Tag Archive: social media marketing

How to Find Time for Social Media Engagement and Be a Lawyer, Too (Pt.1)

Written on March 17, 2010 by Donna Seyle in blogging, law firm blogs, social media marketing
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Social Media  has many parts, and is a topic entirely too big  to capture in one blog post. So this will be a series of posts regarding social media engagement, and how it can promote your firm. DISCLAIMER: I am not a marketing professional, and don’t intend to offer a professional marketing strategy here. This is a discussion of how to integrate social media into your work life, and to understand the value, both personally and professionally, of this new level of engagement that creates promotion for you and your firm.

I’m going to start with blogging, because I believe it is the cornerstone of social media engagement. In the legal community, there are several kinds of bloggers:  those who blog as a publishing vehicle, those who blog for marketing purposes, and those who blend the two together. All are useful, and appeal to different audiences. But the one thing they have in common is they all take time.

Before you blog:

  1. Educate yourself. Be prepared to spend some extra time up front to learn how to make your blog posts productive. The most useful and knowledgeable sites I have found are: blogforprofit.com, remarkablogger.com, problogger.net and copyblogger.com. But don’t get overwhelmed. You don’t need to integrate all of the ideas they offer all at once. Start out using as much of their advice as you can, and grow from there.
  2. Create a strategy. B e sure to define your target audience and determine the best way to reach them.Either research online or consult with a marketing coach to create your marketing strategy. There are lots of free and paid webinars available at the International Social Media Association, Social Media Today, MyLegal, and many more. Also check out my page Social Media Presents: Free Webinars to find listed marketing webinars.
  3. You don’t have to blog if you don’t want to. In social media marketing, there are two different schools of thought about the necessity of blogging as part of your marketing strategy. Some believe you MUST blog, and that your blog is the basis from which the rest of your strategy spans out. Others believe that blogs are simply not necessary. Engaging and contributing in social media networks, along with other marketing strategies, is sufficient. Obviously, I’m in the first camp, and think blogging is the best marketing basis if you really want to get your message(s) out.
  4. Find the personal blogging style that works for you. If you’re a bullet-point kind of writer, that’s the perfect format to use for marketing blogging. It’s very popular and viral. People love to receive information in a quick and easy style, much like the The Week magazine (my husband calls it the ADD News). But if you like the analytic, in-depth approach, go for it. There’s a large audience for that too, particularly in the legal industry.

OK, that’s your upfront work. The time you’ve taken on those steps will enable you to develop a system. Developing a system in turn enables you to find time.

  1. Create an editorial calendar. Decide how many times a week you’re going to blog. Yes, that means one blog post per week minimum. Preferably more if you can manage it. Anything less than once a week disapates your momentum and loses your audience.  In scheduling your blogging activities, start with publish day and work backwards. And don’t try to fit in more than one blogging activity per day. It will become a huge chore and you have too many money-making activities to engage in each day.
  2. Finding topics. Get into the habit of seeing everything as a potential blog topic.Think: what are my clients’ concerns? What do they ask me on any given day?  A question in a case you just researched may be valuable information to potential clients. Go to sites like nolo.com, Avvo.com and many others to discover what questions your potential clients are asking. Join JDSupra.com premium membership. Among the many, many benefits of membership, they will email you a list of “trending topics” in your practice areas that can keep you blogging for weeks. Often as you research, you come up with lots of posting ideas. Begin a folder in your document folder called “Blogging Topics” and record them there. Just get these habits on your harddrive (the one in your head). This takes less time than the time you waste hanging around the coffee lounge, with the side health benefit of cutting down your coffee consumption.
  3. Write an outline. I know, I hate them too. Actually, I don’t use them, and it takes me more time to write a post than I dare admit. But an outline does several things: it forces you to be specific about your topic, organize your materials and references so you know where your information is coming from, and approach your topic in logical sequence. An outline can take up to an hour, but it cuts your writing time in half. Do this at least one day before your editorial calendar says “write your blog post.”  And be sure to schedule this on your daily calendar.
  4. Write your post. Take a breath. Then look at your outline. Start writing immediately. Use your outline title as the title of the post. You can always go back and change it if you think of a better one, or it doesn’t quite capture the gist of the final product. But the point is to write. Take each line of the outline and expand. Once you’ve gotten to the end, go back and edit as necessary. This should take you no longer than one hour. Schedule this for one or more days before your publish date, and enter the time on your work calendar also.
  5. Check your keywords and test your links. You need to do the SEO thing. Keywords, tags, SEO title and description are essential. Or, you can save yourself a lot of effort and join ScribeSEO.com, which does all it for you. And don’t forget those links, both inbound and outbound.  Look at how many links I’ve included in this post. They were important to the content, but they’re also important to the SEO. I just created all my links in 20 minutes.

So there it is, a maximum of 3 hours per week for the most labor-intensive part of your social media engagement. Requires some discipline and a little chunk of time out of a couple of days. Is it for you? Think about it!

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Lawyers: do you have time and resource management dilemmas that require creative solutions? Freelance attorneys and advanced technology are here to help. Take advantage of new and exciting ways to have both a successful law practice and a great lifestyle! Click here to contact me for a free consultation.

Lawyers and Innovation: An Uneasy Alliance

Written on February 23, 2010 by Donna Seyle in Law & Social Networking, Uncategorized, Virtual Law Firm Practice, alternative billing, law practice management, legal technology, social media marketing, social networking
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Much has been written and discussed about the reticence with which lawyers approach the massive restructure of doing business as they knew it. Law school trains us to make legal arguments by following precedent, to rely on what has been decided before. Almost all lawyers have gone to work at law firms after passing the bar, and learn from an established institution how “things are done”. While this is true of other professions as well (i.e., the medical profession, and look at the mess they’re in), there is not one profession that is more risk-adverse than law. And since change involves risk, well. . .you get my point. And right now, lawyers have alot of change on the table.

In “Innovate Now?“, Michael J. Anderson writes: ”

When law firms finally realize that they are falling behind (minimal or non-existent profit growth, lower margins and/or declining market share), the first knee jerk reaction is to reduce costs and start to restructure. In law firms that usually means laying off associates and staff. The sad thinking seems to be that since there is little chance that we can increase the total number of billable hours, we had better share those hours among fewer people and those people should be the owners. For some strange reason we choose to keep the people who cost us the most and let go those who cost less and who will provide a better long term and short term future for the firm.”

That kind of response to today’s economic tsunami is both shortsighted and ineffective.  Clients are straight-up refusing to pay ludicrous hourly fees, so law firms are now faced with finding a different, or “alternative” billing model. This process involves a thorough review of the amount and nature of legal work necessary, the value this work will bring to the client, and complete accountability for and transparency of the work performed.

In order to implement this model, changes need to be made not in a knee-jerk reaction, but in a formalized review of the firm’s practice management that will reduce the risk economic loss in value-priced package. You must determine: 1) whether the work-flow methodology is the most cost-effective, and 2) whether the skills of each associate or staff member are compatible with the work assigned to produce the greatest efficiency. Is the firm just following the “way it was always done” map? Have you implemented practice management techniques to improve both the quality of work product and of work environment? Do you need to hire a Project Manager to oversee newly established procedures?  Asking these questions is the only way lawyers can begin to meaningfully and profitably design billing models other than the billable hour and rest assured they will not go out of business.

Then there is the massively influential rise of social media marketing. Blogging. Networking. Social engagement. Publishing. Webinars. Monitoring the results. Marketing has firmly embedded itself into the strange new world of web 2.0, and most lawyers didn’t even like web 1.0. Let’s just say that if social media where a person, s/he would not be invited to the firm’s Christmas party.

But you cannot afford to allow this aversion to affect your business decisions. If you don’t have the time to do it, hire someone who can. If you say you can’t afford it, ask yourself: can you afford NOT to do it?  Think about how much time and research was spent to determine where best to advertise to reach your target market. Well, guess where all those potential clients are now? Online. Go there.

All of this can be accomplished more easily by embracing technology. Technology is your friend. Research virtual law office platforms to find the one that fits best with your firm’s environment and transfer onto it.  Check out as many legal tech tools as you can. Used correctly, these tools can streamline your communications, case/document/knowledge management systems, automate your ediscovery compliance efforts and keep you updated, informed and on time for meetings. The time management and cost effectiveness can handily reduce your overhead.

To research the tech tools available, search legal IT sites such as TechnoLawyer.com, LegalITprofessionals.com and Mylegal.com (among many others) to learn more about how you can leverage technology to keep the bottom line intact.

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Lawyers: do you have time and resource management dilemmas that require creative solutions? Freelance attorneys and advanced technology are here to help. Take advantage of new and exciting ways to have both a successful law practice and a great lifestyle! Click here to contact me for a free consultation.

A Perspective on Lawyers and Social Media Marketing

Written on December 17, 2009 by Donna Seyle in Uncategorized
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I was researching material for this post, which was originally on an entirely different matter, when I came across a blog that stopped me in my tracks. It was both misleading and mean-spirited, not something you see often in the spirit of providing useful information. And so, running the risk that I will get on this blogger’s radar (where I certainly don’t want to be), I decided to switch gears and talk about a subject that comes up now and then in conversation about lawyers-turned-social-media-marketing-consultants. And the subject is this: why would a lawyer give up his/her practice to become a “snake-oil salesman”?

(I am purposely leaving out the link to this blog because the writer disparages a few people I happen to know and respect for their talents.)

First, let’s talk about the things I agree with in the blog:

  1. There is no such thing as a social media “expert”. There are only advocates, practitioners or consultants who have a greater degree of knowledge of, and creativity with, the use of online marketing techniques;
  2. The economic downturn as forced lawyers to seek a career change; and
  3. There is no 3. There are only 2.

OK, so let’s move on to the genuine question: why WOULD a lawyer leave an esteemed profession and decide to use his/her social media skills to benefit other lawyers?  The writer lists several reasons:

  1. They were failures as lawyers.
  2. They can’t find a job in this economic climate that has devastated the legal profession (and your point is. . .?).
  3. Although the combination of a legal/social media background seems the perfect fit to be able to customize a social media strategy to the legal profession, most of these people never practiced law long enough to gain that insight.
  4. They’ve been disbarred, sanctioned or suspended.

The writer goes on to point out that they don’t even comply with the ethical rules of “full disclosure” to their marketing clients that is required of lawyers when retaining legal clients. (Now, the last time I checked, the requirement of “full disclosure” related to lawyers practicing law, not lawyers offering marketing services.)

And all of this stated by someone, himself an attorney, who holds himself out to be a nationally recognized speaker in the area of  – you guessed it – social media. . . hmmm. And your credentials are what?

So back to the question.  Here are my top 10 reasons why any lawyer who is active in social media, has used it to market themselves, and believes he/she can help other lawyers use these tools to market their practices would change careers:

  1. They don’t like practicing law.
  2. They really enjoy participating in social media communities.
  3. They’ve discovered new and different ways to use these mediums to create successful marketing strategies.
  4. They’ve found that developing new businesses in the social media arena motivates them to be successful.
  5. They would rather work with lawyers than against them.
  6. They enjoy writing, speaking and being creative in their use of new marketing tools.
  7. They are really excited when they wake up in the morning and realize they don’t have to go to court.
  8. They hands-down prefer a tweet-up over a local bar dinner.
  9. If they stay up all night working, it’s because they’re on to something and can’t stop.
  10. The social media world is vibrant, challenging and cutting-edge.

So why do I think this issue is important enough to blog about? Because today, integrating social media into your legal marketing plan is essential to any lawyer’s success. In truth, lawyers make good legal social media marketers because they know the rules of the game. A good mix might be to consult with them in combination with traditional marketing professionals. Of course you’re going to check out anyone’s credentials or recommendations before hiring them to perform these important services. But don’t think for one minute that because they’ve traded in their lawyer’s suit for more casual wear that they are any less smart and clever than your worthy opponent across the courtroom. They’re not losing lawyers. They’re winning social media. . . experts. (Ha! Sorry, I couldn’t resist)

I’d love to hear your perspective.

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Lawyers: do you have time and resource management dilemmas that require creative solutions? Freelance attorneys and advanced technology are here to help. Take advantage of new and exciting ways to have both a successful law practice and a great lifestyle! Click here to contact me for a free consultation.
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