Social Media

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

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

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

Boomer Business Owner Challenge – Emotional Resistance to Social Media

October 18, 2011 By Des Walsh

I keep telling myself I won’t do it again, but there I was yesterday, having another fundamentally frustrating conversation about social media with a Baby Boomer business owner who did not really want to listen.

It started with his making a polite enquiry about what I “did” by way of business and – once I had answered – it quickly moved to his expressing what seemed to be a quite visceral hatred of anything going by the name of social media or social networking.

At least this one didn’t complete his tirade by turning on his heel and storming away, as I had experienced at a business networking event not so long ago. In fact, the one yesterday seemed to want to keep talking.

But what had brought on the tirade? Well, Facebook featured in both of those conversations. Or rather, the protagonists’ views of Facebook. Yesterday it was about the harm perceived as being done to the younger generation through being on Facebook. For the other it was the disruption of his office when their page suddenly attracted a huge amount of attention (yes, what for many would have been public relations manna from heaven was for him a catastrophe of unproductive activity).

In the conversation yesterday, being not totally deterred by the initial outburst, and with what in hindsight was a ridiculous exercise in optimism, I tried quietly to suggest ways in which some strategic engagement with social media might actually help his business. The conversation, as you will have guessed by now, went nowhere in any productive sense.

Don’t try to confuse the issue with facts

Typically with this sort of conversation, the haranguer of the day will tell me, as a matter of objective fact, that his (usually a “his” – I find women Boomers more open to listening to the facts) customers are older and aren’t “on” social networks. I’ve discovered, through a few other conversations on the topic, that a good way to get such people even more angry is to point to research that shows the rapid growth of social network usage by older Internet users.

Such as the Pew Internet study report published in August this year that found a whopping 60% uptick in Baby Boomer (ages 43-64) participation on social networks, up from 20% of American Internet users to 32%.

So it’s not about facts. Which means that asking these business owners to just “think” about how social media can help their business may well be a futile exercise.

It’s about emotion.

I’m not a psychologist and I don’t know of any study that has been done on the role of emotion in business owners’ decision processes about social media. But I have on several occasions, not just the couple I mentioned above, been struck by the forcefulness of the resistance to any discussion about social media.

Which does suggest to me a very strong emotional undercurrent is at work.

Implications for marketing social media strategy services

Up till now, my next day reaction to these situations has been to tell myself once again that I am not really interested any more in evangelizing social media and that I just want to connect with people who are ready to roll and looking for a strategist guide and coach to help them get where they want to be, faster and more effectively.

But lately I’ve been reflecting on some advice I had once in sales training, to the effect that the person who is most resistant to your initial presentation is worth spending time on and may turn out to be a good customer, whereas the person who appeared initially more open is likely to be the one who never buys.

So in focusing my attention on those who are ready to rock ‘n roll, am I leaving some good business opportunities untapped? And thinking of those more resistant business owners and the opportunities I see them as blocking from sight and hearing, is there something different I could do, or could I do something differently, that could help them move into a more open-minded, more receptive frame of mind (and “frame of emotion”)?

Some fear about social media can be quite understandable

Of course not everyone is going to be hostile to the idea of engaging with and through social media. Others may be more or less fearful or anxious, and often with good reason, depending on what they’ve heard or read about the risks involved.

So I’m thinking that in offering my social media strategy services to Boomer business owners I will to well to take more notice of how the owner feels about social media for business, and seek to address that effectively.

I”m not really thinking here about the hardcore resisters – I’m not masochistic – but more about people who are feeling uncomfortable or even a bit fearful about social media and are ready for an open conversation about that.

If you know of any research findings, or case studies, on this topic, and you’d like to share a link to those here, I would be very grateful.

Credit: Chart from Report, “65% of online adults use social networking sites” Pew Internet & American Life Project, August 26, 2011, p. 6, http://pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2011/PIP-SNS-Update-2011.pdf accessed on October 18, 2011

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: Baby Boomers, boomers, Business, Pew Internet, Social Media, social networks