LinkedIn #3: Recommendations, endorsements

(Last of three parts)

Stuff, or fluff? Praise, or craze? Sincere, or cheer? Those are the kinds of questions you should ask about any LinkedIn recommendations or skill endorsements that pop up in your e-mail stack before you accept them into your LinkedIn profile. That’ll make it a professionally credible statement of your skills and achievements, rather than a touchy-feely flurry of Facebookish pats-on-the-back and right-ons.

Consider the following about all would-be recommenders and endorsers:

• How well do you know those people?
• What was the nature of your professional relationships with them?
• How closely did you work with them to give them a full, clear, well-rounded idea of the skills or talents for which they’re endorsing you?
• Would you use them as references for job interviews?
• Would they have enough to say about you if your job interviewer were to contact them?
• Do you feel you possess a significant level of the skills or talents for which they’re recognizing you to give you true credibility in those areas?
• How are they wording and phrasing their recommendations? Do they sound like the right stuff to advance your standing, or mere puff pieces to please and appease you?
• How much is too much, in terms of the number of skills (strong or weak) for which you’re being endorsed, and the number of people who are endorsing you for particular skills?

An endorsement page like this may wow your Facebook friends but may give pause to potential employers, partners or clients who may suspect an attempt to gussy up your profile with the equivalent of Facebook fame. So be careful whom and what you include in your LinkedIn laudations.

In his Personal Branding Blog, career development expert Jacob Share recommends these criteria in choosing who to recommend you:

1. The best recommendations are from people who actually employed you, e.g., a client or boss, because they directly observed, received and evaluated the work you did for them.
2. Useful recommendations can come from co-workers or business partners who witnessed your achievements firsthand or were directly affected by them in a positive way.
3. Sometimes useful recommendations can be provided by a friend, family member or fan who was impressed by your work — but be cautious of conflict-of-interest issues that could turn their recommendations into mere puff pieces.

Also be careful about how you solicit a recommendation from a LinkedIn connection. It’s a good idea to ask that person, “Do you feel you know enough about my skills and achievements in this company to recommend me on LinkedIn?” That way, you’re letting them think about what they want to say about you — or whether they’re qualified to say anything at all — before deciding whether or how to recommend you. Thus their recommendations would appear more sincere and would present your skills more believably in your profile.

Be equally careful about how you recommend or endorse others. If you want to recommend someone in the hope s/he’ll reciprocate, do the following:

• Think carefully about your answer. Rewrite it several times. Ask yourself if that would be the kind of recommendation you would want to receive.
• Back up your points about the person with actual achievements and/or skills in action you observed in that person as a client, boss, co-worker, business partner, etc.
• Keep the recommendation brief, say, 2-5 sentences of varied lengths. After all, short paragraphs rule in the attention-span-challenging world of cyberspace. Also, overlong recommendations may rouse suspicion of overpraise in viewers of your recommendee’s profile, particularly potential employers, clients, consultants and partners.

This recommendation is strong (worthy of its frame!), because it comes from the recipient’s client (“the best” on Jacob Share’s list) — who is also a 1st-level LinkedIn connection to her — and describes in specific detail the type of service she was performing for the client (immigration visa applications), the process of her service to the client (“answering every single of my questions”) and the product the client was happy with (“they have written all the reference letter drafts for me”). This lets the visitor know how well the recommendee works with her clients. The checking off of her “Top Qualities” adds extra gravy, as attributes for which to remember her.

This one is weak, indulging in generic generalities and canned clichés (“Industry Leader,” etc.) with no specifics about how the recipient “brings a wealth of knowledge” about the named subjects, or to what or to whom she has brought them. It is also overlong, forcing the visitor to click “more” to read the rest of the ramble. Moreover, the recommender’s relationship to the recipient isn’t specified, thus may not make Jacob Share’s “useful” category.

Finally, please be careful about your endorsements of others. It’s tempting, when the menu at left pops up on your profile, to simply click “Endorse all 4,” then click the same for the following foursome, and the next, and the next, and the next… to ballyhoo the brands of your buddies.

Yours Truly used to do just that, until one of my endorsees bade me to stop, because that person did not possess many of the skills I was endorsing to no end. Since then, I have been very selective about my endorsements. I question whether someone truly does “know about” the area of expertise below his/her name before clicking the “Endorse” button. That way, endorsements can be as credible as well-written recommendations from professional sources.

It’s nice to sweeten up your LinkedIn peers’ profiles, hoping they’ll follow suit for you. But, as candy can give you cavities, flattery can make you fall flat in the eyes of those you seek to do business with or hire you. So credibility, not candy, and surety, not sugar-coating, are key to LinkedIn leverage, rather than Facebook fanaticism, in all professional social media profiles.

— Todd Larson

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

LinkedIn #2: Searching and making connections

(Second of three parts)

Whether set up as a website prelude, chat channel or notice board, LinkedIn company profiles enable firm project managers or principals to link up with and learn more about other firms they might be interested in forming strategic alliances, proposal teams or development partnerships with, to see if they’d be a good fit.

LinkedIn’s new “Advanced Search” option (see below) lets you track down by job title the specific staff members of those companies you want to connect with, that would have the authority to build the team with you.

For these and other purposes, LinkedIn has a database of connections at your fingerclicks, and a search engine for direct linkage to your desired contacts — which antiquates the Rolodex, that spinaround shuffledeck of card chaos that took up valuable desk space and took you weeks to slog through a thicket of names and numbers from 10 or 20 years ago to find the contact that was hiding from you.

LinkedIn also puts to rest (and to shame) that ’60s connect-and-followup method, as sung by George Harrison:

Carve your number on my wall
And maybe you will get a call
From me, if I needed someone.

If you need someone now, just type in the name in the Search bar at the top of your LinkedIn home page, click the magnifier icon, and presto, an instant roster of John Smiths or whomever you were tracking.

If you need someone by title for recruitment, consultant hiring, design-build teaming or general networking purposes, “Advanced Search is the coolest part of LinkedIn,” said Patrick O’Malley at the May 22 Boston Society of Architects Marketing/PR Wizards meeting. “It allows you to search for people by anything, not just by name — for instance, Vice President of Finance or CFO. Your second-level connections, or friends of friends, will show that so-and-so was vice president of finance and you know him through a first-level connection.”

“LinkedIn is a useful way to make a cold call warm, through a common bond, or through someone you’ve worked together with,” added Julia Corbett Tanen.

To do an Advanced Search, just click “Advanced” at the right of the magnifier, and the Advanced People Search page will come up (click pic for full page):

Then you can type in the title of your desired connection (and the company that person works for, if desired), click Search, and up come folks with that title and company:

At the bottom of each listing is the number of 1st-degree LinkedIn connections you share with that person, for the possibility of being introduced to those title-holders through your direct contacts. Beside each name is the degree of your connection to that person, if any.

However, 3rd-degree connections appear by the person’s first name and last initial only, unless you’re willing to shell out for a LinkedIn Premium account for $24.95/month (Business plan), $39.95/month (Business Plus plan) or $74.95/month (Executive plan). Patrick showed us how to ferret out that last name for free:

1. Open the 3rd-degree connection profile of the person you wish to contact.
2. Open a separate Google Images window on your website browser.
3. Drag the 3rd-degree connection’s profile photo into the Google Images search bar.
4. Click the magnifier icon beside the bar.
5. Click “Search by Image.”
6. Up will pop a list of links with that photo, some likely containing the connection’s last name.

Something to remember about all LinkedIn connections: “Be careful,” said Patrick. “Too often people link in with people they don’t really know or know well. Connect with people you really know and trust, but not with anyone and everyone.”

“Start with the human connection,” said Julia. “Search through people’s profiles and create something they’ll instantly bond with. Exchange messages back and forth before you can say, ‘Let’s have coffee.’ I read profiles in depth, and I look at who recommended them.” She recommends LinkedIn school alumni/ae group pages as safe, trusted ways to connect with individuals who already have something in common with you.

Above all, a LinkedIn connection means little without human substance behind it. Just because someone is LinkedIn with you doesn’t mean s/he’ll remember you later without regular contact with that person over time, in the form of e-mailing articles of interest, e-mail or phone conversations, coffee meetings, offers to help that person, etc. If you connect on LinkedIn but then fall out of touch with someone, that person may end up being like just another name and photo on an overstuffed Rolodex, thus of little or no value to your business or job search goals.

So LinkIn, and KeepInTouch!

— Todd Larson

Next post: LinkedIn #3: Recommendations, endorsements

LinkedIn #1: Design and use of company pages

(First of three parts)

Are you LinkedIn?

By that I don’t mean, “Have you set up your LinkedIn company page?” because many of us already have. (If not, what’s stopping you?) I mean:

• Are you promoting your firm and its brand to best advantage on LinkedIn?
• Are you sharing ideas, articles and blogs on it?
• Are you making desired business connections on it?
• Are you researching clients, companies and competition on it?
• Are you recruiting employees, consultants and partners through it?
• Are you really in on how far LinkedIn’s capabilities have come in 10 years?

These were key points raised at the May 22 BSA Marketing/PR Wizards meeting, where Julia Corbett Tanen of Riot Media and Patrick O’Malley of 617-PATRICK Social Media Training & Consulting gave us the skinny on getting the most out of LinkedIn as a marketing and networking tool, not merely a “Facebook for work” or a “resume on steroids,” in Julia’s words. For starters, here’s a link to Patrick’s PowerPoint presentation of LinkedIn as:

• a profile of your company or your personal work history and brand
• a discussion forum, ideas-sharing and blog-sharing channel
• a database of connections, recommendations and endorsements
• a ‘friends of friends’ network easing the referral/connection process
• a search engine for, say, prospects for CEOs of local companies

A LinkedIn profile is now much more than a company logo intro, services rundown, nutshell history, awards presentation and employee database. It’s an adventure through company milestones, project completions, new hires, promotions, blogposts, thought-shares, and virtually everything including the kitchen sink.

Patrick, however, said a LinkedIn profile’s proper role is to introduce the company and drive traffic to its website for a closer look at the firm’s products and services — an appetizer before the entrée, in a way.

One such example is this profile I coordinated for Pressley Associates Landscape Architects (click pic for full page):

The page begins with a concise overview of the firm, listing the types of landscapes they design, their most prominent works, awards won, and service specialties. The firm’s website link, http://www.pressleyinc.com, is clearly placed in the center column below to direct the user there for more company info, with no ancillary content to divert the user from getting to the main event, the website.

To the right of the info box are pic links to firm employees that have “LinkedIn” their personal profiles, which visitors are free to check out for potential LinkedIn connections, networking, project teaming, etc. — but a company page’s staff database should be handled with discretion if losing an employee to a competitor is a concern. “Competitors can see your Rolodex, so you must decide how private your Rolodex should be,” said Patrick.

Elkus Manfredi Architects, however, go more public with their profile. They introduce the firm as if we were to enter their office, then bring in the big news:

The splash photo of their reception area does make us feel welcome to the firm — then wowed by the Boston Globe announcement of the approval of their big Convention Center hotel project, with a link to that article and a comment box to kick off the congratulations and conversations. This way, they’re presenting themselves as a successful firm that welcomes your business, comments and congrats, in the hope of expanding by becoming the “talk of the town.”

By doing so, the visitor can easily follow the firm’s latest developments — and be awed by the string of successes Elkus/Manfredi has been having, as shown by its multiple project announcements, groundbreakings and completions to “like” and comment on as you scroll down the page.

Burns & McDonnell, a civil engineering firm based in Kansas City, Mo., really pushes the LinkedIn envelope by bragging, then blogging:

Leading off with a banner ballyhooing their “100 Best Companies to Work For” accolades from FORTUNE magazine, they jump right down into links to articles of general public interest — e.g., the benefits of reading every day (as “liked” and commented on by Yours Truly), job search issues and strategies, job interview techniques — as well as pieces of industry or company relevance.

“You must have a posting strategy that makes sense, that’s not spam, but caring about what’s relevant in your field, what a lot of people will be interested in,” said Patrick. “If you post that one interesting article that people want to read, they will follow you for that. The goal is not to promote your company, but to give something of value to the community.”

You are doing so by educating and informing your readerbase on the latest industry trends, tips and techniques, as well as tips for greater personal success in general. This makes you a thought leader in your field, hence heightens your industry credibility.

The Boston Society of Architects‘ profile finds a middle ground between LinkedIn as LeadIn and LinkedIn as LearnIn:

Starting with a shot of the BSA storefront (a good “introduction” to the organization), the page presents the “Recent Updates” as optional click-ons, thus leading the eye down to the company profile and weblink more immediately. As a bonus, below the BSA’s key contacts is a link to info about ArchitectureBoston, their magazine, for more information about the industry in general as well as “BSA Currents.” This page sets a good example for presenting a lot of content with minimal window-dressing — “less is more,” in Mies van der Rohe’s words.

— Todd Larson

Next post: LinkedIn #2: Searching and making connections

Not yet sold on social media?

“Working with architects is like talking to cats — each office is in its own little microcosm,” quipped a guest at the Boston Society of Architects Marketing/PR Wizards’ recent meeting on the subject of branding.

That catty remark described my friend’s efforts to turn her firm on to social media. When she came aboard as their Marketing Manager, she immediately discovered an unused text for a company LinkedIn profile buried in her firm’s file-and-forget files. Twitter hadn’t yet flown with them. They were faceless on Facebook. They were blind to blogging. They were still sending snail-mail cards and brochures. In short, they were stuck in the print-and-paper past, skeptical of social media.

For weeks she played cat-and- mouse with the firm’s principals, trying to catch their attention and articulate the advantages of including social media in their marketing so they could stay competitive with their competitors by not appearing as if they had catnapped through the changing times.

She finally got a LinkedIn profile out of them, as well as a Twitter feed, a Facebook page, a MailChimp e-newsletter, and the beginnings of a blog. Now they’re linked in to LinkedIn, their Tweets are a-twitter, they’re face-to-face on Facebook, they’ve gone ape over MailChimp, and their blog has blossomed.

It was a tough sell, but now they’re sold on social media, seeing for themselves how handy it is for promoting projects, events of interest, and discussion ideas to the public without costing them a dime — and how it improved their visibility and brought out their brand more broadly.

Yet, a Building Design + Construction survey of A/E/C professionals found that only 28% were employing social media for marketing, and 61% weren’t using social media, period. Reasons for resistance to social media include:

• doubt about its business-building ability, given the still-slow economy despite social media’s big bang through cyberspace over the last decade;
• not deeming it necessary if a firm is getting enough business through repeat clients, word of mouth and other traditional networking;
• not thinking they have the time to spend on social media, given its addictive powers and the need to avoid distraction from current A/E/C work;
• fear it will leak too much information about the firm to competitors, resulting in stealing of the firm’s ideas and/or hiring away members of their staff;
• concern that that revelation of information will cause recipients to take it out of context, hence spread false rumors about the firm.

Understandable, but sleeping through social media surges and waking to see how cyber-savvy your competition is could balk your business down the road if you look old-cat — uh, old-hat. You’ll seem out of touch with the times, not the thought-leader in your field that social media have enabled your competitors to become.

Also, you’ll be challenged in your capacity to contribute to conversation. The benefits of discussion through social media are fourfold (at least):

1. to share your ideas about design-build techniques, project planning, client relationship building, business partnership development, proposal writing, etc., with others in your field or the general public, thus increasing your reputation for excellence in and knowledge of your profession;
2. to get the latest scoops, feeds and tips on today’s trends in your field, business-building concepts, marketing effort expansion ideas, possible client contacts, job leads, etc.;
3. to share your firm’s success stories in a way that is more accessible to the public and your contacts, thus beefing up your credibility in the industry;
4. to recruit employees by giving them a more direct, pleasurable connection to you and your firm.

For instance, Abigail Carlen, LEED® AP BD+C, has used social media to attract architects and designers as Marketing Manager for Perkins + Will in New York City, and now as Director of Marketing for H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture in New York (which also has an active Facebook page and Architizer profile with a project portfolio), according to Gina A. Bedoya, CPSM.

“Management understands that, eventually, economic times will change for the better, and there will once again be a need to search for talented architects,” said Bedoya, who is president of Bedoya Business Strategies, Inc., an A/E/C business consulting firm based in Fanwood, N.J. “Using social media to showcase their firm’s culture now will position them as a desirable firm to work for in the future.”

Also, social media are a click- away way to link up, team up and build up client relationships and strategic alliances for the support, collaboration and outside resources a firm needs in this still-shaky economy. Through a potential client’s or partner’s blog, Facebook page, LinkedIn or Architizer profile, etc., a firm can learn more about that company’s design/build needs, goals, approaches and/or philosophies to see if it would be a good match.

“More than ever, it is imperative that A/E/C firms constantly network and ‘get to know their neighbors,'” said Sarah Zibanejadrad, Marketing Manager at Oasis Consulting Services in Roswell, Ga. “You would be surprised how many federal organizations, municipalities, and developers are on only a click away on Facebook or LinkedIn.”

Even a civil engineering firm as old-as-the-hills as Burns & McDonnell of Kansas City, Mo. (founded in 1898) has readily adapted social media for these and other purposes.

Click on the icons or links below to see for yourself:

Their Careers Blog has many informational articles on networking, job searching, engineering trends, time management techniques and much more, in a style tailored to the general public interest rather than just industry insiders.

Their Facebook page is packed with stories about their industry, their current projects, volunteer opportunities, and numerous career issues.

They use LinkedIn for employee recruitment and career-related articles like those in their Careers Blog and on their Facebook page.

On Pinterest they post project photos, event notice posters, visual intros to engineering tools, etc., with links to corresponding Twitter and other feeds.

They Tweet about honors they receive, positions they have open, events of interest to the industry, etc.

Their YouTube videos run the gamut from an intern’s testimony on his experience at the firm to an award presentation to a recent summit.

Burns & McDonnell are a model for maxing out their mass-media communication through multiple channels, thus staying firmly in the public and industry eye — to the point of being ranked 26th in FORTUNE’s 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2012, and 18th in 2013.

To convince your firm of social media’s benefits, I recommend a soft-sell approach, to avoid getting caught in a situation like the one on the right.

(This was where my friend fell short, attacking the problem like a raging tiger instead of a serene Siamese. Had the patient purr of a supportive associate not softened her hard-sell, her firm would be far from wearing the cat’s pajamas in their industry today — though they were lions in it all along.)

For starters:

Analyze your competition. Scrutinize all of its social media for visual and verbal content, graphic style and layout, communication of company mission and industry ideas, brand quality and consistency, and so on.
Go beyond the big cats — Blogger, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Google, LinkedIn, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Twitter, WordPress, YouTube, etc. — to include industry-specialized social media, e.g., Archello, Archinect, Architizer, Houzz. Make careful notes of the assets and liabilities of each profile.

Present your findings to the principals in a marketing meeting. While showing the best and worst aspects of your competitor’s profiles on your laptop or projection system, use a thoughtful, go-easy tone of voice to explain what works and what doesn’t, what could inspire your firm’s profiles, and what the firm could do to distinguish itself from the competition. This will enable the principals to think for themselves about how their competitors have built better images and how they themselves could do so, capitalizing on their competitors’ sure things and shortfalls.

Assure them that you, the marketer, will handle most of the media. If the principals and associates are concerned that social media usage will eat up billable time on their ongoing projects, let them know you’ll take care of setting up and developing all of the profiles, writing most of the content, and coordinating all staff contributions to it.
Use your weekly marketing meetings and daily dealings with the principals to put forward your profile and content proposals for their review, revision and go-ahead, to make the social media development process as collaborative as possible without being intrusive.

Propose a social media development plan by which profile content, style and format can be reviewed, agreed upon in advance, and practiced regularly to resolve the perpetual puzzles of spamming, oversaturation, stealing of ideas, hiring away personnel, etc., as much as possible. Also, formulate a targeted approach to business solicitation, client or business partner relationship development, industry ideas sharing, and sending out project announcement, holiday greeting and company anniversary e-cards through social media. That way, the principals can rest assured that the media will be used responsibly and efficiently.

Treat social media like a cocktail party or industry convention. No firm would question those timeless methods of communicating with a covey of characters and cultivating connections with promising prospects and bypassing blah ones. So you could emphasize social media as a transition of those dynamics from convention to computer, from luau to laptop.
This would allow a firm to communicate with clients, partners and the public more regularly, rather than just waiting for those once-in-a-blue-moon social events to happen. Thus social media communication could lead to more business possibilities more frequently, in part because it enables firms to invite key business prospects to networking events in advance, i.e., setting up to talk shop rather than waiting to run into them at the event or hoping they’ll be there.

Let them know what they’re missing. Calmly caution the principals that, with the ever- expanding use of social media for business networking, not jumping on its bandwagon would be like not maintaining one’s presence at parties or conventions, hence being less remembered than the competition, and risking bankruptcy.

Assure them they’ll be in the catbird seat if they take a bite out of social media. A bit of an exaggeration, but refining one’s marketing according to current trends signifies a willingness to keep growing and changing with the industry, hence to keep up with one’s contacts socially and technologically, to avoid being a cat in your own little microcosm. You’ll notice the results…

— Todd Larson

Sources:

1. Bedoya, Gina A., “The Who, What, When, Why and How of Social Media for the A/E/C Community,” Engineering News-Record, May 1, 2010.
2. Giedrys, Sally, “When Social Media is Worth Your Time,” The Friedman File, Dec. 2012, Friedman & Partners.
3. Leavitt, Neal, “How the A/E/C Community Uses Social Media These Days,” iMedia Connection, May 23, 2012.
4. Shorr, Brad, “3 analogies to help executives ‘get’ social media,” ragan.com, Aug. 8, 2012.
5. Zibanejadrad, Sarah, “Why Social Media is Useful to A/E/C Firms,” rumorinteactivemedia.com

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Brand X: what your firm could get stuck with…

…if you keep horsing around with the backdated boilerplates, crapshoot colors, inconsistent images, mixed-up messages and scattershot slogans that create chronic confusion about what your firm’s brand really is and how to communicate it consistently to clients, collaborators, even co-workers.

That was a key issue raised at the March meeting of the Boston Society of Architects Marketing/PR Wizards. The focus was proper brand development and implementation for uniformity of image throughout a firm’s marketing collateral, and the challenge of keeping vigil on the firm’s brand identity amid the runaway horserace of social media and electronic design/production tools, the constantly changing marketplace, even in-house personnel and team comings and goings.

I took away from that meeting the necessity to follow the 5 Cs in branding:

1. Clarity
2. Cohesion
3. Consistency
4. Communication
5. Collaboration

Clarity is attained by sifting through the haystack of concepts, catchphrases, clauses, clichés and keywords you’ve bandied about for eons to find the needle of necessity to pinpoint your firm’s core values: who we are, what we do, our mission, our philosophy, our approach, etc.

Once those core values are agreed upon, now comes a bigger hurdle: unifying them into a strong message that captures the firm’s essence, image and brand in a nutshell. This message must guide the creation of marketing materials accordingly, leading you toward…

Cohesion between message and graphics. At the meeting it was mentioned that “there are two parts to your brand and identity, and the whole graphic piece and message should be thought of together.” As form follows function in building, material should follow message in marketing.

Payette’s website is a prime example. The firm evokes its 75-80 year history and honors its roots with an older-looking logo and archival images. Their “collaborative and participatory” process is shown in photos of staff teaming on models, plans, construction sites, etc. Shots of building materials used — brick, exposed wood, concrete, etc. — signify that “we value process as much as the end product.” A picture of a pin-up board they use to encourage constant collaboration and idea-sharing emphasizes the firm’s “innovative process.” Images of their office displays of brand words like “Integrity” drive home their message.

Consistency is another big hurdle if a firm’s employees buck its brand standards (if any exist to begin with) and use “random cowboy” fonts, titles, templates, logos, palettes, signatures, stationery, etc., in its outgoing marketing materials and correspondence.

This certainly doesn’t promote the firm as a cohesive team — especially since this inconsistency’s main cause is poor communication and enforcement of brand guidelines in the firm as a whole, particularly to newbies who might be using an old letterhead or studio report template without being aware of it. Brand standard setting and up-front communication of it to all firm members (discussed below) is key to averting a bucking bronco of a brand.

HMFH Architects, Inc., sets a great example of branding consistency by perpetuating its green, blue, orange and purple color scheme throughout its business cards, office signage, origami candy holders, website dropdown menus, etc., as well as some of its school building designs.

Perkins + Will has simplified its logo to fit easily into lots of collateral across its 22 international offices. All individual office websites share the same logo, menu and home page. This presents the firm as one cohesive company committed to interoffice interaction and consistency of quality throughout the world.

From “Making a Style Guide,” www.bene.be

From the Giraffe Project Standards Manual by Reid Parham

Communication with co-workers about brand standards, as mentioned above, must precede communication of the brand to the public. This is where the style guide comes in — which must have clarity in its own right.

“I wrote it in a fit of frustration,” remarked a meeting attendee. “It’s hard to follow, so no one follows it.” The solution, in Thoreau’s lingo: “Simplify, simplify.”

The style guide should be:

• created by a team, including a project administrator and coordinator, who know the firm’s fonts and colors cold;
• presented as a hierarchy of headings, subheadings and texts, and hues, shades and tints, within coherent schemes that bring out the brand;
• made easy for the entire firm to read, learn and follow — no pedantic or awkward language, complex sentences or the like;
• made accessible to all through the company intranet, a printed manual to keep at your workstation, or a findable file that’s not like looking for a needle in a haystack.

For template consistency, a firm using InDesign might consider training its entire staff in that software to familiarize everyone with the firm’s template style, design/branding components and collateral production process. Elizabeth Brown (who attended the meeting) does just that through Soft-Teach.com, a customized computer training program offering on-site instruction right in a firm’s office.

It is also important to give every new employee a formal orientation to the firm’s branding approach and style right away, so s/he’ll know it right off the bat and not end up using a letterhead, masthead or subhead from 5 or 10 years ago.

Collaboration is central to brand communication and implementation, in terms of arriving at an agreed-upon image that reflects the firm as a team, receives input from all concerned, and is ultimately approved and consistently implemented by everyone. To facilitate this process, Payette and HMFH have pin-up boards where employees post their branding ideas for open discussion, like so:

   

This method engages the firm at every level so every person has a voice. Sharing ideas through Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, your blog or your intranet can add to the collaborative process — particularly if you’re going paperless. And, for visual concept postings for the paper-repelled, there’s always Pinterest. But cowboy chaos would reign supreme without weekly or monthly staff meetings to rein in the randomness, share the scoops from all sides, arrive at a branding consensus, and collectively craft a mission message and visual vocabulary that fits your firm to a T — not an X.

— Todd Larson

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Proposals, like buildings, demand teamwork

Much as we like to credit a building solely to its “starchitect” — Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, etc. — a work of architecture is never the work of one man. It’s the product of a complex, multilayered, multifaceted team of designers, drafters, engineers, contractors, developers, site planners, surveyors, project managers, attorneys, financiers, construction workers, manufacturers, inspectors, client reps, graphic designers, IT technicians and, yes, marketers.

(Did I miss anybody?)

The same goes for project proposals. I just read an interesting piece about the importance of teamwork in proposal production on LinkedIn’s Proposal Development and Writing Secrets group page. Though intended to promote the author’s proposal streamlining and price quotation service, this piece has many good pointers on how to put several heads together to craft and draft a proposal so all stakeholders in the project get in their two cents’ worth. This yields a more professional proposal than if they dumped the whole thing in one person’s lap.

For starters:

• Select, collect. In a firm meeting or a special proposal powwow, determine up front who all the project’s players will be. Then make up a top-down chart of this project team in a “family tree” format, from principal to project manager to associates to assistants.

This will clarify the who, what, when, where and why of each player’s role in the whole. Which in turn will make it easier for each to contribute key content to the proposal in a more structured way.

• Appoint a point. To give credence to the project in the client’s eyes, make the project manager the client’s main point of contact. This way the team’s channel of client communication can consistently come from one point person, rather than a confused cluster of contradictory chatter coming from one member one day and another the next.

• Collaborate, communicate. For a more fleshed-out proposal with input from all sides, the PM should contact the project team several times to continually get their insights and input prior to, and in the course of, the proposal writing process.

• Retrieve, receive. The PM might begin by sending a group e-mail out to the team with as complete information about the potential client as can be gathered from the Internet, newspapers and library research: the client’s website, LinkedIn and Wikipedia profiles, Twitter and Facebook info, YouTube videos, news coverage, ratings on NASDAQ, Moody’s, Standard & Poor, Dun & Bradstreet, etc.

In this e-mail the PM should ask all team members to e-mail back any additional info about the client and/or its industry they can dig up, and any questions they have about the project. This will prompt the PM to think of more questions to extract more specifics from the client about the project requirements.

• Drill, distill. The PM then interrogates the client with this comprehensive list of questions, allowing the client’s answers to provoke further questions about the project’s technical details and overall aims. Once satisfied with the resultant information, the PM synthesizes it into a bullet-point list of the client’s project requirements and needs to make it easier for the team to peruse and ponder.

• Brainstorm, form. Based on this point list that arose from their questions, the proposal team has meetings of the minds to form thoughtful solutions to the client’s project demands. More heads involved mean more issues examined, hence a broader, deeper project proposal.

These issues should include:

• How will our service benefit the client, business-wise?
• How will it benefit the users or occupants of the building, in terms of personal well-being and space efficiency?
• What will be the project’s long-term value to the client and generations of users, occupants and/or customers?
• Is our proposal convincing, compelling, competitive?
• How should graphics and images be arranged with texts to communicate our project aims more powerfully in the proposal?
• Are we really addressing the client’s needs, or just trumpeting our track record?
• How can we put our track record to use to meet the client’s specific architectural, social, environmental, economic and civic requirements for this project?
• How will our service qualify the structure for LEED certification?
• What level of LEED certification are we aiming for (silver, gold, platinum)?
• What specific sustainable building materials, cosmetics, construction techniques, material recycling plans, etc., that would make us eligible for LEED certification, should be mentioned in the proposal?
• How could BIM, Revit, etc., be employed to ferret out more specific details of the construction process and product to include in the proposal?

The team as a group should ask the right questions and come up with the right answers to make the proposal client-centric, not egocentric. Thus the client becomes the true architect of the project by dictating the design s/he desires.

• Stimulate, formulate. E-mail is no substitute for the face-to- face team meetings that stimulate the open discussion needed to formulate not only specific solutions to the client’s project problems, but also collective action plans for preparing the proposal accordingly.

In-the-flesh meetings also prompt unasked questions that raise unresolved issues about unexplained details that could affect the project’s progress and viability. Furthermore, these get-togethers reaffirm the camaraderie and common bond among the team that is essential to both proposal and project success.

• Involve, resolve. It’s also important to involve in the proposal development process the subcontractors, consultants, designers, landscapers, engineers, and anyone else that would be involved in the project itself. This way, each party would get a sense of how the others functioned in the project process so that conflicts within the team could be resolved faster and no one would feel “left out” by not being informed of what was going on every step of the way. And this team spirit would be reflected in the proposal, presenting the project as a collaborative effort, not a soup of supers and subs.

• Glean, clean. Notwithstanding that collaborative effort, the writing process demands leadership from the proposal manager, coordinator or writer, as marketer Michael Sweeney deftly describes it in his blog, The Design Marketer’s Workstation.

This person must receive all e-mails and attend all meetings of the proposal team, take rigorous notes all along, and play journalist, even detective or cross-examiner, in probing the PM and others with additional questions to clear up confusion or glean missing info. Then s/he can synthesize all salient points into a first draft of the proposal, cleaning up any vague, wordy or cryptic language to make the text terse, fluid and readable.

But the collaboration doesn’t stop there: the proposal manager/coordinator/writer must confer with the PM and other key people to make sure their project intentions are being communicated properly and precisely.

• Chop, crop. The proposal scribe should by all means put the brakes on the document if it’s getting to be legal-doc length. But s/he must first talk with those key proposal teammates if s/he feels something needs to be cut from a text or cropped from an image to make the proposal flow better, get to the point faster, or consume less paper. For what lands on the cutting-room floor could make or break a project’s chances of success.

• Rake over, make over. Before the proposal is sent to the client, each team member should take the time to read it over carefully to fill in gaps, eliminate inessentials, and take out tangents. Then the team should meet to make sure — as a group — that the proposal is using the right language to convey the right message about the project, and that the reader can visualize the project by reading the proposal. More sets of eyes mean fewer errors and omissions, hence a sounder proposal that demonstrates the teamwork you’re going to bring to the project itself.

Thus a “together” approach to building a proposal helps to establish and confirm the design/development team that will carry out the actual project if the firm wins it, as well as each team member’s specific responsibilities on the project.

Megan Scott, Client Services Assistant at Butler Fairman & Seufert Civil Engineers in Indianapolis, cites a fine example of proposal teamwork in a LinkedIn discussion:

“I coordinate with the business development team for help with the cover letter and project understanding. I coordinate with IT/graphics for any maps, renderings, cross sections I might need and with the technical department head for the project approach and verification of highlighted project examples.

“We also implemented a Go/No-Go system to try and help provide more information up front, along with a proposal completion schedule highlighting responsibilities and due dates to ensure the proposal gets done with sufficient time for review.”

Photo by Tee Meng, Wiki

These are examples of how teamwork can ease the burden on the designated proposal writer, who may spend as much as 25-30 hours per week on proposals, “in which case 6 per month should be ‘maxed out,’” according to Michael LePostollec, Marketing Manager at Faithful+Gould Construction Management in Philadelphia. “It’s always possible to do more, but at some point there are diminishing returns and burnout sets in.”

This reminds me of a time when I was instructed to write up a DSB form for a proposal. Putting it aside for other marketing priorities, I got the following reminder: “I’m not doin’ it, you’re doin’ it!”

The firm as a whole should be doin’ it — just like they’ll do on the project.

— Todd Larson

P.S. If you’re curious about that piece I read that inspired this post, click here.

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