I’ve written before about how tightly packed certain markets are. Forensics investigators as a whole value community, but within that group, vendors for mobile device forensics, e-discovery and other sub-fields are quite competitive. (At times, I visualize sharpened bared teeth. But anyway.)

By now most people in the industry know that I represent the High Technology Crime Investigation Association. As part of that work (especially in the months leading up to its conference), I have promoted directly competing firms, sometimes while I was contracted with one or two. I also contract with three mobile forensics vendors.

How do I manage without violating contractual agreements, or ethical boundaries?

Transparency without disclosure

Without disclosing specific needs or intended strategies (e.g. “ABC wants to focus on e-discovery…”) I inform current clients of new contracts. Sometimes I do this even in negotiation stages, depending on how I feel about the situation I’m hearing and the role I’m expected to work in. I also inform new prospects of existing contracts, right at the start, in case it’s a deal-breaker for them.

I don’t sign contracts I don’t feel comfortable with. If something is a clear conflict — two direct competitors in the exact same space (think AccessData/Guidance, or Cellebrite/MSAB) I don’t play them off against each other. That’s just too much to ask.

But in less clear instances, where I feel there’s more flexibility and I do sign, I am diligent about keeping the work separate.

For instance, among my mobile forensics clients, one has me working on a campaign basis. Their PR team is firmly established, and I am working with the messaging direction they provide, rather than helping them determine and direct messaging. Another client opted to have me work on product promotion rather than the training branch of its business, because I was already working with another client on its own training.

In all three cases, differentiation is key. The clients had already mapped out the way they wanted to differentiate themselves, possibly the most important thing they could do in such a tight market. Why… and how are the differing messages not a conflict for me?

The community standard

It comes back to “community.” Each vendor has something to bring to the table. Each has its strengths and its weaknesses; within the company, each product has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Moreover, each forensic examiner has his/her preferences when it comes to tools, based on the tool interface, ease of use, and a dozen other intangible factors. And because the mobile forensics industry still has yet to produce a tool that can acquire all the data from every digital device with every operating system on the planet, most examiners use multiple tools — including directly competing products if they can afford it.

In that regard, what I do shouldn’t be much different from what a vendor-neutral reseller does: find what works best for the customer. (This is perhaps most in play when I’m representing HTCIA, when what I do on their clock is to benefit the membership community as a whole. And no, I don’t charge clients for promoting their company on HTCIA’s behalf.)

In my case, it’s a matter of finding the communication that will:

• Best highlight the answers to customer questions, at whatever stage in the buying or ownership process. Use cases, for instance, are clear examples of showing one product’s strength without coming at another product’s expense.
• Align with client values, experiences and strengths in a way that matches media needs. Depending on whether the client has an investigative, legal, hacking, government or private background (or some combination thereof), I pitch stories that draw on that experience. Subject matter experts don’t come from cookie cutters, and the possibilities for good stories are endless as a result. I haven’t pitched the same story for two competing clients, and I doubt I ever will.
• Start and continue conversations according to community values on social networking sites. Forensic examiners value truth above all else, so they like healthy debates that challenge one another and keep standards high. Marketing messages don’t work with them, and the best vendors respect that.

Remember: I was a journalist first, and it’s this sense of impartiality that I bring to my PR work. I was writing for the investigative community long before I started in PR, and those are the people — my readers and sources — I feel the most sense of responsibility to: contracts and paychecks come and go, but the community remains the same.

Their needs are what I’m responding to when I counsel clients and write content. The point is not to water down the message, but rather, to raise the bar on clients: to bring their strengths and values out from behind the veil of marketing-speak like “innovative” and “revolutionary” and to show the customer how the clients will help solve their work problems.

At that point, keeping client strategies separate pretty much works the same way as keeping my own personal biases out of client work. Clients pay me to incorporate their values into the content I craft for them, so as long as they clearly communicate those values and goals to me, I’m able to come up with strategies that work for everyone — and that don’t conflict.

photo credit: jesse.millan

Do you reflect the image you want to?

Last week I attended the Techno Security/Mobile Forensics Conferences in Myrtle Beach, SC. Because this year, as last year, I was there to represent a client, I spent the bulk of my time in and around the exhibit hall.

At one point I wandered past the spot where, last year, I’d been set up in my client’s booth. I noticed that across from the spot was a different vendor from last year’s. Then I realized the vendor I’d seen last year was nowhere in sight.

This was a bit of a surprise. The vendor was one of the larger companies, so while the economy is tough for everyone right now, what had made them decide not to spend money on attending this conference — even though it’s one of the largest in the industry?

Usually vendors tie their event decisions to the number of leads they can get from face-to-face interactions. Looking back on last year, I remembered that I couldn’t recall a time when I had seen the two booth attendants actually interacting with anyone. They’d spent the bulk of their time, noses down, typing away on their laptops.

Whether they intended to or not, they’d sent a clear message: “Don’t bother us. We’re busy doing more important things.” People had walked right by their booth, even after interacting with booth reps beside and across from them.

If the company really did opt out of this year’s Techno because their cost-to-lead ratio was too high, it’s a shame they didn’t realize that the solution was completely within their control.

Communicating your place in community

Conferences are, arguably, a microcosm of PR. Your customers show up. Media show up. You may have multiple company representatives there. And you interact with other vendors. All represent facets of your public relations efforts.

How you interact with them may be one of the most important gauges the participants have of your company’s values. This is a critical factor in their decision about whether to do business with you — it is part of your branding, to a much greater extent than product or value proposition.

In the digital forensics and information security industry, the highest premium is placed on community. Information is important, but it can’t be shared without emotional and intellectual connections. Therefore, disengaging from any part of the community (as the vendor I described did last year) shows your company doesn’t really value that community.

This goes for the other vendors, too — even your competitors. No one wants to see uncles or in-laws at each other’s throats during a family dinner, so why should this be okay at a conference? Yet this year, a competitor of one of the event’s sponsors went too far in positioning itself apart from the sponsor:

• Their team stayed clear of hosted events (even one involving free food. Gasp!) At one point, they clustered in the hotel lobby as if circling the wagons while everyone else gathered to socialize.
• Their sales representative had changed out the sponsor-branded nametag lanyard for a lanyard from a previous conference — that his company had sponsored.
• They didn’t come over to the sponsor’s booth to socialize, as I’d seen them do at previous events.

I was not alone in noticing their choices. Trickiest: although at least one (the lanyard) was a conscious choice, the others may not have been. The sales team may have decided to go out to dinner rather than attend the social event, simply because they wanted more robust fare. Still, it would have been wise for them to consider how that choice looked from the outside in. That’s because while choices may not affect sales to any measurable effect, every action ripples, many times in ways we don’t see.

Match conscious with unconscious

To communicate a consistent brand message, all the pieces have to come together, not just consciously — what you are telling customers and others — but also unconsciously: what you are showing them through your actions.

If the “tell” and the “show” don’t match, it may not cost you short-term sales, but the longer the mismatch goes on, the less equity you’ll have… and the more ground you’ll lose to competitors who are consistent in word and deed. In other words, don’t risk ego — corporate or individual — against community.

Does your approach, conscious and unconscious, communicate what you want customers to believe about you and your organization? If not, what will it take to fix it?

photo credit: Unhindered by Talent

• Something breaks. A piece of equipment, an aircraft, a phone tree, web hosting.
• Disgruntled customer tweets about it.
• Company rep whose product/service broke follows disgruntled customer and asks how they can make it better.
• And/or, company’s competitor also follows disgruntled customer, offering a chance to switch.

This has happened with greater frequency in the past 8-12 months. Taking cues from case studies like Comcast and Dell, companies are monitoring Twitter streams and blogs, retweeting positive comments and asking about negatives. They may monitor for business opportunities like a need for website hosting or ESI archival solutions. This is social customer service, and it’s almost machine-like in its predictability.

Which is exactly why businesses need to tread carefully when the case studies tell us we need to be responsive, to “join the conversation.” Social media may be technology, but being “social” means they are personal. Machine-like is not a good quality to bring to a social environment, and here’s why:

Response overload

More businesses being more responsive means more risk of being tuned out. Can you imagine being in a large room, surrounded by people fawning to make sure your every need was taken care of? It would get old, fast. Indeed, I was actually blocked in the last few weeks by someone I respect highly, who also blocked the client I represent.

I had a good guess as to why: he’d complained a few times about the client, and being the good social PR person that I am, I’d followed up each time. The last time, he complained that he didn’t want to hear from me every time he blew off steam. I thought this meant I needed to respect his boundaries — not that he’d block both me and the client.

Why is this important? Some people just don’t want to “be engaged,” right? In this case, the individual is someone we call an “influencer”: his opinion matters to other professionals who follow him. Not having access to his (protected) Twitter stream means that he could be driving business away, and I would never know it or have the chance to respond.

In the grand scheme of things, this is probably not a big deal; it doesn’t mean a departure from the business goals I helped the client create and work toward. But it is an uncomfortable position to be in, and that is why I say: tread gently. Don’t assume that conversation about you indicates a desire for conversation with you.

Respond to what you can control

In my Twitter stream last month, two forensics “tweeps” brought up problems they’d been having with a certain brand of hard drive. I jumped in, telling them that 15 years ago when I worked in computer support, that brand of hard drive seemed to crash on us the most often, too.

Within seconds a brand rep was following all three of us, asking how s/he could help with our “trepidation” about the brand. I didn’t respond, just tweeted to my friends that I still hesitate whenever I see the brand name in the specs of a computer I’m considering buying. I wasn’t sure what else I was supposed to say.

If you’re not making the decisions, or if the problem (say, quality control) is bigger than a simple customer-service transaction, stay in “monitor” mode (including following individuals) and work closely with those who can resolve the problem. If it’s not likely to get resolved, figure out what the lessons are to learn. We can’t all work in a Zappo’s company culture, so when it comes to communicating with your publics, how can you work with what you’ve got?

The community isn’t your personal marketing territory

A Facebook friend — a book author and church leader, not a professional marketer — recently said, “When ‘community’ is the agenda in the community, friendship itself becomes utilitarian.”

All friendships are a little bit utilitarian. We fulfill both spoken and unspoken needs through the company we keep. We may even give back, anticipating in the backs of our minds the time when we will need something. Only in the best of friendships do we give selflessly.

It’s unlikely that our marketing relationships will ever achieve that agape level — businesses exist to make money, they are inherently impersonal. However, they are still composed of human beings. And while a marketer might naturally say that of course a brand community is utilitarian, our customers might be mourning the loss of true communities in ways we don’t realize (and perhaps should be more sensitive to).

Example: a police lieutenant I know worried that social media would add to the increasing erosion of Southern front-porch values, the gift of an invitation to “come up and sit a spell” on a warm summer evening. He was the first person I thought of when I read how social media is recreating the neighborhood:

The human need to be part of something small and special — a smaller circle of special friends and family — is at the heart of everything we do as people. It can be seen in the many meetups and niche conferences we hear about daily. It’s the power to know where someone you ‘like’ is, at any given moment of the day, using Foursquare, but then using that knowledge to meet and greet them, hand to hand, face to face. We may brag about our Twitter followers and friend dozens on Facebook, but in our hearts, it’s our real-life friends who drive us to buy or not to buy, to support charities or not support them.

Granted, it can be hard to “recreate neighborhoods” when your customers are scattered far and wide. But when you form relationships online that translate into meetings, dinners and drinks at tradeshows, when you and your customers trust and think of each other as friends rather than soul-suckers who always want something… issues with response overload and things beyond our control may just be reduced.

As with any relationship, though, such business-friendships must be carefully cultivated. However, fearing them — fearing crossed boundaries and advantages given and taken — does not make for the kind of “social business” that we know can lead to better customer loyalty, and thus, sales.

How are you striving to improve your responsiveness to customers? How is it, or isn’t it, working for you?

photo credit: teamstickergiant

I plied him with the most tailored advice I could give about starting and joining in conversations, linking, curating related content, and generally being himself. He was already starting to collect followers, and I knew he’d be welcomed.

But he wasn’t posting. When he finally did, the post seemed awkward. And yet, he’d told me he was reading and parsing everything I’d written. So what was going on?

Short bursts of conversation are not for everyone

Most people who thrive on Twitter tend to do so within just a few tweets of joining. They figure out how and where to find the people they want to connect with, and before long, only their follower counts show how new they are to the space. The short form of communication doesn’t seem to bother them in the slightest.

I emailed my SME. “It’s not the conversing with people… it’s figuring out how to fit your natural patterns into Twitter syntax. How often do you text message or IM or chat with other people?” I asked.

His response: NEVER. “I hate texting and IM’ing,” he wrote. “I only text my wife and a couple of buddies. I never use IM.”

Of course it would be harder to fit into short-form messaging. And yet, there was still that niggling problem: because of the forensics community on Twitter, it was still the best place to drive traffic back to his site.

I recommended he check out Twitterfeed. Although I don’t advocate automation as a stand-in for the kind of relationship-building Twitter enables, it was clear that my SME wasn’t all that into this particular mode of relationship-building. Automation would ensure that he could tweet both his own, and related content. Enough tweets, and he’d be able to stay in front of followers.

But don’t just “set it and forget it”

Those who expect to be able to build a relationship with Twitter-based experts may be turned off when their RT or attempts to start a conversation go unanswered. They’re not likely to understand that this isn’t because the expert is a snob, but simply because s/he isn’t there to respond.

To get around this, the expert might do one of several things:

• Post a Twitter bio reflecting that the account is automated and giving users the option to email with questions or comments. This isn’t perfect — people generally won’t check before they reply to a tweet — but when they first follow you, the bio can be useful to establish a ground rule.
• If you dislike Twitter, but you’re on LinkedIn or Facebook and feed your status updates to Twitter, consider periodic tweets that ask followers to connect with you via one of those channels instead.
• Ask blog readers to email you or comment on your blog rather than tweeting you. (Twitterfeed allows you to input text before or after a tweet.)
• Use an app — my SME tells me Twitter for iPhone has one — that pops a message up whenever you’re publicly mentioned.

Twitter is well worth the time and effort to get to know, but if you hate short-form messaging in general and decide, after making an honest effort, that it really isn’t for you, then consider automation and/or combining the channel with the social sites you do prefer.

Have you chosen not to use Twitter? What have your experiences been? How do you connect with the investigative community otherwise?

photo credit: cevanoff

That’s exactly how it went down, and while the effort wasn’t flawless — no streaming video or Foursquare vendor check-ins, for one — I don’t think those things were strictly necessary. First, they could even have alienated some of the attendees (cops get nervous about the bad guys having access to the same resources).

Second and more importantly, the HTCIA conference is (and has always been) about making face-to-face connections. Like me, many investigators work remotely, either with other jurisdictions or with clients cross-country. The conference is a chance for them to learn new things, yes, but also to get a read on people previously only known by name or voice or words.

Public relations is community relations

If anything, my on-scene PR efforts reinforced something I have heard repeated many times by other PR pros: public relations isn’t just media outreach. Instead, it incorporates media relations together with customer relations, investor relations, community relations, and even employee relations. Anyone whom the organization touches, in other words, is defined as its “public.”

In Atlanta I met vendors and speakers, HTCIA chapter officers, long-time members and newer members. Each in their own way helped validate and refine our past efforts and future plans for PR, because they brought me closer to defining who in fact our publics are.

Marketing and PR pros talk about “buyer personas,” sketches of a company’s ideal customer that are drawn from market surveys and other research. Made for each target market segment, personas help marketers develop appropriate communications, from website content to webinars and video to mobile apps.

It sounds a bit clinical, and to some extent it has to be. Behavior is as scientific as it is irrational, and if buyer persona development can help develop communications that inspire rational decision-making, then it’s a worthwhile pursuit. But it shouldn’t overlook the actual people. If personas help us understand our ideal, then meeting and talking to our actual publics help us understand the actual.

PR and marketing people also talk about the importance of community building, and this is the reason why. Personas are the product of marketing; community, of public relations. If personas help us communicate the relevance of our products and services to an ideal, then community helps our real customers respond with how we can make products and services even more relevant to them.

The value of personal interaction

Personas are only a start, and this was the value of the HTCIA conference to me as its PR representative. It’s not just tweets and retweets on Twitter, or “likes” on our Facebook page. Those are fun and provide a degree of interesting insight, and so they are an important part of our outreach. But social networking is only a part of the community, with just some publics represented.

While the conference is likewise, it afforded the kinds of interactions — verbal and nonverbal — that online cannot. It showed me the extent to which each group is part of the HTCIA community, and where we might encourage stronger relationships. Even though I had plans for where to focus my efforts going into 2011, my conversations at the conference helped solidify those — and even identified some things I hadn’t considered.

What does public relations mean to you? How have your online and offline interactions validated or changed your definition?

Image: Edmund Cheung/HTCIA

It’s not just for private companies

Weighted toward the private side? OK, yes, it is, in that in my examples I talked about selling products and services to customers. I wrote most of it not long after the great discussions I had with some vendors at Techno Security about content and social strategies.

But I used some law enforcement-specific examples too, especially with regard to victims of high-tech crimes, because ultimately, everyone is “selling” – they’re working to earn trust. Just as companies want to earn customers’ trust that their products will solve the problems they’re built to solve, law enforcement task forces want to earn citizens’ trust that their investigations will solve community problems.

Building on examiners’ content

The more digital forensics catches on, the more examiners from both public and private sectors seem to appear on blogs and in forums, hoping to learn from as well as educate each other. The community is perhaps one of the strongest on the Internet… yet it’s all about the individuals. Their agencies and companies hardly join in.

It does say something that these professionals are allowed to blog, podcast, tweet and join websites like LinkedIn, identifying themselves as employees of a particular company (though law enforcement agencies are less amenable to this). But what if their organizations tapped into their content?

Educating other examiners is, of course, different from educating members of the public, or less technically inclined employees. For an organization to point to its employees as proof of their collective expertise may not backfire, but it would be hard for the general public to understand the relevance to themselves.

Still, to link to a body of professionals all contributing research and opinion to the community would indicate at the very least an organization that hires original thinkers who care about cybercrime investigations. It would make those individuals more accessible to bloggers and journalists who could assist with public education. And it would signal to the investigative community that the organization values its employees.

How might your employees’ content improve your citizens’ or customers’ view of how you serve them?

What can you accomplish as part of your community?

Eric Huber’s post about Guidance vs. AccessData touched a nerve (as you’ll see from the comments I left there). Over the last 18 months of business-building, I’ve read many a blog from marketing/public relations/social media people who all say the same basic things:

• If you want loyal customers who consistently buy your products and services, build relationships with them.
• Connect those customers to one another via your products and services.
• Your relationships with them, and theirs with each other, constitute a community.
• Be part of that community, not outside it or over it.

These are the values that create loyalty over the long term. They are part of an organization’s culture. And I worry that too many digital forensic solutions providers, at least the “big guns,” are not part of the community they serve. They’re too focused on competing with one another.

Community vs. competition

It’s not just what I’ve heard and read that leads me to say this. It’s the almost complete lack of presence on social networking sites. There are exceptions — the SANS Institute and AccessData, both of which  put out valuable information as well as engage customers — but most everyone else? Might have a presence via blog or Twitter or LinkedIn, but only rarely update.

Which is a shame, because they’re missing out on a phenomenal little community. A community of developers and examiners, investigators and problem-solvers, many of whom blog or podcast their thoughts and expertise. What if forensic brands regularly joined these daily conversations?

I suspect one or more of several reasons why they don’t:

• They’re afraid of getting too cozy, of the chance that an off-the-cuff comment might betray an important secret.
• Their PR staff running the social networking show aren’t privy to enough of what’s going on in the company.
• Their PR staff know plenty about what’s going on in the company, but not enough of what’s going on in the industry to be able to talk about it.
• They’re afraid the competition will go after customers with whom they actively engage online.

There are probably at least a few more reasons. But the upshot is, even if they are monitoring the blogs and podcasts, they are still too busy looking sideways to focus on things the community wants and asks for beyond product-specific features. Of such needs and desires is innovation born, and companies too focused on remaining the leader of the pack can never rock their customers’ world by breaking free and doing something truly special.

Sure, they might offer intriguing and even ground-breaking information in conference labs or lectures… but those only reach the people who are there. And you can’t earn loyalty by taking business cards and putting the email addresses you find there on an email list that spits out the same content. Loyalty comes after customers recognize that you’re trying to make their lives better: easier, faster, more efficient.

Community-building as business strategy

So whether it’s great content that teaches, great products that help them do their jobs, great customer service that solves their problems, or (best of all) some combination of the three, good value-adding, community-building strategy has got to be part of more forensic vendors’ offerings. You’re not helping digital investigations by keeping your cards close to your chest, and you may even be making them harder.

All the while, you’re leaving a gaping wide opening for community members who do understand each other’s needs to come along and take what you’ve been taking for granted all along: customer loyalty.

Because at that point it won’t be about the products anymore. It will be about all the intangibles that go with them: the things you can never compete with because your C-suite isn’t willing to share enough of its passion, values, personality, the things that drove the company into the digital investigations industry to begin with.

What can you do today to become more fully a part of the investigative community?

Image: diamondmountain via Flickr