Professional What?
When I think of Professional Services organisations, the ‘Big Four’ spring to
mind automatically – KPMG, PwC, EY and Deloitte. These are multinational corporate firms whose
roots are based in accountancy and auditing.
So how do Professional Services firms rate with their
digital footprint compared to the other industry sectors in Australia? The
chart below from
the ABS shows that they have a 25% social media presence.
(ABS,
2014)
These results are surprising and I would have expected this
to be higher in this day and age of Web 2.0.
But looking across the chart as a whole, I believe that Australian
firms have low maturity levels and are lagging behind their American
counterparts when it comes to engaging online.
The ABS
give reasons as to why there is not such a high presence which range from
‘lack of customer demand’, ‘maintenance costs’, ’lack of technical expertise’ and
‘no need for a web presence’. McKinsey Global Institute 2012 report discuss the
low adoption in the Professional Services sector and the reasons that they give
are “cultural issues, resistance by management and lack of enthusiasm by staff,
as they can see no personal gain”.
Blogging Aussie Style
I have decided to select an Australian Professional Services
company to analyse their corporate use of blogs. The company selected is SMS
Management & Technology who describe themselves are providing services for Strategy, Design, Deliver,
Enable and Operate and solutions
for Business Innovation, Customer, Digital Agility, Digital Transformation,
Efficiency, Managed Services, Mobility and Solutions by Industry. They describe a wide range of success stories
across various industry sectors.
So how efficaciously is SMS with their social media
presence? Doing a quick scan, it shows that they are active with Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube and Vimeo and of course their Blog.
Blogs are part of the social media technologies, one of the
forerunners of the technology but they have never lost its appeal even to a 140
character tweet. SMS have described their SMS Blog content as “Leadership on a number of issues, the
latest company news, information on emerging technologies, our solutions and
services as well as general light-hearted discussion and career highlights from
SMSers, current events and more.”
Why have a Corporate Blog?
So why do organisations use Blogs? Blogs are a platform
which gives companies the opportunity to market and advertise themselves
through another medium. It provides
another communication channel for the direct sharing, dissemination of
information which is accessible worldwide.
It helps to personalising and promoting their company, it gives them a
‘space’ to do opinion pieces and to get immediate feedback. It can help with brand awareness and building
virtual rapport with customers and provided another avenue for customer service.
It is a way to communication and collaboration with their internal employees
and their external customers. It has
become part of companies’ communication and management strategies.
Some of the disadvantages of Blogs are the investment of
time and resources by the company to create, maintained and monitored the blog
traffic. Reputation management also
needs to be allowed for. I do not think
that companies are mining the rich data that is available from blogs. It is not enough just to count ‘clicks’ and ‘likes’
on Blogs, sentiment
analysis is needed which can be used to identify and extract subjective
information.
How are SMS using Blogs to bring value to their
organisation? McKinsey Global Institute 2012 report breaks down
the 10 value levers across the organisational functions:
From the levers, the ones I see SMS utilising their Blogs for
are :
- Marketing and sales
- use social technologies
for marketing communication/interaction
- generate and foster sales
leads
- Business Support
- Improve collaboration and
communication
- Enterprise wide levers
- Use social technology to
improve intra- or inter-organisations collaboration and communication
They
are not using their Blog for social commerce but it could foster and generate
sales leads by existing and being accessible.
There are not much reply comments on any of their blogs so it appears if
they are not generating social traffic so they cannot be deriving any customer insights
from these.
I do not have a view of how they use blogs internally to
the organisations but the replies to the blogs are mainly from internal
employees.
Blog Evaluation
Can a Blog be evaluated? Is there a monetary or social
value associated with it? How can this be measured? Some of the criteria that
can be used are:
Ø
Content
Some of SMS’s Blog categories sparked
my interest such as Digital Agility and The Social Enterprise with some of the
blog content being -
The Blogs content is relevant for
not just these two area of interest I selected but for the other categories
that are also available.
Ø
Credible
Is the information provided credible?
Are the blogs trustworthy, authoritative and accurate? Are they biased? Corporate
blog are not unbiased as this is their sole purpose to promote the company, its
brand, products and services. I’m sure that the blogs are reviewed internally
before being release to the public to ensure corporate correctness. They appear
to have dedicated bloggers who are identified by name and links to their
biographies which enforces their credibility.
Ø
Valuable
How valuable is the content? Who is
the audience and is it relevant to them.
For their customers who are pursuing a digital strategy or embarking on social
media technologies, the blogs are highly relevant.
Ø Findable
Can the content be found easily?
Does it give the user a good experience?
The Blog page has got good information architecture design which is simply
structured with the Blogs categorised for findability which heightens the user
experience. The Blogs are searchable and
content is retrievable.
Ø
Currency
Are the blogs up to date and managed? There are regular Blogs and these are updated
which gives the user confidence in the Blogs. More frequent Blogs might gain them more social
traffic.
Ø
Connectedness
Are the blogs creating social network
traffic? Are people connecting with the author and therefore the company
brand? The
Blogs are not creating external traffic and there is only a minimum amount from
internal employees, so they are not achieving good connectedness and need to
improve on this.
Walking the Talk
Here is a company whose business is to provide services to
other companies to create their digital and social enterprise strategies. Do they practice what they preach? From my quick analysis on SMS I believe that
they are walking the talk.
References:
McKinsey (2013). The social economy: Unlocking value and
productivity through social technologies
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