For our latest installment of “General Counsel Corner,” I spoke with the employment counsel for a Fortune 500 company. My question to her was:
Clients apply their own set of metrics for determining quality, value, and success. What are some of the metrics you use when selecting outside counsel?”
Continue Reading General Counsel Corner: What Metrics Do You Apply to Outside Counsel?
You may notice that things look a *wee* bit different around here, especially if you’re viewing this on a mobile device – that’s because today, we launch Zen’s fancy new re-design!
It’s a cleaner, fresher look, and the most exciting change is that we’ve gone responsive, so you’ll have the ability to read Zen posts on mobile and navigate the site MUCH easier than ever before. Plus, although I was very fond of my serene green site, the bold black and pink that we’ve got going on now is actually more representative of my personal palette.
A huge thanks to LexBlog for putting together such a beautiful design!
So take some time to tool around a bit and check things out. I’ll be continuing to bring you valuable content as always, but with a new look. I hope you enjoy it!
Last week, we focused on how to freshen up your content marketing through curation and focusing on being mobile-friendly. Today, I’m using that same post from Entrepreneur as inspiration to encourage you to think differently about content marketing with these two tips.
(And, as a side note, you’ll want to keep an eye on this space late tomorrow for some big Zen news!)
Tip One: Use Rich Media
It sounds like buzzwords, but don’t panic – I’m talking about things like video, and that’s no reason to be scared. Video is an amazing way to add depth to your content, and even repurpose a lot of the work you’re already doing.
For example record, or re-record, a presentation that you did on a substantive topic and break it up into manageable pieces that you can post to your blog and share via social media. Bonus points for getting your firm to include these in your firm bio to give visitors even more insight into who you are.
Take a piece you recently wrote on some new legislation and distill it into a 2-5 minute soundbite that you record and upload to Vimeo or YouTube and share.
Continue Reading Two for Tuesdays: Think Differently About Content Marketing
One week from today, I leave for our Annual Meeting in Sicily, which has got one major thing on my mind (aside from last minute details) and that is NETWORKING.
This is our largest conference of the year, so it presents a LOT of opportunities for our delegates to take advantage of the networking opportunities that are available to them just by showing up. But as with any marketing or business development activity, you only get out of it what you put into it.
Yes, it would be nice if you could walk away from an event with little or no effort and have business thrown right into your lap, but it just doesn’t work that way (once in a blue moon, the stars will align and it will happen, but that’s luck, not networking).
So today, I wanted to focus on some dos and don’ts of conference networking, in the hopes that whether you’re a consummate networking professional or a first timer, you’ll get something out of this list!
I’m going to put these in bullet formatting for a quick list you can zip through, so let’s go!
We are pleased to announce that our firm of the month is EXPLegal, our host for the 2015 ILN 27th Annual Meeting in Taormina, Sicily!
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As I was doing some reading on content marketing, I came across this post from almost a year ago, which is, ironically, about staying current with your content marketing to avoid becoming a dinosaur.
And while it’s true that it’s important to stay on top of the trends and "hot" ideas in content to make sure that what you’re producing is being consumed and shared, there are some excellent tips in there that lawyers, firms and law firm professionals will find of use in their own content marketing strategies, and are actually still fairly current.
Today, let’s look at two of them.
Tip One: Make your Content Mobile-Friendly
It was true in June of 2014, and it’s even more true now – people are accessing content from their mobile devices. Some statistics for you:
Continue Reading Two for Tuesdays: Freshen Up Your Content Marketing
I know, I know, I should probably change this regular feature to Two "Content" Tips for Tuesdays. I may get back to adding in other tips at some point, but for now, content is such a meaty and worthwhile topic that I’m happy to continue to use the Two for Tuesdays platform to opine on it.
Today, I want to talk about digestibility.
There are a lot of pieces to the puzzle of what makes content successful, and one of those things is how easy you make it for your audience to read it. We’ve talked about things like writing in their language and not using legalese, but in this case, I’m referring directly towards how the content appears on the page (for our purposes here, we’re focused on written content, though it can be blogs, articles, or what have you).
This morning, I was reading (okay, skimming) the Content Marketing Institute’s "Who Killed the Content?" piece, and zeroed in on their section about making content clean and skimmable.
You may think "this doesn’t apply to me – I’m a lawyer, writing on important subjects that my clients really care about, and they will both want and need to read every word."
Continue Reading Two for Tuesdays: Make Your Content Easy to Digest
"Be more human."
That was the closing advice from the LMA’s keynote speaker, Dan Pink, at this year’s conference.
While it was easy to compare Pink to the previous two years’ keynotes (Kat Cole and James Kane) and find him a bit lacking, especially when it came to audience engagement on Twitter, he still offered some great tidbits of information for us to takeaway (and many of the live tweeters following along offered a lot of strong praise for the speech).
Anecdotally, when speaking with several regular LMA attendees, they told me that they felt as though the keynote should be more of a "rah rah" type of presentation to pump up legal marketers, but instead, this was more for and about our lawyers. I agree with that assessment, so the lawyers among my readers may find more value in the content from Dan Pink.
For a much more concise recap of the session than I’m about to offer, check out Heather Morse’s post right from Pink’s presentation.
Continue Reading Leadership and the New Principles of Influence – An LMA Recap
I’ve still got content marketing on the brain (not surprisingly), and I’m seeing more and more discussion about it in legal circles lately. Remember when Lance Godard of Fisher & Phillips told us that 2015 would be the year of content marketing?
But just because we’re excited and focused on it doesn’t mean that it’s without it challenges. Last week, we looked at two from this WordStream post, and today, we’re going to tackle a couple more.
Before we get started, you may want to read a couple of excellent articles – both shared by Adrian Lurssen, and one that he authored:
Challenge One: Signal vs. Noise
This is something that Adrian talks about in his piece, which is why I suggest that you read it before diving into my comments. When WordStream talks about this challenge, they look at it as the challenge of maintaining an ambitious publishing schedule.
Continue Reading Two for Tuesdays: More Challenges to Content Marketing
Attendees at the Legal Marketing Association conference will normally shy away from any session that is entirely presented by service providers – but if that session is done by One North, they’re making a big mistake.
Not only are they always entertaining, but they assume the audience comes in with a high level understanding of the content to begin with (not always the case with all presenters, admittedly) and they deliver some solid food for thought.
At #LMA15, their session was on "Creating Natively Digital Brand Experiences," which sounds like a lot of terrifying marketing speak. We are going to talk about branding and logos, but the marketing nerd in me loves all of this, so please bear with me. For the lawyers in my audience, you may want to read along anyway – it will give you some insight into the broader challenges that your firm and your firm’s marketing professionals face when it comes to branding (which is an important issue!).
LMA members, if you missed this, Kalev Peekna and Nate Denton from One North, the conference presenters, will be sharing highlights from their presentation in the next Social Media SIG webinar on May 12th – members can register here.
Continue Reading Creating Natively Digital Brand Experiences – A Recap
