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Exploring Social Media for Law Firms “Your brand isn’t what YOU say it is, it’s what GOOGLE says it is” - Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine June 28, 2010
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Why Should Big Law do Social Media

Oct 21, 2014

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Page 1: Why Should Big Law do Social Media

Exploring Social Media for Law Firms

“Your brand isn’t what YOU say it is, it’s what GOOGLE says it is”

- Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine

June 28, 2010

Page 2: Why Should Big Law do Social Media

Start Your Engines

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Today we’ll talk about:

• Why social media matters• Brief overview• Deeper dive into LinkedIn• Getting started• Industry resources

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Why Social Media Matters

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Lawyers are already experimenting, even Biglaw

• Leads: 10% of lawyers have had a client retain them as a result of use of online SM, according to an ABA report

• Blogging: 96 of the 2009 AmLaw 200 law firms are now blogging. This number is up from 39 firms since August 2007

• Reading Online: Blogs are most frequently used tool among in-house lawyers at the largest companies (revenue of $1.5 billion to $9.9 billion) with 35% visiting a blog in past 24 hours and 54% in the past week

– Nearly 70% of Corporate Counsel aged 30 to 39 expect their consumption of business and legal industry news through SM platforms to increase within the next six months

• Tweeting: 29 of AmLaw 100 firms have a Twitter account, though many “blast” like @WeilGotshal

• Updating: 37 percent of Counsel aged 30-39 have used Facebook for professional reasons in the past 24 hours, and 48 percent – nearly half – have used it professionally in the past week

– More than 10% of law firms in the country are on Facebook and more than 40% of attorneys, per ABA

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A Part of Marketing

OUTBOUND MARKETING

• Direct Mail / email• Print Ads• Marketing collateral

INBOUND MARKETING

• Blogging• Social/Digital Media• Public Relations• Website

Interruption Permission

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Social Media is for Leads and Sales

Source: State of Inbound Marketing Report - http://bit.ly/aewfHr 7

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What You Need to Know Now

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Is your company ranked on the first page of Google?

If not, 3,923,869 sets of eyeballs missed your website 10Source: http://training.seobook.com/google-ranking-value

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• Search is the most performed action on the internet. Email is a close second.

• By 2014, mobile and internet technology will help over 3 billion of the world’s adults interact electronically

• By 2015, online marketing will control more than $250 billion internet spending worldwide

Did You Google Today?

• Google: 34,000 searches per second (2 million per minute; 121 million per hour; 3 billion per day; 88 billion per month, figures rounded)

• Yahoo: 3,200 searches per second (194,000 per minute; 12 million per hour; 280 million per day; 8.4 billion per month, figures rounded)

• Bing: 927 searches per second (56,000 per minute; 3 million per hour; 80 million per day; 2.4 billion per month, figures rounded)

Sources: Gartner; http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1278413Search Engine Land http://searchengineland.com/by-the-numbers-twitter-vs-facebook-vs-google-

buzz-36709

11 Photo Credit: http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/2010/03/technologys_dark_underbelly.html

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• More Tools/Channels = Less Control • Are you and your company being “found” by the right

people?• Do you know what search terms are used to reach your

website?• Do you have a plan to convince the search engines to rank

you more highly than a competitor?• Your digital footprint is your resume

Take Control 12

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• RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content

• It allows you stay easily informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in, without having to go to specific websites

Real Simple Syndication (RSS)

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• RSS feeds allow organizations to keep clients and prospects up-to-date on news, thought leadership, company updates

• Common RSS aggregators include Google Reader, MyYahoo, BlogLines, Feedburner, Microsoft Outlook

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Get More For Less (Time)

• Separate the wheat from the chaff • Archive all the information you want to read…but don’t

have time to• Keep clients, prospects and influencers up-to-date,

without clogging inboxes

University of Arkansashttp://www.uark.edu/misc/wheat/

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• Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging tool

in which users send and read posts of up to 140-

characters called tweets.

• Tweets are distributed to followers on a “feed” which

displays the tweets in real time

• Twitter now has 105,779,710

registered users

• New users are signing up at the

rate of 300,000 per day

• 180 million unique visitors come to

the site every month

• Twitter's search engine receives

around 600 million search queries

per day

Source: Huffington Post, 4/21/10

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Why should legal marketers care?

• Generational shifts: Older attorneys may be reluctant, but younger folks are increasingly curious. Are you positioned to respond to that? Further, participation by younger attorneys puts the firm’s best foot forward without the “risk” of putting the face of the practice on initiative.

• Content distribution: We are each being taught to consume information “on the go” through our phones. Won’t our marketing strategies ultimately need to reflect that trend?

• Dying Outlets: Do you believe The Wall Street Journal can drive leads? If so, do you know what will happen when internet ad revenue overtakes newspapers by 2014?

• Your own future: Even if the attorneys don’t want to change…should you, just a little?

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If it works for other firms, what kind of potential could it hold for yours?

• Sullivan & Cromwell partner Frank Aquila, who was named a Legal Rebel by the ABA Journal in part because of his use of Twitter (@FAquila). He now writes for BusinessWeek, too.

• Dr. Lisa Haile, Partner and co-chair of DLA Piper’s global life sciences sector uses Twitter extensively to demonstrate her thought leadership. It netted an inquiry from a general counsel of a large target company

• Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer set up an internal wiki to encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing among its top rainmakers

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Mastering LinkedIn

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•Global: LinkedIn has over 65 million members in over 200 countries•Fortune 500: Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members•Focused: LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional audience•Influential: Users are younger, richer and more powerful than Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Business Week readers•Powerful: Your LinkedIn profile automatically shows high up on Google’s first page

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• Needed to Play: Your peers and competitors are already there• 66% of LinkedIn users are decision makers or have influence in the purchase decisions at

their companies • Responses to questions posed can be ranked. Over time, rankings create another community

of respected experts based on the helpfulness of their advice.

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First Step: Get yourself off to the right start

• Establish your profile: Complete 100%, add a picture and leverage the “summary” section

• Use your own name to create a “vanity profile:” www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethsosnow

• Customize your website links: Match search phrases that you know your prospects use

• Invite your contacts to join the network: Remember bigger is better and you are never “done”

• Update your status several times a week: Every time you act, it appears on the home page of your 1st degree connections

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Second Step: Take advantage of LinkedIn tools and features to deepen connections

• Shared Connections: Find potential clients/employees — and then see what connections you have in common

• LinkedIn Answers: Establish authority and expertise by participating in ongoing discussions

• LinkedIn Groups: Interact with other business professionals on relevant topics, add your own RSS feed

• Ad campaigns: Identify highly qualified targets by seniority, industry, job function, company size, etc.

• Events: View at a glance all of your network’s upcoming events• Recommendations: Market your business by having your

colleagues and clients share your expertise• Create a Group: Potentially the most powerful way to use LinkedIn

– build your own community

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How can your firm get started?

• Recognize that you don’t have to start by getting “social”– Combat distrust & cynicism with competitive intelligence and emerging insights

• Audit online activity on at least a quarterly basis– Radian6, Techrigy, Scout Labs

• Construct “early warning” systems on key issues, competitors & conversations

– TweetBeep, Backtype, BoardAlerts

• Harvest your existing contacts on LinkedIn, even if the lawyers are not ready

– Flowtown

• Benchmark & monitor clients/peers using social media & LI report

• Consider targeted SEO project, perhaps for an up and coming practice

• Construct recruiting SM strategy to demonstrate that firm is evolving

• Harvest analytics from website and current email blasts

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Resources

• Legal Marketers– Jayne Navarre: Virtual Marketing officer, upcoming

book on SM case studies for lawyers– Nancy Myrland: Myrland Marketing, former in-house– Heather Milligan: The Legal Watercooler – Adrian Dayton: Marketing Strategy & The Law blog,

“Social Media for Lawyers: Twitter Edition”– Nicole Black: “Social Media for Lawyers: The Next

Frontier” – Mailing List: Both the LMA and Larry Bodine’s mailing

list offer good SM nuggets24

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Legal Networks: Leads or…referral sources?

• Legal On Ramp: invite only community with in house counsel & attorneys

• Martindale-Hubbell Connected: just won an award for “Best Closed Community”

• JD Supra: “cross-share” lawyer contributed articles (Mintz Levin has given nearly 600 documents)

• Civile.IT: has more than 100,000 users per month (Italian)

• ACC listserv

• LexBlog: is blog publishing platform used by 65% of AmLaw bloggers (incl. Russell Jackson’s)

• Avvo: has free lawyer profiles and a “content network”

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Questions?

Please contact me:

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @elizabethsosnow

LinkedIn: Elizabeth Sosnow

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