Category: Legal Technology

Fast Track Mastership of Legal Social Media- One Day Seminar / Webinar Oct. 21st Washington DC

The National Law Review would like to make you aware of a one day seminar / webinar presented by MyLegal.com designed to help lawyers gain a fast track mastership of legal social media. 

“I don’t think it’s too late to embrace social networking, it just rather disappoints me that other professions use these technologies, and lawyers for some reason are always rather late to the party. I have little doubt that within five years, social media, social networking systems, will play a central role in the daily lives of lawyers.”  Richard Susskind, September 2010.

The conference will be held on Thursday, October 21, 2010, at the Georgetown University Hotel and Conference Center in Washington, D.C. The conference will sell out at 300 on-site participants, so we will be introducing to the legal community a new technology called SMASH.  This technology aggregates the video stream of the sessions, along with the tweets, blogs and photos related to the conference, in one convenient landing page, allowing off-site attendees to experience the conference in a unique and interactive way.

By following the conference Twitter conversation directly from the SMASH page, off-site attendees can join in the live conversation while simultaneously seeing the speaker and checking out the live conference photos.  These are interactions and connections that might not otherwise have been made. 

After the conference, registered users will have access to the video of the sessions, along with the speaker presentations.  The sessions will also be available via iTunes, allowing registered users to listen and learn while on the way to work, running errands or housework (ugh)!  Multi-tasking is King!  After listening to the sessions, users can continue the conversation and commentary online.

Conference speakers / topics scheduled to be included are:

Matthew Asbell, Esq., Certified Legal Social Media Strategist will speak on the use and protection of trademarks in social media marketing.

Nicole Black, Esq., founder of lawtechTalk.com and co-author of “Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier” will speak on social media for lawyers.

Larry Bodine, Esq., legal marketing expert and author of the Lawmarketing Blog will speak on business development with LinkedIn.

Steve Crandall, J.D., expert in digital media and business applications of social networks will speak on social media and the law.

Adrian Dayton, Esq., author of “Social Media for Lawyers: Twitter Edition” and the “Legal Marketing: Social Media Edition” blog will speak on starting to bringing in business with social media

Carolyn Elefant, Esq., creator of MyShingle.com, the longest running blog on solo and small firm practice, and co-author of “Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier” will speak on social media for lawyers.

Sharon Nelson, Esq., author of the electronic evidence blog “Ride the Lightning” and co-host of the ABA podcast series “The Digital Edge:  Lawyers and Technology” will speak on on social media: ethical, compliance, E-discovery and liability implications.

Conrad Saam, runs marketing for Avvo, where he oversees the firm’s SEM, SEO, social media, online marketing, email and web analytics initiatives will speak on getting the most out of Avvo.

John Simek, co-author of “The Electronic Evidence and Discovery Handbook: Forms, Checklists and Guidelines” and “Information Security for Lawyers and Law Firms” will speak on on social media: ethical, compliance, E-discovery and liability implications.

For more information, conference schedules and registration forms, please visit:  http://mylegalmedia.com or call 253-405-7910.

How Extensive Is Your Experience? Insights on Law Firm Website Text.

Sonny Cohen of Duo Consulting   provides some food for thought about the same old – same old law firm website text. From Last Week’s Business of Law at the National Law Review: 

It is common for law firm websites to speak about themselves with hyperbole.  Self-important adjectives litter the site content.  Firm’s with exceptional people are one-upped by those with truly exceptional people.  Knowledge is only valid if it isgenuine. Experience, it seems comes in a variety of flavors as well. Some firms havewide experience.  For others it is deep experience.  But the most common benchmark of experience is that it be extensive.  Does your firm claim extensive experience?

Now it’s not that I don’t believe it when I read of a professional’s extensive experience. It’s just that this really doesn’t tell me anything. Worse, it doesn’t tell me anything different from the next guy who also has extensive experience. In fact, I would argue, my baseline is extensive experience. Now tell me how you’re better.

If you Google the phrase “extensive experience” there are over 6 million website pages where this value is claimed.  Using the search tool on several law firm websites, I discovered an “extensive experience” ratio of about  35% – 50% (# of appearances of “extensive experience”/attorney). So making this claim doesn’t so much separate one professional from the pack as much as it defines the pack. (Check your firm’s ratio and let me know!)

But the problem with this “extensive experience” language is not merely that it is linguistic laziness. Rather, this laziness results in failing to detail the richness, complexity and detail which this phrase references. And in so not doing, opportunities are lost for using this missing content.  You won’t be found in a search engine because, frankly, nobody is looking for “extensive experience.” And you won’t be discovered in your site search because, well, almost half of all attorneys have the same vague amount of experience. And it is all extensive.

Yes, I understand that, often, considerable descriptive detail must be concealed for privacy considerations.  Yeah, so? Content developers (copywriters) simply have to work harder to anonymize those involved. But, with a little effort, it is possible and essential to provide sufficient detail to make the stories comprehensible and relevant – and content rich.

Go the extra mile to gather the detail that elicits that sense of extensive experience. Boil it down to 3 to 5 cogent bullet points of industry and matter relevance. And post it. Your site visitor will have a better experience. This will result in more web pages consumed and possibly a longer time on the site with more opportunity for engagement. And search engines will devour the details for their ranking algorithms.  And you know how I know this? I have extensive experience.

© 1999-2010 Duo Consulting

About the Author – Sonny Cohen:

Sonny works closely with Duo’s clients to develop their online business and marketing strategy. His tactical responsiblities include: Implementing and managing paid search engine campaigns;  Consulting on and implementing permission-based email; Providing strategic online marketing consultation to law firms and others using web analytics to help drive website and business performance and Conceputalizing and implementing social media marketing

Sonny has over 30 years of business management and marketing experience,  He was a Serial entrepreneur and business marketer as an Apple Computer reseller; Internet partner in the business consulting firm Friedman, Eisenstein, Raemer and Schwartz; Director of Business Development for startup Primecom, an online e-commerce application service provider; and Director of Marketing for NextPart, Inc..  312-529-3003 / www.duoconsulting.com

Is Your Email Service Provider the Best?

This week’s Business of Law Guest Bloggers at the National Law Review are from Duo Consulting.  Sonny Cohen of Duo provides some good specifics on what to look for in an emailing service.

We recently received this question from a law firm marketer. I’ve edited it slightly for brevity and anonymity:

“Our email service is earning a big #fail at this point. We’ve used (Name Brand provider) with great success for small jobs and I’m talking with them about an enterprise solution. Do you have a provider you love (or a crappy one I should be warned away from)? What are the pros and cons of the systems you’ve used?”

The question, submitted to a listserv, engendered responses of affiliation with one ESP or another because they liked them, had no problems, or other good indications of service. But email delivery is more complex than you might first imagine and one size does not fit all. It is not (yet) a commodity. Personal recommendations of quality service or indications of being satisfied are a good start of an evaluation but an insufficient qualifier for engaging an email service provider. Like the acquisition of almost any service (legal or technical) it is important to understand requirements.

This is not intended to be comprehensive but merely to illustrate my point. Get this part and you might get there is more to the story. So let’s take a look at these simple factors:

  • What does your email subscriber base look like? gmail.com? or bigcompanyname.com?
  • How big a mailing would you execute at one time?
  • What is your mailing frequency?

If you send a lot of email frequently to corporate email addresses, the email reputation is critical to getting into the inbox of your subscriber. The better email service providers (ESPs) do 2 things. First, they manage the reputation of the email addresses from which they send the email (their IP addresses). The best ESPs offer you the opportunity to set up your own email address on their system. This will look something like email.lawfirm.com and email will come from something like sonny@email.lawfirm.com So while it still looks like your business, it is isolated from your domain (lawfirm.com) and from the email sending behavior or misbehavior of other clients of this ESP. Are you with me?

What happens if you send an email to a lot of people at the same domain such asxxxx@client.com where xxxx is lots of different people? When all these emails show up @client.com at one time, they look like spam. It may even look like an attack on the email server. The corporate email server receives these emails so you probably see these emails as being delivered. But they never make it into the inbox of the individual email recipients.

The better ESPs offer the capability to throttle the sending of emails so that they don’t look like a spam attack on an email server. It more closely resembles natural email commerce. Good commercial ESPs can afford to throttle the send of their emails. Spammers cannot because they’ve got way too much email to send. Are we getting esoteric yet?

ESPs are commercial companies and not a part of any website development company’s core competency. We have our favorites but we are not linked at the hip. Email services built into CRM systems such as Interaction, Salesforce, etc. are bulk mailers and do not have these deliverability features and a deliverability desk (personnel) focused on managing IP reputation. This doesn’t make them bad by any stretch. But it does affect deliverability performance.

Finally, the best ESPs are becoming messaging companies capable of delivering text messages and voice messages. If your communication strategy is to be first to market with targeted information, you may find that a text message alert system is a client service you haven’t yet considered. It is unlikely that your “economy” bulk email guy who is “friendly to deal with”  offers these extended and diversified contact capabilities. And maybe you don’t need it and never will.

Being able to track email performance is a common feature but it is not the test of a quality system. And these tools may not even provide accurate or complete information regarding the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. Even the best (i.e. more costly) ESPs come only close to precise. Third party firms like Return Path and Pivotal Veracity might provide this higher level of email evaluation and deliverability improvement.

Price is not always a guarantee that you will get better delivery services like what I’ve identified above. But a low price pretty much guarantees that you will not. For my part, I think reaching targeted contacts for a few pennies is a pretty good deal. If you are driven to cut that penny in half, you should at least know what you are getting and what you aren’t.

Whew! Hope this is helpful. Oh yeah, who do we use? ExactTarget. But remember. One size does not fit all. Think about your requirements.

Email open rate is only one indicator of email success

© 1999-2010 Duo Consulting

About the Author:

Sonny works closely with Duo’s clients to develop their online business and marketing strategy. His tactical responsiblities include: Implementing and managing paid search engine campaigns;  Consulting on and implementing permission-based email; Providing strategic online marketing consultation to law firms and others using web analytics to help drive website and business performance and Conceputalizing and implementing social media marketing.

312-529-3003 / www.duoconsulting.com

Twitter Do’s & Twitter Don’ts

As included in the Business of Law Section of the National Law Review Tom Ciesielka of TC Public Relations provides some solid Do’s & Don’ts for Twitter:  

With millions of unique visitors each month, Twitter is still at the top of the social media game. Some people still use Twitter to catalog boring details of the day. However, savvy and smart users realize Twitter’s usefulness as a concise way of marketing and reaching out to consumers and media.  Read the following do’s & don’ts to continue being one of the savvy and smart users.

  • Do make quality friends. Capturing an audience on Twitter is important, but don’t start following 857 people in one day. Start with a few friends, some movers and shakers of your industry, some legal reporters—listen to their tweets, and offer relevant replies. Then continue to follow a few new people week by week. Don’t just follow to follow, but actually think about why you want to connect with a certain person – think “strategic following.” Then contribute meaningful posts each day that others might find interesting as a way to build your own following.
  • Do protect your reputation. Twitter can be used to solidify your brand image, and it is an indispensable medium when crisis hits. Maintaining a Twitter account can help your firm when a damaging story hits cyberspace because a response on Twitter is often the fastest way to acknowledge the problem or issue. Failing to address any breaking news that involves your company makes you look at best, incompetent and at worst, guilty. Confidentiality laws may render tweeting a bad idea, but you should always pay attention to what’s happening and be prepared to do damage control when necessary.
  • Do be efficient. Building relationships on Twitter can facilitate communication about your legal specialties and expertise. However, using Twitter effectively and appropriately can be a time-consuming job, so try and implement applications that will help you be more efficient like TwitterFeed, TweetDeck and ÜberTwitter. It is also more efficient to partake in niche topic conversations about your practice areas instead of tweeting about the world of law in general. Specificity trumps generality.
  • Don’t be boring or narcissistic. Stick to tweeting about pertinent topics and find ways to express your personality through the links you post, rather than tweeting about how many briefs you’ve written that day or what color tie you’re wearing. Share links to legal headlines or comment on stories related to your expertise. Participate in discussion, reply to other users’ tweets, re-tweet their tweets—Twitter is not a one-person game, so don’t try to be the center of the universe.
  • Don’t turn off your censor. In cyberspace, a record of your most inappropriate tweet will live on in infamy long after you’ve cooled down. Never forget that what you say on Twitter can come back to haunt you, so rude or tasteless comments can come back to haunt you. Play it cool and don’t tweet anything you wouldn’t say in public; after all, Twitter is incredibly public.

Copyright © 2010 TC Public Relations

This posting is republished with permission from the Chicago Lawyer Magazine Blog “Around the Watercooler” located at:  http://h20cooler.wordpress.com/2010/

About the Author:

Tom Ciesielka, President of TC Public Relations, has worked in public relations, marketing and business development for more than 25 years and has enjoyed working with clients ranging from law firms to distinguished authors to national and local companies. He feels privileged to have established trusting working relationships with these clients and values every opportunity he gets to help businesses grow.  He is also a former board member of the Legal Marketing Association in Chicago and has spoken at Chicago Bar Associations CLE programs.  312-422-1333 / www.tcpr.net

What's Hot in Marketing Technology for Law Firms?

The National Law Review’s Business of Law featured blogger is Kristyn J. Sornat of the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) – who was a panelist at ILTA’s recent annual conference in Las Vegas.  Kristyn recaps some of the valuable information she picked up at the conference.  Read On:  

Lessons learned from the International Legal Technology Association’s Conference – ILTA 2010

For the past several years, the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) has included a one-day marketing technology track at their annual conference. While the track originally focused on client relationship management (CRM) software (namely InterAction), it has grown to include all things related to marketing technology. This year there were four sessions:

I.   Web Analytics and Search Engine Optimization: Smart Strategies

II.   Using Technology for Successful Events

III.  ERM and CRM: Compare and Contrast

IV.  Marketing Technology Roundtable

I. Web Analytics and Search Engine Optimization: Smart Strategies

In order to stay competitive it is important that law firms utilize a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to help improve their rankings in both branded and non-branded searches performed on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. This session focused on changes firms can make to their websites to support their SEO goals, including:

  • Eliminate pages with duplicate content
  • Name URL’s rather than using numbers
  • Add metadata to all pages
  • Create links between pages on your site and use meaningful phrases to describe the content to which you are linking (not just “click here”)
  • Seek inbound links to pages on your site from reputable sources
  • Push out your content as much as possible through e-mail distributions, RSS feeds, social media and syndication services – such as the National Law Review.

Also, the session covered the importance of using web analytics to track how your website is performing and whether the changes implemented are successful. Several free web analytics tools are available, including Google Analytics, Yahoo! Web Analytics and Piwik.

At the end of the session, the panelists provided the audience with 10 Questions about SEO and Web Analytics That You Should Know How to Answer.

II. Using Technology for Successful Events

This session focused on the increasing importance of e-mail communications for events and tools available to manage those communications. Two e-mail platforms were mentioned that link directly to CRM software: Tikit eMarketing andConcep. The Tikit eMarketing solution requires your firm to have in-house resources to design and send e-mails through your own server. The Concep solution involves a third-party vendor that aides in template design and uses its own servers to distribute your e-mails.

Important things to remember regarding invitations and RSVP forms:

  • Include disclaimers, the firm’s address and an unsubscribe link (important to comply with CAN-SPAM).
  • Apply alt tags for all images.
  • Use a combination of images, background color and text, rather than one big image for your invitation.
  • Link to a survey in your invitation to find out what people are interested in hearing about.
  • Link to a survey in your post-event follow-up e-mails to gauge the response of the audience, find out what else they would have liked to learn and their interest in future events.
  • Cross-market events in appropriate client alerts and other news-like e-mail distributions.
  • Personalize the e-mail with the recipient’s name in the subject line or body of the e-mail for a better response rate.
  • Use social media to promote the event to an audience who may not already be familiar with your firm.

 III. ERM and CRM: Compare and Contrast

This topic turned into a hot debate among the panelists and drew a large crowd of enterprise relationship management (ERM) and CRM vendors who were anxious to hear how their solutions would be discussed. There were three panelists from different law firms, one with only an ERM solution, one with only a CRM solution and one with both solutions in place. One of the main functions of both ERM and CRM software is tracking “who knows who” among your clients, prospects and referral sources. ERM gathers this information by monitoring e-mail traffic and possibly phone calls of your employees and brings that information into the system automatically. Most CRM systems pull this information from address books in Outlook (and other e-mail systems) and require more active participation from attorneys to be successful.

The message from the panel was that every firm is different, and selecting one or both solutions depends on the culture of your firm and its needs. If you have attorneys who won’t take the time to share their contacts through CRM software and will not object to the information being pulled automatically, an ERM solution may work for you. If you have attorneys who are concerned about privacy and want to be able to do more (such as track business development efforts, e-mail marketing lists and client information), the CRM option is the way to go. If you have a combination of needs, you might look into implementing both solutions.

During the presentation, the panelists were careful not to mention what vendors they used, but did supply the following list of ERM and CRM providers that to cater to the law firm market.

CRM Vendors

LexisNexis – InterAction

Versys Corporation – IntelliPad

Client Profiles/Microsoft – CRM4Legal

Cole Valley Software – ContactEase

Hubbard One – Contact Manager

ERM Vendors

Cole Valley Software – Relationship Discovery

LexisNexis – InterAction IQ

Hubbard One – ContactNet

BranchIt Corporation – BranchIt

 

IV. Marketing Technology Roundtable / Hot Trends in Law Firm Marketing Technology

In the fourth session, all panelists from the previous sessions returned to answer audience questions about marketing technology. The first thing discussed was what’s hot or new in the market. Below are some of the advances that are happening now or may be coming your way in the near future.

Websites: Looking at the future of law firm websites, the group saw many changes on the horizon.  One panelist described a recent demo she attended from Saturno Design that featured a new tool that essentially sets up a “mapping” feature to deliver customized content to each visitor based on what they viewed during prior visits to your site. Several panelists also predicted a blurring between the traditional law firm site and social media. Examples included pulling content from LinkedIn profiles for attorney bios or replacing the traditional newsletter and alert sections with blogs.

Video: Video was a hot topic throughout the sessions. Many firms have already begun to use this medium on their websites and in their electronic communications, adding a human element that was not possible before. Mary Tomaro, Web and Interactive Marketing Manager for Jones Day, said videos on their website have become quite popular. An important note, if your firm is comfortable using YouTube to host its videos, there are two benefits to this approach: 1) you can save the cost of purchasing software to host them yourself, and 2) you can increase the reach of the videos, as they can be spread virally and are more easily found by search engines.

Mobile Apps: To date, only a select few firms have released applications for use on mobile devices. The panelists saw this as an increasingly important trend as users move away from traditional desktop computers and use their mobile devices and other tools, such as iPads, to search for and read content. Read a blog post describing the recent success of Morrison & Foerster’s iPhone app.

Social Media: Although social media may not be a new tool, many firms have yet to establish a usage policy or firmwide strategy. As you iron out how your firm will utilize social media, keep in mind that relevance is more important than reach – it doesn’t matter if you have 2,000 Twitter followers if the content you give them doesn’t resonate.

© 2010 International Legal Technology Association  

About the Author:

Kristyn is Marketing Technology Specialist at Chicago-based Much Shelist. She is responsible for the firm’s CRM database (InterAction), electronic marketing campaigns (from basic HTML design through distribution and analytics) and social media strategy. She also has various duties related to the firm’s Web site, including search engine optimization and Web analytics interpretation. Kristyn was recognized by the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) with a 2010 Distinguished Peer Award for outstanding achievements in marketing technology at the organization’s annual conference. She has nearly five years of marketing technology experience in a law firm environment.

www.muchshelist.com / 312-521-2125