Perceptint Musings

The advantage of being a digital marketing advocate versus a digital marketing strategist is the luxury it provides for you to step inside a client’s world like never before. Being a strategist, I would need to be tied to a particular agency to provide the agency’s strategic road-map for the client. Being an advocate, I’m inside the clients world looking out at the agency’s who are doing the work and providing feedback on the relationship, services, and quality of work being delivered.

In this model, I can help steer the strategic road-map without being limited to one agency’s set of services. I’ve touched before on the limitations that working with a single agency can cause. My belief is based on experience and feedback from many clients.

So how does an advocate maintain relationships with agencies and clients without being seen as interfering in their relationships? Here are a few ideas for how it is done.

Reach out to the agencies
Agencies working for their clients need to know when an advocate is working with their client’s team. Getting to know the agencies, their teams personalities, their goals and objectives, and understanding how they work best are all critical components to making the relationship work for the advocate. I’ve got to understand if I can treat the agency as an equal partner or if I need to enhance the communication strategy of my client to see if we can get an agency on the same page with us.

Having worked for agencies, I know the personality types that are drawn into this type of work. The value I bring to my clients is helping them understand those personalities and how to work best for them. My ultimate goal is to make sure my client is getting the most out of their agency, both the relationship and services.

Insist on quarterly or bi-annual agency report cards 
Agency report cards are critical to maintaining long-term positive relationships. These report cards should cover all of the major service lines, report on any incidents and resolutions during the quarter. It should also offer the agency a place to make its voice heard and express its ideas for improving the overall relationship.

If an agency isn’t willing to be graded on their work, why should a client be willing to spend millions of dollars with them? The trick is making sure the exercise is equitable to all parties and offers honest and actionable feedback that can be tracked over time.

Praise the agency when they deserve it
Enough agencies do great work that they deserve to be patted on the back for it. Being on the agency side, this isn’t always something you would expect from your clients. But when it happens, it can take all of the behind the scenes struggles of a project and really revitalize an agency team. As an advocate, I have to know when to dish out the praise and when to dish out the tough love. If more teams felt the praise from their clients, you’d have less agency teams end up at that point of “I’m working on an account I just don’t care about”.

Do some of the agencies work for them
Information gathering, presentation of new concepts, and sometimes just plain pioneering are the things that a client expects an agency to magically deliver. The problem is its tougher for an agency to do all of these things because they do sit outside of the fenced-in backyard. They don’t always know the current political environment, the marketing environment, etc.

If agencies were brought in to situations where clear objectives had already been established, the client already understood the scope of the request they were going to make, and the potential channels had already been brainstormed, they’d have a lot more to work on and deliver against than just having the client fill out a creative brief. The advocate has to serve that critical information role for the client. They can help their client establish a base-line understanding of a situation or new channels and then look to agencies to see how they are addressing those channels in practice with their customers.

The ultimate goal for all of these ideas is to create smarter buyers of agency services. I can’t supplant what a fully staffed agency can deliver. But I can sniff out a rotten egg when I smell one and provide my client a better understanding of how to maximize their existing relationships.

What do you think? Are there other things the advocate should focus on to ensure they’re not seen as a threat by agencies? As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.

Just a question to anyone reading this. How do you feel about the continued growth of social networking/media outlets? 

Social networking sites are still growing like crazy. MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Bebo, Ning, and a number of other well known social sites continue to grow and spread their influence.

My issue is this. It feels awkward moving from platform to platform and “reacquainting myself” with my connections. Here’s how my experience has gone so far. I’m interested to hear back from others to see how it’s gone for you.

I knew starting my own business that I’d have to get serious about using the sites I already knew about and had either joined and lagged on or never joined but knew I needed to. LinkedIn, followed by Facebook felt very safe and easy to dabble in.

LinkedIn put be back in touch with a number of colleagues that I’d always liked to have stayed in touch with. Facebook presented me the option to reconnect with friends and find new colleagues in the digital marketing world. I knew where people were working, what their kids looked like, and had a good idea of how deep their knowledge ran on 12 question movie quizzes.

So then I get an invite to Plaxo from a good friend and I want to respond. Then I need to setup my connections in Plaxo to see who’s there. Then I have to give it access to my Hotmail, Gmail, LinkedIn, COBRA insurance forms, etc. And there are so many people on each of the various sites that you pretty much always choose the generic “hi I’m here now too - please recognize our previous connections and reaffirm here again today that nothing has changed in the last six weeks” email.

Anyways, that’s my quick take on the last six months. I’m finding real value in using Facebook to make professional connections and LinkedIn to find business people. I don’t know that I can commit to managing too many more social profiles. I’m interested by Twitter, but don’t have the patience for IM news. I like fast, but not so fast I can barely digest it fast.

As a marketing advocate, I have to know about all of the various social outlest, but as a user, I find myself gravitating towards just a few.

What’s your take? Do you feel any of these feelings or can you not get enough? I’d love to discuss.

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

Life has a funny way of throwing you for loops. Sometimes you are halfway expecting them, other times they come totally from left field. Last week, my 95 year old grandmother passed away after years of being the toughest woman I know. She bounced back from so many illnesses and injuries so many times it seemed like it nothing could ever beat her.

I’ll be back in the publishing routine now that I’m back and working again. I wanted to let everyone know I’m still around and everything is fine. I just needed to be with family and celebrate the life of Edna Boswell because we will miss her greatly. Rest well sweet lady, you are in a better place.

In the next few days, I’ll dive back in with my thoughts on executive coaching. Until then, I hope that life blesses each of you with good memories, good family and good times with those you love.

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