LawyerCasting

LinkedIn Tips for Lawyers

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.

New Data Shows Social Media Actually Driving Increased Email Usage

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.

Legal Marketers Need to Focus on Key Factors Affecting Email Deliverability

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

The Basics of Link Building for Law Firms

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:

• "It adds value to the "receiving page", allowing it to improve its visibility in the search engines.
• It adds value to the entire receiving domain, allowing each page on that domain to improve its rank ever so slightly.
• The text of the link is an indication to the search engine of the topic of the website and more specifically the receiving page.
• People click on links, resulting in so called "direct traffic"."

These benefits guide the steps a marketer should take (or avoid) when executing a link building campaign. In particular:

• Evalute the strength of a site and/or page to provide the link using criteria such as PageRank
• To the extent you can influence the "anchor text" that will comprise the link, choose keywords related to the topic of your website for which you want to boost your ranking (albeit Yoast does advise not to always shy away from "call to action" anchor text such as "click here," which won't provide any value in terms of identifying the subject matter of your website, but could boost traffic)
• Do NOT get involved with link schemes (Google will eventually penalize you)

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.

Client Lauren Stiller Rikleen Launches New Website for the Rikleen Institute for Strategic Leadership

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.

What Email Marketing Best Practices Can Law Firm Marketers Pick Up From the B2C Space?

The Return Path blog recently listed some email marketing "best practices" that B2B email marketers can learn from their B2C brethren.

Perhaps the most important was integrating social media with your email marketing program. For example, if you publish a blog, are you repurposing some of that content for your email marketing campaigns? How about content from LinkedIn discussions?

Similarly, many email service providers (including yours truly) now offer a feature called social forwarding that allows recipients of law firm email alerts and newsletters to easily forward the content in those emails to their social networks on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Are you taking advantage of this feature?

Download Google's Updated Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

For law firm marketers interested in learning more search engine optimization (SEO), we recommend downloading Google's updated Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, which was released late last year.

Many people seem to think that SEO is rocket science. It's not. In its guide, Google walks readers through essential SEO best practices, including unique and contextually accurate title and description tags, search-engine friendly URL's, composing anchor text in links, etc.

Of course, execution of these "best practices" is a different story, and for that step, it makes sense to work with a vendor offering software that complies with them.

Anyway, Google's guide should be required reading for anyone involved with optimizing a law firm website or blog. Download your copy at the link above today.

Client Diserio Martin O'Connor & Castiglioni LLP Launches New Website

We'd like to congratulate our client, Diserio Martin O'Connor & Castiglioni LLP - aka "DMOC" - on the launch of their new website.

DMOC is a leading Connecticut law firm of about 20 attorneys with multiple practice areas (including corporate, real estate, litigation, intellectual property and trusts & estates) focused primarily on the Connecticut business market.

The site runs on and is managed by our customized content management software, and employs SEO "best practices" in URL structure and meta tagging.

Should You Host Law Firm Blogs at Custom Domains or Within Your Law Firm Website?

There's been an ongoing debate within the legal marketing community whether it's better to host law firm blogs at custom domains, or subsume them within a law firm's website.

Our view has always been that to maximize the SEO benefits of a blog, the “best practice” is to host the blog at its own custom domain. This will allow the blog to develop its own ranking within Google’s index in connection with a narrow topic instead of getting lost within the broader range of content at the website domain. Hosting a firm blog and website at separate domains also enables both the blog and website to earn “inbound link” credit with Google by linking to each other.

As an example, see a leading blog on corporate governance, Pomtalk.com, published by Pomerantz Haudek Grossman & Gross, which is deployed at a custom domain different than the firm's website (which provides a more general overview of the firm's class action litigation practice focused on institutional investors).

Pinch Pennies and Your Email Deliverability May Suffer

Many prospective law firm clients often ask us why they should pay more for our email marketing software than for software offered by one of the cheaper email blast services (we all know who they are).

The answer is simple - we offer clients a platform that increases the likelihood that their emails will get delivered instead of blocked. In short, email marketing is not about sending emails, but about getting them delivered.

Our reputation monitoring service has proven this point time and time again. In fact, just last week we distributed the same exact email to the same exact domains (the first distribution was an original invite for an event, and the other was a reminder) - except the first distribution was sent from a cheaper email blast service (to remain nameless), and the reminder was distributed on our platform.

The distribution sent by the cheaper blast service was blocked by recipients using the Postini filtering service. Why? Our reputation monitoring service indicated the domain name used by the service had a "grey" listing on a domain blacklist service - URIBL-GREY - which means it may have been used by spammers. This listing meant there was an increased risk of a higher spam score in a content-based spam filter such as SpamAssassin. A high enough score, apparently, to offend Postini.

So that's the bottom line - the cheaper blast services can charge less because they cram thousands of accounts on to their servers. Some of those accounts may be spammers, which is bad news for legitimate email marketers because the ISP's, filtering services and corporate IT folks are increasingly judging your email reputation by the company you keep on your mail server. You can follow "best practices," but if some of the folks sharing your IP address and/or domain are "bad apples," your own deliverability will suffer (sharing an IP address with spammers is like sharing a social security number with deadbeats - you won't get a loan no matter how stellar your credit record).

Alas, in email marketing as in life, you get what you pay for.

Successful Law Firm Video Strategy: Poke Fun at Yourself

The video below produced by the personal injury law firm of Trolman, Glaser & Lichtman in New York is a good example of a law firm video that is refreshingly creative and innovative - essentially, the video pokes fun at personal injury lawyers by acknowledging - "tongue in cheek" - the public's perception that personal injury lawyers commence lawsuits on the flimsiest grounds (in the video, a prospective client is claiming he suffered "pain and suffering" when power was lost during a stellar performance on his favorite video game; he now wants to sue the utility).

A firm that can produce a video like this that promotes its expertise with humor is going to have a winner.

Interested in producing a creative law firm video? Download our brochure on lawyer video marketing services.

Why Are Law Firm Email Newsletter Open Rates Dropping?

In our recently released report on "The State of Law Firm Email Marketing", we noted that, based on an analysis of nearly 7 million law firm emails over a two-year period, open rates had dropped from a mean of 27.94% in the second half of 2008 to a mean of 21.42% in the first half of 2010. Perhaps you're also seeing your own open rates dropping for your own email marketing campaigns? Cause for concern?

As per the report, there are technical and cultural reasons behind these declines, which (in most cases) should reassure a law firm email marketer experiencing declines that they are not due to a loss of client interest in the firm's email marketing communications. The two key issues at work are:

• Increased use of image blocking
• Inbox “overload”

eLawMarketing Will be a Lead Sponsor at LMA's 2011 Annual Conference in Orlando

We're proud to announce that eLawMarketing will be a lead sponsor at LMA's 2011 Annual Conference in Orlando on April 4-6, 2011. Our logo is now up on the LMA Conference website.

We look forward to greeting all of our clients and readers who will be attending.

Free Report for Legal Marketers: Law Firm Email Marketing Benchmarks and Best Practices

Law firms are heavy users of email marketing.

But until now, legal marketers had no industry benchmarks to consult to measure how their email marketing campaigns were performing against their peers.

Indeed, clients regularly ask us, "What's a good open rate for a law firm email newsletter?" "A good clickthrough rate?" "A bad bounce rate?"

To address those kinds of questions, today eLawMarketing is releasing a new free report - The State of Law Firm Email Marketing: Benchmarks, Trends, and Best Practices - documenting benchmarks for five key performance metrics generated by campaigns aggregating 6,896,610 emails distributed by law firms of all sizes during four consecutive 6-month periods running from July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2010.

Legal marketers can use the report to:

• Gauge and improve the performance of their firms' email marketing campaigns
• Discover how their campaigns are performing relative to the campaigns of their peers
• Learn more about “best practices” in the creation and distribution of law firm email marketing campaigns

Click here to download a free copy of the report.

Do You Know How Your Law Firm Blog or Website Looks to Google?

In the past we've written about why it's better to display keyword-rich content on your law firm website or blog as HTML text instead of Flash, notwithstanding Google's constantly improving ability to index content in Flash files.

There's a technique you can use to see how Google views the HTML text on your website or blog. First, search for your website or blog in a Google search. Then click the "cached" link. Then, on the next screen, click the "text only version" link on the far right. The resulting screen will show you how the text on your site or blog appears to Google.

As Google explains, if important content isn't visible in the text-only version of the page, it may be because it's embedded in an image or otherwise unavailable to search engines. But, of course, to maximize search engine visibility for various keywords, you want those keywords to be as visible to Google as possible. So the ideal remains to display them as text on your website or blog.

What Are the Top 5 SEO Ranking Factors?

We're often asked by law firm marketers to advise on the top factors to focus on to optimize a website or blog for search engine visibility. Sorry to say, but there's no secret formula or silver bullet, and any self-professed "SEO consultant" who tells you otherwise is selling snake oil.

SEOMoz, a leading provider of SEO tools and resources, polls the top SEO experts around the world every two years to obtain their insights into the top positive (and negative) factors for search engine optimization. The 2009 report, which surveyed 72 experts, identifies the top five positive factors.

What Email Elements Are Tested the Most?

MarketingSherpa recently released the results of a study asking close to 1,500 marketers what email elements they test frequently or plan to test -- using techniques such as A/B split or multivariate testing -- in order to improve the effectiveness of their email marketing campaigns. 

The chart below shows that subject lines remain the most frequently tested element, but that other items such as "calls to action," send time and creative/copy, are being tested nearly as frequently. MarketingSherpa speculates that the reason for broader testing is that "tweaking" elements based on testing can produce dramatic improvements in campaign results and has proven to be well worth the time and effort required.

Interestingly, B2C marketers test all email elements more heavily than B2B marketers.

Of course, firms must work with email services providers that offer "testing" capabilities (performing A/B testing, for example, requires the ability to segment large lists randomly into two smaller equal-sized lists).

Read more about the study on MarketingSherpa. 

Law Firms That Continue to Distribute Emails to Non-Responsive Subscribers Endanger Their Email Deliverability

A recent study by Return Path, a company that offers resources and tools to help companies maximize email deliverability, warns that email marketers who continue to distribute emails to non-responsive subscribers (i.e., subscribers that haven't opened or clicked over a prolonged period), risk endangering their overall email deliverability. 

The risk is two-fold. First, when non-responsive subscribers receive a steady stream of emails, or in some cases an increased frequency of emails, they will often begin reporting those emails as spam driving up the marketer’s complaint rate. 

In addition, some ISPs are increasingly paying attention to whether or not their users respond to commercial mail. If a marketer is mailing at a high frequency and receives a disproportionately low response or no response at all over a consistent period of time, their sender reputation could be negatively impacted. This could lead to having all of the company’s email end up in the spam folder or, worse, having it blocked outright. 

From the standpoint of ROI, disinterested recipients skew response patterns and email metrics (e.g., bring down open rates), thus making it harder to obtain an accurate picture of the success of one's email marketing programs. 

Finally, since most email service providers charge based on email volume, there's an out-of-pocket cost associated with continuing to distribute emails to non-responsive subscribers. Ask your email services provider about whether they provide subscriber engagement reports to help "clean" your lists of non-responsive subscribers.

Click here to download a free copy of Return Path's study.

Farella Braun+Martel Policyholder Perspective Blog Named Top 50 Insurance Blog

Congratulations to the insurance coverage lawyers at client Farella Braun+Martel. Their Policyholder Perspective blog, addressing legal trends and developments related to commercial insurance coverage, was ranked by the LexisNexis Insurance Law Community as one of the Top 50 Insurance Blogs for 2009.

MoFo2Go Update: MarketingSherpa Checks in on Morrison & Foerster's iPhone App

Morrison & Foerster made headlines earlier this year with an announcement that it had built an iPhone application called MoFo2Go, providing clients and other contacts access to:

• attorney bios, contact information and practice areas
• firm articles, press releases, and alerts
• a firm location finder; and 
• a maze game.

Recently, MarketingSherpa interviewed David Harvey, Senior Marketing Manager at Morrison & Foerster, about the outcome of the firm's bold marketing experiment. Harvey reported that there have been more than 1,500 downloads of the app, in addition to enthusiastic feedback from clients and numerous press mentions.

Harvey also shared six key questions other law firms should ask in deciding whether a branded iPhone app has a place in its marketing and communications mix: 

Question #1. Are your customers and prospects using the iPhone? 

Key issue here is the mobile phone platform most commonly used by your target audiences. The iPhone garners alot of buzz, but Android and Blackberry are also popular with business users. MoFo's strong presence in Silicon Valley led the firm to the iPhone platform, but other firms may find their key client segments are not big iPhone users. 

Question #2. What types of features can you offer app users? Consider what kinds of features and functions you can provide through an iPhone app. MarketingSherpa advises checking out what iPhone apps, if any, your competitors might be offering. In MoFo's case, few large law firms or other professional service providers were offering apps, so the firm didn't have much to go on. In the end, it settled on the four functions noted above, which Harvey's team felt would be useful to clients on the go. 

For answers to these four additional questions:

• "How will your app support iPhone functionality?"
• "Who will develop the app?" 
• "When do you need the app to be launched?"
• "How will you promote your app?"

Read the full article on MarketingSherpa (free access until August 29th).

Are Your Social Media Efforts Unfocused or Distracting You From Developing Other Lawyering Skills?

In the past, we've wondered how a lawyer is meant to devote time to all of the various social media channels, and still find time for servicing clients (and enjoying a personal life). They say "law is a jealous mistress." Is social media any different?

The key, says MarketingSherpa, is to avoid engaging in social media for social media's sake, which leads to unfocused efforts. That is, it's not about building a Facebook page for the sake of having one up. Rather, the more effective tactic is to search out social networks populated by your target audiences and focus efforts on building visibility with those audiences.

On a related note, in a post published last Friday, our colleague, Jayne Navarre, asks: "Is Social Media Distracting Lawyers?" The concern raised is that the ease of social networking is causing younger attorneys to ignore honing the more difficultly acquired networking skills necessary for business development success in face-to-face settings.

Delivering Targeted Content Tailored to Subscriber Interests is Most Effective Email Marketing Tactic

MarketingSherpa recently released results of a study showing that the most effective email marketing tactic is to deliver targeted content tailored to subscriber interests.

While dividing up distribution lists into targeted segments can be somewhat time-consuming (depending on the internal CRM system in place), law firms that adhere to this "best practice" should see higher click and conversion rates than their peers who distribute content to broader audiences not necessarily interested in each topic discussed in the emails received. And stronger subscriber engagement typically leads to lower unsubscribe rates.

See the chart below for other tactics viewed favorably (or not). Click here to see a larger version.

 

How Social Media is Changing Email

We recently explored the (simplistic) question of whether social media is killing email, and showed how the two channels are not mutually exclusive, but complementary.

For those looking for resources addressing the issue of how email marketing is changing in light of evolving Internet habits and preferences, we recommend this treasure trove of links to online articles on the subject titled tongue-in-cheek "Email is Not Dead."

One interesting quote: "Email is not dead because people want to write to one another, using their email accounts, in more than 140-character bursts." This is so true - I frequently find myself struggling to squeeze an important message into the 140-character limit of a text (and using all sorts of abbreviations like "c u @ wrk" and "r u going 2"), and then realizing, "Hey, I know (or have) this person's email address," and then quickly switching to Blackberry email mode to compose a more intelligent missive.

Obviously, there other insights are provided as well. See the articles at the link above.

Law Firm Flash Holiday eCards for 2010 - Go Green!

The summer is almost over - which means the 2010 holiday season is around the corner. Not too early to start thinking about Flash eCards for the coming holiday season.

Flash holiday eCards are "green" and eco-friendly (no paper waste!), as well as tech savvy. Your clients will love them on all fronts.

See six law firm holiday ecard samples below designed and animated by our Flash programming partner from prior years ranging from Custom, Semi-Custom, and Stock. Click a screenshot or link to view any animation. All come accompanied by holiday music.

And this year, for the first time, we are offering the following premium features:

• Personalized eCards - your attorneys can add personalized messages that display in the card itself to recipients as the animation plays (view personalized sample).
• Analytics - administrators can view who distributed what cards to whom, and how many views were recorded

Contact us for more information.

Goulston & Storrs	Arnold & Porter
Milbank	Dewey LeBoeuf (featuring multiple languages)
Faegre & Benson	Winthrop & Weinstine

Start Sounding Like a Social Media Maven With the Social Media Dictionary

Feeling ignorant of the ever expanding list of social media "terms"? As in "what's a 'hash tag'?" Or a "mashup?" How about "bit.ly" - what is it exactly that they do? (ever hear of TinyURL?)

Well, you no longer have to feel like a social media neophyte. To the rescue is HubSpot with its Social Media Dictionary, listing 101 basic social media and other online marketing terms you ought to know.

The list is far from comprehensive (focusing a bit too much, IMHO, on brandname services), but it's a start.