This episode runs 28 min.
David and Josh discuss the very important People section on your website.
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Mentioned in This Episode 132: Website People Section
- You should include your people on your website
- But, won’t our competitors steal our best people?
- Who to include in your People section
- Photo options: headshot, full body, business, biz casual, casual,
- Include bios or bullet qualifications or Q&A
- People do business with people they know, like and trust
- Relationships can and do begin online (no, not Tinder)
- Where to put your people beyond the People section
- Have Ambassadors for markets and service lines
- Can your People section help your firm win the talent war?
- Photo group shots or just individual photos in case people leave the firm
- Video protraits
- What about people that refuse to have their photo taken
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Announcer: Welcome to PSM, the Professional Services Marketing podcast. It’s insight applied.
David Lecours: Hello and welcome to PSM show, the podcast for AEC marketers. I’m David Lecours and I’ve got Josh Miles with me here as well. How’s it going, Josh?
Josh Miles: Going well sir, how are you?
David Lecours: I’m good, I’m glad to be back on the podcast. So today I have a topic that’s a perennial one and it relates to featuring your people or your staff on your website. Is that something you’ve ever dealt with?
Josh Miles: Oh my goodness, when it comes to websites there are always like three or four big emotional topics and there are a few things more emotional I think than people on websites.
David Lecours: Yeah, absolutely. I just want to remind our listeners that we have a title sponsor and they support the underwriting and the technical production of this show and that sponsor is SMPS, who reminds us that business is transformed through marketing leadership. If you want to find out more about SMPS check out their website where you can see their people smps.org. If you want to see our people, Josh and I, check out our website at psm.show.
Announcer: This is PSM. It’s insight applied.
David Lecours: Okay, Josh, let’s get into this. Of course, the first question that always comes up and it takes many different forums when a firm our audience is working on updating their website is it should, in fact, they feature their people on their website? I have strong opinion about this but first I want to hear yours.
Josh Miles: You know, David, I think it’s a funny question in particular when we think about especially the more design firm leaning groups in the AEC world where they’re really good at finding amazing photographers who take amazing photographs of buildings that are completely devoid of humans. I think when it comes time to add the photos of their people on their website, I think the gut feeling for most firms is they’re scared to do it. Why do you think that is?
David Lecours: Well, I think, in general, people are self-conscious of their own image, which is funny. In that we now live in this world of selfies and Instagram and Facebook, and man, in those mediums people don’t seem to be hesitant to post their own photos. But for some reason, there’s this very strong line in the sand of that’s personal and this is professional. As a professional, it’s all about our work, it’s not about me. I guess the irony of that is the thing that I always hear is like, “Hey, we’re in a relationship business. People buy us for us and it’s that personal connection.” Yeah, I feel very strongly that firms should feature their people. Now there’s lots of different ways we can do that, and we’ll talk about those, but, yeah, at some level you’ve got to feature the people that are doing the work.
Josh Miles: Yeah, I completely agree with that. I guess I would take it a step further too and say you probably should have some people in those beautiful [crosstalk 00:03:18] buildings as well because we didn’t make the buildings just for photos. We made them for the end user. I had the opportunity recently to attend a design intelligence conference called the Design Futures Council and they were talking about maybe the flipped idea that your hospital client is not asking you to build them a more beautiful hospital, they’re asking you to join them on their quest to cure cancer and building this new hospital is really just a step in getting to their goal. I think that super important piece of keeping the people in mind is huge for the industry as a whole. There’s nothing more personal than the people who are actually going to be doing the work and being able to introduce that team to everyone who’s checking out your website.
David Lecours: Yeah, for sure. Now one of the resistance or push backs I sometimes get from clients is, “Hey, if we feature our people on there, our competitors are going to steal them.” What do you think about that, is that a valid fear?
Josh Miles: If I had a nickel for every time I heard that, that piece of feedback. Well, I think in all seriousness, this is going to sound a little bit smarter lucky, but I think if firms worried as much about what it took to keep their most valuable people and worry less about having them poached, I think it wouldn’t matter. They could have the home phone or their … like anybody has a home phone, they could have their cell phone numbers printed under their bios and have nothing to worry about because they’re creating such an awesome culture and such a great place to work. As a side point, there’s this little thing called social media where maybe your best people might be on there too and that might be a better poaching ground than your website anyway.
David Lecours: I know, I always tell it like, “Well, look, your competitors already know who your great people are, your great people are visible experts. They’re out there speaking and writing and they’re on LinkedIn, and if it was so easy to just poach them because they happen to be on your website, yeah, then there are bigger problems that need to be resolved first before you consider whether or not you put your people on your website.”
Josh Miles: Somehow not showing the photo is a great defensive move though.
David Lecours: Right, yeah. They can’t see them but how can they hire them?
Josh Miles: Right.
David Lecours: But, yeah, I think it is so important but we know that people buy from people they know, like, and trust. The best way to get to know people and get to like them and get to trust them is to get to feel what they’re like. What I found is that these relationships now are beginning online, yes, there’s no substitute for meeting somebody in person. But it’s not an either or situation, you can meet somebody online and then meet them in person, or you can go vice versa. So we need to fluidly move in and out and having somebody available online on the website is such a great start. Not just for recruiting for projects but I’d love to hear your thoughts on having your people on there as a recruiting tool.
Josh Miles: Well, I think something that we’ve talked about in AEC marketing links over the past few years is this whole idea of a talent war and I think failing to showcase your people and your culture on your website is just a huge miss unless you have a horrible culture or a horrible place to work. If you’ve got a great company and a great place to work, I think the more that you can show that off, your team and your culture are some of the few meaningful differentiators who would be employee. I think it’s a huge wasted opportunity just to not show what that looks like.
David Lecours: That’s a really interesting point, it seems obvious but nobody else has your people. I know that we can’t differentiate solely on our people. I’ve never met a firm that doesn’t think that they have the smartest people and the best people. But there’s this makeup of each individual personality that when combined does make your culture and does make, hopefully, the firm different. I don’t think that can be understated.
Josh Miles: Okay, so this is maybe the most emotionally instigating question that gets asked around the boardroom table around websites, which is who should we feature on our website?
David Lecours: Yes, right.
Josh Miles: Whether it’s a large firm or a small firm or multi-office, multi-location, huge, massive firm, how do you consult with your clients and how do you recommend coming to a conclusion about who gets featured on the website?
David Lecours: Yeah, I used to say it was a pretty … Well, not easy, but easier decision and it was just based on size. If the firm was say 50 people or larger, featuring everybody was just instantly off the table. I’ve changed my view on that because the last two sites we’ve done, one was for a firm that has 175 people and one was a firm that has over 300 people. In both cases, we decided to feature every single person in the firm. Now, I don’t recommend that for everybody, it’s not for the faint of heart. It requires you to create individual pages for each of those people. But it was really important to those firms and so I guess it comes back to like everything, strategy. What is it you want to emphasize and doesn’t make sense? There’s definitely benefits to having everybody on there for recruitment and retention.
David Lecours: Everybody can then literally point to a URL to their own individual page and send that out to friends and family. We’re always trying to explain what we do for a living to our parents and having that link to your particular page on your company’s website is a great introduction to go there.
Josh Miles: See, mom, I’m actually on the website, that’s how you can sell.
David Lecours: Yeah, I am working, I am working. It’s a hard decision because you don’t want to alienate people and so then the question becomes where do you draw the line? Like, okay, let’s say the firm’s decided, “We’re not going to feature everybody but we’re going to feature VPs and above or directors and above.” I think you have to pick an arbitrary line and then decide, “These are the folks that are going to be featured.” I would say at minimum like let’s say I think you’ve got to feature your people, but the minimum, not number, but the minimum level of people that should be included are people that have some form of client level contact. That could take a lot of forms, that could take business development, marketing, of course, I mean, those people absolutely have to be on there. But also it could take the place of project managers and it could take the place of account people or it depends on how you’re structured.
David Lecours: I think if you have client level contact, you’ve got to be on there because during that client dating process where prospective clients are trying to get to know your firm for them to be able to do the research and get to know your people, the people that might be leading or working on your project through your website is a great feature.
Josh Miles: Let’s pretend for just a moment that there’s some really great argument as to why your people shouldn’t be on the website and I mean specifically in terms of individual bios. Let’s say we have maybe it’s a privacy issue or maybe it’s we do super secret projects and we can’t have our people who have security clearance. Something goofy like that, who knows. How else could a firm demonstrate culture through photography or through people if it’s not through bios?
David Lecours: I think event type of situations where you’re having like internal events or maybe you’ve put on an internal conference. I think you can communicate culture by showing off the thought leadership that you’ve shown. But, yeah, it is tough if you cannot show any individual photo of a person. Then maybe it needs to be some illustration. I don’t know why I’m going there but like in TV situations, crime dramas in particular, where they can’t show photography, but they’ll show an artist’s rendering of the scene. Maybe you use an illustration, which I’ve seen done actually pretty effectively and it actually adds a level of interest and uniqueness. So rather than a headshot, it’s an illustration of a person or it’s an illustration of a scene working together or an infographic that demonstrates culture, things like that.
Josh Miles: Maybe that’s a good segue from our maybe silly made up reason why you can’t show your people, but maybe in addition to the bios, where else would you recommend that our people show up on the website?
David Lecours: Yeah, I think, right. Of course, you should probably have some team or staff or people section and that’s the baseline minimum. But I think that people should show up in other places. Like if you’re going to have a section on vertical markets that you serve or you’re going to have a section on services that you serve, it’s a great idea to have ambassadors for each of those particular markets. So that if somebody is in that market, let’s say you work in airports and you have a prospective client that wants to get to know about your expertise in airports, they can reach out to somebody who is that Ambassador. Whether it’s via email or phone and ask particular questions. Even if they didn’t ask questions, it’s almost like just having that person there suggests this reassurance that there’s somebody that stands behind the work and it’s not just nameless, faceless, we’re going to hire a bunch of freelancers to fill in. No, there’s somebody dedicated to this market or this service and you can reach them if you need to.
David Lecours: Yeah, I think those ambassadors are really good. I also think that putting people in relationship to project descriptions if there was somebody significant who added a, I don’t know, level of detail or expertise, linking the person within the project description back to the team or staff section. Then, finally, I think it’s essential to list people where you are housing or archiving, you’re writing and you’re speaking. Any thought leadership should have links to people and who actually wrote the article and who gave the talk so that if you like what they wrote, you can link to them and get to know them on a deeper level. Then potentially follow them via social media or potentially sign up for a list, an email list, like I want to receive everything that that person writes or speaks about.
Josh Miles: I used to get really nerdy about, I say used to like I don’t anymore, but I used to follow a little more closely to Google SEO recommendations and one of the ideas that became very popular with Google for a while was this idea of an Author Box. Meaning like linking your Google+, if you remember that ghost town, to your blog posts. But I’d love the artifact that came out of that which was at the bottom of a blog post, having the photo and the mini bio of the person who wrote it and maybe links to other things. I would definitely recommend that’s another place where you could show off some of your thought leaders as connecting to all of those pieces. Having specifically using that photo again in that place.
David Lecours: Right, if you use the analogy to the print world, we would call that a byline, the Wall Street Journal article has. Well, they have a unique illustration style where they typically will show off maybe their journalist’s picture or headshot but it’s illustrated and then usually not all bio, but at least a minimum their name and their title or any area of expertise. Yeah, I think that’s really good. Let’s say we’ve got this people section, we’re going to feature people. We talked about maybe there’s some untraditional things, of course. Well, let’s talk about photography first. The next thing that often comes up is, “How do we take the picture of the person? Do we go full body shot? Do we do headshot? Do we put them behind their desk? Do we put them in front of a drafting table? Oh, no, we can’t do that, that says we don’t use CAD or Revit or the new tool. How do we actually shoot these people? Any suggestions there for our audience?
Josh Miles: Yeah, just a few years ago, I remember a Canadian firm that I had been introduced to and they had done was pretty novel at the time. They did square portraits that were actually pulled shots from Instagram for all the bios. So instead of taking the time to try to make everybody consistent and getting all the same lighting and bringing a professional photographer, they intentionally went the other direction and found the most creative selfie or photo of the staff person on Instagram and he shared that in the square and all of the colorized and dressed up, however it was. That was a really unique thing back then, I still don’t see lots of that but I think you have such a wide range of options when it comes to photography. Similar to working with a different graphic designer for your digital identity, I think we can really say a lot of different things stylistically with the photography too.
Josh Miles: Whether it’s really dark, serious stark lighting, or whether it’s really bright and airy and blown out, or whether it’s really colorful or whether your people are all photographed with their dog or their favorite thing. There’s just so many different things that you can do. What are some of your favorites that you’ve seen?
David Lecours: Yeah, I saw one recently where so rather than actually shooting everybody like individually against a backdrop, which is the traditional way to do it, this was the company had an internal event where it was a State of the Union for that company. They had speaker or a couple speakers and they had people out in the audience. They hired a photographer who was really good at shooting events and they actually used the photographs of this event. The photographer was tasked to try to make sure he shot everybody individually. All the shots are like environmental portraits where people are talking to other people and they’re out. It was a nice approach, it felt like it was a day at the work. It wasn’t like a post JCPenney portrait session of shot, it was people in their natural habitat. I thought it was a really cool way to do it.
David Lecours: Another thing I’ve seen done is, yeah, maybe you use a more traditional headshot for the gallery and then you click on that and you go to the person’s individual page and then they get the opportunity to submit their own photo that best shows off their personality. Now, we’ve done that before with clients and, yeah, we have to set some parameters and maybe there’s a little editing of like, “Well, maybe that’s not the best photo to show off in this environment. Keep that one for your own social media feed.” That’s a great approach. One of the things that I like to do where if you shoot somebody, let’s say you shoot their full body, you’ve now got three shots in one. You’ve got that full body shot which you can use in certain places.
David Lecours: You can do a waist up kind of shot from that same thing just by cropping in and it gives you a different perspective and aspect ratio. Then the third one of that is you just crop in really tightly to the shoulders and head, and that’s like a three in one approach that works pretty well.
Josh Miles: Any tips for firms who are maybe looking at this as a big expense line item in terms of weighing between, bringing in a professional headshot photographer versus trying to do in the DIY approach?
David Lecours: Yeah, so and this is also a challenge if you’ve got multiple locations. Let’s say you’ve got offices around the country to fly a photographer out to every single office and shoot every single person is probably cost prohibitive. But let’s say you bring in a photographer for your corporate office and you shoot the C-level executives, ask that photographer to set up a style guide and maybe suggest a particular backdrop that you can actually use in all the locations or particular lighting. You’re probably not going to get it as polished and professional as when you hire a professional photographer. But that photographer could give you some suggestions about how to gain some consistency across the entire organization.
Josh Miles: I think maybe along those lines too, especially, as our audience is largely marketers who are listening who might have to go up a few rungs of the organization to get that particular photo style approved or get some buy in from the principles. Something like Pinterest, just looking for headshot styles, or even going to design or advertising or marketing agency websites and look at how they do their people. I think you’ll find some maybe interesting and maybe some examples of what not to do. But I think that’ll give you maybe some inspiration as to what else is possible.
David Lecours: Yeah, ask your web designer for some suggestions because I think you’re spot on there in that marketing and ad agencies tend to be a little more progressive in this. They have creative license to do so. But I think you see folks are creative too, let’s show it off. Yeah, sure, we’re doing engineering and we’re building bridges but those are amazingly creative bridges. It doesn’t need to be super corporate or conservative.
Josh Miles: It’s not just about the photo, that what you do when it comes to the bio or what else should our listeners be thinking about?
David Lecours: Yeah, we need to get to know people, it’s not just what they look like, there needs to be some whether it’s a bio or … there’s a lot of different ways you can do this. I’ve certainly seen short bios and then a LinkedIn link that allows you to go on and see all the person’s qualifications. We’ve done it for clients in the past where we do Q&A. Like we write together with the marketing director 10 questions, and what we do is we distribute that to everybody that’s going to be featured. We say, “Hey, pick the five of those 10 that you feel most comfortable answering that are going to show you off in the best light.” That gives the person on staff some say and control over what gets published and they get to choose what questions they answer. It can be done as a narrative, maybe it’s a story about that particular person, maybe it’s some particular client problem that they solved and that thing is so iconic that that becomes the quick narrative.
David Lecours: If you do something like that, it’s probably good also in a sidebar to list their qualifications about maybe where they went to school and any professional degrees or associations that they have. But I think there’s a lot of opportunity here to be able to show people off. You can have downloadable PDFs, you can have information that let’s say it’s in a print proposal and you give a URL and then they can link back to the bio section and then you’re not using valuable word counts which are often so important these days in proposals. Spending time listing entire bios or narratives of their people. Have you seen anything else that stands out for how to show off your folks and words?
Josh Miles: Yeah, I think, again, be creative with this. I think there are so many different ways you could do it. You could have the, of course, litany of all the social media networks, or if you want the full story, you can always just go straight to LinkedIn because that’s presumably where you’re going to have probably the most complete resume or all the listing of experiences there. I don’t know, write a limerick or a haiku or a fictional story that’s clearly fictional. Just something that shows the personality of the firm and maybe the personality of the person. I think those are all really interesting ways that could potentially stand out from what your competitors are doing.
David Lecours: Josh, we’ve been focused on the individual person, but reality is that we work in these collaborative groups and many times the output is much greater and so shouldn’t we also show group shots and any suggestions around that?
Josh Miles: Yeah, and I love you always get into the issue of, well, what if so and so leaves or we have this certain amount of turnover? But I think the more that we can show more photo journalistic style shots that are not just the team of 12 posed against the wall, it’s more of here’s what it looks like when our design team is working on a problem together. Those photos, I think, have a longer shelf life even maybe many years after someone has left because it still shows the culture of how that team interacts and it’s less about Bob or Sally who’s in the photo and more about the context.
David Lecours: Right, and I always tell clients, “Hey, that person was at your firm at the time that photo was shot. This isn’t like photo realism where everything has to be up-to-date. You can keep a photo of somebody that isn’t in the firm anymore.
Josh Miles: It’s like a webcam.
David Lecours: Yeah, and well they say, “Well, could we just Photoshop them out?” I said, “No, it’s going to look ridiculous and you’ll be able to tell.” But I like your idea like hiring a photo journalist to shoot rather than maybe somebody that specializes in portraiture and some photographers can do both real well, but that’s a great way to show off scenarios that, “Yeah, if you’re going to show culture like show what it looks like and feels like every day and group shots often are a great way to do that. Then you can also have some fun and pose people, but in very untraditional ways. I’m thinking of a site we did recently where the photographer got up on a ladder and shot everybody. They were in a circle on their backs and their heads together and some of them are holding a favorite tool that they use in their job day to day, their engineers, and somebody in the photo is just cracking up.
David Lecours: I love it because like the traditional wisdom will say, “Oh, no, we can’t use that, somebody broke character, and I was saying, “No, no, no, we have to use that one because that’s the one that shows the humanity of what people are really like. We don’t want perfection, that’s not attractive, we want people to show off who they really are.”
Josh Miles: Yeah and I think the best images, photos otherwise, are the things that are really more concept driven and not that they have to be so art directed that they look static or stale, but something that feels intentional and that I love the idea that you’re describing of the people laying on their backs with their heads next to each other. That tells a story about what this team is like and you can certainly connect the dots for yourself about what that story is. But think about how could you pull your people together to do something that really stands out differently?
David Lecours: And then finally, we’ve been talking about still photographs, but wow, if we want to get to know somebody, isn’t video a great way to do that?
Josh Miles: Man, I love that idea and actually I think you might have been one of the first people that I heard talking about this. I think whether it’s more of just an Ambient Video, so it’s like this looping thing of Bob go work at his computer or whether it’s actual. Like actually interview of Bob talking to the camera about how he thinks about engineering or design or whatever it is, I think those could be really differentiating.
David Lecours: Yeah, for sure. You could take a bunch of those and combine them together to make a culture video but you could then break them apart and use them individually on people’s individual pages. I think that these video, I’m calling them video portraits, could be really, really cool.
Josh Miles: Yeah, absolutely.
David Lecours: Nice. Well, I think we’ve summarized all the key points. Anything else you wanted to talk about?
Josh Miles: Well, I think just in case everyone hasn’t gotten our point of view, clearly show your people on your website. It’s all a matter of what fits best with your culture and your firm but I think failing to demonstrate the people in the team and the culture that’s there is just a huge miss. I would just encourage firms to encourage their principles with some of these topics and all the reasons why you should feature your people.
David Lecours: I found that peer pressure can often be a great motivator, so find a firm that maybe you compete with or maybe it’s just a firm that’s admired in the industry and it’s like they’re showing their people and you can say, “Look, they’re not having their people poach, they’re not afraid to show off their people.” We need to be doing that too.
Josh Miles: Or at least they could say David and Josh said so.
David Lecours: Yes, exactly. Blame us, we’ll take the heat. Hey, Josh, I want to tell our listeners, there’s a relatively new feature in that we are transcribing all our episodes now going forward of PSM Show. So if you know somebody that for some reason doesn’t like audio and prefers to read things, every word that Josh and I say is now transcribed in the show notes of each episode. If you go to psm.show and find the episode. You have the opportunity to read the episode. Some people like that because they can go back and we, of course, do highlights of links or references or things like that. I just wanted to point that out.
Josh Miles: Well, now we’re going to be a little more accountable to what we’re saying on this.
David Lecours: I know, I know.
Josh Miles: It’s going to be written down.
David Lecours: Hey, if you guys have any questions or comments about this show or future guests or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Go to psm.show, just scroll down and drop us a line in the contact form there. That’s it of this episode of PSM show from myself, David Lecours and Josh Miles. We’ll see you next time.