a bee in my bonnet

Five lessons from my year at the water cooler

I think most of you who know me know I have not  been paying attention to this blog in a while. Okay, rather a long while. (And it's not the only blog I've been ignoring.)

I don't feel guilty though, because I was busy. I was involved in a rather intensive client engagement over the past year or more. And in that time, I did spend time on friends and family and other priorities. I also looked after a couple of other clients with smaller engagements.

My blog suffered, yes, but now that I am surfacing from that big engagement, I thought I would share some of the lessons I learned in my absence.

The project was a bit of a departure. Most of my previous engagements have been focused on communications in support of external marketing, and nearly all of this work has been for small or young technology companies, and occasionally or for smaller groups within larger companies. 

This latest gig was spearheading a major internal communications project for a large crown corporation (yes, you heard me -- the federal government).

My job was to develop and execute a plan to support the introduction of a whole new approach to pay and benefits in the 1500-employee organization. I was working as part of a dedicated project team, and surrounded by compensation experts. (There are textbooks on the subject! With lots of math and stuff!! I know, because I was handed one as a reference early on in this engagement.)

I also reported to the internal communications team, and worked with colleagues in that group to deliver the various pieces in the plan.

So, what did I learn? Well, aside from learning lots about the organization, total compensation, and performance management, I learned lots about internal communications and change management.

1. Do not assume people understand the status quo.

This was the single most important takeaway from an engagement filled with learning. I know, I am not the first person to say this. I've read it myself a couple of times. But experience is the best teacher, right?

In this project, I was assured early on by the subject matter experts that most employees had been around long enough to understand the organization's rather complex approach to performance pay, which was being eliminated in favour of a simpler approach.

In fact, there was a disconnect between the official terminology, adopted by those in Human Resources, and the common language and understanding of employees.

I had an inkling of this disconnect a week or two before we "launched" the changes. A valued colleague in internal communications who was reviewing draft materials kept asking me to explain and re-explain the changes to performance pay. We had several discussions about whether or not the concept was well understood.I invited one of the subject matter experts to come in and help walk her through it.

In the race to D-Day, however, I didn't really spend much time beyond these private discussions to test the assumptions. I put my colleague's confusion down to the fact that she was relatively new (although she had a tenure of almost 5 years!) and convinced myself that her perception was not pervasive.

But it soon became clear that her probing questions were the tip of a rather large iceberg. (Needless to say, I got better at trusting this particular colleague's instincts and insights.)

In the end, we had to support the simple statements about what was changing and what was not with Q&As posted on-line (the same question, asked in multiple ways, using plain language), with diagrams, and with scenarios (using sample employees and numbers, to make the examples real). We had to revisit what we had already posted, and develop new material, delivered on-line and in employee sessions. 

We lost time (and could have lost ground if not for the incredibly dedicated and adaptable team of subject matter and communications experts) by not having properly assessed this disconnect before the changes were announced.

2. Repetition is good. I repeat: Repetition is good.

Again, this is not new.

The common wisdom goes is that you have to repeat the same thing seven times, in multiple ways, before people get it. We had built this into the communications plan, which included everything from print communiques to presentations, from on-line resources to talking points for managers to use in face-to-face meetings, from newsletter articles to town hall meetings.

Still, I saw clearly that the material that many grasped in the spring still bore repeating in the fall. And again before winter was over.

A colleague who wore the change management hat for the project was invaluable with her ongoing reminders to cover the same ground in new, digestible ways. She also was good at seeking feedback and gathering impressions from the employees, and bringing the significant gaps to my attention and the attention of the project team.

3. Keep it simple.

This applies to the words you use, of course, but it equally applies to the amount of information you cram into any one "message"  or event.

It is a tendency, especially when there are a dozen or more people reviewing any one item, to try to have it cover any and all "exceptions" and to cover as much ground as possible. 

In fact, I am quite good at cramming three thoughts and several nuances into any given sentence. I learned that this is precisely the wrong thing to do when communicating for change management.

The turning point for me came when I had a great sit down meeting with the head of internal communications a few months into the project, and he reminded me that we were losing sight of the objective -- to communicate as clearly as possible to the widest possible audience.

It is not the job of communications to handle the exceptions. That is the face-to-face job of a manager or expert. It can also be the focus of targeted communications (which we did lots of, too, especially after this wake-up call).

Again, I know it sounds simple, but it's the kind of thing you can lose sight of when you are just trying to get something reviewed and approved by several layers in an organization.

4. Being an outsider is incredibly valuable.

Outsiders ask perceptive questions. They propose new solutions.  Generally, outsiders are more resistant to the jargon that becomes pervasive within an organization.

I have long believed that my principal value as a consultant is that I wear the hat of the outsider, and this project was no exception. It was especially useful as we developed an agreed set of terminology for use by the project team (and by translators) and we were able to keep it relatively simple and jargon free.

5. Being connected to the insiders' ecosystem is invaluable.

Although I am often brought in as an outsider, with a valuable outsider's perspective on things, the nature of this project convinced me of the value of "belonging" to the internal ecosystem.

First, I was very much a part of the project team. My client treated me as one of their own, equipping me with a computer, with a phone line, and with access to their systems.

Second, and even more significant, they arranged the engagement so that I had a dotted-line reporting relationship to the internal communications group. This was at the behest of internal comms, but the project team most definitely reaped a benefit of that relationship.

Over and over again, we avoided missteps by ensuring I was in the loop about what else was going on across the organization. I was able to get familiar more quickly with the resources and tools available to me.  I was able to leverage corporate history and experience.

It didn't hurt that the organization in question is full of really smart people with their hearts in the right places.

**

So, I hope to be posting a bit more regularly this year, now that that big project is in maintenance mode... but if I don't, take heart. I will share with you what I learn when I finally do come back.  :)

I spent a bit of downtime this week reflecting on the lessons I learned in my most recent client engagement. I have a post coming on that tomorrow!

Is it just me, or is it the economy?

I read the new job numbers in the Citizen today, in an article that sites 79,100 new jobs across the country in November. (Of course, Ottawa being Ottawa, and the Citizen being the Citizen, the sub head also notes that the numbers "dip" in the Ottawa area. Ottawa is being affected by a drop in government jobs, apparently.)

I was also at a party this week, hosted by my friend Lisa Courtney Lloyd, for her (incredible) network of women marketers. The consensus around the room is that something is happening, that the economy is picking up. In fact, there were a couple of anecdotal tidbits:

• Several of us have seen an increase in the open jobs and posting that are circulating around.  Recently, in my inbox, I've seen several jobs for senior communicators, in the private and public sector.
• Many of us have had a surge in our consulting businesses, beginning in late October or November. A couple of us shared our sense that consultants see the up-ticks and down-swings in the economy first. (Consultants, especially marketing consultants, are often the first to experience the pain of budget cuts. The flip side is that companies often hire consultants as a first step when rebuilding marketing efforts, before deciding whether or where to hire new staff.)
• Several of us also shared a sense that Ottawa is moving away from two very separate economies, one for entrepreneurial tech companies and another for government and quasi government.  More of us are bridging that gap in our businesses. In fact, my friend Margo Crawford, a tech company founder herself, was talking about the work she does with her NGO (non governmental organization) clients, getting them to act more like businesses, and often convincing them there is excellent private sector talent they should be going after.

I realize that none of this is backed up with hard data, and so it may mean nothing.

Still, at the beginning of November, I was looking at one client going into maintenance mode, and was having to hustle to chase what looked to be a small amount of work in December.  Since then, client number one has express an interest in keeping things going at the current level, I have signed a second major client (my first non-tech, quasi governmental client in more than a decade), have inked a contract for a small coaching gig, and have had another friend ask me to write a proposal for some writing work.

© Photographer: Kts | Agency: Dreamstime.com

I am hearing the same noises from my friends, including Francis Moran, Karen McNaughton, Susan Odle, and more.

So, is it just me, or is there something bigger afoot?  How's business for you? Let me know what you think in a comment. 

Hey, this is cool. I am trying Typepad's new Quick Compose blog posting feature for this post. It doesn't allow links, I don't think, but you can add photos and stuff, perfect for a more spontaneous post.

You see, to write a post takes me no time at all, it's all the fiddly bits (formatting, linking to friends' posts and related sites etc.) that takes me time. That said, that's also what makes certain posts more interesting.

Still, this could be a good tool for the kind of post that is "bigger than a tweet, smaller than a blog post." In fact, the content is edited into a little window like a speech bubble, not unlike Twitter's interface. Hmmmm.

Doing Business Outside the Echo Chamber

I had the pleasure this month of co-facilitating a workshop on social media with my long time professional acquaintance Lynda Partner. (Thanks to Lynda for including me on this project!)

Demystifying Social Media was an afternoon workshop put on by the Ottawa Women's Business Network.

What was really fun was that the audience was not made up of social media professionals, or even professional marketers, but rather lawyers, accountants, financial advisers, recruiters, retail business owners -- and most had only dabbled in social media, if that.

In Lynda's words, it was fun seeing 40 people go from asking why, to how.

A lot of the credit for that goes to Lynda, and her drive to keep the content relevant to the audience. In addition, my past experience with delivering workshops helped to keep the content interactive.

It was great for me to meet real business people with real-world issues, operating outside my normal bubble, the high tech, B2B marketing circles. And equally great was the realization that Lynda and I had insights that were valuable to people who don't live our issues every day.

Now that the content exists, in an interactive workshop format that can be customized to various audiences  (although it probably can't morph into "Twitter for Seniors"), Lynda and I are keen to see if there might be others who want this kind of hands-on introduction.  If you know of anyone, ping me a note (see contact info link, to the right), tweet me, or just leave a comment here.

Giving away the milk (at a discount)

I grew up in the generation where our parents used to say:

"Why would he buy the cow, if you give away the milk for free?"

(I know, I am probably slotting myself in with all the oldies you know by admitting that.)

Well, don't tell my parents, but as a marketer, I am always looking for ways to give away the milk, or at least to offer it at a discount.

I think that most marketers need to explore "try before you buy," alternatives for customers. This can be as simple as running a blog, which -- for a services company -- can give prospects insights into how consultants work and what makes them tick. (It's one of the reasons I run this blog.) 

For products companies, "try before you buy" might mean offering a risk-free trial period, a web demo, or a money-back guarantee.

Arguably, one of marketing's biggest roles within a company is overcoming the objections or barriers to a buying decision. One of the biggest objections, in almost all sales situations, is risk. There are many ways to reduce the perceived risk, of course, from pricing strategies to customer case studies, and they are all important. (By the way, here is a great case study, by my friends at Kaszas Communications, that demonstrates how case studies reduce the friction in the sales cycle.)

A "try before you buy" offer is one of the most effective ways reduce a buyer's risk, their fear of the unknown. With that in mind, I decided to create my own "engage Gillian on a trial basis" project. Guess what? It worked!

What I did

I had decided that I needed to create a template for a simple marketing audit. I've called the process Five for the Win(TM), and I've designed it as a straightforward interview (2 hours) followed by a independent review of available marketing data (analytics etc - another half day of my time), to produce a report with findings in 5 key areas, and 5 top recommendations. (More on this in a future post.)

It's not meant to be exhaustive, but it gives my client great, data-backed, independent insights into what's working and what's not in their marketing efforts, at a high level.

Not free, but discounted

It is not totally free, but it is offered at a steep discount off my regularly daily rate for ad hoc work. (Like most consultants, I have lower rates for ongoing projects and longer-term commitments, and a higher rate for hours billed outside of any ongoing commitment.)

My Five for the Win process allows prospective clients to see how I think, and get some informed external feedback on their efforts, and an actionable set of recommendations.

Even if they decide they don't have ongoing work for me, or if I decide I can't really contribute what the company needs to move its efforts forward, there is an outcome that has made the "trial" engagement worthwhile.

And while it does cost money, a client that moves ahead with me as a consultant more than saves that same amount, because the project jump starts my knowledge of the company and its marketing challenges.

Outcome

So, I tried it on a real live prospect.

I've known the CEO of a smallish tech company for years. We've talked on and off about how he could tune his marketing, but, for one reason or another, he was never ready to engage me for any ongoing work.

Again, he and I met, and he wasn't sure exactly how he would engage me. "I know I could use some of your time, I just don't know how." I proposed he do the marketing audit, as a first step, and described the report I would produce. He knew he could use the report to reexamine and refocus his marketing expenditures, and agreed.

If he had had to pay my daily rate for this, the risk would have been too high (even though he knows me). But at a reduced rate, as an exercise that might easily save as much money as it costs, it was a no-brainer. As my trial customer, he got exceptional value, because he helped shape the process and the report, and because I spent days and days thinking about his business.

As I worked on the report, it became clearer how I might be able to help him to implement the recommendations. When he received it he acknowledged that while the news about how (in)effective the company's marketing efforts had been was not good, it was not a surprise.

He also bought into my top five recommendations.

Needless to say, he believes he got value from that first engagement, and this has led to a longer term, ongoing engagement for me with this company, worth tens of thousands of dollars to me.

In addition, we are already ahead of the game, because we are already on the same page as to what needs doing, and in what order.

And I proved to myself that anything you can do to reduce your customer's perceived risk of working with you is worth your time. So, go ahead, give away some of the milk for free (or at a discount).

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Money pot or money pit? Marketing to governments

I was at a great Zone5ive session last week. "Public Sector Marketing: Aligning your strategy and tactics to market to government."

(Disclosure: I am on the Zone5ive organizing committee. I didn't propose or manage this one. That was ably handled by fellow committee member, Peter Lloyd. Also, I have, in the past, done a small bit of work for one of the presenting companies, TELUS, but I am in no way compensated for mentioning them in this post, nor do I have any other work pending with them).

I knew it was going to be good. I knew two of the three panellists, Gwen Avery, Director of Public Sector Marketing at TELUS (and a fine presenter), and Peter Andrews, CEO of Grantium. So I went, even though the subject matter is somewhat peripheral to me.

I learned lots. Here are my top three takeaways.

1. Marketing to governments is a death-defying thrill ride

You're thinking, marketing to governments = boring. Right?

Wrong. Marketing to governments (B2G marketing) is not for the faint-of-heart.

The length of the sales cycle when dealing with governments is legendary. But there's more.

Costs to a company of responding to an RFP (request for proposals) can be upwards of $50,000, and the details of bids (winning and losing) can be made public to competitors. In fact, Grantium recently spent tens of thousands in legal fees in the US to protect information in one of its lost bids from a competitor.

To be successful in marketing and selling to government, the company needs to have deep coffers (TELUS, as a result of its diversified national business, and Grantium as a result of outside investment). Or, it must start small, with deals below the $25,000 threshold that triggers serious scrutiny within the public sector, and earn a reputation as a solid supplier that over-delivers. This is how the third panellist, Louis-Paul Normand from Interis, described his company's start.

All of this is why one of the keys in marketing to governments is the bid/no bid decision. If the company has not adequately influenced the content of the RFP, through marketing and proper differentiation, it is often not worth it to pursue the business. (This may be true in all enterprise sales, but seems even more obvious in dealings with government.)

2. There is more to the marketing mix than "business development"

I also gained an appreciation for the thoughtfulness with which these successful government suppliers allocate their marketing dollars. My limited past experience had told me that most marketing to government fell under the category of "business development," and was as much a sales activity as anything.

I was wrong. All three panelists looked at their marketing efforts as having three thrusts.  For TELUS these were described as:

• establishing thought leadership

• driving incremental revenue, and

• increasing the addressable market

Interis and Grantium had also classed their marketing efforts, and Louis-Paul labeled Interis' efforts by corporate marketing (brand and reputation), capability marketing (skills and services), and contact marketing (direct marketing and other activities to drive revenue).

With respect to the mix at TELUS, Gwen pointed out the company has a great, well recognized brand, in particular among consumers, for handsets. The job of the public sector marketing team is to make sure the company is known for what it offers "beyond adorable frogs and monkeys." :)

(TELUS is Canada's largest security IT consulting firm, for instance, and has a leadership position in healthcare IT.)

So, it spends a significant effort on building thought leadership, with almost a third of its public sector marketing resources focused on that goal. (Aside: I'd be interested in talking more to Gwen on the metrics they use to measure success for this thrust.) This is meant to ensure it is known in government IT and operational circles, and known for the right things. 

Marketing to drive incremental revenue accounts for about 50 percent of the effort, and increasing the addressable market accounts for the balance (20 percent).

(I love that Gwen comes to all of her speaking engagements with data in hand, for us numbers geeks!)

3. The toughest nut in B2G marketing: account penetration

The panellists were unanimous that the key marketing challenge with most government business is after the business has been won, to ensure adoption and penetration into accounts. It is vital to any company not to forget this.

Again, this is a challenge common to large enterprise sales, but my sense is that the nature of the procurement vehicles and annual budget cycles in government can complicate this and make it more acute.

Those are my top three takeaways. Were you there? Do you market to government? What have you learned?

Love my tweets, hate my @ replies?

I had lunch with one of the very savvy people I know last week.

I was surprised, as I am often, when he complained that he has trouble following the twitter feeds of people that have lots of @-replies in their tweets; that is, tweets addressed to other tweeps, using the convention of starting with @[username] at the beginning of the tweet.

He wasn't specifically addressing his complaint to me, but it is something I know I am "guilty" of.

It's true, @-replies can be annoying. They can disrupt the flow of an otherwise entertaining and informative Twitter stream filled with pithy observations and links.

People have told me that they feel compelled to try to dig down and read the entire conversation, either traveling from one "in reply to" link to another, or by using a service like Tweetree.

In fact, another friend of mine, Lynda Partner, had a post recently in which she gripes about the tweeps that have too many replies in their tweets.  She calls them the "socialites" and says: "you gotta wonder why anyone wants to follow one side of a bunch of conversations even if it’s with a celebrity - it smacks of teenage girl talk."

The thing is, you don't need to follow these conversations. You are in no way obligated to.  Twitter provides a settings menu (go to the notices tab) where you can choose which replies you will see. (Here is a Twitter help article explaining this.)

That's right. You choose what you see. If you are seeing @-replies you don't care for, then you should probably change your settings.

For instance, I have it set so that I see only the @-replies of people I follow when I am also following the person the reply was directed to. So, if @lpartner replies to @tcoopee or @robertlendvai, I will see it, because I (very happily) follow them too. I won't see it when she replies to @steveadolph (unless I go directly to Lynda's twitter profile to read all her tweets, or if I do a search and it turns up).

Folks - there is no right or wrong way to use Twitter. Some people use it as a social platform, a sort of Facebook Lite, an open networking tool (which probably describes me). Others use it to pontificate or to market their products, to narrowcast or broadcast their feeds. Some people use it to tell you what they had for breakfast.

None of these people is wrong. I follow people of most types, for a variety of reasons.

Who do you follow?

My love-hate relationship with goals

Anyone that knows me knows that I like goals. I believe in goals. I embrace goals.

It's been a constant theme in my career, as a consultant and as an employee.  I like "ownership" and accountability in my work, and goals enable both.

Goals (in marketing) are good.

• In setting goals and getting buy-in for those goals, you get alignment with your managers, and support for your day to day activities. Maybe that means more budget (or less budget pressure). Maybe (hopefully) it means a more trusting boss.

  

• Goals awaken the competitive need to achieve that most people have in some way. When I set a goal, I can be extremely tenacious in achieving it, and am euphoric when I achieve a stretch goal. The excitement of achieving goals can energize a whole team.

• Goals, properly set, remind us why we all come to work every day. For instance, goals in marketing should tie to revenue in some measurable way. The goal should not be to "produce a whitepaper," but to "produce a whitepaper shortens the sales cycle." Stated that way, they help to remind me that my goal is to shorten the sales cycle, to increase sales, not to produce collateral.

But sometimes it's just not that simple.

Goals (in marketing) are bad.

Goals can be a curse. Especially if, in focusing on the goal, you lose sight of the purpose of the goal. A well crafted goal can help prevent this, but sometimes we forget to surface and reset our priorities based on a changing landscape around us.

Goals can provide an illusion that we are doing the right things, especially when the company is in trouble. 

In one of my former marketing roles, for example, the management team (of which I was a member) became too focused on weekly, tactical goals. The worse our situation, the more to-dos we added to our lists, the more to-dos we exacted from the people we working in our teams.

Achieving these tactical goals week after week, and crossing items off my endless to-do list, may have helped me feel like my butt was not on the line (even though it was)  but it meant I was not focused on solving the big issues. Instead of generating press coverage, retooling the company's website, or enhancing our visibility in our local community, I should have been focused on generating (or saving) cash in the short term.

Nothing else mattered.

Those other goals may have made sense if we had not faced a serious, unexpected cash shortage, one that we initially thought or hoped was temporary, but they should have faded to irrelevance given the new reality. And I should have refocused my own effort and those on my team away from any goals that did not directly contribute to that over-arching issue.

Lessons learned

• For leaner companies, marketing goals need to be tied explicitly and quantitatively to the immediate business objectives as much as possible (revenue, number of customers, repeat customers).

• Longer term goals (around visibility, mind-share, hiring) are important only in direct proportion to the amount of cash on hand.  

• Companies and management teams need to build in a way to ensure departmental goals can be tuned when the business landscape suddenly shifts. Tactical goals should be focused on the immediate reality, and the strategic goals should be geared to medium-term survival. Being open and honest with departmental managers about the business realities, what is needed to survive and thrive, is one step.

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Tools of the new newsroom

Mathew Ingram had a great line in a recent presentation on Twitter he gave to his colleagues at The Globe and Mail. 

When people criticize it, try substituting the word "Twitter" with the phrase "talking with people," and see if the criticism still makes sense.

In this one line, he nails the argument that Twitter should not be singled out for special disdain or admiration on the basis of who is using it, or how (or how silly the name sounds). It is just a tool, a technology, one of many that facilitates interaction between people.

For journalists, better interaction (with readers, sources, commentators, experts, witnesses) can improve how they do their jobs. Twitter can also be a source of breaking news.

Start conversations. (And this time, we mean it.)

The same theme emerged at Mathew's talk at Third Tuesday Ottawa, a week ago, organized by Joe Thornley and friends. He talked then about the "tools" (including the Globe's public policy wiki, it's use of CoverItLive -- a powerful tool that is a vast improvement over the "fake" live-blogging the paper had in place previously -- Twitter and more) and how these tools can be put to use.

As Mathew put it, the former tagline of the Globe, "Start Conversations," is more than a slogan to most journalists, and something that motivates many Globe reporters. Until recently, however, those conversations would take place somewhere else, and the journalists had a limited ability to participate.

More and more, those conversations are taking within the Globe platform, and journalists are beginning to engage. (Mathew talked about encouraging reporters to get more engaged in the comments. He noted that not participating is like throwing a party, and leaving when the guests show up.)

A "social" experiment

He characterized the Globe's investments in these tools as an "experiment."

It sounds like the experiment is working. The Globe will be doing "more of everything" it's been doing. "If people decamp from Twitter and go and use a different tool, with an even stupider name," the Globe will go there with them, Mathew noted.

The bottom line?

So, as people increasingly go online to consume their fix of news, and the traditional revenue sources (print advertising, subscriptions) suffer, what does all this community-building do for the revenue model of most newspapers? How will newspapers make money in the future? 

Mathew admitted that that is an not-yet-solved puzzle, but that, like all the best newspapers, the Globe is connecting passionate people to the subjects they are most passionate about. "If we can't figure out how to monetize that, we deserve to fail."

Another post of interest

I really liked this post from Jay Rosen that summarizes some of the latest thinking on the future of the newsroom, via links to 12+ other posts.

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