Networking & Business Development

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bag-and-handsI love bringing guest voices to Zen to share some wisdom with you, and today, I am fortunate to introduce a legal marketer and friend of mine, Jennifer Simpson Carr. Jenn has led business development and communications efforts at national law firms for nearly ten years.  She has a passion for strategic communications and recently earned a Mini-MBA in Digital Marketing from Rutgers Business School.

I got to know Jenn when she was working with ILN member firm, Davis & Gilbert, in New York, and we’ve stayed in touch as her career and family have taken her all over the country. This is her first foray into blogging, offering an excellent recap of the roundtable session she led during last week’s Law Firm Marketing & Business Development Forum, with some important takeaways on creating a digital strategy across your firm. Let’s give her a warm welcome! 
Continue Reading Creating a Cohesive Digital Strategy Across Your Firm

unsplash_523b1f5aafc42_1The best session that I attended at the Legal Marketing Association‘s Annual Conference by far was “ROI: Measuring So You Can Better Manage,” with Equinox Strategy Partners‘ Jonathan Fitzgarrald (Full disclosure: Jonathan is a friend of mine, but whether I’d known him or not, this session was chock full of value).

Per the conference guide:

As stewards of marketing and business development resources, legal marketers can build trust and rapport within their firms and obtain buy-in for key initiatives by managing expectations and measuring results.

Join Jonathan Fitzgarrald of Equinox Strategy Partners as he provides real-life examples and best practices surrounding:

  • Key metrics for justifying your existence at your firm
  • Formats and frequency for reporting results
  • Determining which attorneys should see what metrics
  • How to better leverage peer (e.g., finance) relationships
  • Available technologies for tracking and reporting metrics”

Jonathan used the session to give us ten actionable steps that we can use within our own firms and organizations to better manage the relationships with our lawyers. 
Continue Reading 10 Ways to be a Legal Marketing Rock Star

5cde60f6Seeing Jabez LeBret at last week’s Legal Marketing Association Annual Conference reminded me that I needed to catch up on my Legal Coffee Break podcasts – if you’re not yet familiar with it, the Legal Coffee Break podcast is a concise, less than ten-minute, update on legal marketing, technology, and other issues in the legal industry, hosted by GNGF founders Mark Homer and Jabez, with Jabez being the primary voice to this point.

Episode 26 discusses two things that are important to lawyers, and how they have changed with the advent of technology: referrals, and first impressions. Since Jabez talks about issues that I regularly address with my own lawyers, this one particularly stuck with me. 
Continue Reading Referrals and First Impressions: How Technology Has Changed Them

photo-1429277158984-614d155e0017“What if we showed up and said ‘We’re human too’?” asked Deloitte CMO, Diana O’Brien during last week’s Legal Marketing Association‘s keynote presentation.

It may seem like a strange message from a CMO when talking about marketing your brand, but like many of us, O’Brien has been emphasizing that the client experience is essential for marketing success – and the way to connect with your clients is by “creating moments that matter” and then acting on them.

She focused on a few key themes that supported this idea throughout her presentation: 
Continue Reading Marketing: Creating Moments that Matter

photo-1457213453084-d386450c6252Next week, I’m heading to Tokyo for our Asia Pacific Regional Conference, and the following week, I’ll be off to Austin for the Legal Marketing Association’s Annual Meeting (and yes, I’m running my half-marathon in between those two, in a city that is not my home). Because of this, I’ve got conference networking on the brain. Much of what I want to say about conference networking I’ve already said here at Zen, so instead of rehashing it, I want to round-up some of my favorite posts and advice for networking at conferences right here for you. I’m also throwing in a couple of posts related to general networking, and adding in how you can apply the advice to conferences:

Networking Hacks from Undergrads

The two tips in here are to embrace Facebook (really, social media in general) and that business cards are back. In terms of social media, you want to be using this before, during and after a conference – before the conference, use the tips suggested in the post to find and connect to the speakers and attendees at the event that you’d like to meet, and set up networking opportunities. While things can happen organically, wouldn’t you rather make sure that you didn’t leave them up to fate? During the conference, do the same. When you  meet someone, or see a speaker that you like, add them to your LinkedIn connections with a personalized note reminding them of your connection or complimenting them about something that they said. After the conference, add anyone that you missed and arrange to follow up with them where appropriate. Ensure that you have plenty of business cards with you, that they’re up to date with your current information, and are memorable – people were clamoring for my unique cards at the recent awards ceremony I went to in London, even though they were already members of a competing network.
Continue Reading The Value of Conference Networking

Today, I’m bringing you a reprint of my friend, Lance Godard‘s latest blog post on 3 reasons every lawyer should study JD Supra’s Readers’ Choice Awards. The awards came out earlier this week, and while you may be inclined to dismiss them automatically as something only to celebrate for those who were honored, you’d be wrong. There are actually a number of important reasons you should be focused on the information revealed in these awards, and Lance is here to tell us why.

***

[Guest perspective by Lance Godard, Client Relations Manager in the Ohio offices of employment law firm Fisher & Phillips.]

JD Supra just published their inaugural Readers’ Choice awards, featuring top authors and top content across 26 categories in 2015. The accompanying report provides critical insight into who’s reading what – and in which industry – that every lawyer should know. Some observations:

Clients Read What They Need To Know

First, the awards make clear that the “secret” of leading authors on JD Supra is to give the people what they want. These authors are writing about the issues relevant to the companies they want to reach. That may seem self-evident, but it’s not. Because it means you have to step away from your perspective as advisor, as someone who knows what her clients SHOULD be worrying about, and step into the shoes of those clients trying to understand a hundred different and diverse legal issues all at once. Of course you can (and should) write about issues you think your potential clients need to know. But if you’re not analyzing the developments they think are important, you’re not going to gain the credibility that will lead them to take your word for it.

…step away from your perspective as advisor, as someone who knows what her clients SHOULD be worrying about, and step into the shoes of those clients trying to understand a hundred different and diverse legal issues all at once.

Continue Reading 3 Reasons Why Every Lawyer Should Study JD Supra’s Readers’ Choice Awards

photo-1452690700222-8a2a1a109f4cRemember the good old days when we just did a bunch of things and didn’t have specialized terms for them? Yep, these aren’t them.

“Social media marketing” came about when social media platforms were introduced and we learned how to use online technology to build relationships that we’d previously been building offline (that’s tremendously simplified, but you get the idea). Then “content marketing” came along to describe what many law firms had been doing for years – writing about the law and its impact on their clients, and then sharing it with them. As a term, content marketing is broader than that, but in terms of the legal industry, that’s pretty much the short version.

As we worked through the introduction of the terms, we separated people into two camps: the “broadcasters” and the “engagers.” The “broadcasters” treated social media and content marketing as a means to spread their message around, but without the end goal of developing community with anyone. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a different valuation – some of the goals that firms/lawyers who embrace this philosophy might be pursuing are reputation enhancement, being considered a thought leader on a particular subject, etc. Many firms/lawyers have been successful, and even built a large following this way, and spend little or no time engaging with their audience.
Continue Reading Two Ways to Translate Content Marketing into Relationship Marketing

photo-1433170897235-615700336230Of all the social media platforms out there, I’d venture to say that LinkedIn is the one that lawyers are most comfortable using. It has a reputation for being the most professional, and as a result, it’s had the widest adoption within the industry. In recent years, LinkedIn has really expanded their offerings, and provided a robust, deep platform that allows us to engage in new ways, all which make it an even more valuable platform than it was at the beginning.

Like any social platform (or any tool, really), LinkedIn is what you make of it – you can treat it as a place to broadcast from, and as long as you have something valuable to say, you may find that many people are listening to you. But if you want to use it as a business development tool, then you need to get serious about the steps that you take to leverage its features. I read a great article today over on Inc which talked about three ways to use LinkedIn to attract your ideal customer. Since “sales” is a dirty word for lawyers, we’re instead going to talk about using LinkedIn for business/relationship development (which, by the way, is really the same thing, but said in a more palatable way).

Since it’s our Two for Tuesday day, we’ll just presume that you already have a robust LinkedIn profile. I promise that at some point this year, I will update my LinkedIn for Lawyers book, which is a step-by-step process for setting up a profile, but for the moment, let’s set aside that tip and focus on the other two that Inc author, Bill Carmody, suggests. 
Continue Reading Two Ways to Use LinkedIn to Attract Your Ideal Client

What good would looking at commercials from Super Bowl 50 be without looking at the worst of the worst? That’s right, today’s post is all about the UGLY commercials of 2016. And boy, did we have some ugly ones.

While this ad still managed to get some good press and actually (if you can believe it) immediately started trending when it aired during the game, for me, this commercial was the WORST of this year’s crop:

Mountain Dew: Puppy Monkey Baby

https://youtu.be/ql7uY36-LwA

I know, I’m sorry, I have to include it again for you to appreciate why I chose this ad for the ugly list.

So, why is this one so terrible? First of all, it’s creepy. The Huffington Post said:

#PuppyMonkeyBaby quickly became a trending Twitter topic, and most agreed on one thing: there’s a line between cute and horrifying.”

I particularly loved when they said “Mountain Dew? How about Mountain DON’T.”
Continue Reading Superbowl Commercials – The Ugly of 2016

We’ve seen the great commercials from 2016, and we’ve seen the pretty good ones, but now it’s time to get into the fun stuff – the bad commercials from Super Bowl 2016.

There are five strong candidates for “bad” commercials this year, because we had such strong contenders for the “ugly” category – but we’ll get to those next week. I’m sure you can guess what they are. With so many mediocre commercials this year, the biggest issue is that many of the spots were just flat out forgettable. I took notes on every commercials, and for the most part, it was the name of the spot, followed by “eh.” As I said on Monday, if you’re spending Super Bowl-sized money on your advertising spots, you should be spending Super Bowl sized money on the advertising itself – and that means at least evoking *some* reaction from the viewing public.

The following commercials did just that. They weren’t the worst of the worst, but they were fairly terrible. Let’s take a look at each of them, and discuss why they failed.

LG Man from the Future

https://youtu.be/PzLfPx-8OuM

Oh boy, did I want to love this commercial. I mean, it’s Liam Neeson. And, for you eagle-eyed viewers out there, yes, that’s his son appearing with him in the spot.
Continue Reading Superbowl Commercials – The Bad of 2016