"Be steadfast in your goal, but flexible about how you get there." This quote, said by Shawna Korgan during a recent Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS) conference, sounded strangely familiar. A few months earlier, as part of a six-company research team put together at SMPS University, we discovered a common situation across our firms: more of our leaders needed to get involved on LinkedIn, but there was no straight path to get there.

We asked the question: how could we encourage our company leaders to get more active on LinkedIn when each of them faced different hurdles towards getting involved?

Becoming Curators of Information

Understanding the LinkedIn preferences of our industry would be a valuable first step, and so our team created a survey to identify the predispositions of 370 industry personnel. It included questions ranging from general social media use to specific LinkedIn preferences. With a response rate of 35 percent (considered impressively high by survey standards), we knew we were on to something important.

The survey revealed that our firm leaders wanted to get more active on LinkedIn, and were interested in getting help from the local marketing teams. We then built a service blueprint to map service delivery from our leaders' perspectives. This allowed us to define the lines of interaction and identify gaps for improvement. The deconstructed process looked like this:

Focusing on Flexibility

With the survey and service blueprint complete, we had all the information needed to come up with plans for our individual companies. Here at Dewberry, we closed an interaction gap with specialized training programs. Working with our communications department, which was already offering corporate social media training, our regional marketing staff began to schedule training tailored to specific service lines and local leadership at the branch level.

We quickly found that fitting in more relevant trainings actually increased our technical staff's understanding and usage of LinkedIn. We're even beginning to see more strategic marketing plans take shape that include interaction by our firm leaders.

Sharing Our Knowledge to Boost the Conversation

Our research revealed 79 percent of all respondents agree that building their network is the platform's most important use.

To that end, we want to share our research with you. As our team did during an educational breakout session at that same SMPS national conference, we want to give you the knowledge to encourage your firm's leadership to get active on LinkedIn, connect with our leaders, and build a better online conversation across the AEC industry as a whole.