The Technology Is Invisible

April 19, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

The technology we use to market and promote our products and services has gotten to the point where people don’t even realize it exists.

When marketing your law firm, you shy away from doing too much online. After all, your clients aren’t online. They tell you they found you in the Yellow Pages, the newspaper, or on television.

Right. And I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you on the cheap.

Technology has become so prevalent that people don’t know it’s there anymore.

Take, for example, my wife Melissa. She’s not a technophobe, but she doesn’t get her hands dirty with technology. She’s more comfortable with a paper magazine than a blog for the most part, and rolls her eyes when I get all geeky in her presence.

Still, she’s unwittingly become so entrenched in technology she doesn’t even realize it.

Ten years ago Melissa trained for the San Diego Rock and Roll Marathon. She hated every minute of it, primarily because she did all of her training runs in Central Park. Loop after loop, it got boring. She swore she’d never run again, and made good on that promise for a decade.

Now she’s back in her running shoes, training for a half marathon. And she’s actually enjoying it.

Why? Because now she’s running in the streets, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and going up the West Side Highway on the running path.

Last night she told me the key is that she’s not bored this time, and that street running suits her far more than park running. When I asked her why she didn’t run the streets last time she told me she was too fixated on distance for her marathon training.

But this time she’s got tools that she didn’t have the first time around. Now she’s got a host of online tools to help her map out routes, as well as an iPhone app that tracks her distance. The only thing she could have used last time was a pedometer, and those were expensive a decade ago.

My darling fell to silence as the realization swept over her. If anyone had asked her why she enjoyed running this time she would have come up with a host of other reasons – none of them related to technology. Yet that technology was the real reason why her training was so much easier this time around.

Your clients are similarly enmeshed in technology to an extent that they don’t realize. It’s so engrained they don’t know it’s there.

Marketing your law firm online may seem counterintuitive if you pay attention to what your clients are telling you. Ask them if they’re online and they might tell you they are not. But the truth is elusive.

They’re on Facebook catching up with their friends.

They’re on Twitter, following brands and local companies looking for discounts.

They’re reading the news and checking the local weather in the morning.

They’re getting directions and using Google as a new form of 411 (remember that?).

Take, for example, the town of Cedar Rapids, IA. Last November at the member’s-only workshop of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys someone raised their hand and steadfastly refused to believe that his clients were online. Why he was sitting in on my panel presentation about online legal marketing, I’ll never know – but that’s a different story.

This lawyer is in Cedar Rapids, IA. According to Wikipedia, The U.S. Census Bureau estimated the city’s population at 128,056 in 2008. We’ll use that as a baseline for the moment.

Heading over to Facebook, I checked to see how many of their members over the age of 18 were within 25 miles of Cedar Rapids. The result is below:

So over half of my colleague’s potential client base is on Facebook. Many of them probably don’t think of themselves as being online, though – they’re just “on Facebook.”

How about Twitter? I did a simple Twitter Search and narrowed it down to the same radius around Cedar Rapids, IA. Results? You betcha:

Again – ask these people if they’re online and many will tell you they aren’t.

The ease of use and ubiquity of online tools and applications has gotten to the point where people don’t even consider the online/offline distinction anymore.

It’s more than email or web browsing. It’s the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare (yes, Foursquare covers places like Cedar Rapids), and on and on. It’s engrained in who we are and where we spend our time, like it or not.

Do you think your prospective clients aren’t online? Are you prepared to re-think that position? Because if you’re not, someone else in your area will – soon.

Filed Under: Legal Marketing Tagged With: blog hosting services, facebook, law firm, marketing, marketing your law firm, online, online social networking, social information processing, social media, tell, Twitter, web 2.0, Yellow Pages

Legal Marketing At The End Of The Honeymoon

March 12, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

Your online legal marketing plans have taken shape, and you’re serious about generating new business for your law firm. You haven’t abandoned your offline marketing but you’re looking at those media like distasteful relatives you are required to invite to your home for holidays.

Your law firm blog is all shiny and new, the pictures beautiful and the designer paid. You’ve got your Facebook fan page, Twitter account, whatever you’ve decided to work with. Your legal marketing efforts are all ready to go.

Welcome the the online legal marketing honeymoon, when it’s all wine and roses, romantic sunset walks along the beach and passion.

You start off easy, with a blog post about the basics. You get so excited it takes you 900 words to describe the most mundane subject, but that’s OK – you want to be thorough, right?

Of course, it’s dry and boring to the outsider. But it really showcases your knowledge of the field, sets you apart from the rest of the competition. That’s what legal marketing is all about, right? Full steam ahead!

The next day you go onto Twitter and follow everyone and their mother, all in a mad rush to beat Ashton Kutcher and Oprah in numbers of followers. The more people you follow, the more will follow you back!

You have no idea who these people are, or why they would want to follow you. But they sure to use Twitter a lot! Your Twitter stream gets clogged up within seconds, but you send out a link to your brand new blog post and know – just KNOW – it will send your traffic skyrocketing.

Of course, next up is Facebook. Two bazillion users, and they are all pining for your wisdom. You set up your fan page, so you send out a suggestion to all of your Facebook friends that they become fans. You send out your blog posts there, too.

You are a legal marketing Goliath. Market domination is within reach. You can sense your competition trembling in their offices, fearful of your wrath and legal marketing prowess.

Now, check your website analytics. Re-check them. Keep checking. Where’s that rush of traffic?

The online legal marketing honeymoon is over. And as with all long-term relationships, the hard work begins.

Your spouse doesn’t bring you flowers anymore (cue the song, please). No more all-nighters filled with insights into one another. It’s time to start figuring out who’s going to load the dishwasher at night.

So, too, with your online legal marketing efforts. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you aren’t going to be an overnight success. Nobody is. It takes hard work, nose to the grindstone, day in and day out.

And even worse is the fact that it never ends.

You have a blog but need to feed the machine. Forever.

You are on Twitter, but if you don’t interact and reach out to new people then it’s nothing more than another broadcast mechanism.

Facebook is bigger than ever, but if you’re there and don’t work on your presence then you might as well go home.

Because the competition is waking up, and doing it faster than you realize. Lawyers are hitting Avvo hard, learning the Facebook ropes, and embracing blogging like never before.

Maybe you’ve never heard of them, maybe their legal marketing efforts aren’t on your radar yet because you’ve got your nose buried.

It doesn’t matter. They’re out there. And your competition isn’t just spending money on some company that claims they’ll get you on the first page of Google (not that it matters even if they could – if you’ve not nothing to add to the conversation then nobody’s going to stick around your site for long).

So stop asking how long you’ve got to keep at this marketing and content creation thing. Forget about when you can start going to sleep early and sleeping late again. It isn’t going to happen – not now, not ever.

You signed up for this, after all. You decided that you wanted to run your own law firm, to be the master (or mistress) of your own domain, to eat what you kill.

But ask anyone who’s been married for 50 years if the hard work has been worth it. Most will say it was some of the most rewarding work they’ve ever done.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: blog, facebook, law firm, Legal Marketing, offline marketing, online legal marketing, online social networking, social media, Twitter, world wide web

Til Death Do You Part?

January 5, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

My parents got married 41 years ago today. When they tied the knot, the world was undergoing radical changes. Social attitudes were being forever altered. The media was about to uncover a huge problem with the government.

Photos moved the nation to do great things. Words kept people spellbound.

Now, 41 years later, our society is changing once again. The org chart that has ruled American since inception is crumbling. Heck, it’s already crumbled.

A plane crashes in New York City and the media gets photos and video from the population, not from beat reporters.

You lock your keys out of the car and make a phone call from outside the vehicle. To a number you found by checking out a global network of information held in the palm of your hand.

You meet a close friend in a restaurant and realize it’s the first time in your long relationship that you’ve ever stood in the same physical space.

You want to work from the beach and realize the only thing keeping you from doing so is … your own reluctance to do so.

How funny is it that my parents vowed to remain together for the rest of their lives, never realizing that their lives would change so much.

They had a choice. They could either allow the changes to wash them away, or they could adapt to the new world. They could retain their moorings, adapt and retain their sensibilities. Their relationships. Their values.

Technology changes how we interact, but it doesn’t dictate the fundamentals of how we make connections. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever – it’s just a platform. What you do with it is up to you, and how you use it to make connections is your choice.

Don’t confuse the platform with the fundamentals.

You can tweet, Facebook or just make the cocktail party circuit your home. You can meetup, tweetup or just catch up over coffee or a meal.

But whatever you do, you need to remember to do something.

Now. Before it’s too late.

Filed Under: Legal Marketing Tagged With: facebook, linkedin, tweetup, Twitter

Using Facebook Comments To Hone Your Legal Marketing Message

November 5, 2009 By Jay Fleischman

Over the past few months I’ve noticed that when I post a link to a blog post to Facebook, I tend to get a number of comments. Often, these comments turn into full-fledged conversations among 2, 3 or more of my Facebook friends – many of whom have never met one another. I usually sit back and watch these discussions unfold without getting in the way, enthralled with the back-and-forth going on in front of me.

In the process I often learn a few things. Maybe a nuance in the law I didn’t previously see, but more often it’s a concern that someone has about bankruptcy or consumer protection laws. Seeing the issues through the eyes of my audience in real-time is invaluable, as it enables me to continue the process of education and, from time to time, hone the way I provide information so it’s more valuable to the world.

In a recent post, John Battelle (On Facebook, Comments, and Implications) noticed the same phenomenon. Like me, John posts to his blog and has that link sent automatically to Twitter. Facebook, in turn, picks up the Twitter status update.

John claims that Facebook is the defacto leader in distribution of attention, and likens it to Google in 2004-06. And though I’m a huge Twitter supporter, I’m inclined to agree for a few reasons:

With Twitter you’ve got 140 characters. That’s enough for a retweet, but not much commentary. In order to add anything to the conversation you’ve got to create your own blog post in response (or a video, or podcast) and send THAT out there as well. Takes too long, not practical. The back-and-forth of 140 characters is liberating in some ways, constraining in others.

On Facebook, interaction is made simple using the “Comment” feature. Click a button, put down your thoughts, and you’re done. It’s the simplicity of content creation that makes it so compelling.

When commenting on a blog, you’re able to hide behind relative anonymity. On Facebook, you get to show yourself for your friends to see. In doing so, you can strut your stuff and show that you are interested and have something to say.

On Facebook, your comments are shown to your friends as well as to the friends of the original poster of information – not the whole world. There’s relative safety there, not having to worry so much about millions of strangers reading every word you utter.

Why is this important to you, the lawyer? Because it’s giving you a window into your audience – the human being who either now does, or may in the future, need your help solving a problem.

When you’re on Facebook you get to put your ideas out there and see what resonates. More to the point, you’re able to get gut reactions from people. And when that happens, you can more easily hone your marketing messages for maximum effect.

Filed Under: Legal Marketing Tagged With: facebook, social media marketing for lawyers, Twitter

Pitfalls Of Law Firm Blogs: If You Build It, They Won’t Come

November 3, 2009 By Jay Fleischman

Every marketing maven out there will tell you that blogging is the best thing since the baker took a knife to the loaf of bread to slice it. And it is – or it can be. But if all you’re going to do is write a blog for your law firm marketing efforts I can tell you that you’re not going to get a ton of traffic.

Unless, that is, you do something to promote your law firm blog.

We’ve all heard the Costnerism, “If you build it, they will come.” And to an extent, that’s true when it comes to blogging. The problem is that most lawyers are passive bloggers. They write a post, optimize it as best as they can, and sit back to watch their web analytics. When they fail to see a huge spike in traffic they get angry about it.

But here’s the thing:

If you are blogging as part of your legal marketing efforts, you need to understand that your blog is going to do nothing but attract search engine traffic at first. That search engine traffic isn’t going to be enormous at first – after all, your site needs to be properly crawled and indexed to incorporate the new content. Updating can take some time, especially for new sites or domains that haven’t been updated regularly in the past.

If You Want To Get Traffic To Your Law Firm Blog, You Need To Promote It

That’s right, you’ve got to get off your duff to make something happen. Greater traffic not only increases readership, it also tells Google that you’re popular. When Google sees visitors spike, it views that as a reason to bump you up in the search engines.

To help you along, here are 5 ways to promote your law firm blog:

Facebook It! Using the “Add A Link” feature in your status update area, you can tell your friends about your blog posts. They can not only read it, but share it with their friends. Disclosure: for a long time, I had it set up that all of my Twitter updates went to Facebook. I recently learned my lesson that this shortcut just doesn’t cut it. It clogs up your stream, annoys your Facebook friends, and is just icky (in my opinion).
Tweet It! Send out your blog updates through Twitter (you can do it automatically using Twitterfeed as well as directly from your blog if you’re using Headway Theme or a variety of plugins). Word of caution, though: if your sole reason for being on Twitter is to use it as a broadcast mechanism for your blog posts then you should not be using Twitter.
Submit It! There are a ton of blog directories online – some paid, some free. Submit your blog to as many as possible (caution: it’s time consuming) to help spread the word.
Comment It! Take the time to get to know who else is blogging about your area of practice, as well as in the tangential areas in which your potential readers may take interest (hint: lots of people who are looking to file for bankruptcy are reading personal finance blogs). Read those blogs regularly, and make an effort to post useful comments (do not post those, “Nice site!” comments. They’re useless, and a smart blogger will delete them). In this way you’ll become known to the bloggers (very good) as well as to their regular readers (also very good).
Read It! That’s right, read your blog. Are you informative and coherent, or do you write solely with search engines in mind? If you’re not writing for human beings, how can you expect that any will actually read your blog?

The process of growing blog readership can be a slow one, and frustrating. Using these five tactics will help you begin the process of building traffic and a loyal readership base.

Photo courtesy of ellievanhoutte.

Filed Under: Legal Marketing Tagged With: blawg, blog commenting, blogging, facebook, legal blogging, social media, Twitter

Online Legal Marketing – 6 Ways To Reduce Your Bounce Rate

October 21, 2009 By Jay Fleischman

You’ve committed to marketing your law firm online. Your bankruptcy website is getting 10, 20, 50, 100 or more unique visitors each day, which is pretty good. After all, the site hasn’t been touched in months (if not years) and it doesn’t cost much to keep it online. Even if you’re a regular legal blogger, it still doesn’t take anything but elbow grease and some time to maintain your site.

Any clients who come to you from your online legal marketing efforts are freebies, so you’re not paying much attention to the disparity between visitors and clients.

Let’s step back for a moment and say you’re getting 25 unique visitors per day. Not a ton, but still 750 people each month.

Out of those visitors, you’re getting 20 new clients from your online marketing efforts. If you’re charging $1,000 for an average case, that’s $20,000 a month. Cool, right?

Not so much. How about all those people to surf to your website and leave, vanishing into the ether?

They’re gone, off to another lawyer. Worse yet, they’re off to no other lawyer.

Maybe people are getting to your website and realizing that there’s no compelling reason to stick around. Maybe they read a bunch of pages and then go elsewhere. How do you know?

The key is to studying your website’s bounce rate. To my mind, it’s a critical aspect of the data you should be looking at closely.

What Is The Bounce Rate?

Avinash Kaushik, the Google employee who lives website analytics, defines bounce rate as, “I came, I puked, I left.” More technically, he defines bounce rate as, “single page view visits divided by entry pages.” Avinash goes into a bit more detail on the Official Google Blog.

In other words, the percent of people who land on your site, do absolutely nothing whatsoever, and then close the window and head for somewhere else.

I call it the failure rate. Someone came to my website, took one look at what I was talking about, and decided that is had absolutely ZERO value.

The Intersection Of Bounce Rate And Online Legal Marketing

When you’re marketing your law practice online, you are looking to create a connection with your audience. Whether it’s a blog or a static website, you understand (at some level) that it’s tough to make any lasting positive impression on someone if they stick around for only a few seconds. therefore, one of your goals is to give people a reason to stick around as long as possible.

What’s A Good Bounce Rate?

The short answer is, “I have no clue.” Do you want people to come to your site and surf for a bunch of information? Do you want them to land on the site, get your phone number and call you? Do you want them to get lost in your site, delving deeper and deeper? Or do you want them to log on, find your Facebook page, and then go there to become a fan?

Your ideal bounce rate will depend based on your motives. But suffice to say, if you’ve got a 60% bounce rate then you’re definitely not engaging your visitors. It probably explains why you’re getting 20 visits per day and only 1 phone call from a new client.

6 Ways To Improve The Bounce Rate On Your Law Firm Website

Know What You’re Dealing With. Figure out the bounce rate per referring site and keyword search term. You will find that some sites give you good traffic (i.e., traffic with a low bounce rate) and others not so much. In addition, you’ll find that some search terms result in a high bounce rate. This means that your content may be optimized for the search engines (i.e., people see your site when they search for a specific term) but not for visitors (i.e., once they get to your site they realize they’ve been short-changed).
Next, concentrate on getting more referrals from the good sources. Maybe people who come to your site from Facebook stick around whereas people who visit from Twitter bounce out a lot. Send more of your links to Facebook and take the time to test what other types of tweets might encourage more people to visit and stick around happily.
Spruce Up Your Site’s Navigation. If people can’t figure out how to navigate around your site, they’re going to leave fast.
Update Your Website Content. If I come to your site today and see the same stuff I saw yesterday, I’m not going to have a reason to stick around.
Create More Internal Links. Internal links are hotlinks on a page that go to other pages on your site. When you create internal links it encourages visitors to move from one page to another more easily. A good thing to do is create a link from legal terms to pages with definitions (in other words, link the word “discharge” to another page that has a definition for that term). It’s good for users to get clarification when they don’t understand something.
Use Visual Cues To Draw In Visitors. Eye-catching pictures and video content encourages people to stick around for awhile longer.

Your law firm website’s bounce rate is important, and tells a lot about what appeals to your website visitors. Work on reducing your bounce rate and you’ll find that your site’s effectiveness rises exponentially.

Photos courtesy of Kevin Steele and p@r@noid.

Filed Under: Legal Marketing, Online Marketing For Lawyers Tagged With: Avinash Kaushik, bounce rate, facebook, internet marketing, Legal Marketing, online marketing, Online Marketing For Lawyers, rate online, web analytics, websites for lawyers, world wide web

What If You Don't Want Clients To Connect With You On Social Networking Sites?

June 22, 2009 By Jay Fleischman

Bankruptcy lawyers and consumer protection lawyers who are using tools such as Facebook and Twitter are finding that their clients are there, too. That’s good, right?

To some, not so much. Some of my lawyer friends have commented lately that they don’t want to connect with their clients on these sites because doing so will show the client a side of the lawyer that isn’t congruent with the lawyer’s “office personality.” In other words, the lawyer’s kind of uncomfortable with the client seeing pictures of their attorney on a catamaran in the Caribbean.

To those lawyers I say – you’ve got two options. Either get your hair wet or stay out of the pool.

Look, it’s pretty simple. If you’ve got a social networking profile it’s out there. Google can find it, so searchers can find it. Period.

If you don’t want someone to find the profile, don’t have one. Because once you do, it’s out there.

What If You Don’t Want Clients To Connect With You On Social Networking Sites?

You run a very real risk of being perceived as an elitist snob, that’s what. By declining to allow a client to friend you on Facebook you’re telling that person, “Look, you’re good enough to give me money and allow me to live my life. But you stay on the other side of the red velvet rope with the riff-raff while I hang out over here with the cool kids.”

Imagine this. You’re walking down the street and see your dentist with his wife. This is a guy who has stuck his hand in your mouth, has seen your gums, and has watched you spit into a basin. You’re pretty intimate.

So you stop, smile at your dentist and put out your hand to shake his. Pleasantries and what not.

Your dentist, barely breaking stride, looks at you briefly and shakes his head. As he continues on his way you hear his wife say, “Who was that?”

“Nobody important,” comes the reply.

How do you feel? Are you going back to that dentist anytime soon?

How about using Fan Pages on Facebook? Can’t you just use those and tell clients they can connect with you there?

Again, it’s like shuttling the client to the back of the bus. They’re left with the feeling that they’re somehow inferior. And they get justifiably angry at that.

So here’s the solution – radical, but it works.

Don’t put stuff on your social networking sites unless you’re comfortable with the world seeing it. No naked pictures, no dancing on bars, no driving fast without a seatbelt. My rule of thumb is this – if I don’t want my mom to see it, I don’t put it up there.

As to the stuff that’s on there, remember that your clients need to know who you are as a person. Your dog, your cat, your life. Doing so makes you more than just a lawyer in a suit, it makes you a person. Someone with a life, who has things they think are cool and fun. Someone who is just like them, separated only by circumstance and some specialized knowledge (and perhaps some student loans to show for it). Doing so allows you to maintain rapport and bonding, create empathy and maintain your positive influence over clients.

Because deep down, we are not too different from our clients. It’s not too far to fall into bill problems, nor is it too far to climb to the top of the ladder.

Filed Under: Legal Marketing Tagged With: facebook, social media

10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Needs To Know

February 3, 2009 By Jay Fleischman

I love Facebook, and so do lots of lawyers. We use it to keep up with old friends, clients, and make new connections – professional and personal.

But what happens when someone puts up an old photo of us that we would rather keep shielded from the public eye? Do we want videos of our kids floating around out there?

Check out this fantastic article about the privacy settings you never knew about. Then go implement them.