 |
| How well does your practice execute this formula? |
There's no doubt that many of those working in professional services could learn to tell their stories more effectively and better reach the clients who most need to hear them. It's the difference between walking home with the work or not. Not much new there.
Some might scoff also at the claim that the same generation of internet technologies their daughters use to communicate with their classmates could transform the way they themselves connect with and persuade potential clients. But it's now a fact, and the wave of change this presages will prove highly disruptive in the lives of many professionals locked into the ways of the past.
I'll expand on this short post at a later time, but here's the outline of a presentation I'm currently making. It's appropriate to most companies but especially pertinent to professional service practitioners as it's about using knowledge to build the stories that communicate and enhance competence. In short, it's about developing their firms' stocks of organisational capital.
Clients seek out professionals for the knowledge and experience they can bring to bear on their problems. And professionals get most of their work from repeat business and referral. How they communicate what they know, and how they learn from the work they do, contextualise it and convey it are critical factors in winning business ahead of competitors.
An important part of this equation is that of learning and transforming accumulating knowledge into revitalised competence and service evolution, as depicted in this diagram. It is about strengthening the magnet that attracts clients and multiplies their referrals. And the speed with which this may be accomplished is something the internet's emerging technologies can accelerate significantly when the required disciplines to make them work are applied across a practice. It gives the firm new things to say, new ways to say it and opens the door to new audiences to say them to.
Where many practices fall short is that they don't know what they know. Their professional staff - partners, senior managers and employees alike - have diverse knowledge, experience and capabilities. Each also has their own unique battery of contacts, interests and insights which can be farmed in the pursuit of competitive advantage. Moreover, because it can be in their own interests, given the invitation to do so (assuming this invitation is made in the right way - itself possibly the subject of a whole other discussion), most employees can be encouraged to step forward with what they know when asked. Used appropriately, new and often free internet tools can enhance considerably the potency of such knowledge sharing.
Yet more often than not the experiences of those not directly and daily involved or engaged in the hunt for new business lie buried, under-used and under-exploited. Yet, in this age, there is no such thing as the professional firm that can afford to waste an iota of its intelligence, nor one that can afford to apply a brake to its learning in the pursuit of new work. How a company learns faster than its competitors, especially in the professions, is the only thing that will sustain its edge.
Professional firms have often been bitten by the bug of believing that commissioning a public relations firm to manage their media communications would transform their prospects. It's a fallacy and more often results in the value of the PR firm's contribution being questioned when practices can't find stories their publicist is able to place in the appropriate media, and the PR firm doesn't understand the firm's business well enough to know which questions to ask. The old PR model is fast becoming as broken as the media into which they are attempting to place stories. (And if anyone is questioning how imperilled the old forms of print media are becoming, this link is telling.)
The new media, however, upend the old equation. They lend themselves to the development of a pot of rolling content that can be used in many ways, and which is based on the purposeful learning which is an integral feature of its own feedback loop. It looks much more like this.
Organisations that adopt this strategy for developing and telling their stories multiply the audiences with which they can communicate, and the ways in which they may do so. Getting to this point is what makes this work all the more interesting because the process is critical, and the skills, disciplines and strategies that make it work aren't, until explained, always readily understood.
When we take this to the next level, however, it appears that the skills and knowledge required are well beyond the competence of the average publicity representative, as competitive advances now reach beyond simple publicity communications into the realm of strategy. Yet, in fact, they are inseparable.
The two circles above are not, of course, separate but the same and their depiction as such here simply illustrates the many levels at which native collaborative intelligence can be applied to winning steady competitive gain. Moving along this continuum faster than competitors itself becomes part of the feedback mechanism that accelerates progress and the attractiveness of the stories the professional firm has to tell. Indeed, it is so fresh and unusual that even old media will be interested in hearing this one.
Perhaps the one key ingredient that must be so strongly emphasised is that there are perfectly serviceable tools available to accomplish all of the above available at no charge online. It means few are the organisations that can afford not to learn how to exploit technologies that are available at such low cost to even their smallest competitors.
What is in short supply, however, are the skills, learning and insights to make them work.
