Last week, I had the opportunity to make a presentation to the St. Louis chapter of PRSA on this topic – which is based on multiple conversations with my fellow BlissPR colleagues about how we help our clients achieve their business goals. 

B2B service companies are great clients because they stretch us to come up with a clear vantage point on technical and often enterprise level matters.   But they can also be tough clients because they are very busy, as well as risk averse and slow to adopt change.   When we are faced with creating a new campaign, here are some of the things we think about to get out of the traditional “lather, rinse, repeat” kind of PR.  Here is what I said in St. Louis – what have I missed?  (Want to make sure you see this, @tressalynne)

1. Raise the Altitude.  First, get up above product.  If you are discussing the features and benefits of what the company sells, you won’t get the audience’s full attention.  It’s like looking at photos of someone else’s kids.  Find out what the audience truly cares about, and focus on that.  Here’s a great example of a major financial company surfacing the issues of concern to its customers, who are heads of HR:  MetLife’s 8th Annual Employee Benefits Trends Study.
2. Carve out an Issue to Own.  Second, don’t be afraid to make an idea the hero of the moment.  The idea can be an issue, a trend, a topic area – think “privacy” or “motivation” or “risk” or “capital flows” — but it’s not the product.  Then build a microsite or a blog or a strong point of view around that.  We have seen consulting firms take this tack, and predict that corporations will do so as well.  
3. Be of Service to the Communities you Care About.  What does your client know that can help the communities that they serve?   How can you help them do their own business better?  Often, research, benchmark data, opinion, counsel can be packaged in a way that galvanizes decision-making.  Here’s an example: BDO’s Retail Survey.
4. Enter the Ongoing Conversation. If your client is discussing a topic that matters, and has a point of view or research that extends the conversation, then you better be finding the right dialogues, and the people (bloggers) who are influencing them.  Addict-o-matic is a great way to find them. 
5. Learn to Share.  Once you have created your content, deliver it in many forms and formats.  SMPRs, video, data nuggets, how to advice, predictions.   And don’t be afraid to partner with a media outlet to deliver all that content goodness.  Here’s an example of what we mean:  Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com/Hay Group Study Identifies Best Companies for Leadership.
6. Don’t Hog the Microphone.  When your client is the only one talking –even if he or she is the smartest person in the room, it’s less interesting than if you invite other voices in to the discussion.  Open it up and more people will listen.    That’s what they found at McKinsey’s whatmatters microsite.   
7. Get Local.  If there’s a national trend – movement of some kind, whether it’s a rule change, a regulation, legislation – there will likely be local fallout.  Capture it!  People care about changes and problems happening in their own backyards, and are more likely to pick up the phone and call someone in their own area for help.
8. Build Your own Community.  In the old days, we used trade media to reach niche markets.  Not so much anymore.  Plus niche markets are getting nichier.  Sometimes you find them, sometimes you have to help your clients create them.  So if it’s CFOs of Canadian natural resources companies, or hospital facilities managers in the southwest, or med students who care about TB,  or meeting planners for financial services companies, sometimes it’s easiest to build your own audience.  

That’s what I came up with – what steps would you add? Click here to see the full deck or feel free to email me at abby@blisspr.com.

To reach Abby:

Phone: 212.840.0088
Email: abby@blisspr.com
Twitter: @abbycarr
LinkedIn: Abby Carr

1. Data does not equal strategy. Data is available at our finger tips, which makes it powerful to B2B organizations; however the click of a mouse does not automatically equal strategy or give companies a competitive advantage.  
2. Strategy at the speed of light with the life of a firefly.  Kiechel offers that “in the 1980s it was expected that consulting services would yield a strategy in eight months, today that time line has been shortened to six weeks, including deliverables.”  Strategy sets goals and designs actions to achieve those goals – it is not born, nor does it die over night – the best strategies stick to a thread but are open to a constant evolution.
3. Are directors of strategy necessary? According to Kiechel and his colleagues, if a consulting firm is asking this question, it has missed the boat.  Professional services firms’ today have a more decentralized notion of strategy and so it might not be wise to pin all the responsibility on one person. A central person can be useful to ensure continuity but it is important that ideas are collaborated on and collected across the organizations. Marketing directors, CEOs, heads of PR, directors of thought leadership are all involved in strategy and the sharing and dissemination of ideas across an organization.
4. Don’t underestimate creativity. There are a lot of left brain thinkers in businesses, thank goodness, but right brained thinkers are just as vital to an organization. And being creative isn’t about playing an instrument or being able to draw – it is a way of thinking and viewing the world.  Darrell Rigby from Bain & Company believes that “the pairing of creative and more business minded people creates longer term ROI in companies.” I agree – some of the best and most innovative brainstorms I have been a part of include both types of thinkers. And innovation is the special sauce in most strategies.

What considerations are most important to you in developing B2B strategy?

To reach Cortney:

Phone: 212.840.1661
Email: cortney@blisspr.com
Twitter: @cortneyr
LinkedIn: Cortney Rhoads Stapleton

Social media has changed the way we develop and implement marketing and PR programs, and in doing so, has influenced the question: “to partner, or not to partner?” Today, traditional media partnerships can provide excellent content for social media campaigns. Partnerships now present an entry point, not a barrier, to additional coverage and ultimately, awareness for your brand and/or product.

A recent study by client Hay Group (a global management consulting firm) shows how traditional media partnerships can fuel social media campaign success. 

Study: Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com/Hay Group Best Companies for Leadership Study

Strategy: Partnering with an online outlet gave us the opportunity to develop a robust, proactive social media campaign to extend coverage beyond Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com and drive additional traffic to Hay Group’s website. As part of that strategy, we:

• Developed a social media press release (SMPR): We used Pitchengine.com to create a release that included video interviews with Hay Group’s consultants, pull-out data points from the study, an easy to “re-tweet” Twitter pitch, links to coverage of the study on Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com, and access to other relevant resources. Be forewarned – producing an SMPR can be time-consuming, but the result is a more comprehensive and exciting way to share your information. And, it’s more conducive to sharing online via Twitter, LinkedIn, blog comments, etc. It also can be a useful marketing tool to include in email campaigns, webinars and other marketing communications. 
• Conducted targeted outreach to leadership and HR bloggers: As Kevin Briody notes in his post The Very Basics of Blogger Outreach, the first step to conducting blogger outreach is to identify the right bloggers – and get to know them. There’s a robust community of bloggers discussing management and leadership issues that we were able to engage before, during and after the Best Companies for Leadership study was released. If you’re looking for bloggers who reach your target audience, there are a number of tools that will help you identify them, including Alltop, Google Blog Search and Technorati, to name a few.
• Initiated an awareness/engagement campaign on Twitter: As with blogger outreach, to effectively use Twitter to reach online influencers you must identify the right people and engage them. It’s critical that you’ve built your followers before you launch your social media campaign. Adam Holden-Bache provides 6 useful steps to find your B2B audience on Twitter in his post on Social Media B2B. 

Results: There are many ways to measure the impact of social media marketing, all of which should be based on a specific set of objectives, goals and tactics identified for your specific campaign. Below are a few metrics that we used to gauge the success of our campaign. Within the first month of the launch:

• The SMPR had been viewed more than 1,800 times, cited in more than 30 blogs (including On Leadership, Leading Blog, Three Star Leadership and Great Leadership, among others) and “Tweeted” by more than 350 people (with 356,650+ combined followers) 
• The ten leadership stories that appeared in the “Best Companies for Leadership” special section on the Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com were among the top five most-clicked stories on BusinessWeek.com for a few weeks post-launch
• Hay Group’s website received a boost in traffic, with more than 2,926 visits in the first 24 hours alone (a huge increase over average traffic)

There are many ways that traditional PR initiatives can be leveraged through social media. What tactics have you used?

To reach Aven:

Phone: 212.840.1661
Email: aven@blisspr.com
Twitter: @avenlea
LinkedIn: Aven James

My colleague Meg Wildrick and I had that experience yesterday in a chat with Stuart Sadick, a partner in the Boston office of Heidrick & Struggles, one of the premier search firms.  Stuart, like Meg, started his career at McKinsey. We are now all members of a networking group of people who sell services to professional service firms, such as management consultancies, accounting firms and law firms.

Stuart was about to give a speech at the Harvard University Extension School which is celebrating its Centennial. The subject was “Doing Business in the Post-Meltdown Economy” and one of his themes was leadership. Stuart believes that the days of the superstar CEO – think Lee Iacocca – are over. He argues that successful CEOs in these times will adopt more collaborative, lower key approaches. We suggested that the poster child for the failed celebrity CEO was Carly Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard, who was lionized by the media but eventually ousted by her Board due to the company’s poor performance. She has been succeeded by the far less visible Mark Hurd, who seems to do nothing but deliver excellent earnings.

Stuart also questioned whether “second acts” are possible for major corporate CEOs. In other words, can a CEO recover from a failure at one company to successfully run another? He suggested that John Thain might make an interesting case study. Thain was just named CEO of troubled lender CIT, having previously been ousted from a similar position at the Merrill Lynch unit of Bank of America.

Dropping down from the CEO level, Stuart had some cogent advice for all executives looking to improve their prospects: “You need outside awareness, an understanding of external  trends, what they mean to your business and how you can foster innovation in that climate. You need to be able to identify and add value” And, returning to his theme, “your leadership must be collaborative – raising the bar and helping others do the same. This is a time to re-invent yourself. When everyone zigs, you better learn to zag.”

What do you think? Is the age of the collaborative leader upon us? Are there “second acts” in American business? We’d love to hear from you.

To reach John:

Phone:  212.840.0444 
Email: john@blisspr.com
LinkedIn:  John Bliss

But wait a minute. Let’s put this in historical context. Professional services marketing hasn’t been around very long, only slightly more than 30 years. The critical date is 1977, which is when an Arizona court gave law firms the right to advertise. What was professional services marketing before that time?  Think male partners on golf courses and you won’t be far off the mark.

Ironically, given the green light, much of the legal profession did absolutely nothing. Some plaintiffs firms, such as Jacoby & Meyers, initiated ad campaigns aimed at individuals, but that was about it. The big defense firms hardly noticed. In fact, around 1990 a friend of ours was hired as director of marketing by a good-sized NY firm. We asked her how it was going after she’d been on the job for six months, and she said: “It’s getting better. They just allowed me to pick the firm Christmas card.” She soon left, not surprisingly.

In my opinion, the profession that “got it” in terms of recognizing and seizing the marketing opportunity was accounting. The Big Eight (yes, Virginia, there was such a thing) seemed simultaneously to jump on the bandwagon and begin talking “targeting” and churning out brochures, ads and other collateral. Arthur Young even produced a best-selling tax guide that is published today with its merger partner Ernst & Ernst. Our clients at Deloitte, Haskins & Sells were so proficient with brochures that some people thought they were a publishing company. There were also more than a few humorous moments when the accounting culture clashed with the strategies of the consumer packaged goods wizards who had been recruited to spearhead their marketing efforts.

But the accounting firms moved the marketing ball forward, and eventually other professions followed: management consulting, executive search, actuarial science and, finally, the lawyers. With marketing came price competition that grew steadily cut-throat. Mark Stevens even wrote a seminal book on The Accounting Wars. Professionals found that their technical skills were no longer enough to guarantee employment. They were now (gasp) also expected to sell.

Perhaps the first person to grasp the long-term implications of that trend was Ford Harding, the former marketing director of a relocation consulting firm. He established his own consultancy, Harding & Company, in the early 90’s with one goal in mind: to teach service professionals how to sell. To market his firm, Ford authored three terrific books that I recommend to anyone in this business: Rainmaking, Creating Rainmakers and Cross-Selling Success. His business has been an unqualified success.

That’s a quick summary of the genesis of professional services marketing. Were you involved in it during the ‘80s or ‘90s?  What do you remember about “the early days?”

To reach John:

Phone:  212.840.0444 
Email: john@blisspr.com
LinkedIn:  John Bliss

When I asked him how he markets his firm, he said, “I run a boutique investment bank. Clients come here for two reasons. First, they have a connection, a preexisting relationship with someone at the firm or someone who has been a client, and they see us as a firm they want representing them. Second, they are open to using a boutique instead of a big bank, because of the ‘care’ factor, the quality of the work, and the absence of conflicts.” In other words, if they don’t already know him or his firm, and if they don’t already have a predisposition to working with a boutique, then they may well not bother, and that’s fine with him.   

His comment reminded me that in many cases, services – professional services and financial services alike – are reasonably indistinguishable if seen from the outside. As my colleague and mentor John Bliss has said, “Companies that buy a service are looking for one thing – a predictable outcome.” An error-free audit from a CPA firm, a successful trial from a law firm, a brilliant candidate from an executive search firm. Or, from my friend’s firm, a strategic and profitable merger.

Because services are delivered by people, they don’t offer the predictability of products. That makes experience the key to the buying decision. And, in my opinion, thought leadership – writing, talking, speaking, blogging about the person’s area of expertise in stories, examples and observations – is the best way to communicate the individual’s expertise, as well as his or her care factor. 

Monday, Gartner issued a press release titled: “Once the reserve of Large Consultancy Firms, Thought Leadership Is Rapidly Becoming an Established Field Within Marketing.” In the report,  Gartner stated that:

“An organized discipline of Thought Leadership Marketing (what they short-hand “TLM”) is only now emerging, allowing marketers to use this as a manageable tool to drive business. Gartner defines TLM as the giving — for free or at a nominal charge — of information or advice that a client will value so as to create awareness of the outcome that a company’s product or service can deliver, in order to position and differentiate that offering and stimulate demand for it.” (emphasis mine) 

“Its essence is to show, rather than tell what a company can do, and to do so in a way that positions and differentiates that company’s offering for the chosen target audience.” 

In my opinion, thought leadership for professional and financial service firms – as opposed to IT companies –  is less about differentiating and educating, and more about showcasing wisdom and reassuring the target that the desired outcomes are likely. 

In fact, very few service companies – only those who are investing a new category, or introducing a new methodology or tool – need to spend a ton of time educating. Most of us know what search firms and law firms and investment banks do. But in the trifecta of B2B service marketing – the brand, the service and the people – it’s the people, and their wisdom, who need to be front and center. They don’t need a “unique selling proposition” – they need to communicate what they know, demonstrate how much they care, and, by implication, how reliable their outcomes are. 

Do you agree? What firms do this well in your opinion? Can your firm better showcase its wisdom without becoming pedantic?

To reach Abby:

Phone: 212.840.0088
Email: abby@blisspr.com
Twitter: @abbycarr
LinkedIn: Abby Carr

While that may sound daunting, there’s good news. With the dramatic increase in online outposts, it’s never been easier to identify your potential advocates. Now it’s just a matter of recognizing how to leverage that opportunity. You need to “SELL” yourself:

Start by listening:

• Identify 3 business objectives that will benefit from online marketing efforts
• List 10-15 thought leadership topics that reinforce your objectives, use as initial search terms
• Research where “they” are, using a combination of free and paid search tools. Bookmarking tools such as Digg or Delicious offer great clues and a “running start.”
• Listen to what your targets have to say. Listen longer and harder than you want to.
• Start to understand the different character types involved in your dialogue, including traditional journalists, citizen journalists, bloggers, disgruntled customers, “C-suiters,” potential customers and average Joe’s
• Flag potential friends for your dialogue, including “friends of friends.” For many in B2B companies, the time has come to think of consumer needs, too.
• Stop and think – is the current conversation what you expected? How is it different? Will your initial topics still work for your content? Do you have idea “gaps” that need to be plugged?
• This effort will draw on people from almost every part of the company, from IT to HR to Marketing to Operations. Work out who will be the front line thought leaders and who will be their support ecosystem.

Establish common interests:

• Evaluate where your audiences prefers to live, including prioritizing outposts
• Create several composite friends that “flesh out” who you’ll be interacting with. What is their title? Job experience? Industry? Age? Interests? Likes & dislikes? Level of technology sophistication? What would their ideal friend share with them? In short, how can your company be helpful to them?
• Map out rough editorial calendar that offers realistic frequency, story angles for interaction
• Build an RSS reader that streams your audience’s priority blogs to your desktop. Get acquainted with what they care — and don’t care — about. Particularly look for triggers for commentary and sharing.
• Don’t talk about yourself or your company, talk about what matters to your friends.
• Pick out a time of day to be visible, ideally when your influentials are likely to be online. This is often first thing in the morning. Book 15-30 minutes daily or load content in advance.
• Comment on highly trafficked blogs, ideally at least once a day.
• Think twice before you put the same message on multiple networks. Only “cross post” when it makes sense. Otherwise, you’ll become boring “spam.”
• Respond every time someone contacts you, the good and the bad. Every single day.
• Make sure your content matches audience needs. After spending time with them, will these stories excite them? Move them to action? Get them to become repeat visitors? Immediately change your social media strategies if necessary.

Look for favors after you’ve earned credibility:

• Before a significant launch, agree internally on what you want your friends to do. Download a white paper? Vote in a poll? Subscribe to your blog? Typical beginner’s mistake = thinking that “we want them to buy stuff.”
• Ensure your content and website funnels toward your social media “calls to action.” Hint: make it easy for your fans.
• You can (humbly and infrequently) ask for a retweet, comment, link etc.
• Approach professional contacts to help spread the word…but not often
• When possible, parcel out your big ideas. It avoids audience fatigue and extends impact.
• Stop at the right time.
• Continue to converse about ideas, stories and links that have nothing to do with you.

Love your audience, especially when they are not in sync with you:

• You wanted engagement. Now learn from it, even disinterest or failure.
• Keep giving and helping, always offering more than you get. People will notice and you’ll be handsomely rewarded.
• Don’t give up. Look at your analytics and use those clues to improve the next project. This will take more time and bandwidth than you’d like.
• When momentum kicks in, resist the urge to check the “done” box. This is actually your opportunity to solidify your reputation.
• Build on your “lessons learned” to create even better thought leadership that deepens your new relationships.

A relationship doesn’t end. It’s a circle. In reality, you’ll constantly cycle through these phases, with your fans spread across the spectrum. Design programs that recognize and build on that reality.

What’s your best engagement success story? Or do you have a “failure” that wound up teaching you something even more important about your community?

To reach Elizabeth:

Phone: 212.840.0017
Email: elizabeth@blisspr.com
Twitter: @elizabethsosnow
LinkedIn: Elizabeth Sosnow

Anyone who spends time doing marketing communications for professional services firms will recognize some of these disasters in waiting. PR professionals can be ridiculed for making some classic rookie faux pas, like mass emailing reporters, not knowing what they’re pitching and to whom they’re pitching – you get the gist. In fact, this happens so much that there is an entire blog devoted to bad pitches. But what about those times in every proficient PR professional’s career when you are set up for failure and media mockery? Some disasters are unavoidable … and unsolvable. The purpose of this brief guide is to alert newcomers to the field so they can plan how to deal with these problems with minimal collateral damage.

The first – the new hire release – looks innocent enough. The professional firm hires a new partner, perhaps away from a competitor. This calls for a simple news release that perhaps gets three lines of type in a trade publication or city business book. The problem is that the firm CEO believes he has just hired the next Peter Drucker and wants pickup in the Wall Street Journal. Not surprisingly, the new hire agrees completely and even says “my old PR people could do that easily.” You cannot win this one – all you can do is manage expectations and hope for the best.

A similar foible is the strategic alliance announcement. Your firm has entered into a strategic alliance with another. It can be a peer, a supplier, an overseas entity, whatever.  Your CEO’s chest puffs with pride. This is almost as good as an acquisition, and he expects major ink. The problem is, from a media point-of-view, the alliance has no clients, nothing substantive to say, and no money changed hands in this transaction. In other words, it’s not news beyond a line of type. Your role: manage expectations, and duck!

A problem unique to the management consulting profession is the world class methodology fixation. Consultants love their methodologies and they labor long hours to perfect them and the Power Point slides that explain them (or don’t, but that’s another story). You are expected to generate media coverage that will have potential clients hammering on the door, ready to throw money at your firm. Don’t get caught up in the hysteria. The first journalist to whom you pitch the story will calmly ask: “can you refer me to one of your clients that has successfully used this methodology?” When you say “no,” she will say “then come back to me when you can.” Journalists like stories, not methodologies.

If you’ve labored in the professional service marketing vineyards, you must have similar stories. What are they? We’d love to hear.

To reach John:

Phone: 212.840.0444
Email: john@blisspr.com
LinkedIn:  John Bliss

The Timing of New Legislation

But the 2009 bonus season is unlike any others, with new wrinkles such as the pay restrictions imposed on banks that have received government aid. The White House’s Special Master for Compensation (a.k.a. “Pay Czar”) Kenneth Feinberg has already completed a review of the pay packages for the top 25 highest paid employees at those firms that have not yet paid back the government aid provided during the past year. And more recently, on December 21, Feinberg approved a request by AIG to grant an executive a long-time compensation package that included stock options with a current value of $3.26m. Michael Karp, co-founder of recruiting firm Options Group, predicts that pay packages will vary widely between firms that have paid back government aid – often with taxpayers profiting – and those institutions still relying on government infusions. Most firms insist that they need to pay top dollar to key employees to avoid their being poached by competitors.   

So We Wait and See…

The timing of these compensation reviews is particularly interesting as the annual Wall Street talent swap may now proceed with a two-tiered compensation structure. 

• Will TARP banks experience a brain drain? If so, can they replace lost employees with comparable talent? 
• Might some unexpected winners emerge in the fight for financial talent?  
• Will pay restrictions need to be relaxed, as some firms that have been unable to fill key positions have urged?  Or will these restrictions matter at all in the near-term following a cycle of layoffs and a market with a 10% unemployment rate?

What do you think? How will Feinberg’s guidelines impact the bonuses (and more rightly overall compensation) of the traders, analysts and others on Wall Street? Will this ultimately lead to more or less of job hopping on The Street? 

To reach Donna:

Phone: 212.584.5479
Email: donna@blisspr.com
Twitter: @donnamcsorley

On October 22, 2009 the House Committee approved sweeping new financial industry regulations that if passed will fundamentally change the financial services landscape and the businesses that service these financial firms– particularly the communications industry. The Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act (H.R. 3126) creates a new standalone watchdog agency for the financial services industry, which in theory is responsible for promoting “transparency, simplicity, fairness, accountability, and access in the market for consumer financial products or services.” 

Simply put, this agency is responsible for looking out for the financial interests of consumers by banning unfair and deceptive practices, which regulators hope could mitigate another economic and financial meltdown like the one leading to this recent recession.

One of the biggest points of contention with this bill is the “unfairness” rulemaking authority, which many opposing this bill believe is not only inconsistent with the definition of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), but also goes far beyond the similar authority of the FTC under current law. “Unfairness” has always been highly elusive and vague concept which provides regulators with loose authority when not rooted in more concrete fundamentals.

During a webinar hosted by the Council of PR Firms, Dan Jaffe, Executive Vice President of Government Relations for the Association of National Advertisers, touched on some of the intricacies of this bill as well as the implications for both the financial services industry and communications agencies that work in the industry. According to Jaffe, the House CFPA bill will make four fundamental changes in the regulatory authority of the FTC:

• Expedited Rulemaking Authority
• Immediate civil penalty authority
• No Department of Justice oversight of civil penalty cases
• Expanded liability for “aiding and abetting” an unfair act or practice

The most critical of these provisions to the communications industry of course is the latter – aiding and abetting. This would give the FTC the authority to pursue companies or persons that aid or abet a violation of the FTC Act, which would radically change the business landscape for PR firms, advertising agencies and other media companies that play a role in the communication/sale/delivery process of financial information and services to consumers.

So what does this mean exactly? Well that is something that regulators, policymakers, financial executives and communications professionals continue to hash out at this very moment. Those opposing the bill believe the agency will do little more than enhance the government’s ability to interfere with private business practices, while supporters of the bill see it as a necessary step toward preventing a repeat of the financial carnage witnessed over the past two years.

What we do know is that in its current form, the CFPA bill reflects the largest financial regulation restructuring since the Great Depression. And one thing that most constituents seem to agree on is that if this bill is passed, it will not only reshape financial regulation as we know it, but also have a profound impact on the daily business practices of both financial services companies and the firms that service the industry.

So what’s your vote? Is the CFPA a necessary piece of the financial reform puzzle to protect consumers from abusive financial practices that regulators have failed to reign in during the past decade? Or is this a gratuitous layer of regulation that will reduce financial product choices and stifle innovation – making it difficult for banks to serve their consumer and business clients?

To view the CFPA bill in full, click here.

(photo by Dolceta Online Consumer Education)

To reach Nicole:

Phone: 212.584.5473
Email: nicole@blisspr.com
Twitter: @nicolejleblanc
LinkedIn: Nicole Leblanc