Exec Visibility in Professional Services

Strategic Communications Group (Strategic) has the good fortune of representing a number of professional services firms in the IT, software implementation, telecom, business advisory and commercial real estate markets.

Unlike a product or technology development client in which you can play up features and functionality, the differentiation for a professional services firm is people-driven. Yet, the “our people are smarter than their people” argument is difficult to validate.

That’s why public relations for services firms is so critical. The resulting visibility from third parties such as the media, analysts, conferences, etc. provides important credibility, validating the smarter people argument.

Social media provides yet another channel for professional services firms to promote the thought leadership of their executives. While executive blogs are a great place to start, we’re now in the process of exploring the creation of personalized social communities using Web-based platforms from vendors like Ning and Bumpzee.

Here are two online communities that I found to be well done (neither was created by Strategic):

http://www.inmobile.org/ (for executives in the wireless industry)

http://www.thecustomercollective.com/ (for sales/marketing professionals)

Both are vendor created, yet very much educational in their content. Additionally, these communities are promoted using other communications channels. For instance, I learned for The Customer Collective (from Oracle) from an ad in BusinessWeek.