On my flight to Cleveland recently for the Worldcom PR Group Americas Region meeting, the attendant turned a routine flight procedure into a memorable experience. How? He came to our aisle and said: “Ms. Rhoads, Ms. Sosnow, what would you like to drink this afternoon?” Seeing our surprise at his request, he said “service isn’t dead in the world, people have just forgotten that it’s part of their job description.” This flashed me immediately to a book I read recently by Fred Lee If Disney Ran Your Hospital; which spent a great deal of time talking about service and loyalty. (Here is a blog post by a colleague talking about building loyalty in the PR profession). I don’t know if our attendant made me a loyal American Airlines passenger, but the experience impressed me enough to share it with a friend at the conference, and with all of you.

Maybe there is something to this word of mouth (WOM) marketing.

The good news is, just like American Airlines, your B2B professional services business is taking part in WOM marketing whether you realize it or not. The better news: now that you are aware, you can enhance those conversations to your benefit.

According to an article in the McKinsey Quarterly in April of this year, “WOM is considered the most disruptive factor in marketing and the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions.”

At that Worldcom meeting, I listened to Ed Keller speak about the power of WOM marketing. He said, “ninety percent of WOM conversations are happening in the real world; only 7% are happening online (3% on email, 3% via text and 1% via social media).” I found that number hard to believe but Keller had statistics to back it up – many of which are in his notable book The Influentials. There are other myths Keller dispelled for me regarding WOM:

1. People only remember the negative comments.  According to Keller this old adage isn’t true. His research: 66% of brand references in WOM conversations are positive. People, for the most part, are looking for positive advice or recommendations.  When you travel – you want to find the best hotels; same in business. If I want to hire a graphic artist, find somebody to help a client build a website, or launch a link acquisition strategy I don’t really care who is bad – I want to know who is great and why. Would I have shared my flight attendant experience if he had simply asked me what I wanted to drink or worse, skipped me – probably not – unless he pulled a Steven Slater! Keller might be onto something.
2. It’s not happening in the B2B Sector. People love to talk…about work. Hang out in a bar around 6:00 on a work night and listen to the conversations happening around you. They are about work, vendors, bosses, deadlines, projects etc. Keller also found that those offline conversations are statistically more positive and more likely to lead to a purchase of a product or service than online ones.

So How Do You Take Advantage of WOM Marketing?

1. Figure out what your story is. This has been the subject of blog posts by my colleague Elizabeth Sosnow and me.  People want stories. Just this week I heard Amy Mitchell from the Pew Research Center talk about the future of journalism. They key to the future success of both the  PR and journalism industry: teach the younger generation how to tell stories in several different and compelling ways.
2. Choose wisely who will tell your story. Then arm them with the tools and training to do it successfully.
3. Facilitate the conversation.
4. Measure the impact. Does WOM lead to positive outcomes for your brand? What is working and what isn’t?

Have you had good luck with WOM marketing? If so, share your story.

To reach Cortney:

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

When Harry Met Sally is one of my all-time favorite movies. I’m a real sucker for romantic comedies. Plus, there’s something about Meg Ryan’s and Billy Crystal’s unlikely friendship – and ultimate romance – that’s ennobling. It’s a story of growth. Two opposite temperaments learning to understand, befriend, complement and enrich each others’ lives.

The same could be said for the C-suite’s odd couple – marketing and finance. As marketers face a semi-permanent squeeze on budgets, financial measurement has become a critical part of the CMO’s job. And savvy CMOS are eyeing a more integrated partnership with finance.

According to Avi Dan of Advertising Age:

Marketing was traditionally a siloed operation. This is changing. It’s moving from a hands-off

Department to a much more integrated function within companies, whether it’s under sales of customer service. Nowhere is this going to be more evident than in the growing closeness between marketing and finance. CMOS are aware that finance is important to their success. For example, when asked which additional skill they wish they had, the answer I hear most often is:  ‘better understanding of finance.’ (The New Normal for CMOs)

As CMOs  struggle to  crack the code on web analytics – and identify new, more relevant ways to measure outcomes – the relationship between marketing and finance is evolving. For now, the common goal is ROI and efficiencies. But over time, the potential benefits of analytical marketing are enormous. And so are the opportunities for partnership, coordination, integration and growth.

Do you have examples of partnerships between Marketing and Finance in your organization?

To reach Meg:
Phone:  212.840.0095
Email: meg@blisspr.com
Twitter: @megwildrick
LinkedIn: Meg Wildrick

I was in Las Vegas last week for an event my client (a consulting firm) stages for their retail clients – a function in its 24^th year that brought together about 100 people from 60 different companies. An impressive gathering, but it hasn’t always been so. It has taken serious TLC over the years to grow it to what it is today.

When the sights and characters of Vegas weren’t distracting me (my personal highlight: seeing Elvis, Brett Michaels and Austin Powers walking side-by-side down the Strip), I was, of course, diligently taking notes about the burning issues attendees raised, ideas for future blog posts, etc. But I also found myself thinking about why it’s such a well-attended event that their clients actually look forward to every year – aside from the free meals.  And, no, it’s not in Vegas every year, so what’s the draw?   

Well, it turns out their secret marketing strategy is quite simple: make it about the attendees. This stretches beyond the topics of conversation – that’s a given. Valeria Maltoni said it perfectly in her post yesterday on the 7 “shoulds” of conference organization: “Time and time again the conferences we remember and return to are those that manage to create a context that is conducive to making connections, those that build a bridge between attendees and speakers with creativity, and through collaboration.”

So, how did my client stack the deck in their favor?

• Start Off on the Right Foot – Them: I love the way this conference started. Everyone in the room stood up, introduced themselves/their company and shared a few issues they were grappling with and hoped to discuss at the conference. It immediately gave it a personal feel and encouraged sharing. I can’t think of a better way to get people engaged from the very start.

• Provide Opportunities for People to Talk: The above only works if you then follow through with providing the opportunity to discuss these issues. Sure, there were prepared presentations my client gave on pre-determined issues. They also built in time for a series of break-out discussions around topics attendees raised and facilitated those conversations. There were plenty of opportunities for everyone to share and connect during breakfast, lunch, breaks and at a function in the evening.

• Customize Your Content: The pre-determined presentation topics were not selected by a roll of the dice – there was a pointed outside-in approach. Many of the attendees participate in surveys the consulting firm conducts, and results are shared at the conference and given additional context through case studies or informal polls/discussions at the event to drill deeper. They seek input from attendees at the end of each conference – and prior to meeting – about topics they wish to discuss. Then (go figure), they listen and actually incorporate those insights into the event.

• Share the Limelight: There were several retailers/attendees who presented and shared their case studies. Every time a co-presenter got up to talk about their “real life experiences” around the topic at hand, they were always peppered with questions. Storytelling in a B2B setting has an amazing way of quickly giving ideas, data and theories that are thrown around real context. In addition, people were encouraged to ask questions not only of the speakers, but of the room. Attendees were regularly taking informal polls of the room about what companies were doing X or Y.

In essence, my client avoided being talking heads at the front of the room droning through PowerPoint presentations designed around what they wanted to sell. Their conference has become a valued function because they serve as thoughtful facilitators of meaningful conversation and a resource that gathers and shares intelligence about industry trends and developments about which their clients are asking.

They are creating conversation. And isn’t that what good B2B marketing is all about?

Have you attended an event that effectively engaged people? What worked, in your opinion?

(photo by Auntie P)

To reach Kellie:

Email: kellie@blisspr.com
Twitter: @kshe
LinkedIn: Kellie Sheehan

• 35 YEARS OF BLISSPR – War Stories & Lessons Learned
• FINDING THE WIZARD OF OZ – Public Relations Demystified
• DRIVING THE GROWTH ENGINE – How to Develop New Business
• HOW TO CREATE THOUGHT LEADERSHIP – Online, Offline, Integrated

 Abby Carr, Meg Wildrick and Elizabeth Sosnow take turns in giving the courses with me.  The title of this blog, “Herding Cats,” was the subject of the fifth course, and they thought some of the highlights might be useful to our readers.

First, what’s different about leading a professional service firm?  The obvious answer is that our primary assets – people – go down the elevators every night.  They are fluid, not fixed.  Since our firm deals with very smart people in management consulting, law, accounting, executive search, asset management, insurance and other professional and financial services, our people have to be smart.  And, because our clients occasionally have healthy egos, our people have to have healthy egos too.

In short, the leader of a professional firm cannot treat people the way one might treat a machine that manufactures widgets.  Machines don’t ask “why?”  Our people almost always do, which means you should give them the answers before they ask the question.  Leadership becomes much more an exercise in developing consensus, as anyone who has been in any kind of successful partnership (e.g., marriage) can readily attest.

Second, as a recent president said, there’s the “vision thing.”  Now let me go on record and say that I am not a big believer in VISION STATEMENTS and MISSION STATEMENTS.  I think too often they waste hours of executive time – and lots of dollars – to produce something that is designed not to offend and is thoroughly non-differentiable from the competition. 

But leaders do need vision lest they sound Alice in Wonderland, to whom the Cheshire Cat said: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road can get you there.”  Or worse they can sound like a long forgotten “leader” in the French Revolution, who John F. Kennedy famously quoted as saying: “there go my people; I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.”

Your people need better, and you need not hire consultants or establish task forces to figure it out.  I do not believe a vision needs to be grand – our vision in our early years was survival.  Once we got some critical mass, the vision had three primary components.  We wanted:

1. Measured growth.  You have to grow to create opportunities for your people, but you want to grow at a pace you can manage, one that will not burn you out or your people.
2. A great place to work.  Check.  We have been voted that in the Holmes Report four of the last six years.
3. To enable individuals to grow – including the management team – which has been together now roughly 20 years.

Our vision was achievable, a critical characteristic, and we communicated it regularly and measured ourselves against it. 

We’ll offer some other thoughts on a leading a professional firm in the weeks ahead.  Meanwhile, what do you think are the critical elements?  What do you think of vision and mission statements?

To reach John:

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

Thought leadership is a hot topic these days. Basically, it means showcasing your brainpower to clients and potential clients through research, articles, speeches, surveys and now blogs. We call it the “marketing of ideas.” The September 11 issue of The Economist ran an article on it and our firm has seen the concept move from professional services into financial services and medical devices.

Where did it come from … and why should we care? Walter Kiechel answers both questions in his excellent The Lords of Strategy (Harvard Business Press, 2010), a history of the management consulting firms that specialize in strategy. They were the first proponents of thought leadership marketing, although they didn’t use that term. As to why we should care – simply because the U.S. and world economies might be far worse off without the consultants. Think Detroit … but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Hardly an apologia for the profession, Kiechel’s book traces the origin of strategy consulting from its roots with Bruce Henderson and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) through the recent financial collapse. Some of the fascinating vignettes include:

• Henderson inventing the “retail marketing of business ideas” to put his fledgling consultancy on the map in the mid-60s
• Bill Bain breaking away from BCG to form his own firm with a unique business model, representing one client per industry, and Bain & Co.’s subsequent foray into what became private equity investing
• McKinsey “waking up” to the strategy opportunity under Fred Gluck and eventually surpassing BCG and Bain

There are informative chapters on Michael Porter, Tom Peters, consultancies expanding into Europe,  core competencies, reengineering and the role of strategy consulting in private equity. To me, the most meaningful section of the book dealt with the one industry the strategy consultants were never able to crack: automotive.

“So arrogant, silo-ridden and inert were the Detroit giants that they never bothered to get their minds around … the strategy revolution, despite much advice to do just that… ‘We never laid a glove on them,’ ruefully admits the head of one of the great strategy consultancies, speaking of both his own firm and that of his competitors … Without strategy and strategy consultants, we could have had broad swaths of U.S. industry look like the automakers.”

If you care about the ideas and theories that drive business, you will enjoy this book.  If you don’t, you won’t. 

Have you read any good business books recently?

To reach John:

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

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