Transcript

Jason Mlicki:
This is Jason. Do you want to be on Rattle and Pedal? We have a great audience and we think you should know one another. So come on Rattle and Pedal and share a success or a mistake. Visit rattleandpedal.com/peerstories to learn more. Now on with today’s show.

Announcer:
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 Jeff, today we’re going to talk about digital publishing, the digital editorial process I guess as I’m starting to call it. We’re going to be doing a little bit of working out loud and I’ll talk more about what I mean by that as we get into this, because some of the things we’re going to talk about today I haven’t actually really figured out. I’m sort of hypothesizing right now and I’m processing them in the moment.

Jeff McKay:
Does that mean we’re going to talk about content marketing?

Jason Mlicki:
Well, to the extent thought leadership is a subset of content marketing, I guess we are. I learned the hard way that they are very separate and distinct things over the years. But yes, I suppose we are. We are going to talk about content. We’re going to definitely talk about content, that’s for sure.

Jeff McKay:
Well, you know listeners of this program know how much I abhor that term content marketing because professional services is about thought leadership. To label it content I think does a disservice, and I think where we’re going today with some of the big thoughts you’ve been having around thought leadership since your event, I think it’s very different than what most digital marketing is and what average professional services firms are doing or even thinking about. So let’s not veer too far into content marketing and let’s keep this thing more strategic.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah, maybe just as reference to that comment, I wrote an article sometime last summer, and we can put it in the show notes, around what thought leadership is relative to content marketing. Off the top of my head, I will probably not do a very good job of describing this because I’ve had this question come up sometimes. And to me, I always describe content marketing as stuff that starts with how to, how to do this, how to do that, things that can be relatively simple problems with relatively straightforward step-by-step solutions. And to me, thought leadership tends to be dealing with complex problems that don’t have clear cut straightforward solutions, but are issues that firms or companies need to take a position on if they want to be relevant in the space in which their operating. So that’s to me the separation. I don’t know if that’s black and white or more gray, but that’s how I’ve tried to frame it in my head over the years and that seemed to help a lot. So maybe that’s just a reference point for listeners.

Jason Mlicki:
So yes, I guess in that context we’re definitely talking about the latter. We’re talking about thought leadership. Now, in terms of output, when you say content is a bad word, I mean everything that these processes yield is some form of content, right? If that’s the word that you choose to apply to it, whether it’s a video or a podcast or an article, I mean it’s a piece of content that someone somewhere you want to consume. But, to your point, the intent is probably different, the use case is different, the process to get to it is very different, and that’s maybe sort of the topic of our conversation today is I’ll say breaking apart and rethinking the process that most thought leadership marketers and firms that invest in thought leadership marketing have been using in some cases maybe for decades and the need for that to essentially be rethought entirely and possibly even re-resourced in some situations.

Jeff McKay:
Cool. Let’s jump into it then because I like the sound of that.

Jason Mlicki:
We’ll try to keep you engaged here. I’ve been thinking a lot about this and a lot of this was I have a webinar, I don’t know when this will publish. I have a webinar on this topic. This was the kernel of my talk at our November, our fourth annual thought leadership conference. And I’ve been thinking a lot about this notion that I feel like we have been using a very analog editorial process, a very linear process that has sort of existed for decades, but has essentially been ported to the digital environment, oftentimes without a whole lot of thought as to what that means. At the early days of the internet, it gave us a lot of the outputs, the analog outputs in a digital medium.

Jason Mlicki:
So even the lowly blog, the blog that I mean, honestly, we’ve built our agency on the blog, but if you think about the experience of a blog, you’re basically taking a reading experience that was exceptional offline with a magazine and you’re porting it to a digital medium and you’re making it worse. I mean, the experience of reading and consuming a blog is actually worse than reading as something in a magazine. So we took an inherently offline experience, we ported it online, and we didn’t really improve it, at least not for a while. And you think about that’s the artifact of the process, and the process that yielded the article was linear.

Jason Mlicki:
The process that yields thought leadership output is inherently linear. It’s got a variety of steps and you can argue what they are, but there’s binding the topic, so creating a definition of what topic we want to study and how we want to study it. There’s a research phase, whether it’s primary or secondary research, but there has to be a collection of research done to inform the firm’s position on the topic. There’s an argument shaping phase which yields, okay, what’s our point of view and how are we going to tell a compelling story that makes someone want to read it? If we’ve got primary research, how do we bring that research to life and make it compelling and interesting? How does it tell the story we’re trying to tell? And that usually historically has yielded a content asset. It could be three months of work, it could be six months of work to go through that process to yield research reports, a white paper, maybe an article in a trade journal, maybe it’s the basis for a book which would take even longer, but it’s a very linear process that goes through very clear defined steps.

Jason Mlicki:
And a lot of times the individuals involved in a large and complex organization or a large and complex thought leadership program shift as you go through that process. There’s maybe an editor or a practice leader that’s leading the process, but there’s a researcher that runs the research component, there’s a writer that’s going to work with the expert on shaping the argument, and then there’s the writer that produces the output and then there’s a designer. So there’s like all of these steps and they’re all somewhat connected, but a lot of times not. And then the yield is inherently analog. The yield frequently is this research report. It’s still a big honkin PDF download. And that’s the moment when firms generally start to think about digital publishing. They start thinking about, “Okay, now how do we break this thing apart?” How do we turn this into a video? How do we turn this into a podcast? How do we turn this into something other than what we’ve just poured six months of energy into producing?

Jason Mlicki:
And then one step downstream from that is the marketing of it. I mean a lot of times those are separate, especially in large firms. The people that are developing the content aren’t even the ones publishing it or promoting it. And so it’s like now we’ve got this asset and it’s handed off to someone else to take it into the marketplace somehow. And they may or may not have been involved at the earliest stages of this process.

Jason Mlicki:
To me, that’s sort of the quintessential linear analog model that I would argue a lot of firms still use. And it’s the model that I think needs to be broken apart and entirely rethought. So let me pause there for a second because I just went on a five minute diatribe ,and I want you to be able to just to kind of comment on that and say, okay, here’s what I heard or I agree or disagree or whatever.

Jeff McKay:
I like where you’re going with this. I think I like where you’re going with this.

Jason Mlicki:
You’ll see whether [crosstalk 00:07:41].

Jeff McKay:
Yeah, well a couple of images jumped in my head as you were describing that. And the first one as you were describing the analog was the scientific method. This is how we hypothesize, we do a controlled group of research to isolate a set of variables and causation to produce an outcome that is repeatable. And that’s very much kind of the academic world type of approach to research and thinking, and I would argue professional services are very similar to academic institutions in many ways.

Jeff McKay:
But as you were describing, I’m like, yeah, that makes perfect sense because I want validity, I want to know that this is real or true or however you measure it. I want to know that I’m not just pulling something out of thin air. But when I think as a client, as a buyer of the best thinking, the type of thought leadership that I want to consume is very much akin to a client meeting where you have a group of people in a room brainstorming, talking about an issue, defining the issue in real time with a lot of different opinions with really nothing controlled at all. But in my experience, some of the best learning comes from that type of environment, and it’s a chaotic process, it’s not a linear process at all, but is that what you’re thinking of is this real time interaction and publication, if you will, of this type of thinking?

Jason Mlicki:
Yes, and you raise another layer to this which is really interesting, which is, so I’ve described that as the thought leadership marketer, the function that is producing thought leadership on behalf of the firm, has been working in the shadows. They work in the shadows for six months on this research study and they go through this rigorous journey to develop compelling marketplace insights that then publish, and the research occurred six months ago. It doesn’t reach publish until today. I feel like that’s an analog process that has to be split apart and rethought and instead of… I’ve described it as instead of being linear, it needs to be multi-directional and it needs to be working out loud, which is why I opened this section that way.

Jason Mlicki:
I don’t necessarily yet know how exactly to do this, but to your point to some extent the marketplace is taking us into a compression. They want to compress that process and get obviously insights to market faster and the client, like you said, maybe wants to sort of maybe even cocreate. You almost described a situation where the client is cocreating thought leadership, and that’s a whole other idea but it’s a good one.

Jason Mlicki:
But I sort of feel like when we’re seeing digital experiences, what we’re seeing is certainly the desire for shorter form content. We’ve talked about that. We’re also seeing things like real time video occurring much more frequently. So it could be a couple of practice leaders having a discussion, real time live web stream to either the client base or to the broader market around an issue, but they haven’t really fully vetted yet. They haven’t really fully framed their thinking on this yet or there’s not full governing research to prove their point quite yet. But you’re essentially inviting the client into the conversation before it’s fully baked and published.

Jason Mlicki:
In summary, I’ve described this as moving from a working in the shadows model to working out loud model, which kind of is where the content marketing universe has existed for a long time. There’s people on YouTube making a living just self casting short videos, inspirational videos on a daily basis. Yet in the world of thought leadership, I think that’s a very difficult thing and it’s one that’s not easily figured out and hence the process is so critical. So I don’t know if that made any sense.

Jeff McKay:
No, it makes a lot of sense. I guess you’re making a huge leap, because we’re both thinking of this on the fly. The one limitation of those videos, those YouTube videos, I think to a large degree is they’re one directional and if you have Facebook live or some YouTube live, yes, you can have interaction with your audience, but what ends up happening I think in those situations is the audiences are too large, the interaction has a delay to it, to a large degree it’s discombobulated because people have different agendas with their questions and what have you.

Jason Mlicki:
Those are interesting comments, but I would argue some of those are maybe limitations of the strategy that’s being applied, and I won’t talk too specifically, but there are certainly… The LinkedIn live video is a one to anybody proposition. If I’m going to publish LinkedIn live videos, anybody that follows me and anybody that shares that video with the world is invited in. Same thing with most publicly marketed webinars, the webinar we’re going to do in a few weeks. It doesn’t have to be that way, right? I mean you can have limited invitation events that are live stream videos that invite interaction with a very defined audience and certainly I am aware of firms doing that very, very well.

Jason Mlicki:
I think you’ve definitely hit on a strong chord of this, which is the desire from the client to be in a two way dialogue around this thought leadership, which ultimately, the interesting thing the way I’ve described this is I feel like the first evolution of digital publishing that took us from I guess I’ll just say ’08 to about today, I do feel like it’s like we’re producing radio for television because most of what’s been happening is we’re taking this incredibly interactive bi-directional medium, we’re forcing it into a one way delivery model and it’s against the nature of the medium. And when I say producing radio for television, it’s like, hey, television’s here. Why don’t we produce a radio show with no video? That makes no sense. But that’s I feel like what we’ve been doing for the last 10 years on almost every front is constantly producing the next article.

Jason Mlicki:
Some of its driven by things like Google search algorithm, which historically couldn’t read video content or audio content real well. So we all, if we care about search, fall back on I call it the lowly blog, the 3000 words a month blog series that we’ve built our agency on, right? That is not inherently digitally native, but it accomplishes a purpose. But you struck the chord on the key thing to this, which is that it’s multi-directional and that’s where the medium is going and it’s where the medium has always been. It’s just really now that maybe the bandwidth has made it more viable than ever before and firms have to figure out how to let the client in to the making of the sausage, so to speak, on the thought leadership front.

Jeff McKay:
A survey doesn’t do that?

Jason Mlicki:
I think you’re joking, right? I mean it does. We’ve been grappling with this as well in terms of what best practices in thought leadership research are, and I would argue that it’s rare that a firm puts all the pieces together to actually hit on all best practices, which to your point is a combination of a broad survey maybe mixed with a more narrow qualitative study. There’s just so many different layers to that.

Announcer:
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:
So to me, really I guess what I’m hypothesizing and what we’re trying to guide clients through right now is how to rethink that process, how to make it less linear, inherently less analog, less one directional, more multi-directional, more inherently digital, and I mean this sounds cliche, but more digital first so that the first output doesn’t necessarily need to be the finely polished research report. Maybe it’s a raw client only webcast that invites interaction. Maybe it’s a podcast. I don’t know necessarily, it could be different for every single situation, but the idea that the first output of a thought leadership program probably needs to hit the market sooner and be more interactive than it ever was, and that requires change in process.

Jeff McKay:
Yeah. I think you’re definitely right. I’ve been involved in some of those recently. ITSMA has a gross survey that they do and they turn around very quickly to respondents and share the findings with them on kind of a macro, raw data basis. And I think that’s cool. The whole turnaround time on it is maybe 30 to 45 days. I think that’s really cool. But even still as a client or a respondent, it still isn’t as relevant to me as I would like to have it.

Jeff McKay:
And I say that because the way you’re talking about this process and approach to thought leadership, it begs the question, thought leadership to do what? And normally that thought leadership is to build brand, thought leadership to generate demand, thought leadership to generate leads. And we get kind of focused on that as why we’re producing thought leadership, when really the ultimate consumer of that thought leadership is I’m reading it to get smarter to solve a problem for me here and now, or I’m reading this to get smarter so I could advance in my career or whatever. I think that the process that you’re describing is very much designed to do firm-centric stuff versus client-centric stuff.

Jason Mlicki:
No. So, I would disagree with all three of your outcomes. And we’ve talked about this a little bit in objectives in prior podcasts. If you’re approaching thought leadership to build demand, drive brand, or generating leads, you’re thinking about it wrong, I believe. We always talk about the objective of thought leadership is to educate and inform first and foremost, educate and inform clients on issues that matter. If you took that one layer up from that, you might say that the objective of thought leadership is to impart change. So if you’re trying to lean into a messy, difficult topic that companies are really struggling with and the essence is you’re trying to create change in the market on how they deal with that.

Jason Mlicki:
An example would be the challenger sale. We’ve talked about it so many times. I mean the essence of the challenger sale was to change the way companies sell. And if you really look at the essence of that, it was also to make a much better experience for the buyer, because a company that really embraces the challenger sale correctly delivers a much better buying experience for whatever it is they’re selling than they ever did in the old selling model.

Jason Mlicki:
So I would argue that ultimately, and this is an interesting thought, but just that the objective of thought leadership always needs to supersede the commercial interests of the firm on some level if you want to be successful with it. If you don’t do that, I think you’re going to be systematically disappointed because it’s the curiosity that drives the breakthrough insights and the sea changes in the market. But if at the end of the day it’s just I need 50 more leads, and that’s great, that’s a real need and that’s totally a thing and that’s super important inside of a firm, but if that’s the objective, like you said, it doesn’t feel very client-centric if I’m on the other side of that because I can kind of sense that and read through it.

Jeff McKay:
I think you’re absolutely right. I think clients pick up on it very quickly and we talked about this in the fall in love with the problem discussions we’ve had in the past. I would say what really should shape the process as you think about this, I think about attributes that describe or outline what you’ve just described and to me what I’m going to consume however I consume it and let’s say in a digital interactive way, as you said digital first, it has to be relevant, and by relevant I mean relevant to some issue or something of import to me.

Jeff McKay:
Two, I think it has to be highly personalized because there’s so much generic thought leadership/content out there and the research shows us people can’t really sort through or differentiate any of that because it’s so generic and it’s not relevant to me personally.

Jeff McKay:
Three, it has to be timely. And this gets back to what you said about that delay in the process. It could take six months from conception to hitting the market. I’ve always said the most innovative idea is the one I haven’t been exposed to as a client, even though it could be dated, if I’m seeing it for the first time because I just don’t get out enough. So timely is really important.

Jeff McKay:
Fourth, it gets to your point about thought leadership should be designed to educate, is that it needs to be understandable. And by understandable it needs to be presented, articulated in a way that’s understandable. But I need to be able to drive into it and ask questions that are relevant to me to make it understandable to me.

Jeff McKay:
And then the fifth one, and I think this is really one of the most important as well, I have to trust the person sharing it and the content itself, the thought leadership, the point of view that’s being presented. Because if I don’t trust it, what’s the point? And I have even gotten to a point when I do a Google search on any particular topic, I seldom take the first hit. I’ll scan down the list and look for a brand that I trust that’s speaking on a given topic and click there first.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah, that’s an interesting topic. I threw an extra one in as you were describing that and it’s memorability. When you think about-

Jeff McKay:
Good one.

Jason Mlicki:
Digital publishing essentially, what I’m describing as a shift from analog to digital publishing, is to me understandability and memorability are two of the biggest opportunities inside of the stuff. And we just know, we know from neuroscience research that our ability to retain long form written content is much lower than our ability to retain short form interactive content, video based content or something that’s highly visual. So as your understandable comes in as the ability to communicate a complex idea in a very simple visual that can be retained is critical.

Jason Mlicki:
An example I’ve used for this, and I don’t think I’ve shared this in our conversations, I know I wrote about it in an article was this idea that there’s a higher likelihood that someone can retain the illustration that’s used to impart the idea of the thought leadership than they have the ability to retain the actual content and the message. Yet, usually we do it the other way around. We write the article and then we think about how to visualize it. The only person I’ve actually stumbled into that does it the opposite way is David Baker. So David Baker will commission illustrations before he writes articles and so he sort of works from a collection of illustrations of the things he wants to write. And the interesting thing is I think it works really well for him, because I can literally remember some of his thinking as a consultant from the illustration that carries his story. And I would sort of challenge all firms to think about that for a minute.

Jason Mlicki:
How often is the design, the person responsible for visualizing this, at the front of the process? My suggestion is it’s probably almost never. Very rare that they’re at the front of that process, yet it’s the most memorable retainable thing in a written piece of content. We also know we retain visual interactive things better. So there’s a lot of layers to this. You definitely helped. I mean again, I think on some level we’re doing right here what I’m telling our clients that they need to be thinking about, is literally working the problem out loud with their audience and letting their audience almost interact with it and see how they respond.

Jason Mlicki:
I don’t have all the answers yet. I can tell you what doesn’t work. I mean we’ve tried to sort of blow up our process and reinvent it over the last 12 months and we’ve definitely found ways it doesn’t work and we’re grappling with that. Now we’re trying to really kind of narrow in on how do we actually do it successfully repeatably, which is the real central question. It’s one thing to do it once, but can you do it 10, 15, 20 times over and over again? And we’ve done it successfully a couple of times, but not as many times as I’d like.

Jeff McKay:
Dude, I think you’re onto something big here. I do, I really do. And the difficulty with it is most people are going to think, “Oh, well that already exists.” Like I said, on YouTube or Facebook live or whatever those things are there, but it’s really not because I don’t think that the process that you’re trying to refine is anywhere close to where it needs to be. And probably more important, Jason, is are professional services firms culturally prepared to do some of this stuff? Because you’re talking about taking a risk and putting your ideas out there before they’re fully baked. Whoa, that’s scary stuff for most professional services practitioners. They want to know the answer before they go in front of a client. They don’t want to look stupid, they don’t want to not have an answer for them and to say, “I’m wrestling with this,” is going to be really hard for a lot of people.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah. I don’t disagree in the least. There are things in this model that are cultural challenges inside firms. I mean sometimes there’s silos inside firms that make it very difficult to collapse these things. I mentioned earlier, but before we wrap, I mean just this notion that topic definition, content developments, writing, publishing, producing, and marketing are like separate functions that hardly talk to each other in a lot of firms and that’s a real thing. Collapsing that is going to be a cultural challenge. Getting better communication between those groups is going to be really critical and there are firms that are knocking those walls down. I mean, at our event we definitely… That was a recurring theme last year that there are folks that are responsible for editorial inside of large firms breaking down that barrier. Now smaller firms are going, “I’m kind of the one man show, one woman show.” The thought that these things are separate is hard to kind of contemplate, but I don’t think that the fact that the team is smaller necessarily means that those delineations aren’t there and that the linear process isn’t there, because it is.

Jeff McKay:
I was just going to say a smaller firm is probably at a greater advantage in this situation than a large firm.

Jason Mlicki:
I think they definitely.

Jeff McKay:
Because there aren’t going to be as many silos and fiefdoms to knock down.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah, they definitely are. Now, of course, the larger firm tends to be at an advantage because they have the ability to really produce deeper, more relevant insights often. Well, maybe not more relevant, but deeper, more vetted, more research based, pulling from a broader worldview perhaps. I would also argue smaller firms have the advantage of relevancy because they’re narrower usually, if they’re smart anyway.

Jeff McKay:
Yeah, and more data is becoming readily available for them, so perhaps they don’t need to make the investment in the same methodology of primary research.

Jason Mlicki:
All right, let’s wrap it up. I appreciate you going on this journey with me. We will keep unpacking this over time. You’ll see more on this from us. We have a webinar coming up. We’ll probably have research on this topic and we’ll be trying to kind of insert our voice into what we believe best practices to be over the next few months, so stay tuned.

Jeff McKay:
And, Jason, if somebody wants to interact with us directly, they could actually join us on the podcast because now we have peer stories and they can go to rattle and paddle… rattleandpedal.com/peerstories and come on and have a conversation. Join us in this. You’ll start hearing some of our listeners starting to come on. We had one just last week, Brian Caffarelli. And others will be coming on, so please queue up and join us in this conversation.

Jason Mlicki:
All right, we’ll let you go. Thanks Jeff.

Jeff McKay:
See you buddy.

Announcer:
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.