Last week, we looked at the question of firms’ biggest social media successes, but this week, it’s time to look at the other side of the coin – challenges.

The question we posed was "What has been your greatest social media challenge thus far, and how did your firm tackle it?"

Do Kim Dung: The greatest challenge for Leadco is to get agreement within the firm as to what should be posted online.

Simone Fell: Agreement within the firm with regard to what should be posted online and who should be responsible for drafting and managing content. Truly meaningful content is usually generated at the individual and practice/industry level, where ‘experts’ in those areas update topic-specific postings and seek out useful information for their target audience. This is much trickier to do at the firm level as the audience is so broad and our marketing team does not have the time to seek out keywords associated with the firm’s brand and reach out to everyone talking about those topics with a personally crafted tweet, track the activities of our clients in the media and post items of interest to them (which would definitely require vetting by a group of lawyers), nor do they have the expertise to generate legal commentary. As a result, our general firm accounts repost articles and news items that can already be found on our website. 

John Buchanan: Our biggest challenges are bandwidth-oriented.  We have a small Marketing Department so trying to be really proactive with social media is difficult, as all of the members of my department have pretty full plates already.  On the attorney side, we also have some bandwidth issues, as well, as our attorneys are often so busy with client work that getting more involved with social media often falls to the bottom of their “To Do” lists.  I think this bandwidth challenge will become more and more acute as time goes on, so it may be necessary for us to examine our ROI on social media vs. traditional marketing when making both budget and personnel resource allocations. 

Jeffrey Hild:  I would say that the greatest difficulty we’ve had is educational.  Initially, we had to convey to attorneys the benefits of utilizing social media tools including the creation of blogs and creating LinkedIn profiles.  Then, the difficulty became, with our blog, providing enough fresh content to keep it optimized on relevant search engines. 

Miriam Hackmey & Kobie Rafaeli:  We  try to encourage members of the firm to increase the use of social media tools, open LinkedIn profiles and keep them updated, create professional groups, publish posts and articles and comment on posts.

McDonald Hopkins: Launching our blog has been the most challenging aspect of our social media efforts thus far. It required a lot of time and coordination with our Labor and Employment group. However, now that the blog has gone live, our group does an excellent job of posting on a regular basis on timely topics.