web 2.0 — Legal Practice Pro

5 Ways To Capture Ideas For Your Legal Marketing Efforts

June 6, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

Ever have a great idea about something while doing some random chore or activity? Try as you might to remember it later, it eludes you. Frustrating, no?

We’ve talked about how important content creation is in your legal marketing efforts. We agree that inspiration can come from a variety of sources, and that you should always be on the lookout for legal marketing ideas. How you promote your law firm’s offerings can come from the subtle way that a waitress gets you to order a second piece of pie, or a headline in an ad that convinces you to buy that doo-dad.

My head is always running in a million directions. How to help my clients, an observation about how someone is doing business the right (or wrong) way, or a random thought. One minute it’s gone, the next … poof.

How A Real Lawyer Uses Social Media

June 4, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

Can a real, live lawyer use social media for real, live business?

Social media for lawyers – specifically Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin – has been getting a ton of coverage in the past few days on the heels of this article in Mashable. And it seems to have ignited a bit of a debate on Twitter because there are a few attorneys who question whether the experts quoted are able to speak from experience.

I don’t think there is such a thing as a social media expert. I do believe that there are people who are well-qualified to discuss how to build trust, relationships and communities for business purposes. These are the experts, the ones who teach us how to be more human in the way we conduct business. When these people talk about using the platforms at our disposal, I listen and take notes.

Social media is an all-encompassing term that speaks to platforms, and how they are used to accomplish a particular goal. Those platforms currently include legal blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Tumblr, Posterous, Foursquare, Gowalla, and the list goes on and on. But bear in mind that these are platforms only, and are subject to change without notice. A few years ago it was Friendster. A decade ago it was Usenet. And on and on.

To say that you’re an expert in Twitter means that you know how to set up an account and use the tool. It doesn’t mean you know how to connect with people or businesses who may have some use for your service. When Twitter goes away or, more likely, evolves in ways we can’t currently imagine, the “Twitter expert” will be as useful as a “mimeograph expert”.

The person who’s skilled in the broader skillset of creating and maintaining relationships will continue to thrive. Because that’s not just good marketing, it’s good for life.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I thought it would be useful to outline how I use the various social media platforms to achieve my goals. Those goals, by the way, are fluid. Sometimes I’m looking for help with something. Other times I’m promoting my expertise as a bankruptcy and consumer protection lawyer, or as a guy who knows a thing or two about marketing a law firm. Maybe I’m going to be a new place and need some recommendations for a good place to have dinner. In all cases, the song remains the same overall (hat tip to Robert Plant and Jimmy Page).

Content Distribution And Promotion

Every time I create content on this or any other platform, I promote it on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Doing so exposes my work to people who find the subject matter compelling, and cements my standing as someone who knows about the fields in which I spend my time.

Information Sharing

I’m a newshound, and read hundreds of blogs each day. When I find something that catches my eye, I share it with people. More information is a good thing, no?

Connecting With Interesting People

Here’s where people say Twitter is a waste of time, right? I mean, why would I spend time typing out 140 character messages to strangers? Well, why would you spend an evening at a networking event filled with a diverse group of people? To meet them, get to know them better, and establish a relationship. Maybe that plumber I meet will never have need of my legal services, but I’m betting that he knows of someone who will eventually need me. The stronger my relationship with Mr. Plumber, the more likely I am to be the name and number (OK, email address) that he passes along to his friend who’s going into foreclosure and needs help.

What if Mr. Plumber is in Oklahoma, far from my state of admission (which is New York)? No worries – I can send the referral to one of my colleagues in Oklahoma. I’ve connected with some of them on Twitter, others on Facebook and some on “old school” listservs. Send a referral to a trusted colleague and I get good karma in return. It’s happened so often I’ve lost count, and it increases the chance that I get a referral in return. Karma’s like that, you know.

Strengthening Bonds Established Elsewhere

Let’s say you meet someone offline – a networking event, a social event, whatever the case may be. You connect with them on Facebook, or LinkedIn, or Twitter or whatever platform you choose. Now you’re exposed to them on a regular basis, and they to you. Share information, keep up with one another, and allow your humanity to continue to unfold before one another. It takes a causal meeting with a total stranger and allows you to make something more of it.

Now you want me to prove that it works, right? Here are a few of the things I’ve accomplished by using the platforms available to me:

coverage in print and broadcast television (Twitter and LinkedIn);
paying clients (more than I can count from Facebook in particular, Twitter less so);
quotes and attendant backlinks from highly-regarded online sources, which has increased the ranking of my own site and resulted in more clients (primarily Twitter, but Facebook and LinkedIn to a certain extent); and
referrals from other lawyers as well as from non-lawyers who deal in consumer finance issues (Twitter).

Of course, none of this speaks to the business my firm has received over the years as a result of a never-ending commitment to content creation through our blog and elsewhere.

Is this list comprehensive? Does it take into account all of the nuances of how a real lawyer can use social media to help his or her practice? No, but it does give you the high notes and prove to you that this isn’t just another time suck.

What do you think?

Filed Under: Legal Marketing Tagged With: facebook, goals, lawyers, Legal Marketing, linkedin, marketing, online social networking, social media, Twitter, web 2.0, world wide web

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.