An Essential Guide for Lawyers in Social Media

The online pub­li­ca­tion Attor­ney at Work recent­ly pub­lished a free Lawyer’s Guide to Social Media Mar­ket­ing. It’s an impres­sive piece of work that both breaks down results of a sur­vey of its own read­ers and bun­dles a range of use­ful inde­pen­dent articles.
These arti­cles are quick reads and writ­ten by rep­utable per­son­al­i­ties in the legal indus­try includ­ing Jared Cor­reia, Gyi Tsakalakis, and Attor­ney at Work Edi­tor Mer­ri­lyn Astin Tarl­ton, among many others.
What we found inter­est­ing is just how many US-based attor­neys are active on social media, accord­ing to the sur­vey. For an indus­try that rou­tine­ly catch­es flack for being tech lag­gards or slow to adopt new tools, the sur­vey sug­gests a refresh­ing­ly dif­fer­ent view.
That’s why the study is this week’s Fri­day Share.
Accord­ing to the survey:

– 91% of respon­dents use social media
– 90% are on LinkedIn and half believe LinkedIn is the most effec­tive client-getter
– 41% say they use Face­book more often than any oth­er platform
– 64% say their use of social media is part of an over­all mar­ket­ing strategy
– 5% say social media is very respon­si­ble for get­ting them new clients
– 54% think lawyers using social media for mar­ket­ing is more hype than reality

While the final bul­let seems to rein­force con­ven­tion­al wis­dom, when com­pared with oth­er sur­veys, the dif­fer­ence is clear­ly noticeable.
For exam­ple, the chart we cre­at­ed above com­pares data from the Attor­ney at Work sur­vey, with that of a sur­vey con­duct­ed in the UK by the Solic­i­tors Jour­nal. Those inter­est­ed in the Solic­i­tors Jour­nal sur­vey should see: Info­graph­ics: The online habits of solicitors.

A New Law Firm Business Development Webinar

Savvy law firms know that out­reach or rela­tion­ship build­ing done in silos may come at the expense of addi­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ties for the firm. Know­ing “who knows who” puts law firms in a posi­tion to bet­ter serve client needs and increase the share of legal work for clients.

At a high lev­el, there’s research data to sup­port this view. For exam­ple, it is an area of oppor­tu­ni­ty research firm BTI Con­sult­ing iden­ti­fied for law firms an in its mar­ket out­look for 2015.
On an anec­do­tal lev­el the con­cept can be trans­lat­ed into defin­i­tive num­bers. For exam­ple, as report­ed in the ABA Jour­nal, one law firm earned rough­ly $84,000 in unan­tic­i­pat­ed busi­ness because “because one of its attor­neys left a note every day in the CRM software.”

While the lawyer’s obser­va­tion that one of Osborne’s ven­ture cap­i­tal clients was con­sid­er­ing invest­ing in a com­pa­ny was unre­lat­ed to Osborne’s busi­ness with the client, “anoth­er lawyer at Osborne hap­pened to have deep knowl­edge of the com­pa­ny the ven­ture cap­i­tal firm was eval­u­at­ing and saw the notes in Inter­Ac­tion,” Cher­ian says.

As the sur­vey above notes, clear­ly lawyers are grow­ing busi­ness rela­tion­ships through social media – and tech­nol­o­gy pro­vides a means to under­stand those rela­tion­ships in the con­text of a business.

As part of an edu­ca­tion­al series, the Lex­is­Nex­is Inter­Ac­tion® team is host­ing a webi­nar next week titled: How Tech­nol­o­gy Can Sup­port Your Busi­ness Devel­op­ment Program.

• What: Law firm busi­ness devel­op­ment webinar
• Who: Man­ag­ing part­ners, rain­mak­ers and law firm busi­ness devel­op­ment staff
• When: Thurs­day, Feb­ru­ary 19, 2015; 11:00 a.m. EST
• Where: Online sem­i­nar: http://bit.ly/bizdev-webinar
• Cost: Com­pli­men­ta­ry with registration
• Speak­er: Doug John­son, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor, Cat­a­pult Growth Part­ners, LLC

Bonus! 10 Posts on Social Media and Legal Marketing

If legal mar­ket­ing is a top­ic of con­tin­u­ing inter­est, then we’d also offer this bun­dled list of entries relat­ed to the top­ic at hand.

1. Pow­er of Lists: 51 Twit­ter Han­dles for Legal Pros to Fol­low. A round up of lawyers and legal pros to con­sid­er fol­low­ing on Twit­ter from across seg­ments, func­tions and sizes. And don’t for­get to fol­low us: @Business_of_Law!
2. Six Pre­dic­tions for Law Firm Mar­ket­ing in 2015. In this con­tributed post by Lar­ry Bod­ine, he pre­dicts that “social proof is nec­es­sary to gen­er­ate leads” because “poten­tial clients spend 16 min­utes of every hour” on var­i­ous social media sites.
3. Law Firm Mar­ket­ing: How to Nav­i­gate Online Reviews. A sum­ma­ry of com­men­tary from Trip Advi­sor Assis­tant Gen­er­al Coun­sel David Mor­ris stem­ming from a ses­sion from the Mass LOMAP 4th Annu­al Super Mar­ket­ing Conference.
new client leads con­vert 22 times more often if you respond to a client inquiry with­in minutes.
4. Lies and Truths: 8 Tips for Law Firm Mar­ket­ing Online. This is anoth­er sum­ma­ry from the Mass LOMAP con­fer­ence with tips from a range of experts and a few cap­ti­vat­ing sta­tis­tics includ­ing: “new client leads con­vert 22 times more often if you respond to a client inquiry with­in minutes.”
5. Five Lessons from an Expert Webi­nar on Law Firm Mar­ket­ing. Seem­ing­ly small but impor­tant details mat­ter, accord­ing to this sum­ma­ry of a webi­nar pro­vid­ed by Tim Cor­co­ran and CRM expert Chris Fritsch. Mr. Cor­co­ran also makes a cameo in the above men­tioned Attor­ney at Work social media guide for lawyers.

6. How Buy­ers Seek Out Small Law Firms and Deter­mine Exper­tise. This out­stand­ing – and data-dri­ven – con­tributed arti­cle by Lee Fred­erik­sen, Ph.D. of Hinge mar­ket­ing, under­scores the impor­tance of a holis­tic dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy for law firms, web­sites, search engines like Google, good-old-fash­ioned word-of-mouth, social media and ref­er­ences all play a role.
rain­mak­ing is more cru­cial than ever to firm and lawyer alike with greater com­pe­ti­tion for client business.
7. How Law Firms can Gen­er­ate More Refer­rals and New Busi­ness. This sec­ond con­tributed arti­cle also by Mr. Fred­erik­sen, breaks down sur­vey data to iden­ti­fy the three types of refer­rals that exist – and how to make an effec­tive refer­ral mar­ket­ing strategy.
8. Six Tips from the Big Law Trench­es for an Effec­tive Dig­i­tal Strat­e­gy.  Our cre­ative man­ag­er Kevin Bon­sor sum­ma­rizes a ses­sion by Michelle Woodyear a dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing man­ag­er at Orrick, Her­ring­ton & Sut­cliffe. Tip of the day: “80% of legal site traf­fic is to attor­ney biographies.”
9. Can Rain­mak­ing Be Taught in Law Firms? Are law firm rain mak­ers born or made? While the debate con­tin­ues, the real­i­ty remains, “that rain­mak­ing is more cru­cial than ever to firm and lawyer alike with greater com­pe­ti­tion for client business.”
10. SlideShare Fri­day: Turn­ing Law Firm Web­site Vis­i­tors into Clients. We fin­ish this list with a pre­vi­ous entry from our Fri­day Share series – stay with us here – shar­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion by Lar­ry Bod­ine which also cites data from Hinge Mar­ket­ing. It’s liv­ing proof that real rela­tion­ships are cul­ti­vate online and through social media – and that’s the under­ly­ing point of this entire post. As for Mr. Bodine’s pre­sen­ta­tion, he cites data find­ing that Yelp is the #1 trust­ed site for find­ing a lawyer. His pre­sen­ta­tion is worth reviewing.

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