Content is King

Marketing is all about getting people to voluntarily sit up and pay attention. This article in the Ottawa Citizen points out the breadth of information (good, bad, useful, and useless) available in the blogsphere. Being recognized as a creator of "good and useful" is hard work against a backdrop of such huge volumes of information noise. My reminder to professional services marketers is it's what you say that counts more (you have one message, choose carefully), than where it is said (the vehicles for making your message known are endless). The blogsphere is just one tactic.




Recent Trends / Opportunity is Knocking

The Christian Science Monitor looks at the acceleration of business mergers. Can anyone spell o-p-p-o-r-t-u-n-i-t-y?

Is Your Marketing Strategy a "Me Too"

Branding expert James Archer penned an interesting commentary that should be of interest to 90% of professional services firms. His commentary includes,

"It’s nearly impossible to differentiate yourself clearly and accurately in a newspaper or magazine ad. Coke and Nike and Apple can do it because they’ve got the funding to saturate the world we live in, but for a small business that can only afford to run a few scattered ads at a time, the cumulative effect amounts to almost nothing.

So we need to find alternative ways to stick in someone’s head, and networking is the most powerful way to do that. Talk to people. Help people. Make genuine friends. Rid yourself of the notion of “customers,” and you’ll yourself with a lot of fans who happen to want to pay you."

I wrote earlier this month that too many partners base their marketing knowledge on the practices of their clients, which for the most part, are not professional services firms....

Helping Clients to Work with VCs

I have a soft spot for any knowledge an attorney can acquire that helps the client get things done. And, having worked so long in the early-stage arena I am particularly aware of commentary and knowledge around raising capital. For that specific activity an entrepreneur gives a lot of credence to the advise of their attorney.

In that light, here is a great exchange. Recently Tom McMakin, a VC at Thrive Capital Partners, circulated a list of ten questions every entrepreneur should ask a potential VC investor. This week, Jeff Nolan, a VC at SAP Ventures, posted his answers. The Q&A has good insights for anyone trying to raise venture money for a startup.

Are Professional Services Firms Doomed to be Passive Aggressive Organizations?

At Law Marketing by Andy Havens Andy offered some thoughts about the lack of participation by partners in firm marketing activities. Unfortunately, this non-participatory attitude is not exclusive to law firms. I have run into this sort of behavior at all types of professional services firms that operate under a partnership structure. The question I ask myself is; ‘Why?’

In researching this tendency I have noticed a lot of similarities between the behavior of partnerships (with regard to marketing participation) and traits of a “passive-aggressive” personality.

The Passive-Aggressive (PAP) personality results from; ‘results from desiring, needing, and delighting in the freedom to do as one pleases; and from fearing, and being distressed by, not getting or losing the freedom to do as one pleases. Further traits of PAP are:

• Fear of Dependency - Unsure of autonomy & afraid of being alone, fights dependency needs - usually by trying to control those around them.
• Fear of Intimacy - Guarded & often mistrustful. He picks fights to create distance and maintain control.
• Fear of Competition - Feeling inadequate, he is unable to compete with others. He may either be self-sabotaging or a tyrant to eliminate power threats.
• Obstructionaism – Will make promises and intentionally delay delivery or will not comply at all to blocks any real progress to your getting your way.
• Fostering Chaos - Prefers to leave the puzzle incomplete, the job undone.
• Feeling Victimized - Protests that others unfairly accuse him rather than owning up to own misdeeds. To remain above reproach, plays the part of hapless innocent victim of excessive demands and tirades.
• Making Excuses & Lying - Fabricates excuses for not fulfilling promises. Uses information to control and maintain power.
• Procrastination - Has an odd sense of time - believes that deadlines don't exist for self.
• Chronic Lateness & Forgetfulness - Inability to arrive on time. By forcing other to wait can dictate the ground rules of the relationship. Selective forgetting - used only when avoiding an obligation.
• Ambiguity - Master of mixed messages and sitting on fences. Will make statements that fall on both sides of yes or no.
• Sulking – Feels put upon when unable to live up to promises or obligations and retreats from pressures (sulks, pouts and withdraws).

Many and all of the traits above can be witnessed at most partnerships. And the reason, I believe, is the very culture a partnership structure encourages. Here is my reasoning…

• First, the type of individual that is successful as an attorney, accountant, consultant, etc. is highly intellectual, typically have high drive, excellent attention to detail and nuance, and are confident about his/her ability to make good choices.
• Second, a partner is placed in competition within his/her own firm for power and recognition having to compete against a field of equally qualified individuals. This struggle is evidenced by the what successes are rewarded, how they’re rewarded, and the importance placed on political savvy within these firms.
• Third, partners answer only to themselves or the firm. If a partner does not wish to “play along” (especially if they are a high-dollar rainmaker) they can and will tell everyone that they are going to what they want to do thank you.
• Forth, agreement among partners often has a political price tag.
• Fifth, effort is reserved for what is measured – the billable hour
• Sixth, many non-rainmaking partners have experienced sufficient success without having to demonstrate any interest in external market or network building activities (complacency), and unless something happens to interrupt the flow of work they are being fed they have no reason to change.

Of course, none of this is to say that partnerships are a failure. They are not! This is commentary specific to the marketing capabilities and tendencies within partnerships.

What do I think is the solution? I don’t believe there is one unless partnerships change the power and control structure of their firms. If they were to adopt the organizational structure and principles of a public corporation many marketing issues would disappear with the absolute control of many by a few.

These are just my thoughts. What are your?

Humor for Law Firms

This Jay Leno classic clip from the Tonight Show is always a funny break in the day....

RSS Feeds: An Opportunity to NOT Be Like Everyone Else

For a while at least RSS Feeds were a blessing. The ability to have news and information come to me without being forced to view every billboard, banner, and popup was just too good to be left alone. As outlined by Rok Hrastnik at Marketing Studies.net the feeds spilling into my aggregator will carry everyone else's idea of what I should buy, and I'll have to begin again to puzzle out where the real content is hiding.

The opportunity for professional services firms is to NOT use their own RSS feeds to push "advertising", but to continue to use the feeds for their designed purpose; keeping an interested audience informed.

Professional services firms live and die by their ability to create and sustain face-to-face relationships. The marketing of professional services needs to create an aura of care that would suggest to people that you would treat them like a person that matters.

RSS is a way to show your concern for their needs while giving you a tremendous return for your effort. When advertising starts to show up in their news aggregators, they'll feel exactly the way you're going to feel; irritated. Soon we will all be more aggressive in filtering which feeds we'll keep, and we won't care what we're missing because, like spam, it's too big of a hassle.

Don't be like everyone else! With some bandwagons it's best to just watch them go by and listen to their music until it fades away.