Professional Service Firm Marketing Tips & Strategies

LinkedIn's New Inbox

When I logged in to LinkedIn this morning, I noticed I had a new Inbox design on my home page. I'm still playing around with this, but here is what I've noticed so far.

• You can work with your messages, right from your home page, without first going to the inbox. This is a great usability feature as it helps us to "get things done" more quickly.
• On the home page - messages and invitations are separated. I like having my invitations broken out so I can work through them quickly.
• You can minimize the inbox on the homepage, "putting it away" when you are not using it
• In the inbox itself, You can flag messages. There are also several options for filtering your list of messages.

Overall, I think these changes make for a cleaner, easier to use interface. What do you like or dislike about the new design?

Here is a short video that demonstrates these new features:

Clay Shirkley on Cognitive Surplus

My friend Hector pointed this video out in the comments of a post earlier this week - I enjoyed it so much I wanted to point it out to others. It's from a couple of years ago, but it's really good stuff.

 

Lead Scoring for Professional Service Firms

Another topic I’ve been hearing a lot about lately is lead scoring. Several people have asked me what lead scoring is and whether or not it makes sense for accounting, law, or other professional service firms. Here are some of my thoughts on lead scoring.

What is Lead Scoring?

Generally speaking, lead scoring is a method of assigning point values to your leads. The goal is to determine which leads are most ready to make a purchase so you can concentrate your sales efforts on them.

Points can be assigned by using information the prospect provides (their profile) or by the behavior they exhibit. An example of user provided data would be the information provided when a prospect fills out a form to download a white paper or register for a webinar.

Exhibited behavior may include signing into the webinar (attendance), the number of pages visited,  or submitting a request via your contact form.

Does lead scoring make sense for accountants, lawyers, and other professional service firms?

Maybe. But probably not in the same manner in which lead scoring is generally talked about and demonstrated. Lead scoring can be helpful, but I believe it would be a mistake to use it as the only lead qualifying tool in a professional service practice. Personal contact and interaction will always be an important factor is the selling of professional services.

Here are some other factors to consider when determining if your firm needs a lead scoring system:

Volume of leads – Do the volume of leads you receive justify the time, expense, and effort needed to implement a lead scoring system? Common sense and a simple cost\benefit analysis can go a long way here. You may not need a scoring system for leads generated by your web site, but maybe you could use some help prioritizing leads you receive when you speak in public.

The Hand-off – Lead scoring service providers often talk about issues related to the “handing off” of leads from marketing to sales. Although sales and marketing are different roles, they are often just different hats worn by the same person in a professional service firm. For this reason, many of the issues related to the hand off, such as sales receiving leads who are not qualified, may not exist.

Prioritizing – Service firms can benefit by thinking of a lead scoring system as a way to help them set priorities for following up. Let’s pretend a current client of your accounting firm, for whom you only provide write-up services, downloads information from your website about your payroll services. This scenario deserves a higher level of attention than a stranger from a different state who signed up for your upcoming webinar.

Technology vs. Process – Companies who sell lead scoring services are selling software. As I have mentioned more than once on this blog, I believe you should work on defining your process first – then pick out technology (or other tools) you need to help support that process. Many professional service firms may benefit from having a lead scoring (or lead evaluation) process without spending money on technology.

Do you use a lead scoring system (automated or otherwise) in your firm? What other factors did you consider when making your decision?

Google's new user interface

You may have noticed some changes to Google’s search results page recently. The results page now sports a three column layout with the left hand column containing some colorful new icons.

The tools in the left hand column will help you drill down into your query results. Many of these tools are not new, they are just easier to find now that they are in the left sidebar.

Let’s see how this works. If I search for a pretty generic term like “golf”, I get about 308 million results. BTW, the result count is now under the box where you type in your search phrase.

If what I really wanted to do was search for golf equipment to buy, I an click on the Shopping icon to narrow my results. From there, I can narrow my results by category, price range, brand or store.

Maybe I wanted to read about golf. By clicking on the Books icon, I can view books and magazines about golf. I can also sort books by date if I want to get the latest advice available.

By clicking on the Videos icon, I can narrow down my golf video choices by the duration, quality, how recently they were posted, and source. Yes, the results contain results from sources other than YouTube.

And of course, if I want to go play golf, I can click on the Maps icon to find some local courses. This points out a change that should be of interest to anyone who markets professional services (or any other business) – all searches now appear to bring back local matches. If I search for “attorney”, Google detects that I am in Lenexa, KS and shows me the entries from Google Maps for attorneys in my area. This means that local search is even more important for local businesses. If you are not familiar with Google’s Local Business Center (LBC), you may want to check out this newsletter article about local search.

Another great tool that used to be buried but is now easily found is the Wonder Wheel. The wonder wheel shows other keyword phrases that are related to the key words you searched on. This can be a great tool for doing keyword research or when you are searching for new\related topics to post about on your blog.

I know I haven’t covered all of the changes. Which new features are you finding most useful?

Opting out of Facebook's Instant Personalization

Facebook new Instant Personalization feature is raising some concerns about privacy. They are still changing how things work (FB calls is a pilot program) and I'm still learning the details, so I'm sure more posts will follow. One of the major concerns is that this new feature is turned on by default. Completely opt-ing out is a several step process, so if you want to turn this feature off until you learn more about it, I recommend viewing this video from the Electronic Frontier Foundation on how to opt out of Instant Personalization.

What mobile devices CPAs are using

Over on the CPA Success blog, you can find the results of a survey conducted by Maryland Association of CPAs asking their members what mobile devices they use. Here are a few take aways from the survey results:

• Most CPAs surveyed use either a standard cell phone (32 percent) or a BlackBerry (36 percent).
• 34 percent use their mobile device for texting and 13 percent are using social media tools.
• Nineteen percent of CPAs say they spend more than 10 hours per week on their mobile devices

As CPAs and others continue to increase their use of mobile devices, professional service marketers will place more emphasis on the mobile platform. The challenge, as I see it, is to make sure you have valuable educational content that can be easily requested, found, and\or consumed on these devices rather than just another platform to receive "email blasts" or "coopens". What do you think?

Head on over to the CPA Success blog to read the complete survey results. If you hurry, you may still be able to respond to the survey.

Seesmic Look - Immerse Yourself in the Real Time Web

There are some very cool applications coming out of Seesmic these days. One of them is Seesmic Look, a desktop application that helps users "immerse themselves in the real time web", although right now that is just Twitter. I won't be surprised if that changes soon, though.

A key feature of Look is "playback mode", which shows what people are tweeting in real time. Conversations "bubble up" on the screen as they are happening.  Look allows you to arranges conversation by timeline or alphabetically  as well. My description isn't doing it justice, so make sure to visit the link to their videos below.

Some of the other ways look lets you view conversations include:

• Interests -  are lists of categories such as news, sports, entertainment, etc.
• Trends - show what's popular now, in the past day or in the past week. You can see why a word or phrase is trending (a brief explanation is provided) and view all the trends or specific topics in timeline or playback mode
• Inbox and Social - This is where you manage your mentions, DMs, and your Sent Messages. Use the Social section to view your friends and your Twitter Lists
• Search - create and save searches based on  a person, brand, or any other interest.

I started to create a video to show you Seesmic Look, but they have already provided a nice set of Seesmic Look videos here. Take a look and let me know what you think. While you are there, check out there preview version of the new desktop application - it is a very cool piece of technology.

Accounting Today Goes Digital

The inaugural digital edition of Accounting Today was recently released.

Personally, I enjoy reading magazines in digital format. I preferred to change the default setting on their reader to display one page at a time vs two. That's probably because I work on tablet pc with a relatively small screen. Anyway, the reader gives you plenty of options to customize the display to your liking.

One of the things that has annoyed me about older digital magazine formats is they made it difficult to share information with people.  I was very pleased to see that Accounting Today provides several ways to share information. Here is a screen shot of the sharing options

As you can see, you can share with your friends on social networks

They even allow you to build a widget to insert into your post or web site

	Look inside >
Contents

When I read magazines like this, I'm often in "collection mode" - meaning I like to skim through and tear out pages or highlight items that I want to spend more time with later. Digital magazines have always frustrated me because they are difficult, if not impossible, to cut and paste from. I don't see how to cut and paste from AT, but with the ability to use social bookmarks and using third party tools to take screen shots, I can live with that limitation.

There is one thing I wish I could add. AT always has a nice section where they review business books. I would love to be able to save books to my Amazon wishlist by right-clicking on a link inside the magazine.

Great job by the folks at Accounting Today.

Sharing with the Meebo Bar

You may have heard of Meebo, the folks who provide a service that lets you access all of your different instant messaging (IM) services from one place. This service helps people work in real time by removing the barrier of having to be on the same service in order to be able to instant message.

Meebo Bar is their newest product (still in beta) that makes it incredibly easy for people who visit your blog (or web site) to share information they find there with their friends and people in their social circles.

Once installed, the Meebo bar sits on the bottom of your web page. You have the ability to customize the buttons that show up on the bar. Here is what mine looks like:

(you can also see it on the bottom of this page) 

One of the ways to share information is to click on the “Share a Page” button. In the picture above, this is the left most button. When you click on this button, you see a toolbar like this one:

 

As you can see, I have the option to share this page with my Facebook friends, my Twitter followers, as well as via Yahoo! updates, email, and instant messaging.

On the right hand side of the Meebo bar, there are options to begin chatting with my friends right from the current web page.

The Meebo bar even detects items on the page that people may want to share. If you are viewing this post on the home page of my blog (if not, here is the post http://blog.rebarbusinessbuilders.com/rebar/2009/12/setting-expectations-with-price.html), the post below this one has an embedded video. If you hover your mouse above the video, you will see a tab labelled “drag to share” on the top left of the video. Dragging will make the menu described above appear, so you can share it with your friends.

The Meebo bar was a cinch to set up on this site (this is a Typepad blog). I just copied some javascript from the Meebo site and copied it to an HTML module in the Design section of my blog. My description may sound vague, but Meebo provides excellent, step by step instructions.

To summarize, the Meebo bar gives your site visitors the ability to share information via drag-and-drop and it won’t take you more than 10 minutes to set it up. Give it a try. If you do, leave me a comment so I can check out your site.

Search For Social Media

As the amount of available information on the internet continues to expand, we are constantly searching for new and improved ways to search for that information.

Sometimes when we search, we want to find entries about that subject. However, once we find someone that we trust, we may want to find all of the things that person has written or shared. This information could be on web sites, blogs, social media sites, etc. Searching across all of these platforms can be a time consuming task.

That’s where Lijit comes in. Lijit helps your readers search you and everything you have written, including from your social media sites, all from one place.

Lijit is free to use, they make their money from advertising. They also share the wealth by allowing you to make money from advertising as well, if you choose to include ads on your blog. Their wizard makes creating a widget and adding it to your blog easy-peasy.

Give it a try by entering a search in the Lijit search box on the top right hand column of my blog.