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.