Networking & Business Development

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As I’m still out on holidays, I’m bringing you a fabulous guest post today from my friend, Chris Kirby, President of PCT Solutions. 

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Over the more than 15 years I’ve been coaching and/or training attorneys and other professionals, perhaps the most consistent reason for not marketing is, “I don’t have time.” Whether the client is a monsoon maker or someone who is still looking forward to his first origination credit, they never seem to have time for business development.

No matter how proficient you are at business development, it does take time. And whether you enjoy it or not, business development is no longer optional. So how do you manage to effectively source, grow, flourish, and maintain great relationships when there isn’t a spare minute in the day? Here are a few strategies I’ve seen PCTS clients use to great effect:

Continue Reading Sleepless in the Saddle: Finding time to market when there’s no time to sleep

WestJet has done it again. 

You may remember this airline from their video campaign that went viral during the holiday season – they asked passengers awaiting a flight what was on their Christmas list, and while they flew across the country, employees on either end worked feverishly to make every wish come true. It was sweet and inspiring, even if some thought it was entirely contrived. 

This Father’s Day, they’re at it again. Make sure you have some tissues handy, because even grown men are tearing up at this: 

//www.youtube.com/embed/irxTbB_4y0gContinue Reading WestJet’s Father’s Day Surprise: What Law Firms and Legal Marketers Can Learn

We have a late, breaking Two for Tuesdays for you tonight, and even better, it’s a special guest post from my dear friend Nancy Myrland! I’ve arrived in Chicago for the final prep and overseeing of our Annual Meeting (which accounts for the delay in getting this published) and Nancy kindly agreed to offer you some words of wisdom for this Tuesday. Without further ado…

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TWO WAYS TO REPURPOSE YOUR CONTENT

First, thanks to my good friend, Lindsay, for allowing me to grace the virtual pages of her blog by bringing you this week’s installment of Two for Tuesdays.

Lindsay and I talk a lot about Content Marketing these days. It’s the marketing phrase du jour, or at least one of them. Whether you choose to adopt the industry vernacular, or not, it is important to have this overarching umbrella term, and its related components, in mind when discussing legal marketing.

In a moment, we are going to talk about two simple ways you can repurpose content you may have already created.

Let’s take a half of a step back, and define Content Marketing. To do so, we need to know what Content is. In a recent post of mine on LinkedIn called What Is The Difference Between Content and Content Marketing, I offered this simple definition:

Content is the words and messages you deliver, regardless of the delivery mechanism. Content Marketing is the use, or marketing, of those words in an effort to reach other people.”

Continue Reading Two for Tuesdays: Repurposing Your Content

Attorneys, do not panic. I haven’t lost my mind when I ask you to think like a marketer (I promise, bear with me). 

How many of you (raise your hands) think of marketing as something that some group in your office does once in a while? 

How many of you think of marketing as brochures and advertisements? 

How many of you think marketers are just people who ask you for money and then put pretty logos together or make sure you have enough business cards? 

Okay, put your  hands down. I’ve got news for you – marketing is everything.

So says this excellent blog post from Blue Kite Marketing that I read this morning. The truth is, and we’ve talked about it here before, every interaction that you and your firm have with clients, potential clients, and influencers counts as marketing. Continue Reading Two for Tuesdays: Think Like a Marketer

Greentarget, ALM Legal Intelligence, and Zeughauser Group have released the results of their 2014 survey, newly titled "2014 State of Digital & Content Marketing Survey." The change in title is a great reflection of the change in conversation in the last year, a shift in focus to the discussion around content marketing, and how social tools are used to that end. 

As we in legal know, lawyers have been doing content marketing for as long as we can remember, but we finally have a name for it! 

This year’s survey also has another new feature – a survey of law firm CMOs and marketers. You may remember that we discussed some of the results already, with a focus on LinkedIn, following the LMA conference, but today, let’s take a look at the most important conversation piece to come out of the survey (which you can review in full here). Next week, we’ll take a look at some of the results in more detail. Continue Reading Corporate Journalism is the Future According to Greentarget

Today, I’m bringing you my final recap from LMA14 – and while it’s last, it’s certainly NOT least! We’ll be looking at one of my favorite sessions from the conference, "Generational Marketing: Strategies and Tactics for Engaging Different Generations." Heather Morse (@heather_morse) of Barger & Wolen and Jonathan Fitzgarrald (@jrfitzgarrald) of Greenberg Glusker started talking several months ago about how there were four generations currently in the workplace, but no one was really looking at how that affects our external business development activities and efforts or our internal challenges. 

So they did. 

And in this well-researched, thoughtful and thought-provoking presentation, they got many of us thinking and talking about it as well. 

For me, it brought a number of "a HA!" moments, as I recognized some of the very issues among some of the attorneys I work with that Heather and Jonathan were referring to. Their presentation gave me not only a lot to think about, but a lot of tools to use moving forward. Continue Reading Generational Marketing: Strategies & Tactics from Heather Morse & Jonathan Fitzgarrald

I’ve done a number of posts here recently on best practices for networking and relationship-building at conferences, and you may remember that I’ve said, more than once, how important it is to avoid your room at all costs. 

But there’s a counter-point to that which I’ve been thinking about a lot as we have our ILN Annual Meeting on the horizon, and that is – DON’T SKIP ANYTHING.

Sometimes, when attending a conference, it’s very tempting (and often reasonable) to combine other business with the business of the conference – you may have clients in the same city, or friends that you rarely get to see, or a spouse who is with you, but not joining in on the conference, and you feel that taking an afternoon (or two) or a meal (or two) away from the conference won’t be such a big deal. 

You may think that because a conference is only a few business sessions combined with some social activities (as our conferences are), that the social activities are just the way you’re rewarded for attending the conference. You may even think that because you’ve been to a city before, and done some of the same things, that you don’t need to go on those trips, because you won’t be missing anything. Continue Reading Best Practices in Effective Conference Networking: Don’t Skip Anything

The very last session I went to before our wrap up at LMA14 was "Can the C-Suite Lead the Social Media Law Firm?" with presenters Deborah Grabein (@dgrabein) of Andrews Kurth and Michael Hertz (@michaelhertz) of White & Case and moderator Kevin O’Keefe (@kevinokeefe) of LexBlog. 

The description of the session in the conference book reads:

While Fortune 500 executives are beginning to leverage social media, law firm executives are lagging." 

Two C-Level decision makers (not practicing lawyers) in Am Law 200 firms made the decision in the fall of 2013 to start using social media, personally . They wished to experience how their use of social media could help change the perceptions of their brand, better equip them to lead their marketing and business development teams, and help them guide individual lawyers in their use of social." 

With five months of strategic consulting and coaching, these executives became active content creators and social media contributors on blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+."

Learn about the personal and firm wide challenges and rewards these law firm executives experienced, and will continue to experience in their personal use of social media." 

Continue Reading Key Takeaways from “Can the C-Suite Lead the Social Media Law Firm?”

I’ll be kicking off my recaps starting a bit later this afternoon, but first, I want to bring you a Two for Tuesdays, courtesy of a couple of great things I heard at LMA14. If you really listen to those in the LMA who are smart, thoughtful, hardworking and constantly challenging and improving themselves, you end up learning a lot and being a better marketer yourself. 

One of the best sessions of the conference was the wrap up on Friday afternoon, moderated by conference co-chairs John Byrne & Jose Cunningham, along with LMA president, Tim Corcoran. The moderators invited us to share the takeaways we’d gotten from the conference, and there were two that really stuck out for me – lessons that we can use to make ourselves better at our jobs.

Tip One: "When there’s a gap between exactly what we do, and what we hear from speakers, it’s our job to bridge it."

This is a HUGE pet peeve of mine, and has been for several years – you may remember my comments about it here and here. Continue Reading Two for Tuesdays: Using LMA14 to be a Better Marketer

LMA14 is gone as quickly as it arrived, and it’s left me feeling like I’ve been hit by a truck! As I expected, the networking and the programming were the two most valuable pieces for me, and there are many, many things I’ll be sharing with you all here on Zen in the coming days. 

This year, I really felt that the conference chairs stepped up their game with the programming – almost all of the sessions I went to weren’t just good, they were excellent, and I came away feeling that I’d learned a lot to share with my attorneys, but also a lot that I can use myself in my daily work.  Of course, that means I feel like I’ve been trying to drink water from a fire hose for the last few days, which is a bit overwhelming, but I’ll work to distill it all for you over the next few weeks.

First up, I’d like to share some of the great takeaways to come out of LexBlog’s interviews of LMA attendees – there are some SUPER smart people in our organization, who shared their thoughts with LXBN. You can check out all the interviews here, but I wanted to share a few of my favorites. Pay particular attention to the advice from the General Counsel in the first interview and Toby Brown’s thoughts on the current pricing model. Continue Reading LMA14 – It’s a Wrap!