David and Goliath

Traditional wisdom states that big companies – complex and encumbered by shareholders, legacy IT systems, and outdated processes - are slow moving and not very innovative. Meanwhile, start ups and smaller competitors are nimble and able to outpace their sluggish rivals. That version of reality is, in many ways, borne out by recent corporate history with examples such as Blockbuster losing out to Netflix, or Apple’s iPhone swallowing up any demand for Blackberries.

Indeed, most large companies follow the basic laws of physics when it comes to innovation: the more mass an object has the greater its momentum. In other words, if you are a a giant oil tanker the harder it is to turn around from the direction you’re already headed.

In heading up Kier's digital strategy I've been careful not to use the above as an excuse to avoid attempting to get the buy-in required for us to be innovative. In fact, (and as I'm a 'glass half full' person') I've been careful to actually sell the size of our company as advantageous when it comes to innovation. With 24,000 colleagues there is no doubt a vast array of stories which we can surface to use in our marketing efforts - our job is just to surface them. No doubt the diverse range of services we offer, and industries in which we work means there should be no shortage of compelling content - small startup companies would give their left arm for that amount of potential content!

"Listen up! We have content!"

Alongside this big companies have more cash, human capital and customers than smaller companies making it comparatively easier to launch new products and businesses. But where big companies can really come into our own is by not actually looking for the latest technology wave to ride but instead looking at what we are currently doing and then assessing how we can streamline it for maximum impact.

I have recently been putting together a strategy paper for senior management which looks at these very issues. Working at a large company means that not only is there a challenge in pulling out the good content to promote externally but also in communicating effectively to people internally. With the increasing expectation from users that useful content will find them it is especially important that we invest in systems to reach the masses, cleanse our data-sets and refine our targeting. You won't need any technology to reach a room of 5 people but you'll need a lot of amplification to address a hall of 5,000. The bigger the company the bigger the audience and the bigger the noise you have to cut through. Only by being truly innovative will you stand out from the crowd.

Stacey's love of engineering is from a ‘Women in Science and Engineering’ weekend #NWED2016 https://t.co/y03z8p3AgU pic.twitter.com/9reUmdyhjj

— Kier Group plc (@kiergroup) June 23, 2016

In order to continue to improve our social sentiment and brand reach we are increasingly playing our part in nationally supported campaigns - the latest of these being 'National Women In Engineering Day' (#NWED2016) on 23rd June. Due to the scope of our offering we were confident that we could pull together some engaging content for this and engaged the business to pull out some case studies for our blog and social media. The effort the team put in increased the traffic to the blog by 480% on the average amount of daily activity.

Partaking in this also gave us some excellent learning points for future campaigns (such as implementing more robust event tracking in job applications, linking to contributors' social accounts for authenticity and tying in our company values).

Only by implementing many small, but significant, changes can we ensure the entire business is engaged in turning around the super-tanker but if we all pull in the right direction then nothing will stand in our way...

Father's Day is now over for another year and I very much enjoyed being centre of attention again! It's a great feeling to still be at that stage of life where my children run to the door every day when I get home from work - my daughter is seven and my sons are five and three. It's also particularly rewarding being able to relive my youth vicariously and we've recently dug out all of my old Transformers toys for them to play with. Although watching these thirty year old bits of plastic fall apart in their hands has been quite traumatic!

Another big bonus of having young children is that they all still think I'm cool. I know that the time will soon come when my gorgeous children will morph overnight into terrifying, wised-up, mini-adults. I reckon I’ve got three years, tops. Sometimes I look at the boys (and even the girl) and I can see the cynical teenager in the post.

I can see how it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking they will always see me as someone to look up to but, just because they have treated me as such for a number of years, simply being a Dad is not enough to qualify eternally for this accolade. The only cool Dad's are cool adults already - really, the words 'Dad' and 'Cool' should never be used together.

This got me thinking about the world of digital marketing and how it is still currently perceived as the profession of young and progressive thinkers. However, it may be becoming less so as the older generation (in trying to stay relevant) continue to fully embrace the world of Netflix, wireless printers and smartphones they are being usurped with a rising generation who subvert these advancements and deliberately embrace retro-chic technologies such as record players, vintage clothes and Nokia 3210's. It's clearly not cool to want to be like your parents!

What does the future hold?

With jobs such as 'Head of Digital', 'App Designer' and 'Social Media Manager' not existing ten years ago it's easy to think that by working in these roles you are quite cutting edge but as the majority of companies properly assimilate these into their working practices there will come a time when they will no longer be seen as 'disruptive'. These jobs will be indistinguishable from any other role and will be seen as no different to any other corporate function.

At the moment it's hard to see a time when this might happen as the world of digital is moving so fast. I constantly feel as if I am having to run to keep up, with the speed of developments accelerating rapidly. However, there will come a time when I will peak and become that member of staff, who we all know, who sees no benefit in staying relevant and prints out their emails to read at the weekend or who hasn't yet grasped the concept of a 'Shared drive'. This may be quite hard for some to take - especially for someone like myself who discounted the idea of going into teaching through the fear I'd be spending more time trying to persuade the pupils I was cool rather than teaching them!

My childhood in ruins...

As far as I see it the only option I have with my children is to continue to act like a parent and not a friend. It may be harder to be tough and responsible than to be matey but that is really what children want from their parents. No-one wants to hear about their parent's exploits when they were younger and as a Dad I'm there to be respected, not liked. If I set out to be respected, I might be liked, but if I set out only to be liked, I will never be respected. The age to be 'friends' with my children is when they are 38, not 12.

By mixing a bit of the new with the old this will help in ensuring we all stay happy and don't cross over into each others comfort zones by risking becoming a 'helicopter' parent - and anyway, no-one wants to see a thirty-eight year old man playing with Transformers toys!

With 'content marketing' being the phrase of the moment the digital marketing industry is focusing all of it's efforts on creating 'great content' - we tried our hand at this ourselves with our #KierHeroes campaign. The majority of big brands are using this as something to aspire to and the main reason for this may actually be that it's the type of content that wins awards and generates lots of social media comments and likes.

However, the big question is does it actually sell? With all this emphasis on the next exciting campaign idea one of the best ways to differentiate and exploit may actually be what is seen as 'boring content'. The reason no-one discusses this is because brands are ashamed of content which doesn't seem to be exciting and innovative but in many cases it is a neglected resource. At Kier, many of our fellow FTSE 250 companies may well be businesses many people have never heard of but yet they all turn over millions of pounds a year. They certainly aren't known for great content but they clearly have content strategies in place. Below are a few examples of some work which we've done on our 'boring content':

Company values:

At Kier, there has been a big internal push on our values of Enthusiastic, Collaborative and Forward Thinking. There are reward schemes for colleagues who demonstrate these attributes and they are displayed on the walls of all of our offices and sites for us to abide by when carrying out business.

We also have a section outlining these values on our intranet, induction portal and website. The question is does your company have values so important and clear that you'd carve them into the office walls?!

Company locations:

Adding a list of locations to a website is typically one of those steps that just gets done at the end, but if your business has many locations and activities it can be really important that prospective customers know what you do and where.

This is why we continue to maintain and develop our locations map to help show what our 80+ offices do across the UK and internationally. It’s a quick way for our prospects to learn a lot about us.

Company achievements:

The work of some businesses are technical by their very nature and there really is no other way to sell them. By presenting a clear road map if what has been achieved to date and the plans for the future you can demonstrate how what you have learned to date will influence your future strategy.

At Kier, we have done this for our continued Scape Minor Works Framework in the form of some concise statistics. No amount of YouTube videos or Pinterest pages will convince you more than this simple infographic.

Customer care:

Ensuring your customers and stakeholders get a good service is more essential for any brand than before. We have been doing a lot of work to streamline our customer care form to ensure that enquires are directly piped to the relevant departments.

Not only does this ensure much faster response times but it also reduces the amount of manual intervention required in forwarding comments to the correct business contact or in reporting.

Annual report:

This is a requirement for all businesses of our size and potentially could just be produced as part of a box ticking exercise. Shareholders rarely see engaging content that is designed specifically for them.

Given that they either fund the business (shareholders) or are critical to its running (employees) they need content as well. If anything the content created for them should have at least the same effort as that for customers. This is why we have made the effort to present the highlights in a more easily digestible format and not rely on the reader to have to download a weighty PDF document!

Conclusion

It's clear that none of this content is going to win any awards or be heavily shared on social media. It exists to both convert and educate and is important in building a brand story that is not just about the exciting and photogenic parts. Without it there's a real danger that we are presenting an impression of no real substance and that isn't there to aid conversions - Ultimately that's what we ask from every piece of content we create whether it's boring or great.

With a 'to do' list as long as my desk there is the danger that in a bad week I can barely look up from my computer, let alone leave my desk. Obviously this is not a good situation to be in and means I am neither connected with the business nor living a particularly healthy lifestyle.

Being responsible for digital at a company with 24,000 employees means I'll never be able to fully grasp the diversity of every role and department but, having visited over 20 Kier offices and sites, I've definitely been giving it a go in order to understand how the central digital team can best support them.

To continue this trend, the marketing team took some time away from our desks this week to travel to Barnsley to visit our housing maintenance teams. Kier have a five year contract with Barnsley Council to assist all of their council house residents, and maintain their properties, and we were to join them for a ride along. Whilst half the team were off filming two of us then spent the day on a variety of call outs with Gary (plumber) in the morning and Melvyn (electrician) in the afternoon.

Us suited and booted and ready for action

Interestingly, our first chaperone, Gary, was from a coal mining background and told us that after the closing of the pits he found it hard to adjust to the job of a plumber. The difficulty for him was not the practical side of the jobs (he said he was offered adequate training to carry out all of the repair work) but the social aspect. Some council tenants were just happy to have someone to talk to after a week alone in their house but Gary's experience had just been talking to fellow male miners in the pits. He felt where this job had allowed him to progress the most was in his ability to converse with the tenants whom he had been sent to help.

This got me thinking about  the importance of these same skills in a digital context (or any office environment) and how all digital marketing roles could benefit from a culture that emphasises a combination of skills and duties. It also demonstrated that it may not be the skill which you think you need or have that make you successful in a job.

It's clear that the technology landscape has completely changed our ideas of certain company roles meaning many professionals have also had to venture outside their comfort zones as roles shift along with trends. A great example of this is the traditional customer service department. In the past, customer service representatives communicated with customers over the phone, and later on through online reviews. But nowadays, the roles of social media specialists and customer service professionals are pretty blurred.

This trend has forced social media experts to develop some customer relations skills and vice versa. It also creates a need for these two departments to develop some common goals, best practices, and a consistent voice. The combined effect of the daily work carried out by Kier employees in the field (housing maintenance, highways operatives and construction workers) can have a massive effect on how the brand is perceived across the country. We are concentrating a lot of time and effort on effectively governing the brand but one bad customer experience could undo this work in a second.

The machines are taking over

Also, as more job roles become increasingly automated specialised technical skills may not be the way to compete in an increasingly difficult economy - to really get ahead, what a worker needs are the aforementioned social skills. In the future, the jobs that are least likely to be automated are those that demand lots of interaction with co-workers or clients, not just the performance of rote analytical tasks. These jobs also call for the ability to perform innately human exercises—like pondering another person’s point of view. These nuances of human interaction are the one area in which machines are really struggling to compete with us and are where we can really thrive and differentiate.

The lesson for me was also that  having good technical skills is just a tiny part of success in the workplace. The team in Barnsley do an amazing job of completing their work and keeping the residents happy and their acquired social skills are essential for anyone in order to both enhance the reputation of a company and succeed in a career.

Keeping customers happy since 2015

I have always prided myself on fighting the corner of the external customer in any organisation in which I've worked. After all, without our customers we don't have a business! This has led to me previously getting frustrated when the focus of all of our efforts is placed on internally targeted work such as 'unnecessary' analytics reports for executives or in spending our time and money on staff events and giveaways.

However, a big learning curve for me has been to come to realise that our internal clients are really just as important as our external customers - especially when we have the responsibility of delivering digital solutions for over 24,000 staff! It's taken me a while to come around to this way of thinking, and part of that has been my own pride of wanting our work to hit the largest possible audience, but internal CMS etc. users really do need to be kept as happy as our paying customers.

In the past I have been involved in some great user experience testing initiatives to track everything from the response to a new design to the quality of the navigation but with a solely front-end focus. This has been great in allowing us to tailor a website to ensure the maximum number of leads and goals are achieved but what about user testing the back-end?

As we are responsible for selecting and managing our systems (anything from a CMS to an email client, asset library or survey tool) it's important we also involve the internal users of these to develop and utilise them fully.

What is often overlooked is that the in-house marketing team in any organisation is providing a service. Our clients are the wider business who are all reliant on what we provide to them to do their jobs properly. They may have what we deem to be a smaller audience than us, or one which is not as high profile, but it is our responsibility to streamline the tools we have in order for them to deliver on their individual objectives.

This is why I have introduced some internal user testing of our back-end tools at our regular user group meetings. This will really help my central team get to grips with the pain points and objectives of the wider business and tailor our solutions accordingly.

It's also true that many people are still very nervous of digital. They know it's required and that the digital marketing team are clearly professionals, who know their stuff, but that's as far is it goes. By being clam, collected, trustworthy and most importantly available you can be seen as a team not just of builders of digital assets but a resource on who they can rely on to educate them and help them grow. Being approachable is everything alongside making people feel that no question is a stupid question!

None shall enter!

Some internal clients may not want to be particularly hands on but for those who are it's essential they are provided an environment in which to flourish. If the central team is just seem as an agency who locks down all of the systems and builds everything themselves they will just end up with more work than they can deal with and a load of unfulfilled colleagues on the outside of an impenetrable fortress. 'Self service' is important - if only for your own sanity!

We have seen with the recent launch of our 'Marketing Hub' that the wider business is essential in informing us of what they need to deliver - whether it be in winning work through bid documents or supporting the building of working relationships with councils and joint ventures. We can then present a united front, share best practice and pool our efforts.

This also allows us to be recommended as a service who listens throughout the business and stretch our reach further as more people are sent our way to aid in project delivery and strengthen the brand.

With this in mind I am currently attending our annual two-day 'Leadership Conference' in the Cotswolds where I will be talking about the tools we offer to the business. The plan here is to increase the exposure of what we offer and show our commitment in finding the time to pay the same attention to our internal clients as we do the end-user.

The London themed reception desk

This past week has been particularly exhausting as I have been out and about visiting regional Kier offices and external agencies. However, I was definitely most excited about my Friday appointment as I was invited by my Human Resources colleagues to present a Digital Marketing Workshop at LinkedIn's London office. This has only been open for about six months and is definitely designed to impress clients with it's London theme (including an underground room and desks with built in 'Boris bikes' which charge your mobile phone). Needless to say we made the most of the exciting new surroundings!

Using the facilites at lunchtime

As a department our HR team has always been a priority of mine when ensuring the business engages digitally. Job searches are consistently in the top three on our website (as with everywhere I've ever worked) so streamlining the user experience is paramount. I've also noticed a trend of companies recruiting for 'Resourcing Digital Marketing Managers' who are given the responsibility of developing and delivering a significant upgrade to a company's recruitment and digital attraction assets. This goes beyond new customer acquisition as everyone competes for the very best talent available.

Outside of our content marketing strategy for LinkedIn we work hard on delivering a consistent experience for applicants and my training session emphasised the need for both Marketing and HR to work together to give a consistent view of the company which follows through on the promises made in our advertisements. Some of my key themes and tips for the team were:

• The importance of managing online profiles - if you are a recruiter it's essential you look the part online and maximise the opportunities available to you
• Conversely, it's important to understand the person as well as the worker of whoever you are about to interview. I always undertake background checks on potential interviewees, as if someone has seen fit to share something then it there is no reason not to do your homework on them before you meet. It also gives a good understand of how digitally savvy they are before they start
• Create content beyond just job advertisements - as with a customer acquisition campaign it's just as important to ensure that there is the content available to show what a good place your company can be for people to work. Once a candidate clicks the job advert you need relevant landing pages showing all of the benefits/information available to them as we did with our Apprenticeships Week campaign
• Make your job advert pages as good as they can be - these are your product so it's important they are the jewel in the crown of your careers pages
• Listen as well as talk to shape the employee brand - Along with the usual social media channels, websites such as Glassdoor give you a valuable insight into how you are perceived and if all of the work you are doing is paying off
• Be proactive to find 'passive candidates' - Andy, our LinkedIn Account Director, informed us that only 15% of LinkedIn members are actively seeking work. If you want the best candidates then you have to find them as many people would be open to the right job offer coming along
• Use tools to take away the manual process and filter the best fit candidates - Tools such as LinkedIn recruiter are an excellent way to find your next employee of the month. You can filter by location, experience or job type and it even allows you to use an exemplar employee for a search to find someone else just like them!

Anyone for pool?

To present yourselves as the best employer over your competitors you will need a mixture of all of the above as we're not all blessed with the fantastically modern offices of Tech companies (with table tennis tables and free snacks in every corner) such as LinkedIn!

Can you see the family resemblance?!

The way in which history has been recorded and certain individuals remembered (and others forgotten) is a fascinating subject on which the current trend for social media and online publishing will no doubt have a lasting effect. For this 100th post I'll be sharing how I was very excited to discover a few years ago that the Fryer family had a distant relative who was part of one of the most exciting and evocative naval stories of all time - the Mutiny on the Bounty.

Originating from Southampton many of my ancestors are sailors but none more famous than John Fryer who set sail in 1788 as Master of the Bounty. He was unique in that he was the one member of the crew who disagreed with Captain William Bligh's decision to promote Fletcher Christian (later leader of the mutineers) to Acting Lieutenant but then remained loyal to Bligh after he was cast overboard. Bligh's account of the Mutiny vilified Fryer, but Fryer gave fair evidence at Bligh's court-martial. Edward Christian, Fletcher's brother, was assisted by Fryer in publishing a counterweight to Bligh's version.

John Fryer's Narrative

These events showed that it was possible to have two contemporary and contrasting opinions of an event and that the history with which we are presented can never be 100% accurate. At the time both Fryer and Bligh were privileged in that they were men of influence and could see their accounts published. However, as social media has become popular we are now awash with every type of opinion on an individual or event. This will mean either a much more measured take on how events are remembered or a tangled web of thousands of sources to wade through in which to arrive at an accurate account.

Whereas earlier generations only have very small pieces of information about their lives recorded and perhaps only a few photographs with which to be remembered we are now awash with detailed, self published, online diaries listing what people have eaten for dinner, where they have checked in on Facebook and a mass of photos saved on the devices we all carry around in our pockets. This rising generation is the most photographed in history and one statistic estimates that in the past five years, more photos have been taken than all the prior years combined.

There is a lot of content out there!

However how many of these photos are just saved to a hard disk and hidden in a drawer, or uploaded to a social media site that will be gone in 5 years? Where is that longevity that a painting or book had in the past? Without making the effort to print these precious memories they will be confined to existing on an old device in a drawer as digital is cheap and cameras are everywhere. These lost memories prove expensive - not just to us but to future generations.

A big part of my current job at Kier is to increase the reach of our brand online. Essentially I am responsible for actively managing our digital footprint to build the foundations of how the brand is, and will be, perceived. The opposite side of this (the passive digital footprint) where we are mentioned by the public or in which our logo is photographed somewhere, is something we can attempt to control but eventually we are no longer the masters of our own destiny in the way the rich and powerful were in the past.

Mutineers turn Captain Bligh and
18 others (including John Fryer) adrift

In fact, I am currently taking steps to ensure that this blog is not forgotten and have begun to put together a printed version that will hopefully stand the test of time. Not for my own ego but so that the hours I have spent writing it (in total it amounts to a 60,000 word novel!) are not forgotten on an old and defunct SD Card in someone's loft.

Obviously it will never reach the exciting heights of John Fryer's life - I've worked in some colourful places but never any that have shown signs of a full scale mutiny!