Social Media

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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

photo-1416453072034-c8dbfa2856b5Although social media has been around for a while (and isn’t going anywhere), there’s still this idea in the legal industry and even among many legal marketers that it’s a game, or a waste of time.

But social media, when used strategically and correctly, can actually be about relationship-building and business development.

I could go into a long diatribe about why this is true, what the statistics say to support it, or even start a series about the various tips and tricks you could be using in your own practices for better use of social media – but I won’t.

I will say that, like any other marketing tactic, it’s not for everyone. It’s a tool to be considered and used as part of your overall arsenal, if and when it meets with the goals that you’ve set out and the strategy that you’ve developed. Just as importantly though, don’t discount it as being “for kids” simply because it’s something that you’ve seen your own children using, or you think it’s only big with celebrities, or you’ve heard that it’s somewhere that people can waste hours.

No one embraced the telephone right away either, and now you keep one in your pocket.

(And if people are determined to waste time somewhere, they’ll find a way to do it, whether it’s on Facebook, or on personal calls, or playing games on a non-internet connected device).

All of that being said, this week, I’d like to talk about two concrete ways that social media can work for you – specifically and successfully.

Tip One: Blogging as a Relationship Builder

Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog has long espoused blogging as more than just a platform for putting your thoughts down on paper, so to speak. If used strategically, it’s actually a way to meet the people that you want to meet. Let’s look at an example – in January, I blogged about Two Tools to Turn Trends into Topics, which was based off of a blog post written by Ann Smarty over at the Content Marketing Institute. I often look to CMI for inspiration when I’m blogging, and it’s the second time I’ve referenced Ann in a post that I’ve written for Zen – she writes good stuff.

Continue Reading Two Ways to Make Social Media Work for You

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

photo-1429051883746-afd9d56fbdafBefore we jump into our regularly scheduled post, I wanted to mention that the Legal Marketing Association has put together several of the sessions from the Bay Area Chapter’s Legal Tech Conference, which are available as a webinar series – members can download them for free, and non-members get them at a rate which is really a bargain, considering the depth of content offered. One of the sessions is the panel I participated on with Adrian Lurssen of JD Supra and Laura Toledo of Nilan Johnson & Lewis, but as an independent attendee for the other sessions, I can say that the content was really smart and thoughtful, and would be well worth the time and cost invested! So I share the link with you in the event that you’d like to take a look at it – descriptions of the sessions offered with this bundle are included.

I watched our panel from the conference again, and one of the questions that we were asked during the session is one that I think Zen readers would benefit from discussing as well – that is “How do you motivate lawyers to produce content?”

It’s easy to become convinced that content development is a time-consuming process that you have to devote significant resources to. But if you invest some time in setting up good processes, and marketing professionals act as the support team for the lawyers that are producing the work, it can run much more efficiently than you’d expect. 
Continue Reading Three Ways to Motivate Lawyers to Content Marketing Success

200HWhile you don’t need to break the news to be a successful content marketer in the legal industry (and in many cases, it’s really better if you don’t), it doesn’t mean that you have to stay away from writing about or producing content for the latest trends. You may think that because someone else has already weighed in on something, that you shouldn’t add to the commentary out there – but you may have something valuable to say, or a different perspective to add.

What we refer to as “evergreen content,” or “SEO content that is continually relevant and stays ‘fresh’ for readers.” (thanks, WordStream) is extremely valuable for lawyers and law firms. It’s content that is always relevant to your audience, and will live on well after you’ve produced it, thus doing the work of marketing for you without you having to actively do anything at all. But it’s only part of the story – the other part is covering the latest trends (both those in law, and those outside of the law, from a legal perspective) to give those in the industry a reason to keep coming back to your content. As Ann Smarty says in this piece for the Content Marketing Institute:

Covering relevant timely and newsworthy content is a great way to grow your site audience and take advantage of trends that get people more interested and thus more engaged.”

It’s likely that you already have a number of different sources set up for how you identify the latest trends in your area of practice – whether you’re an active content producer or not, you’re staying up-to-date on the latest legislation, case decisions, and industry discussions that may or may not affect your clients. But as the world expands and evolves, so do the means with which we keep up with the latest trends – and for those of us interested in translating these into content that we can use proactively, there are various tools out there that we can leverage. 
Continue Reading Two Tools to Turn Trends into Topics

iStock_000016006182Small“Social media.”

“Content marketing.”

These terms are thrown around willy nilly these days, because in addition to everything else we’re doing in our daily professional lives, the accessibility of LinkedIn, Facebook, blogging platforms, SnapChat, Vimeo, YouTube, etc. has turned us all into social media and content marketing practitioners.

But while social and digital media are inextricably linked with content marketing, it’s important to distinguish them – they are NOT, in fact, the same thing, and shouldn’t be considered interchangeable. In today’s Two for Tuesdays, while it may seem a bit elementary to some of you out there, it’s come to my attention that there’s some confusion around the difference between social media and content marketing. We’re going to look at the difference between the two (I’ll start with the short version, then delve into the long one), and why it’s important not to confuse them. 
Continue Reading Content Marketing ≠ Social Media

Apple-Emoji-KeyboardI’m (hopefully) rounding up a rather intense fall full of travel, with a trip to Boston for the Legal Marketing Association’s Northeast Conference, where I’m speaking on Content Marketing (my favorite subject!). We had two guest posts last week, and you’re lucky to be getting a republished post this week. This article originally appeared on Sprout Social‘s blog.  They are talking about something that’s a little out of our comfort zone here in legal – emoji marketing. Molly Porter of Seyfarth Shaw spoke about this at the LMA Technology Conference recently, so it’s not altogether foreign in legal, and worth paying attention to.  See how Sprout Social talks about other companies using emoji marketing as well!

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Continue Reading Emoji Marketing: Are We Speaking the Same Language?

iStock_000007887592XSmallMany of us in legal marketing wait with bated breath for the results of the Greentarget “State of Digital and Content Marketing Survey” every year.

Building on Greentarget’s inaugural study in 2010, [it gives us] the latest insights on how corporate general counsel – your clients – are engaging in social media and law firm-generated content.”

We also learn how our “legal marketing peers are evolving their own content and digital strategies to build relationships and fuel business development.”

During LMA’s Technology Conference this year, we were treated to a preview of the survey, which is officially released on November 18th, with Greentarget’s own John Corey. You’ll want to check back on their website on the 18th for the full report (and you can register now to make sure you get a copy on the day it’s released), but we learned some interesting things.
Continue Reading Preview: 2015 State of Digital and Content Marketing Survey

iStock_000021185501SmallIt’s no secret that I love social media – I was an early adopter, and I still regularly engage on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And it’s even less of a secret that I love content marketing, if 9 months’ worth of Two for Tuesdays’ posts have given you any indication.

The connection between the two is a fairly clear one – social media provides an excellent array of distribution channels for you to deliver your content to your intended audiences. That’s a lot of marketing-speak, I know, but basically, all I’m saying is that if you want to get the words, thoughts, and ideas that showcase what a smart, talented and passionate lawyer or legal professional you are in front of the people that matter to you, an important way to make that happen is by being in the same places they are.

We’re all pretty familiar with the standard ways to do this: You publish a blog post or an article, you grab the title or maybe you’re even more advanced and you say something unique about the piece, and you share it on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. with a trackable link and some hashtagged keywords. Maybe you share it again later in the day or in the week to make sure that it was seen by the right people, and you’ve checked back to engage with anyone who commented or shared it with their own audiences.
Continue Reading Use Social Media to Ignite Your Content Marketing