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Professional Services Practitioners the Lost Tribes of Social Media

May 17, 2012 By Des Walsh Leave a Comment

It’s taken longer than I had planned, but I’m finally about to launch my membership program for professional services practitioners wanting help with social media.

The program is called Get the Social Edge Kickstart.

In a free webinar early next week I’ll be explaining how it will all work, with a commencement date of May 28.

It’s not going to be your quick fix, master- social-media- in- 24-hours type of program.

It’s a sixteen week membership program, delivered online, for professionals who’ve decided it’s time to get serious about social media and how it can be used best to enhance their business.

Lost Tribes of Social Media

I call the professional services sector – lawyers, financial advisors, management consultants, engineering consultants, and others – the Lost Tribes of Social Media.

An article I was reading this morning illustrates why. The article reports on the results of the Marketing Directions survey done by leading Australian business magazine BOSS.

What caught my attention particularly in the article was the comment that “Many respondents to Marketing Directions also raised concerns about the lack of control over these (social media) tools, the labour intensiveness involved in staying relevant and up to date, and the likelihood of negative publicity.”

Mention is also made of concerns about social media not adding value “…particularly in business-to-business and professional services sectors…”.

That list of concerns reflects the comments I have been getting from professional services practitioners and from social business strategy colleagues globally.

And it lines up with what I have gleaned from my research over some months now, especially my attempts to find social media case studies, research reports and success stories for professional services firms. There are case studies, reports and success stories, but they are thin on the ground and not easy for people to find, especially people who are not social media specialists in the first place.

So it’s no surprise that lawyers, financial advisors, consultancy firms and others can be quite reluctant or even resistant to launching into using social media. They don’t have the models to relate to.

Sure, they read the stories about global companies in fast moving consumer goods and other sectors which report dramatic success with social media, but don’t see that as relating to their businesses.

They also read or hear the shock-horror stories of things going wrong with social media and are then understandably even more hesitant to do anything themselves.

Get the Social Edge Kickstart addresses all those concerns, and any others, up front and then helps participants develop key understandings and skills to be able to operate effectively in this space. It also provides guidance and support for participants to develop social media strategies, policies and action plans tailored to their particular practices or businesses.

Diving in

I’m absolutely convinced of the need for a program like this.

At the same time I recognize that I might not get overwhelmed with people wanting to join the program.

But I’ve had good feedback so far from colleagues with whom I’ve shared the program concept.

So I’m diving in.

If you know anyone who could be interested in learning more, I trust you will be kind enough to share this link to my webinar early next week: http://bit.ly/gtsekickstart

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: Consultants, financial advisors, financial planners, lawyers, professional services, social edge, Social Media

Testing the Social Media Engagement Management Tool Sprout Social – Part 2

April 25, 2012 By Des Walsh 4 Comments

In March I posted about my exercise of evaluating the social media engagement tool Sprout Social. In this second post on the topic, I’m focusing on some of the reports generated by Sprout Social.

By the way, these posts are not intended as a comprehensive review: more by way of sharing my exploration of the tool.

Also, the information and comments are still based on using the basic Pro version. I’m hoping to make the time in the next couple of days to check out the other offerings – Small Biz, Deluxe and Premium.

Group Trends

The first graphic on the dashboard home page gives an overview of trends in my activity/engagement on Twitter and Facebook. Actually it’s a group report but when this screenshot was taken mine was a group of one. I’ve since added a company Twitter account and will be interested to see how that changes the results.

A distinction I did not notice at first was that whereas the Group Trends graphic shows numbers of new Facebook fans (zero right now for this new page of mine!), other reports on the dashboard reference Facebook impressions rather than fans, as is explained further below.

Audience Demographics

The next graphic image on the home page of my Sprout Social dashboard, was Audience Demographics, where a graph showed at a glance some basic demographics of my Twitter followers and “impressions” for my main Facebook page. (The page is relatively new and has a lot fewer “likes” than there are friends at my longer-standing Facebook profile.)

Actually, for all the time I had this trial account, the content on the right side was not available on the home page, being obscured by the ‘still gathering data” box, as shown in the screenshot below.

But at the same time the figures were available from the Group Report tab on the left sidebar.

Something that took me a while to notice, not because of lack of labeling but just from my own “speed reading”, that the figures for Facebook are not for numbers of “fans” (those *liking* my page) but for those to whom “impressions” could be attributed.

My understanding of Facebook “impressions” (or to be more precise, “post impressions”) is, contrary to what I’d thought, *not* the total number of times a post had been seen on Facebook but, according to leading Facebook expert Mari Smith “the total number of times your post was *rendered* in the stream (fans’ News Feeds + your page wall + social plugins)”.

The graphic above shows very clearly the relative proportions of male and female Twitter followers and of those responsible for the Facebook impressions, and the distribution across age groups from 18 to 65+ for Twitter and from 13 to 55+ for Facebook.

My results, as in the screenshot above, show a fairly even male/female distribution across both platforms, with a narrower gap for Facebook M/F 52/48 per cent than for Twitter M/F 57/43 per cent.

I found the age distribution results pretty encouraging. (Note that, although in the image above you can see the numeric percentages for Facebook but not for Twitter, in the image that comes up in your report online you can see the specific numbers by mousing over each bar.)

Because, allowing for the difference between Twitter follower and Facebook impression data, some quick extrapolation and aggregation shows me that my “audience” is predominantly from 24 to 55. For Twitter, that’s 84.5% and for the Facebook figures it’s equally 70% for men and women. That all works well for me in terms of who I’m focused on in my marketing.

By the same token, if I had found a big discrepancy between the stats and my strategic objectives – e.g. if there had been little or no sign of the 35-44 age group – I would have needed to do some deeper analysis and take appropriate remedial action on my Twitter and/or Facebook activity.

Reports

More detailed statistics are available from the report tabs.

The Twitter report includes:

General stats
Key indicators, such as engagement and influence
Follower demographics by age range and gender
Publishing – performance of outbound content

The Facebook Pages report includes:

Page impressions by date
Impressions breakdown by type, e.g. organic, viral or paid
Impressions by age and gender
Sharing – how people share and type of share
Sharing by age and gender
Your Content, including a content breakdown and effectiveness per item

Although I can get some of the content analysis from Facebook Insights, the Sprout Social details and layouts are not identical with those in Insights. For example, Insights shows me Reach and “People Talking About This” on a daily and weekly basis, and Sprout Social shows me Reach, People Talking About This and Engagement.

Content Statistics Facebook Des Walsh Page

Again with the Content Breakdown, there is similar information in Insights, but I find the presentation in Sprout Social more geared to challenging me on how well or otherwise I may be going with my engagement strategy implementation.

More Coming Soon

So far, I am enjoying using Sprout Social. In another post or posts I will look at other features, especially Scheduler and Discovery.

As mentioned above, I’m hoping also to have a look at the other types of account than the basic Pro I’ve been using.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: analytics, Facebook, impressions, social media management tools, Sprout Social, Twitter

Not Everyone Likes LinkedIn but with 120 Million Users Can You Afford to Ignore It?

April 11, 2012 By Des Walsh Leave a Comment

Getting the Point About LinkedIn

Whenever I get up to speak to a group about LinkedIn, I’m conscious that there will almost certainly be some people in the group who have decided they don’t like the platform and others who may not feel strongly for or against it, but just don’t see the point.

Because let’s face it, for many people, the word “LinkedIn” just conjures up the image of messages, including from people they may not even recall having met, declaring they would like to add the recipient to their “professional network”. Those people probably think of LinkedIn, if they bother to think of it at all, as at best a mystery and at worst an annoyance.

Which is a shame, especially for anyone in business or wanting to promote their brand or career, because there is so much benefit to be derived from LinkedIn. And I for one believe the network should be an essential part of a social media strategy for just about any business, and especially for any business in the broad field of professional services.

So I see it as a key part of my mission these days to show people how they can most effectively use LinkedIn.

Because:

LinkedIn with its more than 120 million members, gives us a valuable key to managing our online identities, both for our individual careers and for our brand or company, and
I’ve spent more time than I care to think of learning about how LinkedIn works and I love sharing from that experience

So in this post I’m basically:

promoting the idea of LinkedIn being good for all or most businesses and
doing a bit of shameless, but hopefully not excessively intrusive, self-promotion of my LinkedIn-related services.

A Must for Business

It’s my belief that just about any business, from large corporations to solo professionals, should have a developed, optimized presence on LinkedIn.

As the Chief Marketing Officer for industry giant HP, Michael Mendenhall said recently:

“LinkedIn is a pioneer in harnessing the power of social media and brands can benefit tremendously from participating in this networking of leading professionals.”

And indeed I see increasing signs that business people are recognizing that LinkedIn may well provide fresh opportunities for market development, reputation-building and even real live deals.

One of those signs is that over the past eighteen months or so I have been getting – and accepting – invitations to speak about LinkedIn for business, such as a webinar for the Australian Businesswomens’ Network and as speaker for a sold-out networking breakfast in the nearby city of Brisbane.

Much, Much More Than a Resume Posting Site

For all the growing interest in LinkedIn among business people, I have to acknowledge that there are still some who ask me questions that show they do not understand the power of the network.

Questions like “Isn’t LinkedIn just a site where you put your resume if you are looking for a job, and maybe somewhere recruiters check to see who is available? I’m not looking for a job and I don’t need staff, so what use would LinkedIn be for me?”

Well of course it can be, and indeed is, a job-seeking/candidate-sourcing site. But it is much more.

That “much more” is why every business owner and executive needs to pay attention to LinkedIn, and especially to the ongoing efforts by LinkedIn to enhance the site’s features as a key social media site for business.

For example:

Company profiles: as well as the individual profiles many people (over 100 million actually) have on LinkedIn, you can also add your company profile and to that you can add information about products and services
LinkedIn Groups: there is a plethora of groups for all sorts of professional and personal interests and some people use those very effectively to promote themselves and their companies – and if you want to set up your own group, you can do that with a few keystrokes
LinkedIn Answers: I am continually amazed at how much information and business wisdom is shared through responses to questions posed on LinkedIn Answers – and asking as well as answering questions there is another way of building your profile and your company’s.

Linked Leverage

The short story then is that LinkedIn is an effective way of gaining leverage in the marketplace, a way of standing out, especially – although not exclusively – for professional services companies and practitioners.

But after doing a lot of presentations, webinars and individual coaching about LinkedIn, I do understand that some things that seem clear enough to me are not at all clear for people new to the platform.

That’s why I produced my short, complimentary ebook, 5 Simple Steps for Getting Started with LinkedIn.

And for people who want to get real value from their LinkedIn membership I cover all the main issues and share tips and guidance, in my range of LinkedIn coaching and workshop packages, under the headings:

LinkedIn profile makeover
LinkedIn profile Done For You
Personal LinkedIn strategy
Corporate workshops on LinkedIn

It’s hard to find good case studies

As a speaker and a coach, I’m always on the lookout for case studies showing how companies, especially in the field of professional services, have been able to use social media to good effect. I’ve had some success in terms of social media generally, but it’s been a harder call for LinkedIn specifically.

When Bill Vick and I wrote the recruiting industry guide, LinkedIn for Recruiting, we were able to find and share a number of case studies for that industry. But that was several years ago and those stories were specific to recruitment.

Right now, I am especially interested in stories from the financial services and legal sectors.

So if you have a case study from one of those professions or some other that you can point me to, or share here in the comments (or send me the info via the Contact page) – or maybe not even a “case study” but just a success story, that would be very much appreciated.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: Business, career, LinkedIn, professional services, Social networking

Six Key Social Platforms for Busy Professionals

April 2, 2012 By Des Walsh 4 Comments

Too many platforms, too little time

Long ago I lost count of all the possible social media platforms and tools a business might reasonably use. And in my email and on various newsfeeds I see more new ones being announced or talked about every day.

That proliferation of possibilities probably helps explain why for many professionals the topic of social media brings on an immediate sense of overwhelm. There’s just too much going on, with too many different social platforms.

The temptation is to just put off or ignore the whole topic and maybe hope things will settle down enough one day to a point where some sense can be made of it all.

Let’s face it: that day is not going to come, not in the foreseeable future anyway. We have to make the best decisions we can in a sea of activity and uncertainty.

Or miss out on how business is increasingly being done.

I understand the sense of overwhelm and I experience it too in my own attempts to keep track of new developments so that I can better advise my clients.

Cutting through the sense of overwhelm

In this post I’m providing an overview of what I see as a basic suite of platforms for just about any business to consider, especially in the broad field of professional services.

Each of us needs to make sense of both the big picture of social media and the details of what technologies are right for us to employ in our business or professional practice.

Which is why, for a while now, I’ve been including in my presentations on the topic some discussion about basic platforms.

By the way, I’ve noticed each time that, even with a variety of audiences, this part of the presentation seems to get extra engagement from most or all present. That tells me it strikes a chord of interest.

A basic suite of social platforms

I’ve also noticed lately that even when I have reduced the list of basic platforms to six it’s still overwhelming for some. So I have been emphasizing that I don’t recommend trying to operate them all at once. That way would lie untold frustration and probably disillusion with the whole process. In fact, I’ve been saying that it makes better sense to develop understanding and skill with one platform at a time.

The six platforms I recommend are, not in any intrinsic order of priority:

LinkedIn
Twitter
Facebook
Google+
Blog
YouTube

LinkedIn is indisputably the first platform of choice for professionals, whatever the industry. It’s more fundamentally a professional networking site than a “social” networking one, has over 150 million users and is still growing.

Twitter, the instant messaging and social networking site where your message can’t be more than 140 characters in length, is seriously underestimated by many, maybe most of the professionals I meet. Others make very effective use of it, as part of their social media strategy.

Facebook, the social networking phenomenon with somewhere over 850 million users, can’t be ignored by anyone in business – or should I say simply “by anyone”. Just how effective it will be for specific businesses is a subject that needs attention when developing a company-specific social strategy.

Google+ (or Google Plus) is a newer social networking platform but growing: launched in June 2011, by the end of the year it had 90 million users. There has been vigorous debate, via blogs and various online forums, about whether Google+ will be a success or whether, as one seminar participant asked me the other day, it is or is becoming a “deserted village”. I’m bullish about Google+, especially because of the launch in January this year of Google plus your world.

A Blog is often the missing element in a business’s social media setup, which in my view is a big mistake, especially for a solo professional wanting to be noticed above th din and wanting to do that economically in dollar terms.

YouTube, the video sharing site with some 60 hours of video being uploaded every minute, provides a very accessible way for any of us to get our message out and is a seriously underutilized resource for many businesses.

Social integration

Thinking strategically, it’s not enough to just build our presence on each of the basic platforms. We need to work out which ones we will put more or less emphasis on, depending on our initial and ongoing strategic assessment.

We also need to take care of social integration, the business of linking our various social presences to get a greater effect for our efforts. It’s something that is often overlooked by professionals who may have quite a good presence across specific platforms.

Username parking

One clarification is needed on the topic of getting used to one platform at a time, then moving on to the next, and that is the necessity to take care early on of some “username parking”. It’s a process similar to that of “domain parking”, in which you register domains (web addresses) for your business or specific brands so as to ensure someone else doesn’t have them, even if you don’t have any immediate plan to use them for a specific site. Basically you are establishing or refreshing an account on a specific platform so as to reserve your ideal username (provided someone else hasn’t got there first).

YMMV

As we used to say in forums, your mileage may vary. If you have a different list of basic platforms, I’d be interested to hear about that, including if you wish the reasons for your choice.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: basic social media platforms, blog, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, social media strategy, Twitter, YouTube

Interview About Wacky Gift Site Helps Me Explain Media Curation

March 27, 2012 By Des Walsh Leave a Comment

Sometimes it’s the quirky projects that can best help us explain serious business concepts and processes.

I watched a very entertaining interview yesterday on the Sunrise breakfast TV show with David Mancherje, founder of a quirky new online site, Me Wanty!

Spending as much time as I do in earnest examination of and discussion about such topics as the ROI of social media and the measurement of online influence, the interview was for me enlightening and even inspirational.

I felt that I could be watching the beginning of a significant, maybe highly successful online business, within a strong social framework, and without any evidence of traditional business planning, with its SWOT analyses, market research and such.

Clearly, young Mr Mancherje and friends were having fun and he even seemed a bit surprised about the attention, including that he was being interviewed from Los Angeles on Australian breakfast television.

And in the course of explaining his project, he provided an illustration of how curation can work, from personal interest and possibly for business benefit.

I’ve been trying to explain curation in the social media context

Lately I’ve been trying, with at best limited success, to explain to people how useful the process of curation can be for a company or individual entrepreneur wanting to build their social presence.

My sense is that while the word curation gets thrown around a lot in discussion of social media, it is a piece of jargon as far as most people outside the social media in-group conversation bubble are concerned and maybe not carrying the same meaning or significance even for those folks inside the bubble.

For anyone keen to have a definition of curation in the new/social media context, my shorthand and, as I am fully aware, quite inadequate definition is “organized, interpreted aggregation”. As summarized in an article on Wikipedia under the heading Media Curation, there is a bit of brouhaha going on about aggregation and curation, .

And even though, as that article points out, some influential people don’t like the concept – or at least its application – I don’t see the practice going away as long as people like to collect things and share information. As with so many things, the social web just gives people a bigger pool to play in.

I’ve been doing my best explain curation to people who aren’t in the social media jargon loop by using the example of a curator for an art exhibition, who may not be herself an artist but has the domain knowledge, judgement of quality, and interpretative and communication skills to be able to combine, explain, distinguish and generally present a coherent story which does good service to the artists and their work and to the audience.

But people’s responses (or lack of responses!) has shown me that even that explanation is a bit cerebral or abstruse, especially for anyone who is uninformed and/or uninterested about what happens in galleries and museums.

So thanks to the interview with David Mancherje I have a new way of explaining curation, and how it might work, by illustration and with the benefit of a good chunk of quirk to get attention.

The relevant bit of the interview went like this.

One of the people interviewing Mancherje was David Koch, who as a successful businessman, finance guy and sometime publisher of a magazine for small business, has much more going for him in the business smarts than you might reasonably expect of a breakfast show host. So it was not surprising that Kochie (as he is known popularly) asked Mancherje about how he was making money, specifically through commissions or advertising.

Mancherje said they made some commission and there was not much advertising. Their goal was just to “get it out to as many people as possible and just have fun with it”. He said there is “so much weird stuff out there” on the web and he “wanted to curate the weirdest, coolest stuff out there” and “it’s just exciting to get Facebook fans and build out the fan base”.

Thank you David Mancherje – for your entertaining site and for the example of curation in action.

By the way, I hasten to add that what we curate does not have to be weird or quirky. Just interesting enough to engage and maintain the attention of the people we want to connect with. But it could be quirky too.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: curation, David Koch, David Mancherje, jargon, mewanty, Social Media, sunrise7

Law Firms and Social Media Success Stories 1

March 26, 2012 By Des Walsh Leave a Comment

I’ve long maintained that there are some serious challenges for professional services firms wanting to engage effectively with and through social media, as I wrote about earlier this year in relation to financial advisers.

The flipside is that there is a lot of opportunity for those professional services that make the effort to develop a good understanding of the social media sphere, create a workable strategy and take action determinedly and consistently.

But it’s not easy to find appropriate case studies against which to benchmark, as I discovered when I went looking for some in the financial advising industry and discovered also applies in the legal industry. when I went searching recently as part of my preparation for an upcoming seminar for lawyers in Brisbane, Australia.

So I thought that rather than go for case studies I would make the search simpler and look for something less rigorous, namely success stories.

As I often do with such searches, I turned to the LinkedIn community and placed a question on LinkedIn Answers. I asked the question ”Does anyone have direct experience of successful social media engagement by a law firm or firms?” As the answers show, a number of people weighed in with links to people who would know or to individuals who seem to be using one or other social platform, say blogging, effectively.

There were only a few examples of evident integration across platforms: i.e. being active on more than one platform and having the activity on the different networks linked. Two of these that stood out for me were the UK’s Chrissie Lightfoot and the California firm Allen Matkins.

Chrissie Lightfoot has very clear links from her website home page to her blog, Facebook page, LinkedIn profile and Twitter account, and takes advantage of features providing for cross-posting across platforms.

For anyone interested in implications of the intersection between technology and the legal profession, I recommend reading her blog post (with link to a fuller version) The iCyborg Lawyer is Near?

Allen Matkins have prominent links to their several blogs on specific practice areas. Links from their web home page to their presences on various social platforms – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – are not obvious (they are at the bottom of the page, as far below the “fold” as can be) but there is a clear integration. I was especially impressed by their very professional videos, using YouTube and embedding the videos also in their web site.

More to come soon

In addition to the above and other success stories linked in the responses to my question on LinkedIn Answers, I plan to post some further examples here of successful social media engagement by law firms, under the heading of Law Firms and Social Media Success Stories.

If you have such a story to share, either for your own firm or another, do please share the information in the comments here.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: lawyers, legal profession, Social Media, Social networking

Testing the Social Engagement Management Tool Sprout Social

March 23, 2012 By Des Walsh 6 Comments

Let me be clear: I love social media and especially the scope it gives me to amplify my marketing and general engagement with clients, prospects and colleagues.

Not to mention the pleasure of connecting socially with friends and colleagues around the globe, many of those being people I would never have been able to connect in the first place without social media.

But the truth is, managing it all in an effective and satisfying way has become a real challenge, a challenge that right now and actually for some time now I don’t feel I have been measuring up to.

Enter Sprout Social, an application which integrates with Twitter, Facebook Fan Pages, LinkedIn, Foursquare and gives me a range of tools and reports which offer the promise of helping me manage the whole process.

An application which could help me not just manage my social engagement in the sense of “keeping up” and not being swamped and demoralized, but actually leverage my engagement to get an amplified and deeper effect from my efforts. That’s all assuming the product’s promotion is to be believed, and the commentary and judgements offered in a couple of reviews I have studied today, for instance here and here.

In addition to communication tools, Sprout Social offers contact management, competitive insight, lead generation, reporting, analytics and more. And so far it seems true that, as claimed, the platform is intuitive and easy to use.

Last night I took one of the regular webinars the company provides to demonstrate the features. It was live, not pushy and quite informative: I liked the fact that the presenter paused from time to time to take questions via the chat box.

There are four packages, ranging from the Pro at $9 a month (10 profiles) up to Premium at $899 a month (unlimited profiles). At first glance, my guess is that:

the SmallBiz package at $39 a month, with 20 profiles, would be very good for, logically, small businesses
the DeLuxe at $~~69(~~59 a month would be especially good for agencies managing a few social accounts for clients and liking the idea of having their own agency corporate branding on reports to clients

The Premium at $899 a month has a number of special features that should make it quite attractive, other things being equal, at the enterprise level or for agencies with an appropriate number of clients.

But for my 30 day free trial (impressively, they don’t require a credit card in advance, so that old scam to catch the forgetful or poorly organized does not operate here), I’ve chosen the minnow package, the Pro, even though the free trial can be used for any of the packages. So why would I choose the one with the fewest features? Basically because I want to know how well or otherwise the product performs at the very basic level and if I am happy with that I can think later about switching to another level, whether during the trial period or, if I choose to subscribe, at a later date.

From what I’ve seen, I already like the monitoring and reporting tools, although I think I may have to be patient till Sprout Social catches up with my Twitter data: the report is currently indicating that I’ve had no new followers on Twitter in the past month, whereas my rough count gives me 223. Maybe that discrepancy is because I have only just now signed up for Sprout Social.

A couple of factors that attracted me to take the trial were about support and social media presence. From comments I read on reviews of the product I noticed a recurring theme of appreciation for the promptness and receptiveness of the support team: and it’s 24/7 support, so I don’t have to worry about the usual Antipodean challenge of trying to remember to contact US based support before I’ve had my breakfast! On social media presence, I was and am impressed that the SproutSocial people are on Twitter and connected promptly and appreciatively when I mentioned the product. Small things maybe, but to me they speak of a company of service-oriented people not self-protective bots.

And there are mobile apps, for Apple and Android.

So my plan is to report from time to time here over the next 29 days on how my trial goes and hopefully that will be helpful to others. Comments, shared experiences of the platform, will be welcome.

Update April 25, 2012: see Part 2 of this series here.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: monitoring, social media analytics, social media management

Managing Social Media Strategy In-house versus Outsourcing

March 6, 2012 By Des Walsh 7 Comments

In an online social media discussion group I belong to, a member asked the other day whether, in order to have an effective social media strategy, a company needs to have its own social media department or in-house staff.

A discussion followed about the comparative merits and limitations of in-house staff resourcing for social media, versus outsourcing.

Some argued for outsourcing the whole process to a company specializing in social media. Others felt that it made more sense to keep, variously, some or all of the process in-house.

My own view is that it doesn’t have to be an either/or decision.

But I’ve heard the full outsourcing pitch often enough from owners of outsourcing businesses to know that they can have a firmly held belief that the only sensible thing any business can do is to outsource the whole process to them, the self-proclaimed social media expert service providers.

And of course on the business owners’ side, there is no shortage of those who would rather write a check and have someone else handle the whole thing than get directly involved themselves.

Even if they have staff who might be able to develop and implement a social media strategy, they can probably adduce some very good reasons for not wanting to either divert those people from their existing responsibilities, or hire new staff for the purpose.

I understand that approach. We’re all busy and circumstances for many businesses these days are very challenging.

But what bothers me about this “outsource it all” approach is that companies which take that course of action never really learn, from day-to-day, “hands-on” practice, what is really involved in connecting via social media with the newly connected, newly empowered customer.

It is partly an age thing. Many older business owners and executives just don’t want to learn new tricks.

But there is a lot more at stake here than new tricks. There is a whole new environment in which business has to operate.

Missing an opportunity

No matter how practical the decision may seem, it seems to me self-evident that any company which outsources completely the social media function is choosing thereby to miss out on an irreplaceable opportunity to learn from practice, including mistakes, how it all works.

Not that I expect busy professionals in fields other than social media to invest the kind of time and money I and other colleagues have done into learning about social media, or to be anything like engaged as some of us are on a daily basis.

It’s a matter of balance.

Naturally I’m all for companies engaging social media strategists!

And I believe that in that role I can usually bring something of fresh value to the table, to help the company develop a strategy that is right for it, as well as being available to provide some other support services.

The key to my preferred approach, which I spell out to clients, is that I aim to “leave the tools behind“, so that the company can become effectively self-sufficient in developing and maintaining their presence on the social web.

What that means is that I help them build their basic strategy in house so they really own it and then if they wish help them with initial implementation. I can also help with training in-house staff to take up the responsibility for implementation.

I’m also happy to do what I can to help them choose outsourced resources, if the task and their approach make that appropriate.

My objective is simply that the company’s owners and key leaders own the strategy, know how to handle the tools and keep overall responsibility for implementation, even if they outsource some or most of the day-to-day implementation tasks.

Not everyone is going to buy that approach, particularly the part about keeping at least some of the core management of the process in-house: but those that do so, and take action to implement the approach, are putting themselves on a path of a more practical learning and enriched understanding about what is happening in the new business environment and how to ride the wave, not be swamped by it.

It’s about taking a long-term view of the business and investing in the future while at the same time engaging more effectively with today’s customers.

Let’s face it: the customer is not outsourcing her or his role as a consumer and in fact is becoming more and more directly connected on a daily basis and more directly engaged via the social web. So can any company afford to be heading in a different direction?

Which is why I believe that a full-scale outsourcing of social media engagement represents not only missed opportunity for capacity building, but a serious risk of becoming less, not more connected with the customer.

What do you think? Are the companies you know more likely to buy the “full outsourcing” pitch, or keep it all in-house, or choose a blend of both?

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: manage social media in-house, outsourcing social media, social media strategy

Practical Social Media Strategy for Financial Advisers – Keynote

February 6, 2012 By Des Walsh Leave a Comment

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:

social media provides an opportunity to get the edge on your competition
there is risk and it can be managed
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

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: Des Walsh, financial advisers, financial planners, financial services, Hillross Financial Services, keynote, social media strategy, wealth management

Social Media Not an Easy Call for Financial Advisors

January 16, 2012 By Des Walsh 9 Comments

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.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: AMP, Australia, Canberra, financial advisers, financial advisors, hillross, Social Media, wealth management