By Naheed Somji
Carbon Design Social Media Strategist
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
A lawyer friend of mine listened to the “marketing guy” drone on and on about how it’s each partners’ responsibility to drum up new business for the firm. He mentioned tactics like attending events, networking, and posting on LinkedIn.
My lawyer friend was not convinced. I believe her exact quote was, “Ain’t nobody got time for that.”
And she is right. When your main focus is settling cases, meeting billable targets, and helping clients, marketing is the last thing on your mind. “I went to law school, not business school!” she exclaimed. Fair enough.
Except… that marketing guy was kind of right.
At Carbon Design, we worked with a top global law firm to help answer a question about LinkedIn usage amongst employees. We analyzed the LinkedIn activity of over 600 partners, specifically measuring post engagement and number of followers (connections) against a list of top performers in the organization.
The results were eye-opening.
We wrote a proprietary formula to calculate a Social Media Score to indicate who has the greatest social media value, aka who is providing the most value by posting about the firm. We found a direct correlation between the most active LinkedIn users and the top billers.
Does posting on LinkedIn all day make you a better lawyer? Of course not. But those who were active on LinkedIn were establishing themselves as thought leaders, and gaining recognition for it. Thus creating the feedback loop. A partner would share their/the firm’s successes on LinkedIn, get cheered on by friends and colleagues, and get noticed by other companies. Over time, a network is built and leads are turned into clients and cases are won so the partner has more successes to share on LinkedIn.
There are two variables needed to make the feedback loop work: content and conversation. The firm provided the content — expertly written articles, blogs, videos — and the partner focused on engaging with their network. If one of these pieces aren’t in place, the marketing effort fails.
If you’re a lawyer reading this, work with your marketing and business development teams to create a content plan for you. This plan should be a checklist of what is required to write an article or record a video. You have two responsibilities: fill out the form that provides the context to the marketing team, and commit to the process and to sharing and engaging with the content when it’s published.
If you’re a marketer or communicator reading this, your job is to create a template where the subject matter expert can give you the information you need in 10 questions or less. You can take their input, the images, and video files, and craft a story that’s relevant for your audience. Keep your SME in the loop on the timeline — remember, endless reviews are where content goes to die, so be clear about the needs and commitment.
If you need help with any of the above, find us on LinkedIn (with the rest of the top performers).
Where does the signal to pull your hand away from heat originate? If your answer is the brain, you’ve already been burned. Instinctively, we pull our hand back without conscious thought, because the response to the stimulus takes a short cut and originates in the spinal cord because of the need for quick action.
According to venture capitalist Peter Levine the need for this same type of short cut may be happening soon with computing. Mr. Levine said that he saw a shift in computing coming from the cloud (centralized) to the return of edge computing (decentralized) because the wave of innovations from IoT, and AI, are driving the need to have decisions made in milliseconds.
As Mr. Levine points out, a connected car is basically a data center on wheels “it has 200 plus central processing units…doing all of its computations at the endpoint and only pass back to the cloud.” Just like you hand doesn’t have time to send a signal to the brain, autonomous vehicles need to react instantaneously to the situation.
Data, insight, and now action, will be moving to the point of engagement in this future view. Now think about the potential challenges that present marketers in staying on brand, and controlling the message with thousands, or even millions, of touchpoints acting independently. Today, the best messaging and value proposition work can (and usually does) go off the track the moment it makes its way to sales and service reps.
Marketers live with the daily issue of cross channel attribution, add cross channel communication to the mix and we better have really good tracking tools! Sure, we can pre-set the messages, designed algorithms to present them at the right moment in the buying cycle, but controlling and tracking the delivery of each message in the context of an overall brand story will be the challenge.
And keep in mind, machines aren’t the only things that learn. As research has shown, the buying process is a highly emotional roller coaster. With machines entering the process we risk driving efficiency at the expense of dehumanizing the experience. As machines learn, we also begin to sense whether we are dealing with a human or a machine.
For example, do you really get the “warm fuzzies” from all those “HBD” messages on Facebook, or the “Congrats on the New Job” on LinkedIn? Machines have been great at helping us be more informed, but they have also have made it easy to turn highly personalized interactions into transactional tasks, void of any emotional connection.
The first wave of machine learning has been about improved efficiencies, productivity, and predictability. As Jeff Bezos stated in his brilliant letter to shareholders, “Machine learning drives our algorithms for demand forecasting, product search ranking, product and deal recommendations…much of the impact of learning will be of this type – quietly, but meaningfully, improving core operation.”
As the next wave approaches, we should be cautious on how it is applied to the buying process. The focus should be on making humans more human, becoming more instinctive, so potential customers don’t get burned.
It’s the time of the year to look back over the last 12 months and create a “best of” list. This year I’ve pulled the most popular posts from five different sites; Adage, Business2Community, Forbes, Fortune and LinkedIn. In addition, I’ve thrown in a few other noteworthy nuggets from the year at the end of the post.
Adage – Why Apple Pay Could be Huge, And It’s Not What You Think explored the potential upside of Apple Pay as an advertising platform. It sparked the most conversation, and debate, on Twitter. Time will tell if they this strategy will come to fruition.
Business2Community – 5 Key Tips and Data Points to Defend You 2015 Marketing Budget. The last post of the year required the most man hours, and it was the most reposted story of the year. It offers marketers help with their 2015 planning activities in the form of free research and benchmark data.
Forbes -the most popular and shared post of the year, Could Falling Test Scores Be a Good Thing for the US? explores the link between test scores and success in business. It also highlights the risk associated with over emphasizing left brain analytic skill development, outlined by Sir Ken Robinson in his Ted Talk video Do Schools Kill Creativity? The endorsement of Marc Andreessen certainly played a big role in the popularity of the post.
Fortune – Are Marketers Measuring the Right Things was the first post I wrote for our new partnership with Fortune. It profiles the efforts of Ciena, a networking company, to elevate marketings role, and importance, within the organization. The post highlights an unique survey tool used to gather feedback from the sales organization on the performance of marketing (see the dashboard below).
LInkedIn – 2014 marked my first year publishing on LinkedIn. Based on my experience so far, I’m not convince it will viable platform for content unless it becomes better policed. Too much promotional material seems is making its way on to it. At this point, I’m not sure I’ll continue to post.
That said, the most popular post on LinkedIn was also one of the most popular on Adage. The Keys to Differentiating Your Company From Others provides tips on how marketers can humanize their corporate brand to better resonate with audiences. It also identifies one of the common flaws of B2B communication – thinking that what you sell…is who you are. Hopefully, it also helped generated a new client for a follower.
Bonus Stuff
A couple of other noteworthy happenings from the year.
Linkedin’s stock opened at $45 a year and a half ago, it now sits at $120. Unlike Facebook, one of the primary reasons it has done so well is that it found its’ “killer app”early on, and built a business model around it.
For recruiters, Linkedin is the largest (now 200 million members) and most current database of business professionals in the world. For job seekers, it’s a portal into new opportunities, connections and references.
To learn more about its capabilities as a recruiting tool, we posted an open account supervisor position for our DC office on Linkedin. The resumes have been sent directly to me for the past month. Unfiltered by a recruiter or HR person, I got a direct shot of the power of Linkedin. As the hiring manager, I learned a good deal about using the tool, and how job candidates can better marketing themselves for posted positions.
Because of the volume generated by Linkedin, hiring managers have the luxury of trying to find exactly what they are looking for without having to dig too hard to find it. We quickly scan the email summary and the attachments. As a result candidates need to:
Read the job description – hiring and HR managers spend a great deal of time defining the role. Take the time to adapt your resume to highlight those areas that best match what we are looking for don’t make us connect the dots because we won’t…we’re already on to the next candidate.
Customize your cover letter – tell us why you’re the right candidate for the position in the cover letter, especially if you can’t link it on your resume. Make a compelling case as to why we should spend additional time looking at your resume and background. A generic cover letter is a waste of time and a sure way to take yourself out of the race.
Know that we will check you out – if we find someone we like, we’ll spend time checking your Linkedin profile (beyond the email summary below) our current and former employers, as well as your social profile. For example, a person that caught my attention was eliminated from the process because I couldn’t find their last two employers on the web. The learning – companies go out of business or are acquired all the time, make sure your resume reflects or notes that change. We will “Google” you.
Brands count – recruiting firms use key word searches to pull resumes. As for me, I scanned resumes also looking for those “key words.” Again, because of the need for speed certain words “pop.” Brand name companies caught my attention (whether the candidate worked for them or had them as a client). Schools you attended, the types of skills you have, and your accomplishments, especially if they were award winning. I also took notice of the number of Linkedin connections and references…it does matter, I’m looking for a good marketer.
Using a connection/s works – leverage your Linkedin connections to find a common link to the hiring manager or job poster for an introduction. I trust the recommendations of people that I’ve worked with in the past. As a result, do your homework. The closer the connection to the hiring manager or recruiter the better chance it will get you noticed.
What does not work – I found the executive education programs to be confusing. It took too much of my time to figure out if you graduated or only took a class. Consider moving the later under skills or experience rather than putting in education. I also found resumes that were more than 2 pages too long to read. A summary is a good to have upfront, but don’t go beyond more than a third of the page. Get into your experience quickly.
Talent is the lifeblood of an agency…for that matter most companies. What you think, say and produce grows our business. We need you, and we have jobs. Help make it easier for us to find you, link your experience and expertise to our needs. Hurry, I need someone…like yesterday.
Everybody knows – or thinks they know intuitively – that social elements add value to marketing. The question is how?
Like anything in business, it comes down to return on investment. Social media is not a strategy and it’s not an end in itself. Unless your business objective (and I’d check with your shareholders on this) is only about gaining page views and follows, marketers need to understand how social adds value to everything else in your toolkit.
So how do you find the “sweetspot” for developing an ROI for social media? Well, start by viewing the tools at their most basic level, as vehicles for sharing and; photo’s, thoughts, content, etc. Consider them “levers” for improving the performance of known activities that have produced a ROI.
Five years ago, we assessed the effectiveness of demand generation campaigns for a client. Because the firm was in the hi-tech industry they had a heavily reliance on content marketing for their campaigns. They spent months designing and building them, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in execution only to see diminishing results.
The audit revealed that their campaign effectiveness (related to lead production) lasted roughly 36 hours after launch (see below). Meaning that the majority of the leads were being created within the first three days of launch, regardless of how long they left the campaign in the market (btw – they are not alone).
Today, social media has the potential to create a long tail, extending the life of expensive campaigns, ultimately improving ROI, and along the way creating and deepening the relationship with the audience.
I’ll use myself as an example: A blog post of entitled The End of Blogs (and Websites) as We Know Them ran recently in on Forbes. It received no special promotion; in fact, you could say the deck was stacked against it. Posted on a Friday, the slowest traffic day of the workweek, at midnight (EST) when most of the blog readers at home or are in bed. By prime blog viewing time (10 am) it had almost dipped below the fold.
But on the following Monday it took off, almost doubling the views of Friday, and continued to build momentum ending the week as the 3rd most popular post of the day. The following week it was the most popular post on Wednesday. So what happened?
Social took over. Without any additional investment to promote the post, social sharing accelerated and extended the life of the post, even as it fell off the first, second and third page of the site. Readers engaged and went from passive viewers to active promoters.
Readers were tweeting their own thoughts and comments about their insights, not just retweeting the post title. They placed in into Linkedin groups adding their comments on the impact of the technology (the topic of the post) to their particular area of interest or role. They were actively engaging in sharing their “discover” with others.
That is the power and the value of social media for content marketing.
The post no longer needed to be pushed because it was being endorsed, and in some ways validated, by readers — the most trusted source of information.
The potential of social media is intriguing, but to determine its true value companies will need to experiment. Using social media to support your content marketing efforts is a prudent choice, but keep this in mind: It will only be effective if the audience/community finds value in the content and part of that value is defined by those who pass it along.
It’s not unusual to find companies referring to their relationship with clients as “partnerships.” It’s common to find client logos on vendor websites. But how often do you see an agency or consulting firm’s logo on client websites? If you visit www.evepark.ca – that’s exactly what you’ll see.
Carbon Design, represented side by side with, a global architecture powerhouse, a world-class designer, and the project principal: the innovative green-tech engineering firm, S2E Technologies Inc. Under S2E’s leadership, these firms are inventing a new consumer category – one that integrates bold new ideas about housing and transportation – and radically resets the carbon footprint of both at the same time.
CASE STUDY
Did you know, that until recently restaurant owners only cared about the cleanliness of the food prep area? Most customers, and owners, assumed that if someone got sick after dining out it was because of food poisoning. That was until Carbon Design and Challenger Inc. helped “challenge” the norm by showing owners that half of the outbreaks in a restaurant were caused by people to people transmissions.
Now owners know where the “hotspots” are, and as a result, restaurant are cleaner than ever. Grab your face mask and enjoy a safe night out, but you may want to avoid the raw oysters 😉.
CASE STUDY
How do you do it? By giving clients and users what they want. Using the remaining budget that was to be used to update the site with the new branding we designed and built an entirely new site on a new platform. But audience needs are constantly evolving so the work never stops. Our team continues to audit performance and make improvements.
As a result, the two-year journey has paid off with the site being named #1 in the industry. Even more importantly, their key priority areas (site search, attorney profiles, etc.) were ranked in the outstanding category. Proving that excellence is a journey not just a destination.
ta Points to Defend You 2015 Marketing Budget
