Laura’s Winning Ideas

The jury is still out on whether Engineers and other technical service providers need a presence on the Social Media sites. The most progressive firms are dabbling in LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace. Most are still sitting on the sidelines.

However, individuals in your firm are on these sites. So every firm needs a social media policy if you don’t already have one.

TRUE STORY:

When the World Wide Web was brand new, the firm I worked for didn’t have a website yet. Only a few of our competitors had websites up, and everyone was fumbling around. We found some good ideas (posting a website and getting in the category for your business with Yahoo and the other directories)  and some bad ideas (posting graphics that were too big to load in less than two minutes!).

Our proposal team was the defacto marketing division since the only other “marketing” department was the graphics team. We took up doing vanity searches of our corporate name just to keep up with what was being said about us out in the ether.  Our employees were also dabbling on the internet, posting personal pages and fooling around with HTML.

Unfortunately, some of those personal pages were objectionable but also mentioned our firm as their employer. Search for our firm and you could get some pages of porn and pages with generally unacceptable lifestyle choices. Maybe you’d get a page that reflected well on our business, maybe not.

We suggested a corporate-wide policy be created to cover how and when the corporate name and/or logo could be used. You would think this wouldn’t have to be written down and disseminated to everyone, but common sense ain’t so common.

Same goes today, only moreso. Some managers worry about social media impacting work productivity. I worry about social media impacting your brand and your firm’s ability to qualify for and win work. A simple set of rules and cautions is all it takes to make folks understand they should avoid implicating the firm in their personal adventures.

Have you Googled your key personnel being proposed for the first time to a client? Don’t you think clients do that?  Add a step in your proposal process to Google all the key people during a review cycle, just to be sure you don’t get any surprises. If it turns out someone with the same name and profile that could be mistaken for your employee has unsavory posts that turn up too high in the search results, 1) coach your person to post their own profile to a few social media sites, especially LinkedIn and Facebook, and 2) consider using their middle initial or otherwise modifying their name to minimize the unsavory hits from matching.

I go one step further and contact many of the folks with my same name. I trade links with them and send traffic their way when it gets misdirected to me. Luckily none of them are strippers, neo-nazis or drug dealers, at least not so far!

Bio-Pharma is a new area of work at 1Ricci. We regularly work on important proposals with consequences for national security, but these Biologic Pharmaceuticals have important ramifications for public safety in the event of a terrorist attack.

BARDA (Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority) is charged with finding and supporting development of agents to protect the US population at large from attack with contaminants and agents like Anthrax, developing medical countermeasures, and stockpiling medicines for an emergency.

Here’s the description from the BARDA home page:

The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), within the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, provides an integrated, systematic approach to the development and purchase of the necessary vaccines, drugs, therapies, and diagnostic tools for public health medical emergencies.

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An ancestor of mine, Matteo Ricci, is back in the news this week. A map commissioned by the Chinese royal house is on display in Washington DC at the Library of Congress. You can read the BBC article and see a picture here.

Matteo Ricci was the first missionary from the West who was welcome and became revered by the Chinese leadership. He arrived in 1583 with new knowledge from the West, but was open to discovering the sciences and inventiveness of the Chinese educated class. Contrary to the BBC article, he was not the first missionary sent to China, but the first who was allowed to stay.

His first work in China was a small book, On Friendship, which just became available in the US in english. The Chinese Prince who had commissioned the book was pleased, and the small book became very popular in China.

I’m going to try to get to Washington D.C. to see this before it leaves for Minnesota where it will have a permanent home with its new owner. It’s one thing to try to keep up with the Joneses, but just try to avoid being a slacker with ancestors like these!

I’ve been thinking about teaching Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) proposal writing skills lately.

The first assumption technical experts bring with them is that, what is obvious to them should be obvious to others. This isn’t correct, and loser proposals prove this. In many cases, your competitors are technically as qualified as your team. However, the winning proposal communicates value in a more illuminating way.

Chris Witt at Life after Powerpoint! said it best yesterday:

– Knowing something without acting on it is like having a candle without lighting it.
– Acting on what you know is like lighting the candle.
– Communicating what you know so others can use it is like using your lit candle to light other people’s candles.

That’s why “presentation and communication” skills are so highly rated, even for technical experts. The better able you are to share what you know so that other people can understand and use it, the more valuable you are.

This is a perfect analogy for proposal professionals. We tip the candles of our SMEs to light the candles of our clients.