Perceptint Musings

The day before the big presentation to the executive council, your client calls you in harried voice. An erupting litany of new problems, new fires, new changes, and news is front and center to be dealt with straight away.

Will we make the deadline? Will we get the report change back from the vendor in time? Will we fall on our face when we have this once in a lifetime audience? Not if the digital marketing advocate has planned and prepped his client like a district attorney bringing the biggest RICO case to date.

The skills to succeed as a consulting outsider in the corporate world require being humble and giving. Being humble means trying your hardest to truly understand your clients world. No predisposed notions of how your ego would attack the situation. Not that your ego isn’t vital to the solution, it’s just not the biggest piece.

Being giving means enabling your clients to stand out from the pack. To have the tools, topics, terminology and time-lines in ready to feed format. Edited freely together to hone them to you clients perfection. Fed by your combined insights, research and opinion - a subtle salad for the corporate soul.

Standing out in an organization that has more than 100,000 employees is difficult. You’ve probably seen this in action in several ways in businesses of all sizes. Some people defy the corporate definition of who they are and rise above it, easily and without hurting others. They rise through the ranks slowly and surely.

Others follow the more traditional route of “seriously, how did this person get this far?” Somehow they rise quickly and to the top and then either transition off just as fast, or stay in place for years. In my experience, these people seem to be stuck in something, not sure themselves how to either escape or move on to a more relaxed mental space.

Corporations create their own meta-physical laws of personality through hierarchy and reward. Drawing lines by salary, title, and the group or persons getting patted on the back and continually rising.

If you or your client didn’t step in at that level, but you want it, you have to plan how to get there. You need a strategy to get into the club of continually rising. Training your clients to succeed ensures you both can stand out in the primordial soup of the corporate soul.

Executive Training Tactics

Feed their corporate ego
An advocate must maintain and grow the influence of their client within the corporate id. Your job is to help the client better think through a political strategy and finding ways to turn vocal naysayers into bobblehead, yes lovers. Providing voice, documentation, research and data as needed to polish the message at ever turn. Your goal is to watch them shine on their stage and spread their influence far and wide.

Identify and strategize personalities
Your client may not be entirely tuned to be watching the corporate political spectrum. Your job then is to use every new or ongoing interaction with teams or personalities within the corporation as a point of personality mapping. In my experience this is best achieved on-site in meetings. Over the phone you only get tone for reference. Body language and positioning broadcast a lot of information about corporate goodwill/bad juju and you just have to watch and track it.

Make it tasty for everyone 
Being succinct is required. People like soundbites and the easier you make it for your client to demonstrate success and tell a good story, the better your chances are of maintaining your clients trust. Practicing simplicity in an age of complexity wins people over. If you know the audience, show them you know just enough to be credible with them and then dive right into your needs, knowing they have to get something out of it too.

Be honest, have a second helping and pass it around
Honesty is good medicine for everyone. Corporate cultures can somehow deny a reality when they choose, until something usually called the truth, interrupts the carefully crafted facade. Helping put your client in a position where they are the consistent bearer of news, either good or bad, helps build that thicker, seasoned skin that people recognize and respect.

It’s when people know your client speaks about only things they know and always ask about the things they don’t. I’ve never found a good reason to hide anything that happens in the course of a marketing campaign. Honesty builds trust, goodwill and relationships.

Next time, I’ll talk about vendor evaluation and my goals for improving the relationships between agencies and their large clients. As always, your feedback and thoughts on today’s topic are welcome.

© 2008 Keith Boswell

Last time I explained the thinking behind the digital marketing advocate, and the situations that led me to create the role. This time I want to start exploring the actual deliverables that I work on for clients and what they are, how they are produced and what their value is. Over the next few posts, I’ll map out quick sketches of several of the core services and what I believe they offer my clients.

Vision Reports 
The Vision Report is a quarterly state of the union for the client. Report data comes from the client as well as any third party vendors that can contribute to the Reports value.

It begins by reiterating all current marketing goals and any new or in process hot items that are still in play. Given that goals within large organizations can change quarter to quarter and year to year, it is intended to be a current and historical snapshot for the organization of all digital marketing activities.

Next is a section on current channels that are in use supporting the various goals. This is a matrix of goals, activities and basic campaign reports - a marketing map of activity, helping the marketers better understand overlap and potential integration value from multiple campaigns supporting a single goal.

The Vision Report then focuses on current political challenges or opportunities that are being tracked. Current tactics in play as well as anticipated goals/timelines for these relationships is documented to help ensure people issues aren’t impeding marketing goals.

Moving into a section on competitive updates and tracking gives my clients a view of things happening in their market that they may or may not be aware of yet. The goal of creating this section is to ensure that clients have as much visibility as possible into their top competition’s site features, content, campaigns and channels they are using. Any metrics that are being tracked for competitive measure are also included in quarterly reports.

The report closes with coverage of emerging trends or channels that present opportunities in the client space. It also serves as a spot for updating trends that have been captured in past Vision Reports. The goal is to keep a historical record of all channels in play or under consideration in the overall marketing map.

Formatting
The Vision Report will be delivered as a PowerPoint deck in the clients templates, in MS Word format for easy printing, in HTML for use on a corporate intranet or email newsletter, and in client specific Wiki Markup so that it can go right into the organizations Wiki. Any other formats that the client believes will help in disseminating and spreading the Vision Report will be used.

Goal of the Vision Report
Give the client the best and most recent information on their market, their progress on core goals, and trends that could influence future decision making. Ensure that the client provides a consistent and strong voice within the organization. Establish corporate mindshare over digital marketing topics, emerging channels and current digital markeing activities.

Next time I’ll cover Executive Coaching and Training. This is an area that is often ignored within most marketing agencies because they feel like their client can do all of the fighting/explaining on their behalf. In the digital marketing world, the complexities of the business language along with the solutions means that most executives could use coaching intended to help them better articulate to their various audiences what they need to be successful.

© 2008 Keith Boswell

A few days ago, I touched on an idea for a new role in the economy - a digital marketing advocate. I called it an Internet marketing specialist in the last post. I vacillate back and forth on the phrasing, but I believe as of today I’m settled into only using digital marketing advocate.

Because in this new role, I might recommend marketing channels or partners outside of the Internet depending on my clients goals and capabilities. The portfolio of options and agencies I discuss with my clients will always be fully engaged as I am their advocate.

After working twelve years in various agencies I realized I was only as good as the capabilities emblazoned on my trade show attire. The agencies reputation and some misinformed clients mistaken belief that we could do everything for a client because we were an agency led to a moment of enlightenment.

I was tired of being in a position that if we were asked about services or features we knew we couldn’t deliver, someone was tasked with bluffing our clients into believing we could deliver it. Screenshots, promises of future road-mapping, fueled by a foundation of MS Excel and MS Word based reports with the most rudimentary analysis because the people tasked with building it all were AM’s, PM’s, engineers, production roles and and anything else not an analyst.

Building and managing web sites, ad systems, software, marketing programs, and content for clients, but having to do it through the single production unit of the agency you’re in, began to tie this marketing advocate and my ideas down like rock rope shorts in a tarry river.

Many agencies have the instinct to do everything they can, even if they’re not good at it. Growing the account, expanding services into a client, constantly pushing to figure out how do we grow business from the marketers who already pay us well for what we do? Like a lap dog that found its perfect master, it waits and begs for table scraps because that is all it knows.

The advocates instinct is to carefully plot a perfect path, researching every millimeter from send off to welcome delivery. The goal is to help guide the great corporate Titanic’s gently past the iceberg, helping avoid the need for lifeboats and gut wrenching decisions because you knew well about the dangers ahead. And your client was right there with you, navigating with the best of them.

In today’s more nimble environment, I was increasingly under fire, having my good reputation staked on junior staff delivering services outside of my groups domain. Their mistakes and inexperience damaging a strategic client relationship I had built for years.

I also realized that no one agency can solve every need for a client today. They don’t need to and they shouldn’t. Digital marketing agencies need areas of expertise that they build thought leadership in, and niche value to maintain customer loyalty.

They could not and should not attempt to market across all digital channels, but increasingly they try. At some point, the sheer size and points of communication that must be maintained for a single client to run smoothly begin to overwhelm the agency model.

Why put good customers and relationships in jeopardy when all it could take was a little honesty and hubris? We don’t do everything you need us to, but the thing you do need from us, we do better than anybody. I’d buy that.

What I and most corporate marketers don’t want to buy is a company that is really good in X, buys companies that do Y and Z, and suddenly we’re supposed to translate that belief in service of X over into Y&Z. This wobbling, stacking blocks of value doesn’t deliver what a client really needs. The only person to benefit from these corporate mash-ups is a misinformed shareholder.

Unless your agency has built every single platform and channel management tool for every service they are selling you, I can almost guarantee that behind the scenes, you are getting the most Frankenstein, stitched together by the seat of your pants digital marketing mirage you’d never believe you saw unless you lived it. And I lived it, so trust me when I say I’ve seen it all.

Agencies that try to grow business by expanding their services deeper into their clients ultimately lose focus on their area of excellence or the ones they are dragging their clients into. Why do you think most clients of agencies receive reports in Word and Excel from many of their digital agencies, and not through an online reporting function?

Most agencies are struggling to consume and process the amount of data they are taking in and tasked with reporting back to clients. As they add new channels, they are adding thousands of data points per client into their systems. Growing their business means ultimately moving expertise into the data management business. And if they are expanding their service offering, it means keeping expertise and leadership across all of those channels., plus managing all that data.

In my estimation, the workforce is about five to ten years away from having enough people with the right experience in each channel to make that a possibility for the largest, global agencies. And that gap is where I smelled opportunity for a new class of strategist - the independent digital marketing advocate.

Someone with a depth of experience delivering digital marketing services, the ability to write like an analyst, the candor and honesty of a good friend, and a communicator who could tie it all together to help clients make better informed decisions, and manage the growing list of needed digital marketing relationships. The advocate can’t build and deliver it all, but they can plan, architect, map, and help steer corporations in ways that someone within an agency doesn’t have the freedom to do.

The advocate can investigate and test new channels on their clients behalf. They can serve as a springboard for new ideas and procedures. They sit in a neutral, analyst stance - giving researched and vetted opinions about various topics, as needed by clients and their own gut reactions to new technologies and trends. They can also help digital marketing agencies and their clients find more value in their relationship.

I chose also to limit myself to a single client per vertical industry. This really leaves plenty of room in my mind for many more digital marketing advocates to begin finding and delivering value until the rest of the workforce catches up.

At this point, valuable time says I should pause and tell you something. This post has turned into a five day epic editing session, so I know I have a lot more to say about this. Rather than keep editing and rewriting, I’ll lay today’s rant to rest.

I ended up just describing the digital marketing advocate this time. Next time, I’ll get into specific deliverables and the types of value I expect this role to create for large organizations. I’m very interested in any and all feedback and ideas that might pop up upon reading this.

May advocacy for a topic fall upon you like a wet, heavy winter rain. Reminding you of its strength with an icy grasp on your imagination. Until next time.

© 2008 Keith Boswell

I realized over the summer that the online marketing world was shifting faster than ever into overdrive and the breadth of knowledge within most buyers of online marketing services was still limited. Around that same time, I began to hear a refrain from customers of the agency I was working for. “We want strategy, and our agency - including you, isn’t giving us what we expect.”

Being inside one and knowing that other agencies were in the same boat, you realize how strategy at that level is confined to the scope of the agencies capabilities. If you’re talking about services you can’t deliver, you’re essentially recommending another agency for the job.

I knew that marketers were beginning to seek out advice from trusted sources that could help guide their thinking as well as the third parties that were helping with online marketing today. They were attending more trade shows, putting themselves out there more as buyers, so as to begin attracting people who could help them.

Over the course of a weekend, I began to spell out a new role that I believed would answer the questions I was hearing asked time and again. Below is the bullet list and brief descriptions from that initial brainstorm. The more I got on paper, the more excited and electrified I became.

Internet Marketing Specialist/Client Advocate

Services

1. Internet marketing plans, strategy and strategy review
2. Deep competitive intelligence – reviews of their online marketing activities, strategies, vendors, etc.
3. Technology reviews/executive briefings with sources on new marketing channels, social, local, etc.
4. How new technology’s should/could be incorporated into the overall online marketing plan both short and long-term
5. Strategic Agency Reviews
6. Executive Coaching/Training
7. State of the Market – yearly reports including review of their activities
8. Quarterly Briefings on new topics - one would be self-chosen, the other would be chosen by the client
9. Presentations/Public Speaking
10. Marketing Conference Reviews/On-site attendance with client team
11. Long-term planning/resource needs/agency RFP’s
12. Current program reviews/feedback
13. Recommended Reading List
14. Test site for 3rd party/agency technologies
15. Work with Analysts within organizations to determine campaign success, metrics, reporting, etc.  

Value to Client

1. Leading and timely Internet marketing strategy and information in easy to digest form from an industry veteran.
2. Tailored to their individual business/vertical.
3. Executive briefings/presentations included
4. Independent of agencies/3rd parties
5. Agencies have their best interests and capabilities at heart, I only know your business and your customers needs and can help drive agencies towards your goals
6. Custom Reports/Briefings to keep executives up to date on what they need to know
7. Honest feedback on agencies/strategies/performance of vendors
8. One client per vertical/competitive market

Needs from Client

1. Routine updates on business priorities/initiatives
2. Bi-weekly round-tables
3. Regulatory and Legal Briefings
4. Travel and Expenses as needed

I knew then that I’d have to quit my job to explore this opportunity fully. I checked into the legal aspects of my non-compete to gain legal counsel and better understand my rights. That cleared my conscience and gave me comfort knowing I wasn’t violating any contract to pursue my new idea.

I couldn’t live inside the agency and advocate changing the agency model at the same time. In another instance of good timing, my wife and I had also decided we needed to move as soon as we could for us and our daughters to be closer to family.

After I quit my job, I sent this same list to a former client who’d asked me to get in touch if I ever went anywhere else. The response back was, “When can you start?” A few weeks later and we were off and running.

My goal in publishing these business notes is to begin fostering and building a new niche for Internet marketing strategists who share a common language and are in the  pursuit of common goals for their clients. These are just my initial take on the present market and I look forward to personally refining them over the coming months. I also look forward to any other online marketers feedback on these concepts and more as I explore them over the coming days.

In the next day or so, I’m going to try and lay out a better picture of all of these bullets in action and better articulate them. I’ll give an inside view of what I believe a marketing advocate looks like and does for their clients.

© 2008 Keith Boswell

Since there wasn’t any feedback on ideas for future posts, I’m going to plow ahead into the fertile stream of consciousness that is my brain. I wanted to talk today about creating value for your clients as an internet marketing consultant.

One of the things that working in retail customer service taught me was that the customer is always right. It sounds like such a cliche, but the truth in the statement is so right on. Especially when you apply the idea to finding success in consulting for clients. A programs success is almost always defined by its perceived value.

One of the mistakes that happens time and again when agencies and companies try to execute a new program is the lack of flexibility around the value and success of a marketing program. Here’s what I mean by that.

Salesperson X has gone out and sold program Y that they believed the client needed more than anything. From what the salesperson has said, the client has expressed this time and again by doing flips and headstands from every sales pitch through contract signing. And it got signed faster than any other contract this quarter, so they must really want it!

Then project kickoff occurs. The new team, production, steps in to replace sales. The razzle dazzle Mercedes is replaced by a well-oiled, hitched wagon. And now you and the client are off to the “across the field fast as you can” races. During your sprint to finish up this pre-defined project, both of you learn that the service they’ve been sold is redundant with another program they already have, isn’t going to impact the business in any way like they thought, or is in process of being done by another vendor in another group within the client organization.

What do you do? For the untrained agencies, project managers and account managers, clients slip through their fingers because they maintain their focus on the statement of work (SOW) because that’s what they’ve been told to do. Finish project Y by May 31st because that’s what the contract says. Deliver the project, even in flames to the client doorstep, because that’s what they paid for.

The way out of this flashing prairie fire of discontent? Educate and train your clients to expect changes mid-stream. Be flexible and open enough in projects to redefine value and success as a project is in motion. If you know a week or a month in that the SOW’s project is going to fail, what can you do to rethink the project, it’s metrics, it’s success - so that your clients investment is not in vain.

Good consultants have the flexibility and eye for opportunity that it takes to continually deliver and find new value for their clients. Project failures lead to corporate exorcism, so you have to keep your eye on finding the value in every project you touch.

Value for a client is also dramatically enhanced when sales and production are working together to scope and deliver client work. Production can help shape the sales offering and ensure that the right resources are in line to deliver the projected work. They can also sniff out early those embarrassing “um…what do you mean you already have another search agency…but I thought we were your search agency…” kind of moments.

This type of crossover planning doesn’t happen as often as you might expect, even in the largest of agencies. But when it does, the client and agency are much happier and better served. Relationships and true partnerships can emerge because of the mutual understanding by all project participants of the goals, needs, etc.

Keeping your value and your clients value high should be at the front and center of every decision you make as a consultant. Keep your customer happy, let them know they are right - with your good counsel and feedback, and stay focused on their world. They know the things they need to demonstrate their own value within the organization, so ask them and help serve it up on a bountiful platter they could never harvest on their own.

May value and wisdom slip from your tongue as raindrops from a storm cloud. Until next time.

© 2008 Keith Boswell