When the platform changes, the leaders change.

Wordperfect had a virtual monopoly on word processing in big firms that used DOS. Then Windows arrived and the folks at Wordperfect didn’t feel the need to hurry in porting themselves to the new platform. They had achieved lock-in after all, and why support Microsoft?

In less than a year, they were toast.

When the game machine platform of choice switches from Sony to xBox to Nintendo, etc., the list of bestelling games change and new companies become dominant.

When the platform for music shifted from record stores to iTunes, the power shifted too, and many labels were crushed.

Again and again the same rules apply. In fact, they always do. When the platform changes, the deck gets shuffled.

Law Firm Marketing Online

If you are reading this blog, there is a good chance you already recognize a change in marketing platforms for law firms is occurring. The days of taking out a full page, yellowbook ad and watching the clients pour in are long gone. In fact, with the staggering amount of new lawyers entering into the work force each year, reliance on referrals and local recommendations is a tough way to drive significant revenue for a firm.

I recently talked with an estate planning attorney that said he has no interest in investing in the internet because his clients are older people that don’t use it. While there may be some validity to the fact that an older generation isn’t using the internet today as much as other sources, do you really believe that it will remain this way? Do you think the baby boomers aren’t going to be researching estate planning online? If you need to be convinced you can attract estate planning clients online then you clearly aren’t ready to invest what it requires to have a successful online strategy. You are Wordperfect in my opinion.

The reality is that the internet is the new marketing platform. The law firms that understand this and invest accordingly will reap the benefits. They will be the new generation of law firms leading the way. The ones that fail to get on board will be playing catch up at best and won’t be around at worst.

Photo by Larry Page

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Don’t get me wrong, all of the other tools that I named are vitally important to driving new business for your law firm from the web. However, none of those will work as efficiently and effectively as possible without someone answering your phone.

As you probably already know, the attention spans of Internet users is very short. If a user finds your online law firm advertisement, video, blog or website, you only have a couple seconds to get them to take action. Assuming they do take action, you only have a couple of minutes to respond to their action before they move on.

Part of our job is to report to our clients on how many phone calls we generated through our various efforts each month. All too often, our client will be shocked as to how many calls came into the office that they never fielded. These lost opportunities are a huge efficiency killer.

When it comes to law firm internet marketing, not answering the phone is simply not an option. In fact, even automated messaging systems really aren’t a sufficient solution anymore. That being said, having a dedicated receptionist can be pricey. That is why virtual law assistants are such a great idea.

No matter what telephone answering solution you choose, the bottom line is that the phone must be answered. With all the money you spend to get the phone to ring, you would be foolish not answer it.

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Unfortunately, I have noticed a recent trend in some of the groups to which I belong. I call it “Featured Discussion Abuse”. Here’s what I mean:

As you can see, the group owner has tagged all five discussion spots as a featured discussion effectively eliminating any other discussions to be displayed on the group’s overview page. Obviously, the group owner can do what she wants, it’s her group. However, it significantly diminishes the effectiveness of the group itself.

Even worse, often times these “featured discussions” aren’t discussions at all. Instead, they’re merely links to the group owners blog posts. Even worse than that, sometimes they’re links to a landing page to the group owner’s services. Being a free-market-kind-of-guy, I am confident that group members will “vote with their memberships”. LinkedIn limits its free accounts to 50 group memberships.

That being said, I’m certainly not one to be bashful about marketing one’s services. In fact, I’m sure there are some out there that would consider some of my own strategies to be on the aggressive side. Nonetheless, in this case, there are other ways to successfully publicize your content in LinkedIn. For example, turning your “post item” into a discussion item takes minimal effort and will actually produce better results.

And if content publicity is your only goal, then simply add it as a news item. Yes, I know that it won’t get the same visibility, but guess what, it probably doesn’t deserve it.

Just my advice, take it or leave it.

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The book describes the effects of fear based communication as such:

For the most part, research has demonstrated that fear-arousing communications usually stimulate the audience to take action to reduce the threat. However there is one important exception: When the fear producing message describes danger but the audience is not told of clear, specific, effective means of reducing the danger, they may deal with the fear by “blocking out” the message or denying that it applies to them. As a consequence, they may indeed be paralyzed into taking no action at all.

Advertising campaigns that inform potential customers of the real-world threats that a company’s goods or services can alleviate should always be accompanied by clear, specific, effective steps they can take to reduce the danger.

Simply scaring customers into believing that a product or service can help with a potential problem might have the opposite effect, potentially cementing them into inaction.

I believe this has an impact on a lot of law firm marketing efforts out there. I have seen quite a few that utilize fear as a strong emotion to get a potential client to take action. However, this may be back-firing if not done properly.

A Law Firm Marketing Example

Perhaps you are marketing your criminal law practice. You have a page on your site discussing the ramifications of what can happen after an individual is arrested for a DWI offense. You lay out the consequences and punishments of a DWI for the reader, with the intent of informing them about consequences and the need to hire a DWI attorney to help them. After arousing a bit of fear in them, you tell them they should contact an attorney. However, you do not clearly articulate what the process is from that point forward or what hiring an attorney can do to help “reduce the danger or fear”. The end result can be one you didn’t intend, a potential client that is frozen into inaction.

Photo by Jimee, Jackie, Tom & Asha

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Be nice.

Like the cooler profession, the legal profession lends itself to frequent adversarial and confrontational situations. Unfortunately, most lawyers fail to appreciate the true meaning of Dalton’s philosophy.

You see, many lawyers believe that aggression, stubbornness, and rudeness, are the keys to zealous representation of their clients. You don’t have to search very hard to find lawyer advertisements, videos, and commercials that depict just how tough lawyers can be.

Please don’t take this as a call for lawyers to clean up and play nice. What I am saying, is that there are significant practical advantages of adopting the “be nice” strategy both in the practice of law and the marketing of a law firm.

Here are some great example’s, from Tom Kane’s excellent Legal Marketing Blog, of niceness hard at work for law firms.

Until It’s Time Not To Be Nice.

And of course, when the time comes not to be nice…. Well, you already know what to do.

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The All Powerful Linkerati?

Back in 2006, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz fame, cleverly invented a term for one of the most crucial components to search engine optimization. His term, “Linkerati“, describes the concept of identifying potential linkbait targets.

With all the “to-do” about content being king, the concept of identifying linkerati is often overlooked. You see, not all visitors and users of your website are likely, or even capable of linking back to your content.

For example, let’s say you maintain a legal blog. You know that content is important so you try to post something every day. In fact, let’s assume that you’re a rather talented legal blogger and your content has a relatively strong following. Comment discussions on your blog are robust, and your articles are frequently the subject of tweets and re-tweets. However, you can’t understand why you receive so-few links back to your blog. The answer, you’re not reaching the legal Linkerati.

Legal Bloggers – Legal bloggers have a lot of incentive to link to your content. They are usually very interested in the subject matter, they are active in the legal blog community, and most importantly, they want links to their own content. Legal bloggers are one of the best sources of relevant links.

Law Firm SEOs – While this may come as a huge surprise to some legal blog professionals, there are a large number of lawyers who don’t have the time, or frankly the desire, to moderate and administer links on their law firm websites and legal blogs. Talking to the law firm seos that handle these tasks on behalf of their lawyer clients, is a great resource for new links.

Legal Web News Writers – Tough to get, but exceptionally valuable, these folks control the legal news outlets on the web, including places like Law.com and other online legal news portals, etc.

Legal Journalists – Online or offline creators of “legal news” are probably the most valuable of all the legal linkerati. A reporter for any major news publisher can generate extremely valuable links back to your law firm website.

So who are your legal linkerati?

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Marketing your law firm through search engines will increase the number of people that “see” your law firm.  The more people that use the web for locating local professional services, the more lawyer internet marketing campaigns just makes sense. For the consumer, finding a lawyer online can be more effective than using traditional methods (like yellow book, or directory listings).

Even initial legal consultations can be performed almost completely online. More information is available about a lawyer or law firm than ever before. Once you build and maintain a strong online presence, you will begin to access the overwhelming number of people in need of legal services on the web.

There is vast variation in the efficiency and effectiveness of law firm web strategies. However, each strategy plays some role in your law firm’s search engine profile. Some of the more important components are a comprehensive keyword strategy, your website’s architecture, and the content found on your website.

Mixing all these components together, will produce a certain outcome for your law firm’s ability to attract new clients from the internet.  If any of these components are out of balance, it will significantly decrease your chances of leveraging the internet successfully.

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Google Local Business Center Listing

Getting your law firm found in Google is all about local search results.  One of the free tools that Google provides for local businesses is their Google Local Business Center listing.

Optimizing Your Listing

David Mihm has put together a fantastic report to help you better understand the local search ranking factors for your LBC listing. In his own words:

Participants were asked to rate the importance of 49 criteria with respect to their influence on rankings in the Google and Yahoo Local “Universal” search algorithms (those that drive the 10-pack, 3-pack, and authoritative onebox search results; NOT the standard organic algorithms)

This is the second annual report and you can read it here.

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This past Tuesday (March 2, 2010), Google released its SEO Report Card. It was reported as an effort by Google to “improve their products’ pages using simple and accepted optimizations”.

Whoa. Google is intentionally optimizing pages to influence their rankings? Then again, maybe not:

“These optimizations are intended to not only help search engines understand the content of our pages better, but also to improve our users’ experience when visiting our sites”.

Ah, it’s just to help the users. I see. As they put it, the optimizations listed are definitely the most “simple and accepted”. Nonetheless, these on-page optimizations serve their purpose and are an important foundation upon which to build your law firm search optimization strategy.

If you’re looking to get started with on-page optimization, check out the Webmaster Central Help Forum and Google’s SEO Beginner’s Guide.

On the other hand, it’s important to keep perspective that doing these simple on-page optimizations alone will not allow you to compete in the highly competitive online legal marketing industry.

I for one, just appreciate the fact that Google not only uses search engine optimization in its vernacular, its also purposefully implementing seo strategies on its own pages. I just can’t wait for Google’s guide to link building… For now, we’ll just have to rely on our own.

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