And here we are, folks, time to discuss my list of "ugly" Superbowl commercials for 2014. Once again, these commercials were not as awful as in years past – I wasn’t terribly offended by any of them, or sitting in disgust.  These were just my least favorite of the bunch, for various reasons (but generally because I was left thinking "what?!"). I’m bringing you a list of seven commercials today, because there were two extra that I disliked a little bit more than would be deserving of the "bad" list.

GoDaddy

Not surprisingly, if you’ve seen my lists before, GoDaddy’s commercial makes it onto my ugly list. Amazingly, it’s not because I was majorly offended by it (which is normally the case). 

Continue Reading Superbowl Commercials – The Ugly 2014

For a change, there were very few commercials in this year’s crop that I truly hated, so it was tough to come up with a "bad" and "ugly" list. However, there were a number of commercials that I felt particularly blah about, or just thought that they really missed the mark with a big opportunity. 

In more than a few cases, I was surprised that a company would spend so much money both on the commercial itself, and on the ad space, only to fall flat. And in other cases, I thought the hype about the commercial built it up to be something great, only to have the execution be less than memorable. 

So without further ado, let’s take a look at the commercials that made it onto my "the bad" list: 

Continue Reading Superbowl Commercials – The Bad 2014

Yesterday, we kicked off the start of my Superbowl commercials review with five of my favorites. Let’s keep the positivity going for another day with five more good commercials (before we head into the bad and the ugly!). 

It’s interesting to see how subjective these choices are (and goes back to my favorite quote, which is from Anais Nin – "We see things not as they are, but as we are"). There are many lists I’ve seen and favorites quoted that I just hated, and so many of my preferred commercials didn’t make it to anyone’s top lists.  So add your thoughts to the comments – which were your hits and misses? 

Continue Reading Superbowl Commercials – The Good 2014 (Part II)

Although I will be talking Superbowl commercials later today, I also wanted to sneak in a Two for Tuesday. The theme for today’s tips is "Get inspired." A lot of us kick off the year in high spirits, feeling motivated to start new projects and make this "our year." February can bring some doldrums, with the dreary weather (I love snow, but we had just rain and ice yesterday, very depressing) and still short days. 

So here are a couple of ways you can help to shake things up a bit: 

  1. Follow two new blogs: There are some really smart people out there, and the internet brings us all closer together every day. I recommend seeking out two new blogs to add to your reader – one of them should be from within the legal industry, while the other one should be from outside. Why outside? Reading what people are doing in other industries can help us to be more creative, and can spark some ideas that we might not have thought of if we limit ourselves to only those conversations happening within legal. 

    They can be totally out of the box too – maybe it’s just a fun blog that you read because you’re personally interested in the subject matter, and it has nothing to do with your professional life. Anything that stretches our minds helps us to grow as people (and subsequently, as professionals). 

    And, obviously, adding another blog from inside your industry can give you a new perspective on the things you’re looking at every day. Since there is a lot of diversity here in terms of what you might be interested in, rather than give you suggestions for which blogs to read, I’ll recommend that you reach out to colleagues and friends to see what they’re reading, and take a look. 
     

  2. Read a book: I love to read, and this is another way to shake things up and get inspired. Read a fiction book that gives your mind a break from the day to day – a break that’s enough to allow the creative juices to flow when you get back to concentrating on your professional work. Read something inspirational that makes you think. I’m challenging you to take one hour a week (can be all at once, or a few minutes here and there) to read a book. 

    If you’re not sure what to read, get recommendations from friends and colleagues. At the moment, I’m reading Marcus Luttrell’s Lone Survivor, which is quite heavy reading. But it engages a different part of my mind than I’m using professionally. 

    If you’re like me, you have a hard time shutting off your brain even when you’re not at work – it often takes me a long time to fall asleep, because I’m thinking of my to do list, new ideas that I want to try out, people I need to remember to follow up with, and more. I spend a not-insignificant amount of time thinking about my work. And because of that, I can often be too close to it to come up with the best way to tackle a project. Reading can give me that mental break, where I’m totally focused on something else for long enough to return to my work with a fresh eye. 

So this week, look for two new blogs and a new book to give you some fresh perspective and a mental break! 

I feel like such a nerd saying this, but I LOVE commercials. 

Not all commercials, mind you, but commercials that are really well done make me very happy. I have been known to *not* skip through the commercials while watching a show that I’ve DVRd. Really.

So, although I like football (I mean, it’s not hockey or anything), what I love most about Superbowl Sunday is the commercials. And maybe the cake I made in the shape of a football field. 

Last year, I was really disappointed in many of the choices that brands made, and I remember wondering why they would spend so much on ad space for a commercial that was so-so, or downright offensive. I didn’t feel that way this year – there were so many spots that were just brilliant, clever or funny, so I know I’ll have a hard time of narrowing it down! 

Since I’m just coming home from judging weekend for the Legal Marketing Association’s Your Honor Awards (for which I was a judge), I’ve got all of those conversations and criteria swirling through my head at the moment. So that with likely make me hyper-critical of the messages of these ads and hopefully able to narrow them down to just my top five! All right…top ten – but I’ll split them into two posts for you!

 

Continue Reading Superbowl Commercials – The Good 2014 (Part I)

While traveling to Chicago today (an adventure in and of itself, due to delayed and cancelled flights and two trips through security – a story for another time), I had the opportunity to read a fascinating in-flight magazine article in American Airlines’ American Way magazine.

The article, titled “The Brand Challenge,” by Kristin Baird Rattini, discusses how private labels in grocery stores are gaining some real traction against national brands. Since I was already contemplating a post that focused on how brands outside of the legal industry can teach us lessons, I was particularly attuned to how the article is relevant to lawyers and legal marketers.

Let’s look at a few of the quotes that struck me, first, starting with the idea behind the article:

It’s called the Publix Brand Challenge, and it’s as close to a callout as you’ll find in the grocery industry. Several times a year, the Publix Super Markets chain in the Southeast pits three to five of its store-brand products against their national-brand equivalents…If customers buy one of the featured national-brand products, they’ll get the Publix store-branded version for free. ‘Buy theirs, get ours free,’ the ad trumpets. ‘We think you’ll prefer Publix.’”

Continue Reading Lessons from Outside the Industry: Grocery Store Brand Challenge

We’re here with another Two for Tuesday, and I decided to give you a couple of tips about another of my favorite things – blogging! As I mentioned last week, Two for Tuesdays is designed to give you two tips that you can implement today – as with last week’s post on LinkedIn, this post has one tip that you can implement quickly, and another that takes a bit more of a time investment: 

  • Include images: You may think it’s a silly thing to include an image with your blog posts when you’re a serious lawyer, but I can’t emphasize enough how important this tip is. First, because you want to give people a reason to look further at your post – we all see so much information every day that there’s got to be a compelling reason to look further. With a bold, eye-catching image, your post will stick out from all of the other text-only things we’re reading, and our eyes may stop scrolling through for a moment to read the title of your post and see if it interest us further. 

    It’s also good practice for breaking up your posts visually – with blogs, people are not usually sitting down at their computer or mobile device to read posts word for word. They’re scanning through quickly, and images (along with things like short paragraphs, bullet points, quotes) can break up the post, thus making it easier to digest for the reader. When they glance at it quickly, they’ll know that it won’t be too tedious for them to read, and they’ll keep reading. 

    One note about images though – make sure you have the rights to use them. You don’t want to be searching Google for the perfect image to use in your blog, only to find out later that it’s copyrighted. Your best bet is to sign up for a stock image account – yes, it costs money, but not as much as if you get yourself into trouble using someone else’s images. It’s also still a grey area as to whether you can use an image without someone’s permission, even if you attribute it, so stick with the stock images. I use iStockPhoto for all of my posts. 
     

  • Create an Editorial Calendar: I know this one is going to take more work…because I just finished doing it myself. I started by searching for sample editorial calendars, and found this one from HubSpot, which works really well for me. I created a new worksheet for each month, and set up cells on each worksheet for every week of that month. Then, I got to work. 

    I already knew there were regular features that I do (the Friday Roundup, Firm of the Month) and features that I want to do more regularly and in a scheduled way (ILN-terviews, Success Stories). So I began with slotting those into my calendar – I liked this sample because it prompted me to note the topic/title for each post, a brief note about the contents (excellent for when I think of a post), the keywords I want to use, who my target it, and the link. I even included an extra column to record the statistics for each post, which I periodically review. 

    Once I had my standard posts in, I started giving some thought to what other types of content I wanted to be producing regularly – this was a bit tougher, because it means I had to be inspired. But the idea here was not to develop a calendar’s worth of specific posts – first, I only looked at the next three months (with a note in my agenda to review this quarterly). Secondly, I was looking for very general subject areas – these allow me to make room for timely topics, should I want to use them, but give me enough direction that on days where I’m struggling to come up with something, there are ideas right in front of me. 

    For example, that’s where Two for Tuesdays came in – it’s broad enough that I can cover whatever I want: social media, networking, conference attendance, event planning, whatever. But it’s also specific enough that I spend the week prior to writing it looking for two tips about something that I want to share. 

    I’ve found that being as busy as I am, it’s not a good idea to wait to blog until I’m "inspired." I either forget to write down my ideas when I have them, or I’m so busy that it completely falls off my radar. I’m a deadline and list-oriented lady, and so having an editorial calendar both gives me the freedom to write when I’m inspired, as well as motivating me to blog more regularly and strategically. (Plus, I’ve been suggesting it for so long, I thought it was time to do as I say!)

    The other thing that’s nice about having an editorial calendar is that it’s easy to see how and when you need to schedule posts – if you have a case coming up that’s going to take up a significant amount of your time, you can do a little advance writing so that you have a few things lined up, which fit right into the calendar. You can even recruit guest posters to write to those topics. 

So there are your two tips for blogging this chilly (at least in the northeast) Tuesday. What better place to stay warm than working in front of your computer to implement these tips?  What tips for blogging would you add? 

For the last few years, I’ve reviewed the hot topic of Superbowl commercials – as a marketing gal, I LOVE the commercials more than the game (especially when I don’t have a horse in the race, as they say). The Superbowl is when some of advertising’s most creative minds come together and create some sheer brilliance…or sheer disasters.

But what I’ve been noticing lately, is that there have been a number of new, big, flashy ads lately, during some other highly-viewed television events. Some of them are a preview for what will be revealed during the big game, while I think others are taking advantage of a large audience, with cheaper ad rates. 

Whatever, the reason, I’m one happy camper. And last night, while watching the Grammys, I saw a new favorite ad. To kick off next week’s discussion of what I see as the good, the bad and the ugly in Superbowl advertising, I thought we’d take a look at Pepsi’s "Halftime Show" ad last night, and what law firms can learn. 

Continue Reading Let the Commercials Begin! What Law Firms Can Learn from Product Advertising

Let’s talk networking.

Merriam-Webster defines "networking" as: 

the exchange of information or services among individuals, groups, or institutions; specifically : the cultivation of productive relationships for employment or business"

My favorite part of this definition is "the cultivation of productive relationships." That’s exactly what I like to focus on, cultivating relationships. There are many, many ways to do this, but today, I’d like to talk about something we’ve adopted here at the ILN that might work for other organizations and firms. We call it "Speed ILNing"

Speed ILNing is a business iteration of speed dating – for those of you not familiar with what speed dating it, it’s a matchmaking system, whose purpose is to help you meet a large number of people in a  short time. A speed dating event normally consists of an inner and outer ring of seats, facing each other. At the start, individuals are paired up, given a few minutes to introduce themselves, and then when the time is up, a bell rings, signalling that one of the rings of people gets up and moves to the next person. 

 

Continue Reading Best Practices for Networking – Speed ILNing

We’re kicking off a new feature today here on Zen – Two for Tuesdays! I’ve given myself the assignment of sticking to an editorial calendar for the blog this year (everyone get excited!) and one of the regular posts I’d like to contribute is this one, which will cover two quick tips that you can implement today on a range of subjects.

Today’s topic is one of my favorites – LinkedIn. It’s changed a lot in the last year, and continues to grow in importance for online networking (and to use to facilitate offline networking). My two tips involve recommendations for your LinkedIn profile: 

  • Make your Professional Headline more descriptive: So many professional headlines that I see (this is taken from your job title when you create your profile, but can be edited separately) are not at all descriptive. In some positions, that’s fine – your job title tells the story. But for lawyers, either having "partner at xyz firm" or "shareholder at xyz firm" or some other iteration of this doesn’t tell anyone anything about you. 

    Let’s be honest – we’re all busy people, and unless something catches our attention in a way that tells us why it matters to us, we’re not going to look further. So if potential contacts (or even existing contacts) glance across your name and professional headline quickly, and all it tells them is that you’re an attorney, they’re not going to look any further to do the work of finding out what area you practice in. 

    How much better would it be if your professional headline read instead something like "Co-Chair, Intellectual Property Litigation at xyz firm" or "Leader of the Labor & Employment Law Practice Group at xyz firm"? If you’ve been reading Zen for a while, you know that I’ve mentioned this before…multiple times. But as I took a quick look through my contacts list on LinkedIn this morning, about 90% of my legal connections had "partner" or "lawyer" as their listed job title. Differentiate yourself by telling people why to connect with you and why to look further. It takes two minutes to make the change to your profile, so do it today. 
     

  • Make it more visual: Although I consider my LinkedIn profile to be fairly advanced, I recently had the opportunity to look at a friend’s profile, and realized that it looked so much more interesting and professional than mine. Why? Because she had added recent articles that she’d authored, which made it far more visual. 

    One of the recent changes to LinkedIn is the ability to add links and files, both to your summary (shown at the top of your profile) and to your individual positions. This took me a little bit more time, but it was worth the investment – I spent a little bit of time adding some of my recent blog posts (which all have catchy images included as part of them, thus making the profile more visual as well), I added representative images for some of the projects I’ve worked on, and even a link to a YouTube recording of a webinar presentation I gave to one of our firms. 

    It has two benefits – first, that it makes my profile look more complete and interesting. Visual impact is hugely important, and when you can add something to your profile to break up the text (making it easier to read) and showing concretely what you’re about, the benefits are huge. Secondarily, and more importantly, you’re giving people something to click on and interact with – it’s a motivation to learn more about you, and a benefit of visiting your profile. It’s another way to make your profile well-rounded, and more than just a static description of who you are. 

    For attorneys, while you may not want to include too much about individual cases for confidentiality reasons, you can share things such as blog posts that you’ve written (for your own blog, or if you’ve guest posted somewhere else), articles that you’ve written (you have the ability to share both links and individual files, so a PDF copy of an article is perfectly fine), recordings of presentations you’ve done, or images from speaking opportunities, etc. Look at the work that you’ve done in terms of business development, and see what you can repurpose – you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but see what you can leverage. 

Please let me know in the comments what other types of tips you’d like to see – I’m happy to speak about anything I have experience with, and bring in others to speak about things I don’t!