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I just finished checking out the NOV/DEC 2011 edition of the ABA's Law Practice Magazine. I wanted to take a hot minute to share my take on some of the highlights.

First up, Essential Do's and Don'ts for LinkedIn Users by Dan Pinnington. Dan writes:

With over 120 million users in more than 200 countries (including at least a million lawyers) and Web traffic that ranks it as the 13th most visited site on the planet, LinkedIn is the social networking tool of choice for professionals. It is far more than a glorified way for job hunters to put their CV online. LinkedIn profiles are optimized to perform well in search engines, specifically when someone looks for you by name. In fact, it’s not uncommon for a LinkedIn profile to rank above your firm’s website!

With the recent claim, of at least one lawyer, that LinkedIn is a waste of time, Dan's article provides some perspective, as well as, some actionable tips about how to, and how not to, use LinkedIn.

To me, LinkedIn is probably the most useful social platform for professionals. Of course, it's all about your purpose for being there. LinkedIn can be great for job hunting and growing your professional network. It's not the best place for real-time communications.

Dan is also right about LinkedIn's performance in search results. If you claim, complete, and optimized your LinkedIn profile, it's likely to be one of the most visible profiles for searches of your name or firm name. As Dan notes, it's even likely to outrank your firm website and blog for branded searches, depending of course on the authority of your other sites.

Next up, Law Firm Marketing: What's the ROI? by Christopher Petrini-Poli and Paul Grabowski. I'm always shocked by how little lawyers focus, measure, and analyze returns on marketing and advertising investments. To me, this article nails the keys: Defining Goals and Calculating ROI.

It's incredible how many law firms explore marketing and advertising campaigns without clear goals in mind. This quickly leads to "black holes", campaigns that run wildly without any identifiable measure of performance.

Further, those that do identify goals, either limit their marketing goals to straight dollars out dollars in and fail to recognize the "one-offs" that various marketing initiatives can have. These one-offs can include network and relationship development and professional reputation enhancement.

Finally, some of the firms that actually discuss goals, fail to put into place systems for measuring, tracking, and calculating whether these goals are being met. Admittedly, whether or not certain types of goals are met can be exceptionally difficult to measure. The authors suggest a 5-step process:

1. Track the number of pieces you are mailing or sending electronically. For advertising, use the number of impressions either in print or electronic form.
   
   
2. Determine the overall cost for production of the piece, including costs for graphics and staff time.
   
   
3. Divide your costs by the total number distributed or impressions. 
   
   
4. Track your responses from recipients. Divide this number by the total number distributed to provide you with a percentage of impact.
   
   
5. Depending on the response from the recipient, if it is a request for work to be performed (or if actual work is completed), estimate the revenue generated versus the cost to produce. This will give you an expected ROI.

Don't continue to spend money on marketing and advertising that isn't carrying it's own weight. Give campaigns enough time to get a representative data set. Constantly analyze each component of your marketing and advertising to decide whether it's "worth it."

Next is Nicholas Gaffney's The Lawyer Raters: In Their Own Words:

Ratings are proliferating across all the goods and services we buy, and the legal industry is no exception. Over the past several years legal rating services and lawyer ranking lists have grown tremendously. Gone are the days where one single institution determines the best lawyers or the top firms. Today, there are many different ways to evaluate legal services and it’s important that as practitioners you have a better handle on what’s happening both online and offline and understand how it impacts your reputation and your business.

Like most people, lawyers are uncomfortable being rated, reviewed, and judged. However, for better or worse, the way people judge professional service providers, like lawyers, has expanding rapidly.

In the past, when someone was referred to a lawyer, that person was likely to call the lawyer or meet with the lawyer directly. Today, that person is much more likely to perform some research about the lawyer online. So the questions become, what will they find, and what can a lawyer do to manage that experience?

When someone searches for a lawyer on Google, what will they find:

• The lawyer’s website, that has been +1′d by someone the guy knows on Google+.
• The lawyer’s Google Places listing with several reviews from clients and other lawyers.
• A .pdf file of the lawyer’s resume.
• The lawyer’s Avvo profile with reviews, answers, and license history.
• The lawyer’s LinkedIn profile that contains testimonials and answers the lawyer has provided on LinkedIn’s answers.
• A YouTube video of the lawyer discussing the anatomy of a car accident case.
• The lawyer’s Super Lawyer profile.
• A local Adwords Express Ad containing ratings, address, and phone.
• An article in which the lawyer is quoted on a local news site.
• The lawyer’s JD Supra profile containing guides for accident injury victims.

For those lawyers who embrace the fact that these rating and review platforms are out there, whether they like it or not, there is huge opportunity for competitive advantage.

In fact, as just one example, lawyers that have reviews on their Googl Places profile can steal clients from competitors that have higher search engine visibility.

Finally, Adam L. Stock discusses How Lawyers are Using Video:

Not only do the videos convey what services and expertise the attorneys can deliver, but they also show how they might deliver those services as well.

The web is rapidly evolving. Gone are the days of the read-only text web. Here are the days of the interactive multimedia web. Soon, your clients will begin to expect to be able to find video of you online.

Here are some of Adam's tips:

Understanding that video is an online social medium is critical to its marketing success. We have borrowed what we’ve learned from successful blogs.

Publish frequently: Volume matters in gaining followers and viewers. We publish approximately one new video per week, making them available to clients who access our videos through a subscription.

Keep videos short: Like blog entries, shorter is better. Based on our experience, online video is best at 1½ to 3 minutes. We may go up to five minutes for a very technical topic.

Tag and share: Like blog entries, tag content and share it through social networks and use syndicators to push out content.

Account for a short shelf life. Videos have a limited shelf life, so don’t make one that will take too long to produce, otherwise the information will be outdated by the time you release it.

Integrate. Integrate online video into your other forms of marketing. For example, you may find that marketing both through email and video may yield a better result than each of these media alone.

Measure results. Like all online media, you can measure views, referrals and the number of times videos are shared. Monitor this information and learn what works for you.

You don't have to look very hard to find lawyer videos that are done well, not so well, and just plain badly. Just like everything else you do, both online and offline, you want your videos to put your best and most professional foot forward.

All in all, I was pretty impressed with this issue of Law Practice Magazine. And that's a pretty good endorsement considering I usually think most of the marketing/advertising information in the legal sector is either out-of-date, not very clear, or just downright poor.

Further, the articles highlighted here were certainly not the only good ones in the issue. They just happened to be the ones that I found most applicable to what I do. I recommend you check out the full issue yourself.

While people go online for a variety reasons, at one time or another, most people will probably use the Internet to solve a problem. In fact, aside from consuming news & stalking your friends on facebook, I would venture to guess that some form of problem-solving is probably contributes to a great deal of Internet usage and search behavior. That is why, as the owner of a law firm, everything that you do online to grow your professional reputation should be designed around solving problems.

This really should come as no surprise. As it has been since ancient times, people call upon advocates to help them solve their problems. Whether it be answering questions, counseling through difficult decisions, or litigating their matters at court, lawyers have always been called upon to solve our problems. And so, the first step to any online professional reputation development should be brainstorming your potential clients' problems.

What Is The Problem?

Unfortunately, many legal professionals conclude that the problem their prospective clients are facing is that they don't know enough about them. That is why they spend so much time and effort adding biographical information about themselves. They write about how hard they work and how much experience they have. They include images about professional awards that they have won and the number of years it has been since they first got their license. But is this truly the problem that prospective clients have? Are they out looking for this information? Perhaps eventually, but not at first.

Solving Their Problems

The first problems they are trying to solve have to do with them. How can I get out of this financial mess? How will I pay my bills now that I can't work because of an injury? What amount of jail time may I be facing for my drunk driving arrest? These are the problems that Internet using prospective clients are trying to solve. And these are the problems that legal professionals should be helping to solve online.

And so, your online professional reputation building should be invested in techniques that solve problem. Here are some excellent ways to help solve-problems online:

• Blogging - Blogging about the problems that your prospective clients are facing, and more important, how you can help them solve them, is one of the most effective ways to communicate the value of your services online.
• Q & A Sites - Sites that provide forums for questions and answers are another great opportunity to help prospectice clients solve problems online.
• Content Syndication - In addition to developing problem-solving content, it's important to get that content in front of those that have the problems that you're trying to answer. That is why content syndication is so important.
• Commenting on Blogs - You may be surprised as to how effective blog commenting can be in terms discussions and problem solving.
• Educational Materials - Whether in the form of guide downloads, e-books, traditional books, or videos, providing a variety of educational materials geared at solving problems is extremely effective online.

So the next time you find yourself tweaking your "about us" or "attorney profile" pages, spend some time thinking "about them". What are their problems? How do you help them solve those problems? How can you effectively communicate your ability to help them solve those problems.

Once you have addressed their problem and how you may be able to help them solve it, only then is it time to communicate your adeptness for solving those problems. Interestingly, it has a lot less to do with where you went to law school and how long you have practiced than it does about how you are able to communicate your ability to solve their specific problem.

I came across this really interesting video called "The Thank You Economy: How Business Must Adapt To Social Media". (Advisory, some explicit language in video)

The talk brought up some really fascinating points about the way we market our services and the changes that are happening as we speak.

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Per usual, very important stuff from Rand Fishkin in Google + Bing Confirm that Twitter/Facebook Influence SEO:

As of yesterday, both Bing and Google have confirmed (via an excellent interview by Danny Sullivan) that links shared through Twitter and Facebook have a direct impact on rankings (in addition to the positive second-order effects they may have on the link graph). This has long been suspected by SEOs (in fact, many of us posited it was happening as of November of last year following Google + Bing's announcements of partnerships with Twitter), but getting this official confirmation is a substantive step forward.

Does this mean that you can "tweet" and "Like" your way to the top of Google's organic results? Unequivocally, no. However, this is yet one more reason that business owners, like legal professionals, shouldn't ignore social media and networking or dismiss it as kids' stuff.

Unfortunately, this revelation will probably mean an increase in phone calls, emails, and other forms of solicitation from "social seo experts" claiming to be able to get clients for attorneys by blasting out huge amounts of tweets and Likes. Fortunately (or at least hopefully), Google is much more sophisticated than that (although in light of recent Googbarrassment, one begins to wonder).

It also probably means that we are likely to see an influx of "spam tweets" and "spam Likes" flooding our social circles. 

Nevertheless, the real takeaway from this validation is that participation in the social web is playing an increasing role in search engine visibility. While some legal marketing professionals believe that Twitter is a complete waste of time for lawyers, others believe, "you'd have to be flat out nuts these days not to be monitoring real time conversation on Twitter mentioning your firm, clients, competition, and keywords & phrases related to the niche in which you practice."

Like everything else in life, finding the right balance for effective participation will present a challenge that each individual legal professional will have to address for themselves. Like it or not, the social and local web are here, probably to stay.

Even those that have been skeptical about the effectiveness of social media and social networking for their law practice are now forced to face the simple fact that social signals will impact their precious Google rankings.

I was reading a post from a blog on evolutionary psychology discussing fear.  In the post, they quote 50 Cent (I know...bear with me) and Robert Greene from their book The 50th Law:

In the beginning, fear was a basic, simple emotion for the human animal. We confronted something overwhelming -- the imminent threat of death in form of wars, plagues and natural disasters -- and we felt fear...Fear is the oldest and strongest emotion known to man, something deeply inscribed in our nervous system and subconscious...

Over time, however, something strange began to happen. The actual terrors that we faced began to lessen in intensity as we gained increasing control over our environment. But instead of our fears lessening as well, they began to multiply in number. We started to worry about our status in society -- whether people liked us, or how we fit into the group. We became anxious for our livelihoods, the future of our families and children, our personal heatlh, and the aging process. Instead of a simple, intense fear of something powerful and real, we developed a kind of generalized anxiety. It was as if the thousand of years of feeling fear in the face of nature could not go away- we had to find something at which to direct our anxiety, no matter how small or improbable.

Fear creates its own self-fulfilling dynamic- as people give in to it, they lose energy and momentum. Their lack of confidence translates into inaction that lowers confidence levels further, on and on. If you view everything through the lens of fear, then you tend to stay in retreat mode.

I thought this was not only interesting, but relevant to the way a law firm might approach their marketing.

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I came across this interesting video discussing lawyers and emotional intelligence on Youtube.

As the video articulates, emotional intelligence is a very important skill set for attorneys and one I think is often overlooked when evaluating what makes a successful attorney tick.  

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I came across this post at Positive Psychology News called Why Riches are not Equivalent to Happiness.  The post discusses the relationship between money and happiness.  In the article, Timothy So writes:

To further elaborate on why the riches are not equivalent to happiness, I adopt the approach used by Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, of looking at happiness as moment-to-moment experience instead of general well-being or flourishing. When we break down happiness into moment-to-moment experience, riches do not necessarily make people happier.

Ed Diener and others argue that happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have. Psychologist Jeff Larsen and Amie McKibban ran experiments to test this concept. People who had more of what they wanted tended to be happier than those who had less, but this effect was mediated by appreciation and gratitude. Simply possessing something is not the key. Happiness comes from appreciating what you have.

Seems to me that happiness is an appreciation of the journey we take as opposed to simply the end result.  I believe that finding happiness in your marketing is a key to having success with it.

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As you may be realizing, writing for your legal blog is a little different than writing in just about any other media or format.  Part social media and social networking, part online visibility tool, and part soap box, your blog truly is (or at least should be) the cornerstone of your professional presence online.

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As the web, social media, and social networks continue to change the very nature of human interaction, it is important not lose sight of the power of face to face meetings.

In Lawyer Marketing: You Have to Get Away from Your Computer to Make Rain, experienced law consulting professional Cordell Parvin shares an important point made by attorney Angie Davis:

You absolutely must get out of your office to become a rainmaker.

While the Internet provides an extraordinary vehicle for the "virtual you" to get out of the office, your strongest relationships are still those that are nurtured through real-life interaction.  

Despite the fact that more and more legal professionals are embracing online relationship building, fewer are successfully bridging the online/offline relationship gap.  Fortunately, the web even provides tools for us to turn our web relationships into old-fashion face to face interactions.

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I think one of the most difficult parts of marketing a law firm is crafting your marketing to connect with people on an emotional level.  It's the balance of achieving this while maintaining a level of professionalism and of course remaining ethical with your marketing.  Unfortunately, most of the law firm marketing I see out there is plain, boring, "do what the other guy is doing" type of stuff.  A mediocre marketing message will bring back mediocre results.

The art of marketing is creating a message that allows people to connect to your service on an emotional level.  No one does this better than Apple. 

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Facebook is all the rage these days.  Every "social media expert", blog article, news outlet, etc. praises all the benefits of Facebook to small businesses.  Now don't get me wrong, I think Facebook has it's place in a law firm's marketing plan.  However, I want to present a couple of things you should think about before you start laying out large monthly spends to get all those new clients by advertising on Facebook.

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