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.

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.

And before the internet, the person who was referred was likely to call or visit the lawyer to inquire about retaining the lawyer's services.

And as part of that inquiry, that prospective client would be likely to ask the lawyer about her experience, maybe her background, and probably a bunch of specific questions about their specific legal matter.

And based on this interview, the prospective client would make a decision about whether or not to hire the lawyer.

And this, or something relatively similar to this, was pretty much how word of mouth legal referrals went.

That was, until the internet.

Instead, legal services consumers are more and more likely to research the lawyer online.

They might search for the lawyer in Google. If they have the address, they might visit the lawyer's website or blog directly. Or they might visit a variety of third-party legal websites, directories, informational portals, or directories.

And so the questions become, what will they find and how will what they find influence their hiring decision?

Will they find anything about you at all?

Will they find an obviously outdated website?

Will they find your clients writing positively about you?

Will they find other lawyers writing positively about you?

Will they find that you are regularly quoted and interviewed in the media?

Will they come away with the feeling that you are the right person to help them?

These are just some of the ways that the internet can influence word of mouth referrals.

And while not every person who is referred to you will necessarily search for you online, more and more people are.

So ask yourself, what do people who are referred to you find when they go online?

If this isn't a good enough reason to start learning how to develop your professional profile online, I don't know what is.

Since Rand did such a nice job articulating the differences between interruption and inbound marketing, I thought it worth applying these concepts to some ways legal services consumers use the internet to when they think they need a lawyer.

Here's a recent television commercial I saw here in Chicago:

So that's there's no confusion, I don't know this attorney. I don't know what the cost of this campaign was. And I have no idea what kind of return it generated.

However, I do know that when their potential clients think they might be in need of a lawyer, they might do this:

And they might see this:

And some folks might not know whether they even need a lawyer yet. So they might ask a question like this:

And some of those consumers may have been referred by friends. So those folks might do this:

And they might see this:

And this:

And they'll eventually find this:

And they may even get to this:

Whether they're directly searching for a lawyer, trying to get answers about their legal issues, or vetting a referral that they received from a friend or family member, the way legal services consumers find information about their legal issues has been forever changed by the internet.

I don't know if interruption marketing will ever completely die. However, I am pretty confident that providing your potential clients with content that demonstrates your knowledge, skill, and experience, when they are looking for it is much more likely to motivate them to contact and hire you than when you interrupt their favorite television show or sports game.

And the internet provides a variety of ways for you to do that. And most of these are much less expensive than their interruption counterparts.

What is Double Ad Serving?

Double ad serving happens when one advertiser tries to show more than one ad on a given search result page. Here is what Google says about it:

To protect the value and diversity of the ads running on Google, we don't generally permit advertisers to manage multiple accounts featuring the same business or keywords except in certain limited exceptions. Furthermore, Google doesn't permit multiple ads from the same or an affiliated company or person to appear on the same results page. We've found that pages with multiple text ads from the same company provide less relevant results and a lower quality experience for users. Over time, multiple ads from the same source also reduce overall advertiser performance and lower their return on investment.

Whether it's because Google isn't very good at enforcing this policy, or really doesn't care as much about protecting the value and diversity of the ads running on the platform as they claim, double ad serving occurs much more frequently than Google would like to let on.

Recently, while performing some competitive analysis for medical malpractice terms in Washington, DC, I noticed yet another example of double ad serving. In this case, it was being done on behalf of a local DC malpractice lawyer.

As you can see, the number one paid search ad is for wilsonlaw.com:

You will also notice another ad a little further down the page for the website: http://www.medical-malpractice-lawfirm.info/. Curiously, that ad appears to be another advertisement for the same lawyer:

Hmmm... That's interesting. The same advertiser, serving the same looking website on two separate domains, on the same results page. Looks to me like a clear violation of Google's double serving policy.

Should I Do This?

Like other issues involving lawyers and online marketing, many readers will look at this example and contemplate, whether this is something that they should be doing. My short answer is no, as it could jeopardize your ability to advertise on Google altogether.

But some will argue that this is an excellent way to "dominate" search engine results pages. In fact, it's my guess that the lawyer doesn't even realize that he's advertising in violation of Google Adword's policy.

In my humble opinion, each advertiser, whether doctor, lawyer, or plumber, needs to make an informed decision about how they advertise and market themselves. Further, specifically for lawyers, there are rules of professional conduct with which lawyers should comply.

Who is to Blame?

So who is to blame for non-compliant advertising? There appear to be three probably suspects: The lawyer-advertiser, the advertising/marketing company, and Google.

Unfortunately, in most cases, lawyers don't have the time, desire, or knowledge, to be able to make informed decisions about their online advertising and marketing. Obviously, this is no excuse for "bad advertising" practices and they are the ones ultimately accountable for their reputation and license. However, it seems that at least some blame must be attributed to their advertising/marketing agency.

As you've probably experienced elsewhere, many advertising and marketing companies aren't in the business of adhering to advertising rules, or lawyer rules of professional responsibility. And in fact, there are some lawyers who insist on gaming the system. So not all blame can be attributed to them either.

Finally, there's Google. Google's incentive is for their users to click on ads. That's how they make money. Do they have incentize to police violations of their policies? Sort of. They contend that if they don't maintain the integrity of the engine and the ad platform, people will search elsewhere. But since Google has become synonymous with search, it isn't realistic to think that people will abandon Google for these types of infractions. In fact, most users wouldn't even notice this form of double ad serving.

Does it Matter?

Undoubtedly, some readers will ask whether it even matters that advertisers participate in double ad serving. Which is a fair question. It's almost a victimless crime. The only groups that may suffer are users, who my be misled that there are more options on search result page than there actually are, and other advertisers who comply with the ad policies.

On the other hand, perhaps the advertiser is taking some risks too. There's a chance that they are penalized for double ad serving by Google. Additionally, they may take a reputational hit or even face ethical issues with their state bar.

Despite the competitive advantage it might provide, I strongly recommend that you don't double ad serve. It is one more reason to learn about online marketing and advertising before you dive in head first.

UPDATED: Was it an Accident?

It was suggested to me that this might have been an accident. For example, the firm might have been handling their paid search in-house and then subsequently decided to outsource to an agency and forgot to turn off their in house campaign.

I think that's a fair possibility in this case. However, I've seen several other instances where an advertiser is working with multiple agencies. In those cases, the "accident" card isn't as easy to play.

When it comes to web strategy, for most legal professionals, there is a huge knowledge gap. This is at least part of the reason that terms like "search engine optimizer" or "SEO" have become synonymous with snake oil. But whether you call it SEO, web strategy, or internet marketing consulting, the fact is that there are a lot of reasons why working with a web strategy consultant can make a lot of sense.

Choosing to retain the services of a web strategy consultant is a decision that should be made with care after understanding some basics about how people use the web and search engines.

While hiring the right partner can improve the effectiveness of your web properties, as well as, help you save time, hiring the wrong partner can result in a big waste of money and even cause damage to both your website and your professional reputation.

But what should a web strategist be hired to do and how does someone distinguish between the right and wrong partner?

Before we get into the specifics of some of the types of things your web strategy partner might be able to help you with, it's important to understand that not all services are right for all people. This means that you should seek someone out that is willing to take a customized approach to assisting you with your online reputation. There really needs to be an evaluation, inventory, and research period so that your prospective web strategy partner has understanding of your marketing messaging and goals. That being said, here are some services that might make sense for you:

• Website Content & Structure Analysis & Development Assistance

  Making sure that your website content and architecture is well-organized is one of the most important services a web strategy partner can provide. Making mistakes in this area can have a significant negative impact on your site's effectiveness. Further, aside from making sure your site is technically sound, content development is the single most important aspect to your web strategy. Having someone that has experience developing web content can have a significant impact on your results.

• Technical Web Design & Development Advice

  Unless you have experience with domain registration, hosting, and content management systems, working with someone that has experience planning and developing websites is really a must, in my humble opinion. While these aspects of web strategy aren't difficult per se, mistakes in this department can cause expensive headaches. In fact, some mistakes here can even prevent your website from appearing in search results altogether.

• Keyword Research, Discovery, Mapping, and Planning

  In my experience, the importance of keyword strategy is often overlooked. While some will claim that all you need to do is to "write on topic," the truth is that your keywords matter. Getting help from someone that has specific experience with legal keywords makes a big difference.

• Web Strategy Training

  While there are many things that your web strategy partner can and should handle for you, there are some things you may decide are better handle by you or someone at your firm. If this is the case, your web strategy partner should offer training to ensure that what you are doing in-house follows best practices.

• Link Acquisition

  If you know anything about the web and search engines, you know that links are extremely important. But not all links are created equally. And how you go about acquiring new links is critically important. While your primary focus should be on developing content that your visitors want to link to and share, there are other ways of acquiring links that you might not have thought about or don't have time to research. This is another area your web strategy partner can assist you.

• Social Media Design, Support, & Training

  As you've probably noticed, social media and social networking platforms are the hot thing. And there is no doubt that social signals will continue to play an important role in terms of your visibility online. However, it's important to understand that social networks are not very good advertising platforms. You should work with someone that understands how lawyers are effectively using these tools for business development and professional networking.

• Local Search Marketing Strategies

  If you have a local consumer practice, local search marketing is a great opportunity. Unfortunately, the number of web consultants that understand local online marketing is much smaller than those that know traditional search engine optimization only. With recent changes made by search engines related to local search marketing, this is an area that can get fairly confusing without some experienced assistance.

It's also important to recognize that not all online landscapes are the same. Legal is a particularly competitive online space. That is why it is helpful to seek out a web partner that has expertise in working with law firms, practice areas, and even geographies similar to yours. Further, as you know, marketing a law firm is unique in terms of professional ethics rules. Your web strategist should have some understanding of these rules and help you make decisions that keep you in compliance.

How To Access Me On The Web

To access Me On The Web, you'll want to visit the Google dashboard and login to your Google account.  From here you'll see the section Me On The Web right underneath your account details.

What Can I Do With Me On The Web?

In Google's own words:

However, your online identity is determined not only by what you post, but also by what others post about you -- whether a mention in a blog post, a photo tag or a reply to a public status update. When someone searches for your name on a search engine like Google, the results that appear are a combination of information you’ve posted and information published by others.

Today we’ve released a new tool to help make it easier to monitor your identity on the web and to provide easy access to resources describing ways to control what information is on the web.

The first thing you'll notice, on the left hand side, is a list of links you've added to your Google Profile (if you haven't yet setup a Google Profile I strongly recommend you take the time to do so).

On the right hand side, you'll see several links including a link to setup a Google Alert for your name and email.

Once you click the link, a box will appear that allows you to easily register to receive alerts each time a mention of your name or email appears on the web.

The remaining links provide access to resources including how to manage your online identity and how to remove unwanted content and the associated search results.

It's important that you understand how to monitor mentions of your name on the web and take action to respond appropriately should the need arise.  These resources will help to streamline that process.

Everyone has moments in their past that they wish they could hide from the professional world. Unfortunately, Facebook friends have a way of bringing up those past indiscretions for everyone to see.

The whole objective behind Facebook is to exchange information with friends, family and colleagues. Yet if a friend posts a photo of you doing something you don’t want to be seen doing and tags you in that photo, the people in your network are going to see it. In fact, if your privacy settings aren’t set properly, you may find that even total strangers are able to see them too.

So here are some security and privacy considerations for Facebook that lawyers should put to good use.

It’s very possible to edit and customize your permissions for sharing information about yourself. Log into your Facebook account and you’ll see on the top right hand side a drop-down menu for “Account”. Inside this menu, you’ll see a selection for “Privacy Settings”.

Use this section to customize the level of privacy you want. Don’t simply click on the “Friends Only” option, unless you want people within your professional network to see photos of you or your kids as well. Instead, use the Custom option and select the level of privacy options you want to apply.

For example, you may choose to only allow people in your friend network to see photos of you or post on your wall. You may even choose to block anyone who isn’t in your friend list from seeing any of your information at all.

There is also the option to hide certain information from view to everyone except you. This is a handy feature if you don’t your contact information, your email address or your phone number visible to anyone online at all.

Tagged Photos and Videos

While you may have reset and reconfigured your sharing permissions, this won’t actually stop someone else from uploading a photo of you and then tagging you in it. Those third-party pictures of you can be seen by people in your network, as well as by the people in the network of the person who posted the photo.

If you’re not comfortable with people loading random photos of you for anyone to see, you can keep track of when anyone tags you in a post or in a photo. You can also choose to hide any externally uploaded photos and make them visible to only you.

To do this, select the drop down menu on the upper right hand side that says “Account” then select the option for “Account Settings”. This will take you to a page where you can control what information you choose to share.

You can also set your account to send you notifications when a person tags you in a post or in a photo. This is an important consideration, as you cede a large amount of reputation control by allowing others to post images of you at will.

Encrypt Your Facebook Sessions

While you’re in the “Account Settings” page, select the “Account Security” option. This allows you to conduct any of your Facebook sessions over a ‘https’ secure connection. You have the added security of knowing you’re not sharing your information with others, which can be very handy if you’re using the Wi-Fi at a Starbucks or at the airport, or other public location.

This section also allows you to monitor and receive notifications of any other activity within your Facebook account.

Across the top of the Account Settings page are several tabs. You can allocate various levels of notifications for different events and occurrences on Facebook.

This post was written by Lior Levin who is a social media consultant to an E2 Visa lawyer from New York who likes to engage in deep social media initiatives.

Photo by kchbrown http://www.flickr.com/photos/phillykevflicks/

If you follow what's going on in the world of search engine marketing, you likely have heard something about Google's Recent Panda-Farmers-Content Update:

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on.

 

This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on. We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.

In the wake of this most recent update, we've received a lot questions from law firms wondering how this might impact their website traffic. And the answer, like most other online answers, is that it really depends.

If you write your own unique website content and blog posts. If you research your posts and provided your opinion, analysis, or even remotely articulate something resembling a point, you will likely not be greatly impacted by this most recent update.

On the other hand. If you copy (or scrape) content from other websites. If you buy content that has been copied or spun via software. If you pull news headlines off of news sites and follow them with the first 100 words of the news articles. If you're using a blog feed of disaster (as Kevin O'Keefe warns against), your website or blog's traffic and rankings may be at risk.

While some of these "strategies" may have worked to increase traffic to your site in the past, they are likely to do more harm than good. Both to your search engine visibility and to your professional reputation.

So here's my advice:

Naturally, I can hear the question from many of you ‘What do we do now?’ So here are a couple of statements that we can make without question.

• If you are scraping sites and mashing content together – Just stop what you're doing right now.
• Make sure that any content that is published to your website or blog is unique. Also, if you are publishing articles on your blog and then syndicating them on other sites without altering them – You should stop doing that too.
• If you're going to syndicate content that you have published to your own site or blog, only put unique content on your site; and wait before syndicating a modified version of your content elsewhere.
• If you publish external content (i.e. guest blog posts, etc) make sure that it is unique.
• If you comments turned off on your blog, turn them on. Moderate them. Respond to them. This tells Google, and more importantly, your visitors that you are listening and actually care that they visit your site. 

I recognize that online publishing may not be a high priority on your list of daily tasks. I also realize that not all lawyers are great writers. While I don't think that outsourcing content for websites and blogs is bad per se, you must have an editorial review process in place for any content published to your website or blog. You should also establish specific guidelines for anyone that contributes content to your site or blog. The truth is, more often than not, you will be the best at writing for your own law firm website and/or legal blog.

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.