Creative Agency Secrets

I have been reading about the Australia Tourism pitch that's going on right now.  It's a knotty one because there is one dominant, hugely successful campaign that lurks in the background (Paul Hogan's shrimp-on-the-barbie) which is now 25 years old but well-remembered.

The Economist quotes Geoff Buckley, MD of Tourism Australia "The Hogan ad was brilliant but it was never taken globally.   Nowadays we need a unique and motivating message that resonates in 23 different markets." Tough.

The contrast with the 100% Pure New Zealand ads that are mostly photographic (one was so beautiful I cut it out) is stark.  Which country would you rather visit.

But that's not the point of this post.  Later in the article Christopher Brown of TTF Australia an industry lobby group, wants to form a brand council bringing together representatives from not just travel but wine, food, film, and fashion industries too.  "We need some heavy-lifting from other sectors to add depth and richness to the Australian story.  No country can afford to sell itself with a 30-=second tourism ad." 

Too true.  And for biz dev folk, the challenge is this:  

Which other skills / companies / individuals can you bring onto your "brand council" in order to give a fuller view of your offering?

As an example, I host events for my clients and prospective clients with other professionals who have a message that creative biz dev folk might be interested in.  See here and here   The key is for both parties to invite their own contacts and (there will be overlap) you end up with a wider audience who can both network with each other and also get exposed to both organisations' skills.

PS am planning another event of this kind for mid-June.  Watch this space…. 

I was invited by the lovely folk at Designer Breakfasts to do a workshop on how to do business development for your agency or for yourself.

The group was fantastic and worked really hard on the problems and tools I set them tow ork on.  Here are the photos.

The handout is here. Designer Breakfasts handout

Just arrived.. and feeling very buoyed as I managed to park the hire car just beside the Hilton which is 200m from the Convention Centre entrance. How about that for a good start! And weekend parking on meters is free in Austin!

Hoping to meet up with a few Twitter folks… while I was driving over last night there was a huge informal Twitter meet-up.

In case you haven’t been following my twitter stream I am in USA this week for South by Southwest SXSW Interactive

Hey am planning my SXSW days…. boy are they risking being very crowded!

I plan on live blogging the ones I attend and adding other stuff as it happens and I get a chance and so here ‘s a probable list of what you’ll be getting on the menu over the next four days… all times are local to Austin TX.

So far this is what I have listed (if I get to them all it’ll be a miracle)

Saturday

08.00 SXSW Social Breakfast, with Ewan Spence

10.00 Book reading: Web Design for ROI

11.30 The Weird Turn Pro: Crowdsourcing For Creatives

14.00 Keynote opening remarks with Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson

15.30 The Art of Speed: Conversation with Monster Makers - Tim Ferriss

17.00 A General Theory of Relativity

Sunday

10.00 Online Advertising for Newbies

11.30 Core conversation: Blog on Company time without getting Dooced

14.00 Stories Games and your Brand

21.00 Threadless and Moo party!!!

Monday

10.00 The art of self-branding

11.30 Self Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing

14.00 Judo Moves for Defending Your Reputation Online

15.00 Book Reading: Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide

15.30 SXSW Open Format

17.00 Sponsored Panel: The Web Agency: There Will Be Blood

When did you last ‘mystery shop’ your own business?  Either do this yourself, or get a friend to do it.

In the eighties this was a terribly trendy thing to do in the UK.  As the US became the ‘land of customer service’ where people bent over backwards to give great service to their clients and customers and the UK looked increasingly like a back-water.  It’s rather fallen out of favour these days.   But I think it’s time for a revival - ONLINE Mystery Shopping.

Seven things you can do to research your company’s customer interface

1. Do online research into your brand, company name, key individuals (remember to also get behind the login firewall for key print media e.g. FT.com, the Economist, Brand Republic, trade journals) and social media sites
2. Check out all the negative search phrases as well as brand names ( XYZ sucks, XYZ hell)
3. Go to the key websites for bad customer experiences Ripoff Report, Blagger, Grumbletext,
4. Phone into a series of offices - at 5 pm on a Friday and during your Monday morning meeting
5. Ask for a reference on your business and see who you speak to and what they say
6. Buy online (if possible)
7. Ask about privacy policy and what data is stored on you (and if you don’t get a coherent answer quickly on this one, sort it out quickly)

I was fortunate to meet Richard Stacy at a Social Media Cafe prototyping event before Christmas.  He’d just left a top agency and was “repurposing” his former existence into a new format designed for corporate communications online.  He described it as a journey of discovery.

Seems he’s come to some conclustions.

Read his excellent blog post on Social Media: four simple things every organisation needs to do

1. Uncover your digital identity
2. Create a credible story
3. Start creating ‘off site’ digital content
4. Create a space to engage with your stakeholders

This is a perfect summary of your online public profile as a business.  If you are yet to make the switch (or develop a parallel online / offline programme) this is a fabulous guide.  It’s also a very good “self-check” mechanism for your business development efforts.

Richard summarises

Ultimately, the most important thing to remember about this whole transparency issue is that trust is shifting from institutions to visible processes. Simply put, people will no longer take or trust what you say about yourself (your institutional claims to trust) at face value (even if it it true) - they will need to be able to understand the processes that guarantee this. The best way to do this is to create the opportunity for them to become part of this process. It is worth remembering that your harshest critic and most loyal customer or supporter are often the same person - provide them a channel for this energy and it is far more likely to be directed in a mutually positive direction.

Many agencies are TERRIBLE at developing their own online profile / persona.  If you read their ‘who we are’ statements - they are virtually all the same….. and few have any backchannel where customers and staff can communicate in public.

Anyone brave enough to comment on how they are doing on the four actions Richard summarises?

Reading Benjamin’s post about practice as a useful business learning tool.  He says

When it comes to work, practice can be more important than experience. Experience comes from doing the same thing over and over again. In today’s business environment that is an opportunity that is increasingly rare. Things move and change. Practice is something different. It involves preparation, reflection, and seeking feedback. It is being purposeful about getting better. It is about conscious learning. That is very different from blind repetition. You can do the same thing over and over and never get better at it. You just get soggy.

I like that.

I have spent many years perfecting a sport technique and his observations about practice becoming less of a chore and more something to be enjoyed, nay relished is very true.  And yet, the better your practice can be “perfect practice” is the only way to become”perfect”.

It’s a natural desire as an adult not to make mistakes.  Children are fantastic at erring - that’s how they learn.  But as adults we hate losing face and so mistakes are something we often seek to avoid.

Business development skills take practice.  When did you last do a cold call? Play with your database and try some new functionality out? go to a trade show and research new products and services?

I have been “lurking” on Skillfair for a year or so now. It’s a website that matches small businesses and freelance consultants to projects.

[Backstory: I first found Skillfair.com about a year ago because they advertised a job creating a micro-site for the River and Rowing Museum. And my sport is rowing, so I picked it up on an alert service for key words. I watched the site from a visitor registration for a while and found jobs that suited some of my clients listed there. My interest built and so I emailed Gill asking if she’d be available for an interview which I could publish. Here it is.]
So how did you start the website?
The Skillfair story began was I went freelance 7-8 years ago when children were young. My background is in IT and I got a contract from former employer, and then another from a mate…. I do specialist work and was on an internet directory and got a third contract from an enquiry off the directory. This led me to the thought that we needed one of those directories for everyone.
Sounds logical.

So how do you get consultants and work opportunities onto Skillfair?
It is hard work doing marketing and sales, when you are a freelancer or independent consultant. And it isn’t most people’s core specialism and so it gets put aside and you end up with the ‘feast or famine’ problem of work. So I created a marketplace for independent consultants in a range of disciplines. To give them a feed into the marketing system that keeps going in the background while they are working with clients.
Skillfair went live early 2002 which was an interesting time then. I had had no work for 6-8 months and got a job shortly after the site went live. The business ticked along for a couple of years. I discovered when you build a website if you don’t spend a lot of money on it you get what you pay for. We needed more behind the scenes in admin – and decided to systemise everything.
This was a key finding. You have to be systematic for all stuff, if you find yourself doing something manually more than 3 times…. like sending customer service emails and enquiry replies ask yourself how can I make it happen without me doing it?
Building a scalable business requires a system to do this for you. This is key to Skillfair’s success to date.
And so what’s happened since then?
We have experienced gradual and organic growth since then. We have not had massive financial investment. The UK economy is at the point where lots of people are going freelance and seeing this as a career option and a positive step. Some of the reasons are work:life balance and not wanting to commute.
And also companies and government want highly skilled people but don’t want to commit to employing them permanently because of financial and legal aspects of permanent employment. The coming together of these two movements is making a wave that didn’t exist before.
How do consultants and freelancers find Skillfair?
Consultants find us though search engines. We use Google ads and have found that placement is important. We do telemarketing as well. We call up people who we think are consultants and ask if they want to be registered for new work. We do the initial work to register them and then leave it up to them to decide to participate further by sending them weekly information.
We also buy lists for the telemarketing. And referrals from other consultants are another very key source of new registrants. Of course, that is how you passed Skillfair’s details onto your clients.
We have worked hard to make it easier to get people to refer their contacts through the website, as they trust what Skillfair is doing. We get about 100 – 200 referrals per week. And 30-40% of paying new joiners come from referrals.
So where do you find the work opportunities?
We use a public sector tender alert service for a lot of client work and we search 6-700 websites per week and OJEU to find the lower value tenders. We have a system for this (of course) to make it less time consuming. (Gill wrote some of the code herself and sourced some of it elsewhere). Skillfair also pays for some services to support this.
The private sector projects come from Google adverts in the main. Search engines are very accurate ‘help with marketing’ means that’s what clients are looking for and / or are a marketing consultant. We find that we get clients precisely when they are looking for advise and support and not at other times.
We now have a database of past clients and we send them newsletters and details of new consultants joining the system and we can send them a regular feed of consultant names for specific skills if they want that.
It is more of a challenge getting clients to say what they want… it is the interim management agencies who are interested in this and more able to say what they want. And we serve them too.

So what are your future plans for Skillfair?
We have worked hard to make a successful business and as I said before, we want it to be scalable. We’ve been working on offering Skillfair as a white label service for professional bodies and trade associations whose membership includes independent consultants. Our service will allow them to provide opportunities to these members without getting involved in admin or commission arrangements and will boost their revenue at relatively low risk. Our goal is to have at least one of these organisations operational by the end of 2008.
Thank you very much for your time, Gill.

And anyone wanting to know more should take a look at Skillfair.com (and please mention that you found it from a link at Creative Agency Secrets!

Some musings….on Networking and technology…..

I received a link to an academic “paper” written about networks by a group of keen MBA students. Intellectualising what is currently happening and really giving me zero insight into what I might do next with my networks…. but here’s the link if you want to read it yourself.

Lloyd has been thinking about tagging on photos and whether this can be both good and bad. And why it links neatly into social objects and how they get used online.

And while working with a client this week, I wrote a summary about social objects (and I was at the NMK conference where Jyri mentioned them and have been reading Hugh on the subject regularly since).

I was thinking a bit on the theory of WHY digital customer engagement is becoming so compelling and HOW data connects brands to potential consumers in both B2B and B2C.

Social Objects are a useful means of creating lasting customer engagement on websites and other digital media.

Background on Social objects from Jyri Engstrom (who I heard talk about it at NMK) The slides are at the bottom of the page and here’s a video.

This blends sociology theory with the real stuff happening on the web today. It explains why we find social media sites compelling and keep returning to them. This takes on from the CRM ideas of Don Peppers and Martha Rogers who, when discussing how to Interact with customers, recommend allowing the customer to dictate how and when they want to communicate with you and the medium for that communication. On social media sites this is the starting point for the ‘conversation’. [I prefer the word conversation to interact - which is rather sterile and sound pre-planned or managed]. And the key difference between social media and CRM is that the brand DOES NOT control the conversation - but it may participate, initiate and guide. Just like a trusted friend or adviser.

And so what are the ‘verbs’ that can apply to your website? How can it be a place for customers to return and visit frequently?

Hugh McLeod has worked hard to continue to promote Jyri’s ideas. He has developed his own ideas on what are social objects and the link is a list of great suggestions. And an application of a social object to blogging.

For this site, I hope that the social object is “Learning about business development”.
Commentary on what makes a social object in a marketing context (there’s a lot here… so read it last).

If there is enough interest, I’d be keen to have a pub drink and chat session to discuss Social Objects for biz dev folk…. let me know if you want to come along.

More anon.

A “Golden Question” is one in which the answer tells you more than the question itself would imply.

Useful for research, discovery and us biz dev types who need to quickly assess new prospects and whether they will buy from us.

I learnt about it from Don Peppers who integrated it into his CRM method (Identify:Differentiate:Interact and learn: Customise).  His classic was to find out whether a customer had a high propensity to buy premium brand pet food.  The question was “Do you buy your pet a christmas present?”.  Neat, isn’t it?  Those who do, are more likely to lavish spend on their animals than those who don’t.  Simple.
And so how have I used it with my clients?  They are mainly working in B2B areas and so the question set needs revising depending on your particular positioning and needs.

#1 Digital Agency selling high end technology back-end services

Julian wanted to be able to find out whether a prospect wanted a simple web site or one with higher functionality.  Working with him, I developed two questions to help him quickly filter people:

Question 1: What was the date of your first website?

Question 2: How many times since then have you re-launched or substantially revised it?

Why does this work? With the first quesiton, he can tell if your company is an early adopter or late arrival for the new web technologies.   And with the second, he can assess your likely sophistication as a web user for marketing.  Each time you re-launch a website the functionality is improved. Relaunching every 2 years means you are more likley to be interested in moving to leading edge features.

So, how does your company stack up against his questions?

#2 Agency working with start-up web businesses

These lads want to be able to find out how far down the road you are to getting your website functional.  THey also need to find out the degree of technological sophistication of the person they are talking to.  Pitching yourself too “techy” and you’ll quickly lose the interest of a punter but being too simplistic has the same effect.  Similarly their services vary depending on the stage of the business and how close to launch the start-up business is.

Question 1: Have you got your requirements document written?

Question 2: Are you happy with your user numbers?

The first establishes business stage and sophistication and the second devines the success of the marketing support put into an already functioning site.

Now what golden questions are right for your business?  Can you use them to shorten your prospecting time frame and more quickly find prospects who have the potential to become customers?