We invite you to read our weekly Public Reputation tips which integrate various marketing disciplines including media relations, marketing strategy, creative focus and web/technology/2.0. Please send us your comments or questions and join our conversation.
Public Reputation Tip of the Week
August 31, 2010
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A Two-Way Commitment is the Key to Successful Law Firm Public Reputation Development
As providers of law firm public reputation management services, we want our clients to view us as valued advisers to the firm. Establishing this type of relationship obviously takes a large commitment, not to mention PR expertise, from our firm, but it also mandates a commitment from the law firm to ensure that the PR firm is viewed as a critical component of the firm's marketing department. So, how do you make sure that you are utilizing your PR counsel as effectively as possible? Let's focus on two of the most critical things a law firm can do:
1) Work with your PR firm to establish clear short- and long-term goals at the outset of the relationship. These goals should be monitored through regular weekly communication and reassessed every six months to ensure that they are still aligned with your firm's goals.
2) Ensure -- and this is really critical -- that your PR firm has access to your attorneys and that the attorneys have been briefed on both the PR/law firm relationship and the ways in which the attorneys and their practices can benefit from the relationship. No matter how committed a law firm is to enhancing its public reputation, any PR/law firm relationship is doomed to fail unless it has buy-in from its lawyers.
A great PR firm will be able to take a relatively small amount of your attorneys' time to develop a strategy and actionable tasks that generate positive results. This will allow your firm's attorneys to quickly return to their billable work. The initial ideas and information, however, must come from the attorney who knows his or her practice best. If the attorney is unwilling or unable to spend that time with their PR adviser, then even the greatest PR firm won't be able to help.
August 24, 2010
Social Media for Attorneys: It's All About Word of Mouth
Word of mouth is the most reliable marketing strategy for lawyers—and for any service-oriented business. Why is word of mouth the best way to promote your product or service? Credibility. Potential clients trust, or at least seriously consider, positive endorsements from previous clients—particularly when the endorser is a personal connection, or in our Web 2.0 world, a “social network” connection.
Online, the power one traditionally garnered through word of mouth marketing has grown exponentially, and attorneys are now presented with limitless business development opportunities. This is where social networking attorneys have a clear advantage over their less tech-savvy counterparts. To state it mathematically, and to borrow LinkedIn’s algorithm, if you were connected to 115 people on LinkedIn (the popular social networking site favored by professionals from every industry), you would potentially be linked to more than one million people through the connections of your connections (i.e., through word of mouth introductions/endorsements). That’s impressive.
How do you harness word of mouth? Beyond offering remarkable service that is worth remarking about, the most effective way to obtain online endorsements from clients is simple—ask. “If you’re happy with our service, please Tweet!” can be added as an e-mail tagline. Or, if your firm is on Facebook or Twitter, encourage clients to “like” your page or “follow” you. Remember, although marketing strategy for lawyers evolves constantly, word of mouth is here to stay. Ignoring the power of a positive (or negative) endorsement online can prove disastrous, so take steps now. More on how to handle negative comments on social networks later.
August 18, 2010
Mobilize Your Associates and Enhance Your Law Firm's Public Reputation
Associates are your future partners and business developers; consequently, you cannot afford to ignore associates, but you also cannot afford to send them out without Public Reputation training. Many law schools do not include marketing classes, so marketing managers need to educate associates on PR best practices. Here are six tips to add to your lesson plan:
- Designate associates to track client engagements and courtroom successes. This will give them face time with busy partners.
- Deputize associates as part of your RFP response team. Drafting responses requires knowledge of the law that your staff may not have and that partners won't always have the time to provide.
- Invite associates to attend business development events, stressing the importance of networking before the event and that it's neither acceptable nor good business sense to "dine and dash" or just talk to other associates.
- Encourage associates to co-author articles for legal journals and contribute to other mainstream media with partners.
- Include associates whenever feasible in partner media briefings and ask them to help formulate talking points or to gather information for interviews.
- Direct some business development dollars toward associate entertainment. Associates' undergraduate and law school friends are also climbing the corporate ladder and could be future clients of your firm.
Giving associates an early start in business development basics helps them develop their own client base while moving both associates and the firm up the public reputation curve.
August 12, 2010
Create A Powerful Personal Brand
In the services industry, although the firm’s brand does lend a measure of support and respect to individual attorneys, the individual often plays an equally, if not more, important role in building the firm's reputation. What does your personal brand say about you and about your firm?
Personal brands can, of course, be related to specific legal expertise, but they can also be related to geography, i.e., this lawyer is the leading expert on trade with Northwest Turkey. Sometimes it’s a combination, i.e., she’s the best commercial real estate lawyer in Marin County.
Personal branding can also relate to personal characteristics—the best-dressed attorney in the courthouse or the one who always wears a very distinctive hat that enables you to immediately recognize with whom you are dealing. On the other hand, sometimes personal characteristic branding can reflect negative traits such as being a bully in the courtroom or always being seen chewing on a huge cigar.
Many lawyers, but not nearly enough, have already realized how powerful the viral nature of social networking is in building a personal brand. They blog; they tweet; they use social networks to build their personal brands by writing, commenting and generally making themselves present.
Use the Web to your advantage to build not only a powerful personal reputation/brand but also lasting client relationships by doing the following:
- Be unique in some way. You will never be known for everything so make sure you are known for something positive.
- Be focused. Unlike your firm's website that is designed to speak to the masses, you need to speak to a very highly targeted audience that will recognize, appreciate and ultimately buy what you are selling.
- Be available. Respond expediently to questions and posts left for you by audiences on websites and social media. Pay attention to what people are saying to you and about you—your Public Reputation depends on it.
Remember that once you start to build an individual brand you will need to maintain and grow it. Managing a personal reputation/brand is just as important as creating one. More on that later.
July 20, 2010
Old Spice, New Media, and Lessons on Risk Taking for Law Firm Public Reputation Management
If you were anywhere online last Wednesday you could not possibly have missed the latest evolution in the new Old Spice ad campaign. What began as a series of cheeky Super Bowl Sunday television ads featuring a buff towel-clad man demonstrating the manliness that’s possible for those who use Old Spice, suddenly morphed into a social media phenomenon.
Leveraging YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, Old Spice man began answering questions posed to him on Twitter in short videos posted to YouTube. It caught fire almost instantly. Soon Twitter and Facebook were abuzz with links to the YouTube videos and questions directed to the @oldspice account. Old Spice was a trending topic on Twitter all day.
There are several lessons here for law firm Public Reputation management:
- Using social media for attorneys means taking risks. No, you do not have to put your partners in towels on YouTube, but you do have to think outside the box.
- Innovate or die. Old Spice has reinvigorated a moribund brand with social media and made it, dare we say it, hip to smell like your grandfather.
- Leverage multiple social media platforms. Part of the genius of the Old Spice campaign is that it reached a wide audience regardless of whether they were on Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.
Not every law firm will end up as a trending topic on Twitter because they use social media for attorneys, but that does not mean it’s not worth trying. There are rewards to taking risks.
July 15, 2010
MAKING THE MOST OUT OF YOUR NEXT LAWYER SPEAKING ENGAGEMENT
When it comes to lawyer speaking engagements, we often hear from attorneys who are frustrated by the characteristics and quality of the audience. You know the story: the attorney signs up for a seminar with a company that agrees to handle the advertising, invitations and all logistical details. It seems like a great bargain – until the attorney shows up to find a hotel conference room packed with competitors!
PUBLIC SPEAKING FOR LAWYERS AND PUBLIC REPUTATION
Public speaking for lawyers is one of the best ways to support your firm’s Public Reputation. Not only does it give an attorney and firm access to a particular audience, but it also generates content that can be used on the firm’s website, in client alerts, and in pitches to journalists and bloggers. However, it pays to do your research before the attorney and marketing staff spend hours perfecting a presentation. Here are a few questions to consider:
- Who is the audience? Find out how many attendees are expected, along with their job titles. If this is an annual event, review attendance lists from past programs to determine the quality of the audience.
- What is the contact policy? Ask whether the attorney will receive the attendee list for post-event follow up. It’s the follow up that drives the majority of law firm business development typically – not the speech itself.
- Is there a discount for “friends of the firm”? Find out whether the conference organizer can waive or heavily discount registration fees for your own contacts. You can improve the quality of the audience, and reach particular prospects, by inviting your own clients and guests to the event.
Simple questions like these can go a long way in helping to determine whether an upcoming conference is the perfect match for your firm and if it will further support your Public Reputation goals.
July 8, 2010
Build Your Public Reputation With Attorney Advertising
Attorney advertising attracts target audiences, promotes your firm’s brand, and enhances your firm’s Public Reputation. As budgeting season approaches, take a hard look at your current marketing efforts and ask yourself—what would be the smartest way to spend our advertising dollars? And if you do not historically set aside an advertising budget, now is a great time to start taking advantage of this dynamic awareness-development tool.
Enhance current advertising:
- When advertising online, review traffic reports and evaluate click-through rates. You may need to tweak design and copy elements to attract more visits.
- Confirm that your advertising is in line with your firm’s business development objectives. Should you scale back on advertising for a particular practice group and ramp up for another?
Start an advertising campaign:
- Visit popular online resources and print publications for your target industries and groups to see how other firms are positioning themselves through advertisements. Identify the competition, study it, and then focus on differentiating your firm from it.
- Plan for the highest frequency of placements possible while staying within your budget.
Advertising campaigns allow you to share carefully orchestrated, audience-driven messages about your firm.
June 30, 2010
Law Firm SEO – Giving You the Competitive Edge
No matter if you have an existing law firm website or are creating a new one, law firm SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is essential to getting the most out of your online presence. In the past you only had to worry about selecting keywords to apply to the site’s meta tags (specific HTML code read by search engines). But SEO has evolved into a more complex process. The essential components of any law firm SEO Strategy now include:
- Keyword Research/Development: the foundation of successful law firm SEO.
- On-Page Optimization: keyword usage and content tactics applied to your law firm website.
- Off-Page Optimization (aka Inbound Link Building): keyword usage and content tactics applied to all of your online communications.
About Inbound Link Building
Inbound links (links on other sites coming into your website) are critical. It’s important to establish and follow an inbound linking process to achieve top search positions.
Law Firm Website Effectiveness Depends on SEO
Without a law firm SEO strategy, your website loses value. When correctly followed, SEO gives you an advantage over your competition and positively impacts your thought-leadership perception, online branding and business development.
June 23, 2010
When Facing a Crisis, Take a Step Back First
You just received the call. The firm is facing a crisis, and whether it involves layoffs, an investigation, bad firm financials or group departures, the firm’s Public Reputation is at stake. Everything you need to do to protect that is swirling in your head. But before you do anything, take a step back. Don’t answer your phone or read your e-mail. The most important thing you need to do first is to think about who at the firm needs to know and pull together a team. Together, you can develop a plan. Below are a few tips for getting started:
- Pull Together Essential Personnel – be sure all essential firm staff are briefed and made part of the communications team, including one designated spokesperson.
- Develop a Plan – you will need a comprehensive strategy for managing all communications, both internal and external.
- Synchronize the Messages – make sure your internal communications (written or verbal) have the same messaging as your external communications.
- Stick to the Plan – once you have your detailed communication schedule, stick to it. Don’t allow media inquiries or rumors to change your timing.
June 16, 2010
Building a Solid Foundation for Your Media Campaign
While your law firm likely has a standard media relations protocol in place, each lawyer also has a certain “way of doing things” when it comes to media outreach. These differences can vary sharply based on practice group, office, or personality. In addition, each reporter you work with will have his or her own unique style of interacting with attorneys at your firm. So, how do you get everyone on the same page?
- Offer to provide a “Media Training 101” at a firmwide or practice group lunch. A short 15-minute presentation is a great way to explain the firmwide approach to media, set ground rules and field questions.
- Each time you work on a media relations campaign, make a point to clarify the goals, target outlets, timelines and potential pitfalls. This saves everyone from unnecessary misunderstanding or frustration down the road.
- Reporters and attorneys alike have different understandings of “on the record,” “on background,” “not for attribution,” etc. In addition, some reporters may agree to send a quote for advance review, while others won’t. There are no standard industry definitions or policies, so agree on the rules before the interview starts.
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