Continuing education

Man cast, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008.

I guess to some extent I liveblogged the Lorraine Murphy Blogging for Business seminar I attended yesterday at Tradeworks Training Society. Certainly I created my first proper WordPress blog and played with a lot of the features. I also got two very valuable tips. One was a piece of information I'd been searching for over the course of the last two years. I needed to be shown, in a very hands-on way, how to name links within the text of my posts themselves. I can't tell you how frustrating is the answer given in Blogger's Help FAQ. I may be permanently stuck in 'potential propellor head' mode but I'm not a complete idiot. Now that the problem's solved, I feel like a genius. The other amazing news was a method for promoting the blog that was so in tune with my sensibilities that I immediately vowed to adopt it. Soon, if not immediately.

I also really enjoyed the exchange with Lorraine. She's a feisty and opinionated woman, but this is the second event she's organized that I've attended, and she does it right from a human perspective. There are breaks. There's good food. There's coffee. There's an amazing amount of hands-on how-to instruction. She's informal without being unprofessional, she's smart and funny, and I'm glad she's successful. We were able to agree to disagree on several topics and agree to agree on several more, and it really felt like an exchange of ideas.

All fired up as I am about social media these days, I decided I couldn't miss Jason Alba's webinar on using LinkedIn. Finally, a seminar that provides detailed how tos, whys, and what-not-to dos. Marketing Profs is, without a doubt, the best continuing education investment I've made this year, and I don't think I've even begun to scratch the surface of the archived resources available.

Back to Connecting the Dots though. I had only just discovered the Questions and Answers section on LinkedIn about a week ago, and the combination of seeing Lorraine work the WordPress forums and realizing what a powerful tool they were for building profile made the lightbulb go off for me re the same feature on LinkedIn. So in the course of examining the PR network Qs and As, I came across Bruce Pilgrim, whose answer to the question, "How do you become a better client servicing person?" is the quintessential 'bad cop' consultant answer. I don't disagree with him at all and I bet I'd like working with him. I can tell he takes his role as a consultant seriously and it's obvious he's not an order taker. He's not going to start with tactics and work his way back, if possible, to the strategy they support, and he's dead right on that front. Still, his answer to the question and his in-your-face style made me remember how very nice it was to work as part of team. When you do, you get to share the responsibility for managing client expectations, and that means you also sometimes get to share in the sheer joy of coming up with creative solutions that get your client known for all the right reasons.

Here's his response to the question, cut and pasted because you'd have to be a LinkedIn member to see it otherwise. But of course you are, aren't you?

"You need to understand that the customer is NOT always right.

Listen very carefully, ask a lot of questions, and try to determine exactly what they really need.

Frequently, an interaction begins with the customer saying: "We need a brochure." (Or a website, or a video, or a white paper, or an ad, etc.) Instead of immediately working on their request, I ask a lot of questions about what they are trying to accomplish.

Often, it turns out that they need something very different from what they think they want. It's your job to be consultative and carefully, respectfully, and diplomatically lead them to the best solution."