Welcome to LawyerCastingTM, a new blog from eLawMarketing (edited by attorney/Internet marketer Joshua Fruchter) covering "best practices" in online marketing for lawyers and law firms, including websites, blogs, podcasts, webcasts, email marketing and much more!
Read the posts below and in our archives to learn all the latest tips and strategies for using the Internet to market your law firm and develop new business. Enjoy and prosper!
Hope all of our readers had a wonderful holiday season. Over the New Year weekend, had occasion to read an interesting article in MIT's Technology Review concerning the "law of social sharing." Apparently propounded by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, the law predicts that "every year, for the foreseeable future, the amount of information you share on the Web will double." Those familiar with the history of computing will undoubtedly catch the allusion to "Moore's Law" conceived of by Gordon Moore, a founder of Intel, who famously predicted that, every two years, the number of transistors that can be fitted onto a chip of any given area, for the same price, will double. No one ever accused Mark Zuckerberg of lacking ambition.
The Web is rapidly being reshaped and redefined by social sharing of content, and Facebook has certainly facilitated that trend with its ubiquitous "Like" buttons, and new technology that allows apps and Web sites to automatically share your activity via Facebook as you browse. Internet titans such as Google and Salesforce.com have jumped on the bandwagon with social sharing features being added to their own applications.
Of course, as the article points out, the exponential growth of social sharing cannot continue forever - people have only a limited number of hours today to devote to social sharing, and will naturally filter out the more inane updates, and focus on those most important to them.
Still, for legal marketers, Zuckerberg's Law merits consideration - does your firm's website, and its blogs and email newsletters, include a social sharing tool? It can be as simple as incorporating an "Add This" icon. If not, that's definitely a feature to add in 2012. To be sure, most people won't care about your latest alert concerning, say, a new IRS regulation addressing some arcane international tax issue. But for the few clients who do, you'd be well advised to give them access to tools that let them share that and other firm content with their like-minded peers.
Click here to read the full MIT article.
Congratulations to Maryland condo lawyer, Raymond Burke, a partner at client Ober Kaler, who was recently cited as an authority on Maryland condominium law by the Maryland Court of Appeals in its recent decision, MRA Property Management, Inc., et al. v. Armstrong, No. 93, Sept. Term 2007 (filed on October 25, 2011), holding that (i) the resale certificate disclosure rules in the Maryland Consumer Protection Act apply to purchases of condominium units, and thus (ii) where a council of unit owners and its property management company violate the resale certificate disclosure obligations imposed by Md. Real. Prop. Code Ann. Sec. 11-135, “they engage in unfair and deceptive trade practices ‘in the sale of consumer realty.’”
The court cited to Ray's publication entitled Developing and Managing Condominium and Homeowners’ Associations, National Business Institute (2007) (co-authored with Kathleen M. Elmore and Cynthia Hitt Kent), in which he wrote:
”Md. Com. Law Code Ann. Sec. 13-408(a) establishes a private cause of action for damages sustained as a result of an act prohibited by the Consumer Protection Act. The Act is specifically applicable to ‘consumer realty,’ and, accordingly, representations made in connection with the sale of real property may constitute unfair and deceptive trade practices where they are misleading.”
It's one of our oldest mantras - email marketing is not just about sending emails, but getting them delivered.
Unfortunately, too many law firms sacrifice deliverability on the altar of savings (i.e., pennywise, pound foolish) by using cheap email blast services that attract hordes of small businesses (and some "bad guys" too) who don't follow best practices and hurt the reputation of all the other companies using the same mail server IP addresses.
So what can law firms do to maximize the likelihood of getting their email alerts and newsletters delivered, and avoid filters?
Consider this quick list of law firm email deliverability tips published by one of our clients, Cyndy McCollough, Senior Manager of Marketing Technology at Dickstein Shapiro LLP, on her new legal marketing blog (Law Marketing Geek). Among the recommendations - regular monitoring of the IP addresses and domains you are using in your emails (a service we provide to Dickstein Shapiro and other firms as part of our sender authentication package).
We'd like to congratulate the law firm of DeMont & Breyer LLP on the launch of their new website.
DeMont & Breyer is a leading intellectual property law firm with a strong focus on patents for highly specialized technologies such as electromagnetics and optics.
Running on Drupal, the website features a number of cutting edge features, including a navigable Javascript slideshow on the homepage with strong visuals highlighting the firm's successful track record in various high tech industries; a patent "expertise" section with links to download copies of numerous patents that the firm has helped prosecute; and "About Us" pages in multiple foreign languages.
We'd like to congratulate the intellectual property group at client Ober Kaler, a leading Maryland-based law firm, on the launch of their new blog - Ober IP Watch - Fueling Innovation.
The blog will focus on intellectual property issues of importance to clients in the technology, healthcare, education, media and arts industries.
The blog is running on WordPress, and part of our customization included programming of special access rules to facilitate multi-lawyer blogging.
It's that time of the year again - with Labor Day now past, it's time to start planning for Flash holiday cards for the 2011 holiday season.
Flash holiday cards are a great alternative to traditional print cards that help brand a firm as:
Please take a moment to view Flash holiday card samples from last year (see links to samples in the lefthand sidebar).
If you are interested in a Flash holiday card option for this coming holiday season, please contact us.
In a result that will come as a surprise to devotees of Twitter and other social sharing tools, a recent New York Times study found that e-mail remains the most popular tool for sharing Internet content.
Specifically, in an online survey of 2,500 self-identified "medium-to-heavy content sharers," respondents said they often preferred email for sharing content because they viewed email as more secure and private and therefore more "personal." Apparently, email is used when people want to have a more intimate, one-to-one conversation about news they find compelling instead of a one-to-many interaction. Respondents also noted that a post can get lost in the shuffle of a Twitter or Facebook stream, but content shared via e-mail definitely will get seen and thus more likely elicit a response.
Legal marketers should keep this insight in mind when adding "sharing" functions to law firm email alerts and newsletters such as "forward to a friend" (which employs email as the sharing mechanism) and social sharing icons.
Separately, the study garnered some interesting insights into the psychology of social sharing with respondents disclosing their motivations for sharing content across various media:
Click here to read more about the study on PaidContent.
We're happy to announce the release of our latest white paper - The Top 10 Law Firm Website Best Practices.
Websites remain a mainstay of a law firm’s online presence. Whether via Google, a referral, or other source, prospective clients come to your website to learn more about your firm’s experience and track record, and to determine whether your attorneys have the expertise to meet their needs. Indeed, in a recent survey of general counsel, 100% of respondents indicated that they always review a firm's website when evaluating and purchasing legal services, while 90% reported that lawyer biographies are the most important section of a law firm's website.
A law firm website that is well-designed, easily navigated, and populated with useful content projects expertise, attention to detail, and technological savvy – key qualities that clients look for in a law firm.
On the other hand, an outdated, poorly designed website is, as one general counsel aptly remarked in a recent survey, "like showing up to a meeting in a crumpled suit."
Deploying a law firm website that attracts visitors, holds their attention and converts them into leads, requires compliance with "best practices."
Our white paper discusses the following top 10 law firm website best practices:
Download your free copy of the white paper today.
If your firm is interested in building a website that complies with "best practices," please contact us.
During the past year, we've begun designing and developing all of our new law firm websites on Drupal - a leading free open-source content management applications now powering tens of thousands of websites worldwide (including the White House website).
Due to the huge developer community (now exceeding 10,000 individuals worldwide) constantly extending and refining Drupal's core capabilities, and contributing value-added modules, we find that we can deploy sophisticated website features at low cost that might otherwise be out of reach for law firms operating on a tight budget and working with a proprietary, closed content management system.
We are thus grateful to Larry Bodine for publishing to his Law Marketing blog today our recent interview with him concerning the benefits of developing a law firm website on Drupal. The interview walks through a number of "power" features available on Drupal such as:
Enjoy!
(note: we don't recommend Drupal for law firm blogs. For blogs, we prefer development on Word Press, which has numerous key blogging features built into the software and available out-of-the-box. Perhaps that will be the subject of a future interview ; - ).
When we speak with law firms about developing and designing a new website, many express the wish for some interactivity on their website homepage. The goal is to highlight, for example, certain success stories, or industries where the firm has expertise, and interactive applications (like Flash) do a good job of drawing visitors' attention to such content.
Alas, it's been over a year since Steve Jobs' penned his famous "Thoughts on Flash" explaining why iPods, iPads and iPhones don't run Flash (which is still the case, although there are apps available for the iPad that allow users to view Flash).
Given the popularity of Apple devices, and the obvious importance of catering to the broadest audience possible, we've started recommending that firms avoid Flash and use Javascript instead to create interactive slideshows if they want some pizzazz on the homepage of their website. See examples of slideshows on our websites at http://www.emonlinemedia.com and http://www.elawmarketing.com.
We've got two law firm websites in production that will feature even more impressive slideshows.
Of course, for some applications, like Flash holiday cards for law firms, the animation desired is so complex that one must resort to Flash. In which case, when a firm distributes a link to a Flash holiday card to clients via email, we'd recommend a little disclaimer that the card won't run on an Apple device, and thus should be viewed on another computer or device.
We recently provided an online workshop to the marketing staff at one of our clients on how their lawyers can best use LinkedIn for marketing and business development.
To be sure, because different lawyers have different business development styles, lawyers will tend to gravitate to the social media platform that most appeals to their personal style.
Personally, I like LinkedIn, which is focused more on "hands-on," practical networking - less conversational than Twitter, less casual than Facebook. It's just my preference.
Anyway, here's an outline of the LinkedIn tips and tricks we prepared for the client's attorneys. Lawyers can consider these guidelines and see if LinkedIn works for them.
Earlier this year, comScore’s “2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review” report highlighted a decline in time spent with web-based email among all US internet users under 55 (with, not surprisingly, users ages 12 to 17 showing the steepest decline in usage, down 59%).
Is social media finally killing off email as the "pundits" have been predicting of years? Hardly.
As an article on eMarketer from late February 2011 observes that, with the proliferation of mobile devices, web-based email checked at a desktop computer is only one slice of all email communications. Further data cited in the article shows a more nuanced picture.
Specifically, 87% of internet users checked personal email daily in 2010, a number that has changed little since 2007. And among those with a separate email account for commercial email - i.e., the B2B crowd - 60% checked that account daily, down just 1 percentage point since 2008.
Moreover, the data shows that social media users are significantly more likely than other internet users to check their email four or more times per day, and less likely to check infrequently. So one could say that social media is actually boosting email usage.
So don't discard your email addresses just yet. Instead, as always, the key is to use email marketing and social media synergistically. For example, on our own email marketing platform, we recently rolled out the ability to insert social sharing icons, as well as a Facebook "Like" button, so that readers can easily share a law firm's email alert, newsletter or invite content with their social network and/or on their Facebook wall.
To read the full eMarketer article, click here.
Return Path, a leading provider of solutions to boost email deliverability, released a report last month that highlighted key factors affecting deliverability of email marketing communications. Two key factors worthy of legal marketers' attention:
1. Reputation: the reputation of a sending server's IP address can have a significant impact on deliverability. The reputation of an IP address suffers when the lists used to distribute emails from that address contain relatively high numbers of unknown users and "spam traps" (i.e., seemingly valid email addresses that haven't subscribed to any communications, and therefore anything they receive is presumed to be spam).
Accordingly, proper list hygiene is a critical component of maximizing deliverability. This means obsessively monitoring the source of email addresses to make sure they belong to legitimate clients or other contacts with whom a firm has an existing business relationship, and quickly pruning bad addresses from subscriber databases.
It also means avoiding cheaper email blast services that cram hundreds of customers on a single IP address, many of whom may not be practicing good list hygiene, and thereby damage the reputation of the IP address for all other legitimate accounts. As we've previously noted, sharing an IP address with spammers (or even mom-and-pop businesses with poor list hygiene practices) is like sharing a social security number with a deadbeat.
2. Infrastructure: receiving mail systems search for signals that a sending mail server is not legitimate such as reverse DNS issues, and failed or non-existent authentication. When these items are not addressed properly, a sender looks unsophisticated and possibly malicious.
Therefore, the report recommends making the proper implementation of authentication and other protocols a high priority.
For firms with existing email marketing programs, a thorough reputation analysis can identify IP address and infrastructure issues.
Click here to download a copy of the Return Path report.
Click here to learn more about our own advanced deliverability solutions
Most legal marketers are aware that inbound links to their law firm's websites and blogs from third party websites can have a major influence on their search engine rankings.
That said, there are many myths and misconceptions about how link building works. Recently came across an excellent blog post on Yoast.com that summarizes the basics of link building.
The post first explains why inbound links help:
These benefits guide the steps a marketer should take (or avoid) when executing a link building campaign. In particular:
Click here to read the full post - I highly recommend it if you're seeking a better understanding of the basics of link building (see also Google's discussion of what makes a quality link).
Law firms interested in search engine optimization (SEO) of their website and/or blogs using link building and other SEO strategies should download our Website Audit and SEO brochures.
We'd like to congratulate our client, Lauren Stiller Rikleen, founder of the Rikleen Institute for Strategic Leadership, on the launch of her new website.
Lauren is a nationally recognized expert on developing a thriving, diverse and multi-generational workforce. She founded the Institute to provide training, speaking, and consulting services designed to help employers create a more dynamic, inclusive, and strategically aligned workplace. Through its innovative and research-based programs, the Rikleen Institute helps transform workplaces by expanding the pool of future leaders and creating an inclusive work environment that is responsive to changing demographics and a changed economy.
The Institute's new website runs on our customized content management software, and employs SEO "best practices" in URL structure and meta tagging.
Audits (Email Marketing and Websites)
Email Marketing:
Core Edition
Email
Marketing:
Advanced Edition
Flash
Applications
Landing
Pages
Online
Press Releases
Online
Reputation Management
Online
RSVP
Podcasts
Powerpoints
Search
Engine Optimization
Social
Media
Video
Webcasting
Website
Development
White
Paper Marketing
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