What’s your, or your law firm’s, greatest challenge about the social web? Heather Milligan, Russell Lawson and I would like to know. We’ll be leading a live discussion at the Legal Marketing Association Annual Conference this week in Denver on how law firms can add strategy to their social web activity.
The excitement is really heating up. Attendees are using Twitter (#LMA10), Facebook, Martindale Connected, LinkedIn and their blogs to discuss topics, travel plans and how they’re going to meet up when they’re there. If you’re going to be there, make sure your mobile phone’s location service is turned on and you can find out where your networks are hanging out around the conference on foursquare or Twitter. (Search jayne Navarre on foursquare or @jaynenavarre on Twitter and you’ll find me.)
Meanwhile, we’re making a last push to hear from legal marketers and lawyers about their questions and challenges so that we may add them to the live conversation. If you can’t make it to Denver this week, don’t worry. Simply post them in the comments here, or here, and we’ll jointly respond to them after the conference on our blogs; Legal Water Cooler, Progressive Marketing Blog or here on the VMO.
Here’s a preview of our discussion:
- Transparency and ownership in social media isn’t about the marketer, it’s about the lawyer building his/her brand. However, a symbiotic bond (trust) between lawyer and marketer is necessary to create champions and buy-in within the organization.
- It’s all about the bio – everything you blog, post, transmit, or link to should reinforce your skills and the law you want to do. Help lawyers create that bio and an online footprint that facilitates conversation.
- Teach your attorneys the value of getting famous. Cross promotion of content on multiple sites and services is key. Exposure of their credentials, knowledge and content becomes viral and achieve better results.
- Marketers can help attorneys set realistic and achievable goals that match their individual style, time restraints, and comfort levels. Encourage them to watch, look, listen, see what others are doing, and how often they are doing it in order to help them use their limited time to best advantage. Help them to prioritize the tactics that work for people like them.
- Give attorneys a good description of how search works. Help them own the first three results on Google.
- Lead attorneys to engagement. Teach them how to use the social tools, create dynamic content, and the importance of frequency and consistency in building relationships, but also teach them how to take those relationships to the next level—off line.
- Understand, first hand, the challenges attorneys face such as time, technologies and ethics and help them get organized with tools and strategies to weed out low performing activities, and by all means, stay on top of the ethics issues.
- Don’t let yourself get thrown off by every new application, network, or platform that comes along. It’s great to find interesting new tools, but let other people test them out first before jumping in and wasting time.
Here’s a question Lindsay Griffith would like the panel to discuss; “How do I keep up with the volume of information on the social web and make sure I’m tapped into the right people?” We’ll report back to you.
So, what’s your greatest challenge on the social web or in your law firms?
