designers and no matter how many prize-winning sites they have to boast of.

To borrow from the great French statesman, Georges Clemenceau, who is said to have remarked that war is too important to be left to generals, web design is too important to be left to web designers.

I am guessing the smarter designers will agree.

Because surely they will want whatever they design to be not just pleasing to the eye but as effective as possible in terms of their client’s business objectives.

I’ve met too many people over the years who have trustingly handed over many thousands of dollars to web designers and have been seriously disappointed when the resulting site did not bring them commensurate returns.

Almost certainly through no fault of the designers who were probably doing the best they could, but without guidance or challenge from the client.

Business owners and executives who will fuss over the most minute aspects of a print brochure design will often leave the design of their web presence – with arguably much more potential impact for their brand – to designers, who are often basically graphic designers who have re-badged themselves as web designers.

Nothing wrong with that, but caveat emptor applies here as for other purchases of goods or services.

Over the weekend I’ve spent a slab of time looking at a lot of blog designs, seeking insight and inspiration for an imminent makeover of this site.

Some of the best insights and inspiration haves come from a Copyblogger post The Strategy Behind the Copyblogger Redesign and the accompanying interview podcast, which I highly recommend for some educational – and entertaining – listening. The post and podcast have helped confirm the appropriateness of my decision to use the Genesis Framework as the platform for the re-design.

I’ve spent some of the weekend time playing around with the possibilities of that framework and I can see that (ed: with the Enterprise child theme) it can work pretty well for me “out of the box”, with plenty of scope for enhancement as I go along.

Over the next week or so I’m also going to do some serious thinking and probably some pen and paper (remember those?) sketching to get as close as I can to a design and layout that is right for my business objectives.

Frankly I doubt that the end result will win prizes, but if it helps me get new clients and is valued by existing clients and other readers I will be more than happy.

My blog, my responsibility.

In the meantime, any tips or tricks you have to share, for getting the right combination of business purpose and technical aspects of blog design, will be welcome.

Image credit: Georges Clemenceau – public domain

Coaches and trainers need to recognize that not everyone will respond positively to the prospect of change and some will resist.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” is a well worn phrase. And useful in its place.

But there are times when, even though something might not be broken, it might have passed its “use by” date, so to speak.

Milking cows by hand, for example. Coming from a long line of dairy farmers, I can imagine some farmers resisting for a long time the introduction of milking machines, even though they had been around since the 19th century.

Never mind that they were demonstrably more efficient than the back-straining drudgery of two hand milkings a day.

Not everyone loves change or jumps at the chance of changing the way things are done.

In my coaching and social media strategy practice, I have to remind myself of that on a regular basis.

I have long thought that in the world of business the people who really like change are, for the most part business owners, consultants, coaches, trainers and some executives.

Talk of change can generate fear and anxiety

For a large proportion of the rest of the working population, the word “change” can trigger anxiety attacks about job restructuring (or worse, as in sackings), about fresh demands for more productivity without commensurate pay or other rewards, maybe about whether mortgage payments or children’s education can be kept up, and a plethora of other fears in the realms especially of financial survival and personal prestige.

So when as coaches or consultants or trainers we share our insights into the possibilities and challenges of change, we need to be very alert to pushback or even sabotage, conscious or unconscious, and have strategies to deal with that.

Sometimes the resistance or sabotage can come from high up in the company, say from an executive who has it all figured out, thanks very much, has established a nice little routine and does not want the even tenor of life disturbed.

But we only have to read the newspapers or watch the news on TV, or pick up the trending topics on social media, to know that in business, in government, in education and in other spheres of our lives, change is a constant. We need to deal with that.

Of course, change has always been a constant, but previously not on such a global basis, and not with the speed and unrelenting severity that we have now come to regard as “normal”.

That means there is even more motivation for some to try, in the business roles and relationships they have, to hold onto what they know and resist strenuously the endeavours of others to promote or create change.

How to deal effectively with that resistance is a subject for another post.

Do you have an example of change being resisted, or a story of resistance to change being faced and dealt with effectively?

(By the way, I never could get the hang of milking cows by hand.)

Image credit: Man milking cow the old fashioned way, from Wikipedia, uploaded by Saintswithin and released to public domain