Putting Our Thoughts in a Book (Sorry in Advance About the Shameless Plug)

A lot of our business is ghostwriting for professional firms. So a lot of the satisfaction we get is vicarious, from seeing our clients’ names in print. But I must admit to a special feeling from seeing my name in print, especially on the cover of a book. (I thought I had gotten over the thrill of the byline when I left journalism 21 years ago. Guess not.)

Three fellow Bloom Groupers (Bernie Thiel, Susan Buddenbaum and Tim Parker) and I have just published a book that collects newsletter articles our firm has written since our launch in 1998. The book bears the same name as our newsletter, Thoughts on Thought Leadership. You can buy the book on Amazon here.

This will sound like a plug (and it is), but I think book is a good way to get your boss, practice heads, managing partner or others in your firm behind thought leadership marketing (for those of you struggling to justify your budget). OK, the ad copy is over.

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The New Growth Formula for the Indian Tech Firms

While vacationing, I couldn't resist commenting on an article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal about the troubles of the Indian tech services firms. (“For India’s Tech Titans, Growth is Waning,” Aug. 20.)

The article described what perhaps was an inevitable trend: declining growth of Indian IT firms as their labor costs increased, competition from other low-cost locales emerged, and Western demand for IT services slackened in an economic downturn.

But the way out of the crunch is also predictable: deliver IT services that are not only less expensive but are also better than those provided by Western companies.

That takes breakthrough services – i.e., creating innovative and superior ways of providing tech support, building Websites that provide post-sale customer service, mining customer data to identify new-product opportunities, and myriad other IT service and consulting offerings. The article said some Indian companies are taking that route (Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys were mentioned).

The question then becomes this: How do you create breakthrough services? One long-ago-proven method is studying a set of non-IT service companies (i.e., your customers) that are exemplary in some domain – building great customer service Websites, providing excellent tech support, etc. – and comparing what they did to a set of companies that aren’t so good at the same task. Studying the key differences between these two groups then shows the IT service/consulting firm doing the research what it must do in its service -- in other words, formalizing informal practices.

This is how the reengineering consulting service was developed by Michael Hammer and the consultancy CSC Index in the late 1980s/early 1990s. It requires an investment in research that leads to service innovation. We haven’t seen many Indian IT service/consulting firms – or Western firms for that matter – make such research investments. But after the price advantage diminishes between the Western and Eastern firms, offering a superior service is what will separate the market leaders from the laggards.

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Home Page as Showcase for Thought Leadership

I absolutely love the new website of newly christened management consultancy Booz (formerly Booz Allen Hamilton). The firm has devoted most of the site's home page to its intellectual capital -- not to its dozens of practices, or to some smarmy mission statement, or to some incoherent message from the CEO.

Here's the site: http://www.booz.com

It's pristine, to the point and engaging. It may have gone a little overboard in emphasizing the firm's thoughts. (The few executives who haven't heard of Booz may not realize it's a management consulting firm from the home page alone.)

But it works for me. What do you think?

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How Publication Design Derails Thought Leadership

You wouldn’t read Harvard Business Review if it looked like a sales brochure – dominated by fancy photography unrelated to the copy next to it, shorn of author bylines, and organized into small sections that force 100 words to make points requiring 1,000 words. Would you?

I recently received IBM’s 2008 “Global CEO Study” and saw such a publication. Seventy-five pages that look like a slick brochure. Only it’s a study, not a sales pitch. But it appears like a sales pitch.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves since I got into the thought leadership marketing business 21 years ago. Most professional services firms continue to use sales brochure design – not editorial publication design – to dress up their intellectual capital. It’s a big mistake – just like putting a Hyundai badge on a car that is a BMW or Lexus-worthy competitor. (In fact, Hyundai just did this, with a $38,000 new car called the Hyundai Genesis. Wall Street Journal auto reviewer Jeff Sabatini raved about the car last Saturday but ultimately stated his belief that Hyundai’s down-market brand will curb interest in it.)

I haven’t read the IBM report, so I can’t comment on the content. (Here’s where to go to get it, but you have to register: http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/bus/html/ceostudy2008.html)

But I imagine IBM spent a great deal to create that content – on conducting the interviews (around 1,000 face to face) and on the design of the publication.

And that’s the problem: The design is way too slick.

Does the brochure design-editorial publication design debate rage on in your organization? And if so, who’s winning?

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The Custom Publishing Conundrum

In recent weeks, several freelance writers have told us their ghostwriting work in producing white papers, articles and custom publications for IT companies is drying up.

I’m not surprised, and it’s no reflection on the skills of these writers. In my mind the downturn has to do with the way publishers of the material – the IT vendors -- address the quality of the ideas in their publications. The vast majority of the articles I’ve read over the years are superficial, vague, jargon-filled, and evidence-free (i.e., very few identify customers that have benefited from their technology). I can’t imagine these articles generate many leads.

If they did, why are budgets for them apparently being slashed today?

To be sure, custom publishing nonetheless remains a big business in the U.S. IT vendors publish hundreds of white papers every year. And in 2008, business-to-business marketers in the U.S. will spend an estimated 30% of their marketing budgets on “custom content” (email newsletters, white papers, customer case studies, blogs, etc.), according to a March study by Junta42 and BtoB magazine. (To see the details, go here: http://www.junta42.com/resources/Business_to_Business_Custom_Publishing_Research/)

Technology vendors do need to tell their target customers that their products have value. They do need to provide evidence that they understand the operations of their customers' business that their technology improves. But they need to do so in a convincing way.

I’d love to hear from the community that produces these publications – the ghostwriters, marketers, PR agencies, IT research companies and computer publishing firms (or anyone else involved in this business). Is your business off? What do you think of the product you’re producing? Does it generate quality leads? How would you improve it?

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Why Your CEO Should Blog

There are a fast-increasing number of blogs in professional services. But few of those bloggers appear to be from the people who run these firms.

I recently came across one very interesting exception: the CEO of Indian outsourcing firm HCL Technologies, a $1.9 billion firm. Vineet Nayar's blog is remarkable on many fronts: for his candor, for the number of posts, for his seeming passion for blogging (although there doesn't appear to be new posts since June).

Check it out: http://vineet.hclblogs.com/

The blog allows HCL employees, clients and prospective clients to better get inside Vineet's head. And he blogs a lot about the kind of company HCL is and is becoming.

From his writings, Vineet appears very employee-focused. I admire his willingness to publicly air his -- and his employees' -- views on HCL's work and work environment.

Do any of you have CEOs who blog? If so, what do they blog about? And what's been the external and internal impact of those blogs? And if they don't blog today, do you think they should?

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Why Display Ads Should Display Expertise

Two ads in today's Wall Street Journal show how professional firms should use advertising – not just to promote a brand image but also to plug specific insights and client work.

Accenture ran an ad in its continuing Tiger Woods series, a now 5-year-old campaign featuring the world’s premier golfer. The ad shows Tiger sizing up a putt, with the copy below the ball mentioning the firm’s research on 500 “high-performing” businesses and client experience. The jump page is www.accenture.com/research

EDS, in the same edition of the newspaper, ran an ad featuring its client work at Molson/Coors.

When they run advertisements, professional services firms should go beyond their brand positioning statements, especially when they are unmemorable, vague and non-distinctive. Why not point to a new piece of research or a client case study on a website to increase the chance that an expensive advertisement goes beyond the vague benefit of “brand enhancement” to actually generate specific inquiries about specific expertise?

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Can You Give Away Too Many Thoughts?

I recently received an email from a marketing person at a large professional services firm who lamented about an issue I have heard for 20 years: Some professionals in the firm worrying about giving away the firm's secrets in its various thought leadership marketing activities.

My response was (and will always be) this: If a client or competitor can figure out how to solve a certain problem by merely reading your article, presentation or even book, you don't have a defensible service. "Reengineering the Corporation" (Hammer and Champy) sold millions of copies in the 1990s, yet lots of consulting firms made lots of money helping companies reengineer their businesses. Many companies couldn't reengineer their processes just by reading the book.

Have you heard this concern -- that "we're giving away our secrets" -- at your professional services firm? And how have you responded?

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Horse Before the Cart

Hi to everyone who reads this blog -- everyone who wants to learn about and share their experiences and views about the emerging discipline of "thought leadership."

This is my second post but my first introduction to all of you -- i.e., what this blog will be about, who I am, and what I'd like to see from all of you readers. First, I'd like you to contribute because that's, in part, what makes blogging MUCH different than just writing and posting articles. The power of a blog, it seems to me, is not just for all of you to get inside my head but for everyone to get inside your heads.

This is my first blog, so please bear with me as I wrestle with what for me is a new medium. The medium at first does feel a little bit like my very early days as a business journalist and sports journalist. (I was a sportswriter in college and just out of college -- San Clemente Sun-Post in the late 1970s -- until I realized that good sportswriters were a dime a dozen.) I switched to business journalism in 1980 when I joined the Orange County Register in California. I loved the ability to write something and see my work in the next day's paper.

Now the "next-day's paper" is the next-minute's blog. Very powerful, and very scary.

Why does the world need one more blog? (Note: maybe it doesn't.) I have been involved in this field of "thought leadership marketing" for 21 years now. (You know something is emerging as a recognized field when it finally has a name that people recognize.) I was fortunate (and lucky) to have joined a management consulting firm (Index Group) in 1987 that had linked up with an ex-MIT computer science professor named Michael Hammer in a research program called PRISM. That program was where the reengineering concept emanated. Index the consulting firm converted it into a consulting practice, and reengineering became the blockbuster consulting concept of the 1990s.

So I was very, very lucky to have seen how the sausage was made -- how the reengineering concept was developed, packaged and marketed. And I got the wonderful opportunity to play a big role in marketing it.

Other consulting firms had been at the thought leadership game long before Index: McKinsey (McKinsey Quarterly has been around since 1964), Booz Allen and others. But none of them had created a blockbuster concept like reengineering. Index's revenue grew from ~$40 million in 1987 when I joined the firm to ~$250 million by 1995. What's more, reengineering had become a multbillion-dollar consulting industry (with firms like McKinsey, Cap Gemini, Accenture, and Deloitte all providing reengineering services).

I view thought leadership as a way for professional services firms of all types (not just consulting firms) to demonstrate their expertise to prospective clients, to give them a sample of their "smarts." Traditional marketing techniques such as advertising, brochures, trade show booths, etc., are not good ways to demonstrate a professional firm's expertise. An advertisement only allows you to declare your firm has some expertise.

There's a big difference between declaring you are the expert and demonstrating it. Clients want you to demonstrate you are a leading expert. Besides having great client references, the way to demonstrate you have expertise on some issue is to show your command of it in a 3,000-word article or 200-page book (or both and more). That's why publicizing research reports, publishing in Harvard Business Review, writing compelling business books, etc., etc., can help professional firms rise above the noise and grab client attention (and budget).

In this blog, I will share my experiences and views on thought leadership. I will point to exemplary things some professional firms are doing in the thought leadership domain, and things they SHOULD be doing to generate and market compelling ideas.

But I want to hear your views as well, and push everyone's thinking about this emerging and exciting discipline.

Welcome aboard.

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The lightbulb goes on!

We had a great session on Thursday morning with the New England Chapter of the Professional Marketing Forum in Boston. The topic was "Establishing the Digital Relationship."

Tim Parker of my firm (The Bloom Group) presented on the use of Web 2.0 technologies by professional services firms. Here is Tim's presentation:

2008 Bloom Group Website Study

view presentation

Doug Cornelius of Goodwin Procter, a law firm, told us about his experiences of blogging on knowledge management and on his legal specialty, real estate finance, for law firms for 18 months.

Establishing the Digital Relationship

view presentation

And Yuval Zukerman of interactive marketing agency Molecular Inc. gave his presentation, "So You Have a Blog. Now What?"

So You Have A Blog: Now What?

view presentation (tags: blog social network web)

I think everyone came away without a strong impression that if some people in their firm weren't already blogging, they should be (including me)! So thanks to Tim, Doug and Yuval for truly demonstrating the need for people in professional services firms to blog. And (especially) for pushing me into the blogosphere.

Here I go ...

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