Category: legal marketing

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legal marketing

Doing Business With a Handshake

Yesterday, Kevin O’Keefe wrote about his efforts to reconnect with his clients by visiting them one at a time. When he mentioned that the United Airlines “Speech” commercial (about having a face-to-face chat with every customer) aired 20 years ago, I was sure he was wrong because that commercial remains fresh in my mind. I looked around online and Kevin was right.

Despite the truth of the message conveyed in that commercial, United no longer does business “with a handshake, face-to-face.” Instead, United pushes all its customers to purchase tickets online. And, if you want to purchase tickets from a reservation sales agent, “the total price will include a $25 call center fee per ticket.” Once on board, United has also slashed its meal service so that if you want food, you either have to bring it yourself or purchase it from United. For the airline, that may save money and reduce wasted food; however, this approach also reduces the amount of service provided to customers and the opportunity for leaving a memorable experience. The net result is that all airlines provide an indistinguishable experience, except for JetBlue.

Another industry that has followed this approach is the banking industry. I don’t know if any banks still continue the practice of charging teller fees, but talk about completing dehumanizing your customer service experience. The funny thing is that a few months ago, I started receiving a lot of calls from banks asking me to open new accounts. Yes, these were banks that had accepted TARP money. But, who’s going to discuss their financial situation with some unverified person on the other end, even if you are sure it’s not a phishing attempt. The best bet for the banks would be for the teller to recommend some new financial products for the customer. But, if you push every one off to use ATMs, then you may need to do business with a handshake again, face-to-face.

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legal marketing Technology

Law Blogs Without RSS Feeds

Every once in a while, I’ll come across a law blog that does not have an RSS feed. The problem isn’t that their blog software doesn’t support RSS feeds. Instead, these bloggers have gone out of their way to disable their feed. I don’t get it.

The entire point of blogging, I thought, was to share your thoughts and perspectives with your readers in a manner that is convenient for them. Let your readers subscribe to your blog with whatever application they want. Seriously, I am too busy to manually keep track of blogs without feeds. However, if a blog that interests me offers a fed, I often end up visiting the blog multiple times during the day, especially if the blog authors are particularly active.

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legal marketing

I Love Arial

I came across a website for a court clerk. The site looks fine on Internet Explorer, but is absolutely unreadable on Firefox or Safari. For some reason, the designer wanted to use Edwardian Script, which was specified in a broken font tag. Internet Explorer ignored the broken tag, so the website was readable. However, Firefox and Safari recognized the tag, and applied the Edwardian Script to most of the text. Yikes. Save the script for wedding invitations. Use Arial, or Helvetica, if you curse the scourge of Arial.

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legal marketing

Can't SEO the Forest from the Trees

The keyword for today is balance.  Search engine optimization (or SEO) refers to certain methods that one can adopt to make your law firm web site or blog appear well on the search engines.  However, it is a grave mistake to treat the Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft search engines as your target audience.  Certainly, showing up at the top of page one increases the chances that a potential client will visit your web site or blog.  However, unless you are a legal publisher just interested in the size of your audience, you need to convert that audience into clients.  And, that’s where writing for search engines instead of humans can hurt you.  Ask whether the page titles and page text that you have written for the search engines are easily digestible by human readers.  Because, if a potential client cannot figure out what you have said, how likely will that person contact you for legal advice or whatever product or service you are offering?

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legal marketing

Permission-Based Marketing

Seth Godin has some great stories about Permission Marketing. Now, I have my own. I received a lovely piece of spam today. At the bottom of the email, the footer read:

Express Email Marketing supports permission-based email marketing. You can change your preferences or unsubscribe from this mailing list at any time.

Please. How can a company purport to support “permission-based email marketing” when I NEVER gave it permission to spam me? Spamming me and then giving me the option to opt-out does not comport with my understanding of permission marketing.

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legal marketing

How Trustworthy is Law Firm Online Advertising?

Kevin O’Keefe says that online advertising by law firms suck, if you extrapolate from a Nielsen Research study that compares the different advertising channels. To no surprise, word of mouth was the most effective form of advertising. I vet a lot of my purchasing decisions through Consumer Reports, as well as Amazon. As for newspaper, television, magazine or Internet ads, I don’t know that I trust one of them over the other. I really question the 63% of people that trust print newspaper ads since fewer than 63% even read a newspaper in an average week. How can you even trust something you don’t read? For newspaper ads, I doubt if reader trust flows uniformly to all advertisers with the Macy’s ad being not untrustworthy, the cell phone ad with an inch of disclaimers being possibly untrustworthy, and the classifieds offering work-at-home opportunities and real estate riches garnering the greatest skepticism. Television ads work the same way with Nike, Disney and Apple ads on the positive end of the spectrum and pharmaceutical, exercise equipment, and spray-on hair ads at the opposite end.

As I see it, one form of advertising isn’t necessarily better than another. Instead, the companies and brands that succeed are the ones that constantly build trust and customer loyalty, which in turn generates that valued word of mouth recommendation. How can law firms build trust? Law firms can build trust and their online reputations through a law firm blog. However, like advertising, which can be good or bad, blogs can swing both ways as well. Know that you are writing for a sophisticated audience that can rapidly differentiate between genuine insight and marketing copy. Also, understand that while some bloggers may praise your blog posts, others may target them for criticism, whether warranted or not, and how you react to praise as well as criticism can amplify or destroy your trustworthiness.

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legal marketing

Jack of All Trades

Seth Godin spotted this blog post on specialization. If you have a law firm web site or blog, you should take his advice to heart. While for a large law firm, the breadth of practice areas may demonstrate size and strength, for a solo or smaller practice, someone that visits your web site or blog may think you are spreading yourself too thin. Can anyone really be a specialist in 3 or 4 practice areas? You want to project to a potential client that you really are a master of divorces of he is seeking a divorce, or a master of copyright if he has a copyright issue.

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legal marketing

Florida Bar Inspired by Amazon.com

1-click.jpgKevin O’Keefe points out that the Florida Bar took four years to propose a new rule regulating attorney web sites. Of course, we’re only hearing about this rule from a news article, so the actual text of the rule may differ. But, seriously, four years of brainstorming and the best they can come up with is 1-click?From the Orlando Business Journal:

Website Rule 4-7.6 would allow lawyers to advertise their past results and statement characteristics concerning the quality of legal services through testimonials on Web pages that are just one click past the homepage.

Now, lawyers being lawyers, we really need to see if the Florida Bar also defined “advertise their past results” and “homepage,” assuming this is how the proposed rule is worded.

  • Advertise Their Past Results. If you’re thinking this rule only applies to personal injury lawyers that list the millions of dollars that they have recovered for their clients, think again. Take a look at White & Case, which incidentally has a Miami office. Their “homepage” includes a news column which currently includes the following bullet points: (1) Bridgepoint in £360 Million LBO of Fat Face and (2) First Ever Public RMBS Securitisation by Ukrainian Bank. Sure, this isn’t exactly “$10 Million for SUV Rollover,” but isn’t this an advertisement of their past results or are press releases different. Because, I’m sure the personal injury attorney could just as well add a new column that includes press releases of their verdicts and settlements. Not so clear cut now, eh?
  • Homepage. I want to see how the Florida Bar defines a homepage. Is it the web page that is labeled “home”? Or, is it the first “web page” that you see when you type in a domain name? What if a law firm initially displays one of those Flash graphics with text zooming back and forth, which prompts you to click to enter? Is that the “homepage”? What if your website has one or more sub-domains? Is each sub-domain an individual website with their own “homepage”? Probably the most pointless part of the 1-click rule is that people “Google” now instead of “Yahoo.” Instead of a web directory taking you to the “homepage,” a search engine takes you to the most relevant page for your search query. So, even if your testimonials are “1-click” from the “homepage,” Google might take you directly to a testimonial page, completely bypassing the “homepage.” What’s the point of the rule then?
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legal marketing

Forget Link Trading. Just Put Up Free Case Law Online.

I receive e-mails to trade links all the time. Usually, these e-mails are from people I’ve never heard of telling me about websites that I’ve never visited before. I just assume that the names are all fake and are sent in bulk to e-mail addresses harvested from around the web. Today, Seth Godin blogged that he received such an e-mail from a well-known company. A very well-known one, especially if you are a lawyer or conduct a lot of legal research. This company is none other than Reed Elsevier, the parent company of LexisNexis. Just put all your case law online for free and everyone will be more than willing to link to you. Seriously. 🙂

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legal marketing Technology

BlawgSearch Helps Lawyers Leverage Peer-Written Content

blawgsearch.jpgJustia recently launched BlawgSearch, a search engine that scours through lawyer and law-related blogs. I think this will be a great research tool for lawyers.

If you come across a case or law in your daily practice and want to see what other lawyers have said about it, Justia’s BlawgSearch lets you search across hundreds of lawyer blogs for commentary from your peers.

P.S. Kevin O’Keefe of lexBlog hates it when people use the term blawgs to describe law blogs. But, really, blog is a contraction of web log, and blawg is a contraction of law blog. If you want to be a purist, maybe we should call all of these law web logs. Now, that’s a tongue-twister. 🙂