Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Rattle and Pedal, Divergent Thoughts on Marketing and Growing Professional Services Firms. Your hosts are Jason Mlicki and Jeff McKay.

Jason Mlicki:
So to all our listeners, I want to make it very clear that I, Jason, picked today’s topic. A week or so ago, Jeff and I were going back and forth on what topics we should cover and I said we should definitely talk about marketing through the COVID-19 crisis, through the pandemic. And his retort back to me was, “I don’t want to do that.” No, no, he didn’t say that. But you basically said you didn’t really want to talk about that because you thought it was newsjacking. And I fundamentally disagree with that. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today is all the marketing around COVID-19. Is it much needed useful advice or is it glorified newsjacking? And you know where I stand, I’ll make my case. I’m sure Jeff will do the like. And in the end, I think we’re going to disagree yet agree in the end as we usually do. So what do you think about all that?

Jeff McKay:
Well said. Let’s jump into this news story. Let’s jack this news story.

Jason Mlicki:
Ah, no, no, no, no, no. Before we do that, actually, let’s define newsjacking because some people may not be familiar with the term. And I have a very specific moment that to me is newsjacking, but maybe you can define what you mean by newsjacking.

Jeff McKay:
Oh, newsjacking to me is taking some social media flurry story and putting your brand associated with it because it’s the number one or number two trending issue on a social media issue.

Jason Mlicki:
So to me, the quintessential example of effective newsjacking was the Oreo cookie ad that was run during the 2013 Superbowl. And I have this up online from an article that David Meerman Scott wrote about it. And that was when they had the blackout at the Superbowl and there was no power in the dome and everyone jumped on social media and Oreo kind of stole the day with this on the moment ad that said, “You can still dunk in the dark.” And they got tons of social lift off that. And that, to me, is sort of the quintessential example of newsjacking. A relatively insignificant event, 30 minutes of blackout in a Superbowl game and using it as an opportunity to insert your brand and kind of get some awareness and visibility. And so to me, that’s one of the best examples of newsjacking. And I guess I would agree, I’m not a huge fan of newsjacking in general either.

Jason Mlicki:
I think it’s sort of … It’s certainly effective for consumer brands. That’s a really effective campaign and strategy for Oreo. It’s lighthearted. It worked in a great moment. But I would not describe anything that’s going on around us right now as being what you just described as newsjacking at all. I look around and I see an economy where the travel industry, Marriott’s off 75% in it’s revenue. American Airlines, it’s flights are 15% full. The restaurant industry lost 100% of revenue in five days. We have over three million people declaring for unemployment in a week and we are now being told that it’s feasible that upwards of a 100,000 to 200,000 people may perish from this in our country. So I look around and see an economy that is basically seized up. There are significant issues for many businesses with cashflow, there are very difficult decisions that business leaders have to make right now about the future of their business, the future of their firms, the employment that they’re going to have. Are they going to lay people off? Are they going to furlough them?

Jason Mlicki:
And so to me, this is one of the most significant moments that I’ve ever been a part of as a business leader. And I think now more than ever, firms need to step into the void because clients need advice more than they’ve ever needed from sound and trusted resources. And so to me, saying that I’m going to step into this void and deliver useful, fact-based, intelligent advice on how to navigate through one of the most difficult business experiences that any business leaders ever had, calling that newsjacking is, to me, just not accurate. It’s not an accurate statement of what’s happening. So that’s my case.

Jeff McKay:
And a solid case it is. And I would be hard pressed to refute it, but let’s jump in to how you actually execute that because it’s the execution, to me, that differentiates newsjacking from actual value add communication and client service delivery. And I think that’s where most of this has fallen down. So let’s talk about that.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah, and I did a webinar on this. I don’t know when this podcast will publish it. That webinar went live about a week ago. And the way I grouped it up, that particular webinar was one on adjusting your thought leadership agenda for the pandemic. And the way I framed it in that talk was good examples and bad examples. And the bad examples all fell into kind of one group of firms that are just talking all about themselves. They’re just kind of going out there and saying, “Yeah, we’re practicing social distancing. Yeah, we’ve got cloud computing and we’re working remotely. And yeah, we’re still available to take your calls.” It’s a very us centric message about everything that they’re doing and that they’re going to be fine and they’re here for you and they’re sort of out of touch with reality. There’s a phrase that’s floated around about being tone deaf and that’s the way I described that is that these people are tone deaf. They’re either saying nothing so they’re ignoring it as if it’s a non event, which I think is probably worse than jumping in and saying something bad. Or they’re saying something that’s so firm centric.

Jason Mlicki:
I use tons of examples in that webinar of just poor communications coming out of companies of all types, but certainly a lot of professional services firms. So that, to me, the is the bad side of the equation, the folks that are just sort of making it all about them and not making it all about the client and having both empathy of the client’s unique situation and then, quite frankly, having valuable, useful advice to bring to the table to help the client deal through this. Because there are a lot of firms, and we’ll talk more about this as well, there are a lot of firms right now that in my humble opinion, at the edges of their firms, are out of touch with reality as to what’s actually happening in the real marketplace and with their clients. And marketers should be scared to death that the edges of their firms are having the absolute wrong conversations right now.

Jeff McKay:
That’s what I’m talking about when I say I don’t want to talk about newsjacking and in those types of firms and approaches, and I would say more than the majority of firms have been doing that. Because I think the human psyche is one, “Well, we have to do something. So anything is better than nothing.” Which is wrong because you could take a second to actually step back and breathe, which a lot of firms are not. They’re operating out of a panic mindset. I think you nailed the context for what firms should be doing. So I think one of the first things from my perspective, and I don’t know if you want to jump into how I would approach this or how we would approach this or you want to set the-

Jason Mlicki:
We’ll do a little bit of both. I mean, so before we go to how to approach this, I want to just share one more example of how not to approach it. And I’m going to be really critical here, very critical, because I want to shock firms to realize what’s really could be happening inside their firms, especially large firms. So about a week and a half ago now, I had a conversation scheduled with my CPA. So this would have been, in terms of published dates, this would have been about maybe March 24th, I believe. Now in full disclosure, this meeting was scheduled probably two weeks in advance of that, maybe three weeks in advance of that. But March 24th, you think about this, the economy now has basically been halted. You’ve got stay in place orders in place, certainly in Ohio and all across the country. And I have, over the last five days of that window, I have clients at every level of continuum from freaking out to relatively calm. And I’m coaching them and working with them to think through how to respond, how to handle this moment. And I have a conversation with my CPA who, mind you, we’re a small business but our CPA represents a top 10 firm. I’m not going to name the firm but represents a top 10 firm. And you want to know the conversation we had that day, Jeff, what it was about?

Jeff McKay:
Tax filing. What?

Jason Mlicki:
It was about my depreciation schedule and my cashflow from 2019.

Jeff McKay:
Oh gosh.

Jason Mlicki:
Three months before. So at the end, I just had to ask him a little bit about this SBA act that has subsequently been passed since. Doesn’t know anything about it. Okay? Now two weeks later, now I’m getting some content from that firm that’s starting to lean into this a little bit. I can’t say how useful it is. I haven’t spent that much time with it. But my point in sharing this story is how many conversations like that have been had at the edges of these relatively big firms over the last three weeks? And how much damage is that doing to the reputation of those firms and those individuals? And I’ll be honest, what’s the likelihood that my CPA is probably going to get removed this year? High. Very high. And that’s a relationship has been in place for over 20 years.

Jason Mlicki:
So I just want to emphasize the gravity of this for firms. That the ones that are sitting there thinking, “We’re not sure what to do,” that’s probably the first place, one of the first places you got to start is think about what are the conversations being had on the edge of the firm here that I’m not privy to and I don’t know what’s going on? So, okay, let’s get off that and let’s start, let’s focus on the good side. I share that story in full disclosure. I mean, I’m not naming names, but it was really a disheartening conversation to see how, quite frankly, out of touch the so-called trusted advisor is to really what’s happening around my business and my clients and the economy and everything. Right?

Jason Mlicki:
And I think that that’s happening a lot right now for firms and all types and all sizes. But maybe less now when we’re … Because we’re recording on April 1st, so the last two weeks, a lot of people have internalized this and those conversations are probably changing, in all fairness. But that’s pretty bad place to be nine days ago. Let’s talk about what you should be doing. Let’s talk about the good side here. You were going to set up and talk about kind of your recommendations and I’ll have some thoughts from our side too or what we’ve been doing. I’ll put it that way.

Jeff McKay:
Well, I think from a strategic perspective, right, this is a firm leadership issue. It’s not a marketing issue. It’s not a communications issue. And I split it into kind of two separate at the beginning, but integrated at the end parts. The first thing that leaders do is they have to take care of their firm and their employees and they need to think through how is this impacting my firm? As you described, is it going to impact my cashflow? What’s the risk exposure from clients canceling projects, postponing projects? And we talked about this so serendipitously about the pipeline cliff with Mark Wainwright a couple of episodes ago. But what’s going to be the impact on my business? And that starts at a macro level, but then it cascades down functionally into marketing. For example, did you have big events planned? Had you had major ad purchases or whatever you have spent money on? The smart leaders are going through their plans and looking where they can save cash, cancel, postpone, reschedule, whatever the case may be. So there’s this internal dimension.

Jeff McKay:
Then there’s the external dimension and that’s how is this going to impact my customers? What’s going to happen to their environment? And so narrowing that out, right? Right. And figuring out, how is this going to impact? I mean, and it’s going to impact, depending on your markets, very differently. And you did a wonderful job of talking about restaurants and travel. Those are very much impacted. I have lots of clients. I mean, their revenues are going to go up in this crisis because their clients need them more. I have others where they’re going to take a serious hit as well, but it’s not the same communication going out to all of them. Right?

Jason Mlicki:
No, you’re absolutely right. And I think that that’s probably the other piece of the bad that I didn’t mention was that some of the content or messages you see coming across are ones that are out of touch. And the webinar, I showed some of those examples of companies that are reaching out to me to tell me about their COVID movements, companies I haven’t done business with in over 20 years, I haven’t heard from in 15. So there’s sort of this out of touch. It’s almost like there’s also this … There’s a tech moment occurring here for a lot of firms in terms of do they have the marketing ops in place to actually understand their databases and who they’re communicating to and how they’re communicating to them? And are they making good decisions about that or are they kind of running business as usual and quite frankly, alienating clients kind of like … I mean, I described that one experience with a little bit of vitriol. I don’t really mean it to be that negative, but it was just more try to kind of give the shock effect to firm leaders about, really, some of the things that are probably playing out around them that they’re just not seeing, they’re not aware of.

Jeff McKay:
And that’s an excellent telltale sign for a managing partner or practice leader about how ineffective their marketing is. Because I know exactly what’s happening inside those firms is they’re saying, “We have to get this message out to all of our clients.” And they’re not taking the time to segment the clients and make the communications relevant because it will take too long because their systems are so weak to do that. And they’d rather just get it out in air on a shotgun approach than a rifle. And it does reputational damage. And it just annoys clients because what we haven’t said, and I think this is very relevant, it’s very important, is these communications that are going out need to answer some fundamental questions before they go out. And the first one is, what problem am I solving with this communication? And for whom? And what do I want the audience to know or do after they’ve read it, if they’ve even read it? And why should this communication come from me or my firm? And there needs to be honest self reflection about am I doing this for self-serving reasons to, as you described, some of those brands talking about themselves? Or am I trying to take advantage of the situation? Or, and I think this is the most important question, is this information helpful?

Jeff McKay:
And helpful is in the eye of the beholder. And a lot of firms go awry in these communications because they don’t understand the context in which it’s being read. And the communications need to meet some very specific criteria. And that is it needs to be relevant. And we’ve talked about this in the past, Jason, about brand awareness versus brand relevance. Is your brand relevant to deliver a particular type of information best to a client? And you gave an excellent example with the accounting firm. I would expect information around CARE or SBA loans to be coming from a accounting firm. I would not expect it to be coming from a software firm or an architectural firm or something like that. Right? So if you’re going to communicate the COVID-19 crisis impact, you need to be doing it within the confines of your brand relevance.

Jeff McKay:
Second, it needs to be specific. Just give me the most specific stuff that you can, I don’t need generic stuff. If I’m in the travel industry or the restaurant industry, give it to me in the context of that, not some generic business framework. And then finally, and you detailed this one really well, it needs to be timely, right? When you needed to talk about this, your accountant was not timely. Coming two weeks later is not useful. And we’ve talked about this on other podcasts, the innovative, timely, helpful thought leadership is the stuff I haven’t seen before. So getting there first is part of the timeliness and relevance of this, but most firms don’t think in those contexts.

Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Rattle and Pedal, Divergent Thoughts on Growing your Professional Services Firm. Your hosts are Jason Mlicki, principal of Rattleback, the marketing agency for professional services firms. And Jeff McKay, former CMO and Founder of strategy consultancy, Prudent Pedal. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by telling a friend and rating us on iTunes. Thank you. Now back to Jason and Jeff.

Jason Mlicki:
This crisis has definitely challenged our preconceived notions on timeliness in ways we’ve not seen before. So it’s hard to imagine a situation where I rely on a lot of different business sources and economic data in order to produce some of the things that I write. And our webinar was a good example of that. I pulled from an economics group called the Institute for Trend Research to really kind of understand sort of the economic impact of this at a countrywide level. My point in saying that is I pulled from data on a Friday for a webinar on a Wednesday and I’m four days removed. I’m kind of prefacing this thing saying, “Well, this data is four days old.” And in normal economic terms, you would never be concerned about that. In the normal economic cycles you would say, “Well, economic periods are much longer than that.” But that’s sort of the compression that we’re operating in is. really some of the fastest timelines we’ve ever seen.

Jason Mlicki:
So, I mean, one of the things we’ve been doing, and I was doing this instinctively when Bob kind of built a framework around it. Instinctively, the thing I was doing with clients was saying, “Look, we have to take a look at, from a thought leadership perspective, what are the problems that we can solve for our clients? And loosely, what are some of the problems, the biggest problems they have right now? And how do we lean into that void and help them in that crisis?” And Bob build a framework around this. He calls it a crisis focus framework and it’s a really simple two by two classic consultant’s matrix. And we’re in the fist of co-authoring an article with that at the heart of it. And it’s basically this idea of really looking at the severity of the problems that the clients face and the speed of the solution. And really, then trying to steer your thought leadership towards the top left corner where there are big problems with relatively rapid solutions, trying to find those inside of your solution set and inside of your client base. And then really kind of steer your thought leadership towards that.

Jason Mlicki:
And in hindsight, over the last two weeks, I had been instinctively taking clients that are saying, “Okay guys, let’s look at your solutions and let’s look at how we need to flex those solutions to talk to the real problems of right now and how we can help solve this.” Especially in situations where some of our clients, they’re facing hurdles they’ve never faced before. And they’re facing things like they have normally delivered consulting services on site, on location, and all of the sudden, there’s no movement of personnel, there’s no access to client facilities. So suddenly, they have to figure that out. And it’s not just a function of how you have a conversation, it’s a function of literally how you apply your advice and rethinking that. So they’re sort of struggling to rethinking solution design while rethinking, what are we saying to the marketplace simultaneously? I mean, to be honest, that’s where we’ve been spending all of our time in the last two weeks is just with clients working through that one at a time saying, “Okay, everything that we had planned editorially from a thought leadership perspective, I’m not going to say everything is out the window. It’s an extreme. But it’s definitely on pause.”

Jason Mlicki:
A lot of times, I described to my webinar, it’s like if you can imagine your editorial calendar, now cut it down the middle and push the stuff to the right out three months and then insert a whole new editorial calendar in the interim three months. That’s basically what you’re having to do with no notice to figure out how you’re going to stay relevant in this cycle. And there’s firms that have been all over this.

Jason Mlicki:
The firm I used as an example, probably a good small firm, I think these guys have been so solid is Array Architects. I don’t know if you follow what they’ve been doing, but wow. Early on, they took their analytics team and they did an analysis of where there would be lack of bed capacity, so not enough beds for the nature of the need. Now this is a firm that’s got a healthcare focus already. And then they mapped out on a timescale when those capacity problems would emerge across the entire country. Then they visualized it, color coded on a chart. Then they wrapped a solution around it basically to help hospitals do a bed assessment to figure out and how likely they were and when they would run out of beds so that they could plan accordingly. So it’s like, to me, that’s probably one of the best examples of just, to your point, very relevant, very timely, right on point, incredibly useful, and all backed up with, “Hey, we can help you figure this out.” Which at the end of the day, is a win win for both parties, right? The hospital needs help badly in this area and of course Array is here to deliver that help.

Jason Mlicki:
And there’s other examples like that. I mean, I think McKinsey’s been unbelievable. I mean, I’ve said I think this might be McKinsey’s finest hour in the world of thought leadership in that they were out in front of this thing earlier than anybody with useful implications on business. And they’d just cut across every functional area, every specific role, and really helping clients just, you can just see it through reading everything, think through all the dimensions of this from every angle, to your point, to get to relevancy at every level. It’s staggering how effective they’ve been. It’s almost like they were built for this moment in ways that most firms just aren’t. And it’s been a real marvelous thing to see in reality, to see how effective they’ve been at bringing forth just valuable, useful information at kind of every functional level of an organization and every type of organization you can imagine and at a pace that’s remarkable. So those are two of the big ones I would highlight. If you’re looking for examples of how to get this right, those are certainly good places to start.

Jeff McKay:
I think those are two great examples. I agree with you with McKinsey for sure. I thought their coverage has been really good. And the Array is an excellent example. I have a client that specializes in the integration of healthcare tech. It was in a very similar situation. I’m curious, when Array took that to the market, was their strategy to just speak to clients? Or were they going to prospects as well?

Jason Mlicki:
I’m not privy to their internal strategies so I don’t know. My sense is both, because I have seen them actually get the … I mean, they’ve got sort of press pickup from this as well because it’s useful. They just released another analysis where they were looking at doctor shortages using the exact same methodology. And so, that’s useful information for the population at large right now, understanding, well, what do we do here? To me and when I look at that, what they’re doing, there’s a short term and long term gain there. The short term gain is absolutely there. They are incredibly helpful to their hospital clients and prospects and they’re probably getting business. They’re probably getting short term revenue that other firms wouldn’t be. But then long term, the reputational lift has got to be phenomenal. Where all of the sudden, they’re stepping into the void and they’re helping. And that’s incredibly valuable. It’s hard to understate the value of that right now for firms and really any brand that’s stepping in to help in whatever way they can. That’s going to pay off in spades over the long haul for organizations that are voices right now.

Jason Mlicki:
Because to me, I mean, the biggest thing that I’ve tried to do from our standpoint for Rattleback and the things that we’re doing from this podcast, the webinar series that I’m in the midst of, to the article that I’m co-authoring with Bob, it’s all about just trying to get in and help people understand what’s happening around them and hopefully give them a way to navigate through it, hopefully help them have a voice of reason through the chaos that they can lean on from a marketing perspective. And knowing that if I can do that, we’ll get our fair share of business, whatever business is out there in this moment and whatever businesses out there on the other side, because we’ll be seen as a valuable credible resource. So that’s probably the number one thing I try to tell clients is there’s going to be a lot of opportunity on the other side of this if you’re positioned for it. But as Bob Buday would point out, there’s a lot of opportunity inside the hurricane too and don’t miss out on on that. And I don’t mean that opportunistically where you’re trying to, like you said, gain from it, but more you’re trying to be helpful, and by being helpful, that creates opportunity for you. So it’s a win-win is what you’re looking for. You’re looking for win-wins.

Jeff McKay:
Yeah. Go into your spam folder and whatever approaches you see in there, don’t use those approaches.

Jason Mlicki:
That’s easy though, right?

Jeff McKay:
Yeah. Yeah. And I think Array and McKinsey provide excellent, clear cut examples of what you could do. There is a crossover, I think, that marketers need to be attuned to, and this is why I asked you the question about are they going after clients or are they going after prospects? The relevance in a given marketplace to talk about a specific issue or solution is really important. And of course it’s obvious that you need to start with your own clients. But I think it’s important for brands to also keep in mind, if you overstep and you start pursuing prospects that don’t know you, have never had an interaction, have not established trust, even though you have relevance and credibility in a given market space, you may not have it with them. You have to tread very softly in that regard and you have to be helpful. And it’s very hard when a buyer is panicked, in chaos, afraid about their own job, don’t want to make a career limiting move. How you approach them and talk to them about a solution is really important and you have to be careful there. And to me, it’s not a blast email and it’s not necessarily some junior sales development rep trying to do lead gen. There are better ways of reaching into organizations in this case.

Jason Mlicki:
You make a good point there. And I actually think the bigger risk for that is on the biz dev side, to be brutally honest, in that if you’ve got an active subscriber base of people consuming your thought leadership and/or you’re sharing that thought leadership through social channels right now, there are a lot of people. I mean, we’re finding certainly that in this compressed window, there are more people entering our marketing system than there would have been otherwise because as we’re publishing useful stuff, people that I’ve never heard of are coming in, right? And so those people are going to be receptive to the message that are coming to them. But I think the bigger risk to your point is that salesperson on the edge trying to start that conversation and not doing it with empathy and respect and not necessarily maybe entering with the right mindset of what they want to talk about.

Jason Mlicki:
Because you do see some of these messages that are coming at me. People that want to work with us on certain things where it’s very clear the timing is very poor, but the person delivering the message either isn’t thinking that through or maybe it’s automated and the system is doing it without any oversight. These are moments when those things get exposed. The stuff that you ignore otherwise now all of a sudden becomes a real point of frustration for people.

Jason Mlicki:
Well, we are well beyond time. So I want to close us out. But I’m going to close this out this way. Here’s what I want to do. I want to ask, so now that we’ve had the conversation, is marketing in this moment useful, needed advice or is it glorified newsjacking? I’ll give you the chance to pick your side. I’ve picked my side a long time ago. I’m pretty outlandish about it.

Jeff McKay:
There are often three areas, and I talk about this in why partners don’t understand marketing, three areas that are often confused within firms. And they are HR internal communications, corporate communications, and marketing. While they overlap, they are very different and very distinct disciplines, audiences, and messages. And what separates them to me is strategic thinking and execution and being very clear about what you’re trying to achieve in each one of those. Most firms don’t delineate between those three and they all get mashed together and that’s when problems happen. So I’m going to say Jason is right. This is probably one of the most articulate podcasts for you. I definitely love having the passionate Jason back. Jason gives very good advice here. Listen to his webinar for sure. My advice is-

Jason Mlicki:
What’s your advice? Go ahead.

Jeff McKay:
My advice is breathe, think strategically, don’t just react.

Jason Mlicki:
And that’s fabulous.

Jeff McKay:
Make sure your communications are helpful, they’re relevant for your brand, they’re specific, and they’re timely. And then all the rest of what Jason said.

Jason Mlicki:
I don’t think we’ve done this podcast, and maybe this would be the next one we should do, is we should talk about the delineation between marketing and communications. Because in some ways, the very titling of this episode is not correct to what we’re talking about. It’s sort of like a mismatch and we’re probably creating some confusion. Because I think that generally, term marketing is used to describe one thing in firms, but that’s not what real marketing is. And you and I would both agree on that. So we should definitely do that next time. So all right, man, I’m going to let you go. We ran long. Appreciate you soldiering through my energy levels on this one and I hope that the listeners enjoyed it and could sense the real tension in our conversation, but also sense, find some useful value in the whole thing.

Jeff McKay:
Well, I hope they had time to listen to it given all the other COVID-19 communications that they’ve gotten.

Jason Mlicki:
Well, they’re-

Jeff McKay:
Probably not. So thank you to the one listener.

Jason Mlicki:
But they’re all interested in knowing what their second cousin’s husband’s daughter’s laser engraving company is doing through this. Right? Anyway, all right, man. I’ll talk to you next time.

Jeff McKay:
Okay, buddy.

Speaker 1:
Thank you for listening to Rattle and Pedal, Divergent Thoughts on Marketing and Growing Professional Services Firms. Find content related to this episode at rattleandpedal.com. Rattle and Pedal is also available on iTunes and Stitcher.