As published in Financial Planning Magazine
There has been a theme to many of my conversations over the last month, both in person and via various digital and social channels, that focuses on the issue of ‘social media’ being somewhat scary to professionals because of the thought of allowing clients into their personal ‘private lives’.
I have heard this fear expressed in many and various ways such as, ‘My clients don’t want to know what I had for lunch’ or even more plainly, ‘I don’t want to let clients into my personal life’.
I believe this stems from a misconceived evolution of what it means to be professional. Over the past century we saw the rise of big business and industrialisation, where the community elements of service were replaced in favour of scale and efficiency.
This was no different across all of the professional services and we developed a corporate culture of separating the personal and the profit. In order to perform in a scalable efficient manner, we had to fit within the corporate conformity which was fast becoming the ‘big businesses’ of advice based enterprise.
This effectively meant that putting on a corporate face in front of clients was how we got the job done. It didn’t matter whether we actually liked working with the people we were seeing because that was irrelevant to corporate profit, and therefore our definition of professionalism became to segregate ourselves from the business process.
What this essentially means is that we sacrificed individualism for conformity because it became a way to generate greater profit and efficiency. That worked in a world where more is better and as advice professionals, we needed to take on and service those clients who came to us irrespective of personal fit.
Of course, the best advisers have never quite ‘conformed’ but in general, advice based industries have largely stagnated in terms of innovation over the last 100 years or so. The reason is because of our misaligned belief that conformity is professional.
I also believe it is this broken idea that is one of the driving forces that has led to the undeniable fact that the majority of adults in our culture do not have adequate professional guidance in their lives.
Imagine how the world would look if everyone in our society was receiving advice around: cash flow planning; how to think about money; business structuring; career path development; legacy planning and so forth. How much more productive would our entire economic system be, how much more lucrative would our industries become and how much better a place would the world be?
I believe the future of advice can be an economic revolution of sustained value creation and I think ‘social business’ and ‘social advice’ is the catalyst for that evolution. You see, there is a fundamental change that is already upon us and which will continue at pace as momentum builds.
There are two important developments to consider as we move into the future of advice. Firstly, the power of community is changing service. Big business can no longer ignore the voice of a lone customer because interconnectivity and social media means that every lone voice can have an exponential impact.
On the flip side, when you understand how to create community and empower happy customers, they take on the ability to be able to promote your business far more effectively and at a far larger scale than the traditional referral model that has been the cornerstone of professional services to date.
Secondly, access to information is becoming more and more commoditised, yet life and decision-making is growing in complexity. What this means is that we are relying more on our emotional filters to make decisions than ever before. Information is no longer a competitive advantage and it is the ability to provide a relationship of trust with which to navigate that is becoming the new force.
Social media is empowering the re-birth of relationship-based business and there is no industry with more upside for growth or positioned better to be at the centre of this revolution than professional services. Yet, our out dated view of professionalism is holding us back because in the era of social advice, who we are and what we believe is our competitive advantage. In order for us to build relationships at scale, we must allow a large audience to see who we are.
Don’t be scared…be liberated. In the new world of social advice there is no need for a separate work and home persona. Letting clients know what you like to eat is actually likely to provide a greater competitive return than a discussion of the latest technical strategy.
Don’t get me wrong, quality advice and your ability to give it is a given because in this new world, a failure of either will be equally transparent. This new evolution means that good advisers only need to be passionately themselves.
Are you ready to be a social adviser?