Earlier this year, Facebook introduced a new feature called “Sponsored Stories.” The name is half-accurate: they’re certainly sponsored, but it’s a stretch to call them stories. Currently, in your Facebook news stream, you’re notified whenever one of your friends clicks the “Like” button on a Facebook page — or in fact, on any page anywhere on the internet (such as an article on CNN.com or at The Onion).

Nothing unusual there — part of the fun of Facebook is that you can point your friends in the direction of something interesting or amusing simply by “Liking” it. It costs nothing to Like and costs nothing to notice the Like, which is why most news streams are filled with Likes, and after awhile you stop paying much attention to them. Facebook has long wanted to leverage this sort of activity by its users, but it learned from its 2008 Beacon debacle not to automatically broadcast news of a user’s purchases to his or her friends. So it had to come up with something else. Now it has.

Facebook has hatched a plan to monetize the Like. “Sponsored Stories” offers businesses the opportunity to upgrade the impact of a Like, moving it out of the ordinary news stream and into a separate box on the right-hand side of the column. Every time a user Likes a product or service, checks in at a coffee shop or shoe store, or otherwise connects with a company that has paid to join the Sponsored Stories program, the box appears on the page of all of that user’s friends. In turn, if that friend Likes the Sponsored Story or the product behind it, that fact is posted to all of his or her friends’ pages, and so forth. This video explains how it works, and this Mashable article provides more details.

What’s Facebook up to? MIT’s Technology Review answers that question in an intriguing article titled, “You are the ad.” Some excerpts:

Facebook aims to be not just a place to advertise but an entirely new way to advertise — one that uses the power of social networks to create and amplify brand messages. In essence, the company is pushing a highly charged version of word of mouth, long seen as the most valuable of all marketing because people view friends’ recommendations as more credible than marketers’. …

“This is in many ways the Holy Grail of marketing: making your customers your marketers,” says [Facebook COO Sheryl] Sandberg…. “For the first time, you can do word-of-mouth marketing at massive scale.” To put it another way, when we use Facebook we no longer just view the ad; we become the ad.

What sets Facebook apart from online rivals, especially Google, is that its advertising is aimed not at influencing immediate purchases but at branding, something online ads have never done very well. “We’re not really demand fulfillment, when you’ve already figured out what you’re going to buy — that’s search,” explains Sandberg … “We’re demand generation, before you know you want something.”

This is something altogether new in the online advertising world, and although it’s off to a relatively slow start, “Sponsored Stories” taps into a very real facet of social networks: a genuine interest in what your friends like to read, use and do. Facebook is absolutely right that recommendations and word-of-mouth are the most powerful marketing tools, and it realizes that shaping brands — “demand generation” — is poised to pick up where traditional advertising (including Google’s search function) leaves off. If this works, Facebook can transform itself from a social phenomenon into a marketing juggernaut.

Why does any of this matter to law firms? Because personal recommendations and referrals just happen to be the way most consumers and small businesses (and a number of large companies too, I’ll wager) choose a lawyer. What did you do the last time you needed a lawyer in an unfamiliar area of practice for a personal matter? Most likely, you asked a friend or family member who they’ve used in the past or who they’d recommend. And when it comes to friends and family members, Facebook has about 600 million of them on hand.

So consider the result of a lawyer or law firm signing up for the “Sponsored Stories” program. The firm’s Facebook page already has a “Like” button, but the firm’s website and blog could add such buttons too. Every time a Facebook member “Likes” something about the firm, that fact is promoted to all the member’s friends.

Now, how many of those friends will be looking for a lawyer at that very moment? Vanishingly few — people looking for lawyers at a given moment are using Google. But those friends will all see the recommendation, will take note of the firm’s name, and will lodge that information somewhere in their cerebral cortex, theoretically to be retrieved when the need for a lawyer does arise — or more interestingly, will perhaps get them thinking about their own nagging legal needs. That’s demand generation, and that’s a very intriguing concept for a legal profession looking for new sources of business.

Caveats abound. Most midsize, large, and full-service firms would find little value in a service like this today (although in future, who knows the degree to which even the biggest corporate GCs will be using Facebook). As the MIT article notes, “Sponsored Stories” is in its infancy and hasn’t come close to Google’s ad revenue; the whole project might be abandoned if it doesn’t fly (although Zuckerberg & Co. seem deeply committed to it). Facebook itself has no guarantee of a long and fulfilling existence.

But the core of an extremely interesting concept for online legal marketing is definitely here. Good lawyers create relationships of trust and reputations for reliability with their clients. Personal endorsements from trusted friends are a very powerful tool for generating legal business. Any company that can connect these facts and create a relationship cascade through a social media platform should get the legal profession’s attention.

When I was running a national lawyer magazine, we recognized that we simply couldn’t provide reasonable coverage of every type of law practice and every sort of law-related issue potentially germane to the readership. So we decided to focus on business and client service issues for law firms and to track developing changes in the marketplace. Our choice wasn’t any better or worse than any other; what matters is that we had to choose to concentrate on some areas and only occasionally touch on the rest.

A similar strategic challenge faces “full-service” law firms. We sometimes refer to such organizations as “big firms” or “BigLaw,” but I think that’s misleading: I’ve seen firms with as few as 30 lawyers and firms with as many as 2,000 both describe themselves as “full-service,” meaning they offer a range of legal services that meet the vast majority of marketplace needs. But here’s the problem: the more you try to do and the more markets you try to engage, the thinner you stretch yourself and the harder it is to identify just what you’re all about.

This dilemma is currently manifesting itself in, of all things, the debate over whether and to what degree full-service firms can use Twitter. My friends at The Lawyer newspaper in London started the ball rolling with an article about a marketing agency’s ranking of major UK law firms on Twitter. The agency’s report raised, but perhaps insufficiently emphasized, the unusual spectacle of Norton Rose’s 10th-place position in the list despite having Tweeted exactly zero times.

Brian Inkster’s The Time Blawg has an excellent summary of the enormous debate that has ensued among lawyers, marketers and social media advisors. The commentary on Brian’s post poses the fundamental question raised by the report: can a large law firm use Twitter at all? There’s a developing sense that the answer to that question is no, for a variety of reasons. My contribution is to suggest that a large (or full-service) firm faces challenges in using Twitter, but perhaps not the ones we might think.

Some commenters believe that big firms can’t use Twitter because a faceless corporate entity can’t engage with its followers: it can’t answer questions, participate in dialogues or otherwise affix a personality to the logo. I’m not sure I agree, because I don’t think Twitter is primarily an engagement tool. Using Twitter to have conversations is like standing at the front of a room with a microphone holding one-on-one discussions with individual audience members: everyone else has to endure one half of a dialogue in which they likely have little interest. Those who’ve experienced overly interactive CLE presentations will know what this feel like.

Instead, I think full-service firms struggle with Twitter precisely because they are full-service — their mandate is to be all things to everyone, or at least many things to many clients. Successful Twitter accounts are always about something in particular, whereas full-service firms are about legal services in general. Faced not with the problem of having too little to say but the challenge of having too much, full-service firms make the same error on Twitter that they often make in other marketing efforts: fear of committing to a narrative, fear of focus, fear of failing to regularly remind everyone that they’re available to do everything. As a result, the firm’s Twitter feed ends up focusing on the firm itself; hence the endless line of big-firm Twitter feeds that do nothing but link to the firms’ own announcements and articles.

The solution, I believe, is for a full-service firm to develop a range of Twitter accounts, each devoted to and operated by a practice or industry group. As I’ve written before, I think Twitter is a publishing vehicle, and as noted above, it’s difficult to publish coherently about a massive range of topics. But a practice or industry group can provide that level of focus and specificity, and as a result it will attract readers (aka potential clients) interested in that focus while still carrying the firm name and reinforcing the firm brand.

What the UK Twitter report didn’t point out, but should have, is that boutiques and smaller firms produce many of the best law firm Twitter feeds — not because they’re more “personal” and “engaging,” I believe, but because they necessarily pursue a narrow focus: they’re restricted in the type of work they offer and/or the marketplaces in which they offer it. That restrictiveness used to be a marketing drawback; nowadays, in a billion-channel long-tail market in which people can find precisely what they’re looking for, that focus and restriction has become a marketing advantage.

Full-service firms can copy that advantage by giving their practice groups (or preferably, industry groups, with a client viewpoint) the opportunity to develop their own narratives on Twitter, not to mention through blogs and other social media vehicles. So far, I’ve found only two full-service law firms that maintain practice group Twitter accounts: Winston & Strawn’s advertising law group and Perkins Coie’s privacy and security group (courtesy My Corporate Resource chart) — I invite you to let me know about other examples in the comments section. These accounts direct readers to interesting and useful information, sometimes their own and sometimes others’, exactly the way a good Twitter feed should.

Full-service firms can use Twitter effectively by harnessing the power of their practice groups to dive deep into a subject, engage readers on the specific issues that concern them, and demonstrate a mastery of the subject area at hand. Firms with many such niche Twitter feeds, in turn, will realize that they’ve found a way to explain to a 21st-century marketplace what “full-service” now really means.

From my perspective, however, I don’t think the strongest brands in the legal space belong to firms at all — they belong to clubs and collectives. In the UK, there’s the “Magic Circle“; in the US, there are “white-shoe law firms“; and here in Canada, there’s the “Seven Sisters.” Throw in Australia’s “Big Six” and South Africa’s “Big Five,” and you start to see how every country conjures up a small group of large firms that are somehow considered to be a cut above the rest.

These “clubs” shouldn’t be confused with rankings such as the AmLaw 100 or the US News & World Report‘s Top 14 law schools: even though these groups rarely change membership or even rank order, they’re still categorized according to a set of metrics that can and do change from time to time. Nor are these collectives the same as global networks like Meritas or Lex Mundi, voluntary referral and collegiality collectives with a central organization. Club membership is involuntary (you can’t nominate yourself), ethereal (who exactly invented the “Magic Circle,” anyway?), and permanent.

Although these clubs deliver enormous benefits, it’s worth asking whether they’ll stand the test of time. As globalization spreads and new firms rise, different brands will evolve that could relegate the old clubs to historical footnotes. Already in Canada, we’ve seen the Norton Rose/Ogilvy Renault merger change the local law firm landscape — there are already several firms larger than some of the “Seven Sisters,” and Norton Rose OR will surpass them all in size. Will we see the growth of a “Global Circle,” a handful of the largest and most highly regarded firms worldwide, a collective brand for the 21st century?

At any rate, I’m not as interested in these established clubs as I am in the question of how “collective branding” likely will evolve in future. The market value of membership in one of these groups is demonstrably high, so it would figure that there’d be interest in developing and populating more of them. The field for large and expensive law firms’ brands is pretty much filled at this point, so the obvious next areas in which these clubs would develop are smaller, more regional and more practice-specific. Here are a few possibilities:

• Regional Groups: Which local firms in Edmonton, St. Louis, Manchester or Melbourne are clearly superior to all the rest? What are the most highly esteemed firms in Quebec or Colorado? Criteria would vary according to whether you’re focusing on general-practice or specialized firms, and whether you’re talking about the consumer or corporate marketplace.
• Boutique Groups: Which are the finest IP boutiques in Canada? What is the most exclusive grouping of specialty litigation shops in the United States? Or in California? Or in Silicon Valley? A one-stop reference point to answer these questions would be useful to clients, but it would be invaluable to law firms in terms of prestige and profile.
• Online Groups: The day is coming, and fast, when virtual or Net-delivered legal services are so ubiquitous that a market need will emerge to separate the finest wheat from the rest. Call it the”Cyber Circle” — a small collection of virtual firms that are recognized to be head and shoulders above the rest.

Two questions are raised by this discussion. The first is: who decides? The firms themselves obviously can’t. Bar associations certainly can’t be seen supporting some members’ firms above others. Law schools? Maybe, but query whether their views would have legitimacy in the profession. Judges? Nope. The likeliest candidate would be a journal or periodical of some kind, preferably legal (US News and World Report‘s pernicious influence on law school rankings is the exception that proves the rule). The American Lawyer has made its name with the AmLaw lists, but again, these are rankings, not clubs. There’s no “#1 Magic Circle firm” — in these clubs, all members are equal. There’s an opportunity here for publications, especially regional and specialty ones, to become players in the branding game.

The other question is: why should we care? This has resonance for me and for anyone who has viewed exclusive societies of all kinds as the worst kind of elitism — the “No Homers” club brought to life. Why should we concern ourselves with a group whose members are chosen through an opaque process and proclaimed to be much better than non-members? Because like it or not, these collective brands wield a tremendous amount of power. People like shorthand methods for narrowing a large field of choices down to a select few, and if that method imbues the selection process with the promise of high quality and reliability (especially important in the law), all the better.

The Magic Circle and its fellow brands exist for a reason, and there’s reason to think more might develop down the road. Keep your eye on the future of collective brands in what promises to be an increasingly noisy and complicated legal marketplace.

Thanksgiving is the perfect opportunity to offer your clients a genuine “Thank you for being our client” greeting from the entire firm. The holiday itself reinforces the message to your clients. A win-win. … How many Thanksgiving cards did you get last year? That’s what I thought. Your clients don’t get them either. That’s why yours will stand out. It is also why yours will be talked about.

If you’ve struggled with the right kind of December holiday card to send — or worse, received an inappropriately-themed card from a service provider yourself — you can appreciate why this is such a clever and insightful suggestion. I’ll be doing it this year and I’d recommend you do the same.

But my focus here at Stem Legal is on communications, and I’d like to build on Matt’s idea to talk about the importance of a communications strategy. Sending Thanksgiving cards to clients is the mark of a firm that has thought through how it interacts with clients and why — a firm that is determined to use communication as a market differentiator and a client development tool.

Very few law firms think this way. For the great majority of firms, communication is an autonomic side effect of doing business, kind of like expelling carbon dioxide when you breathe. These firms communicate when they need to, and what they communicate seldom varies from the industry standard. Setting aside “non-lawyer” things like ordering supplies or paying the gas bill, as well as personal interactions like boardroom meetings, CLE presentations or on-campus interviews, they include:

• client work product
• letters, phone calls and emails regarding work product
• client bills
• newsletters and blogs
• a website
• social media updates
• press releases
• recruitment brochures

These categories encapsulate maybe 90% of a law firm’s organizational interactions with its clients and the legal marketplace generally. What’s interesting is that the unique or distinguishing features of these interactions — those elements that mark these communications as unmistakably coming from XYZ firm — are virtually zero. Remove the letterhead from a legal opinion, hide the logos on a website, black out the firm name from a news release, and most clients (and many lawyers) would struggle to identify its origins.

Law firm communications are generic, and if I may go further, they’re also usually bland, stiff, bloodless and unengaging. And when I see a field where most participants are going through the motions, I see the chance to own that field.

Many law firms have a strategic plan. Many also craft a strategy to address business development, and some have strategies for recruitment, lawyer development, and even social media. But the one thing that every single law firm does every day, often without any direction or even conscious thought, is communicate, and rarely is any strategy attached to it.

A law firm communications strategy, therefore, is an opportunity — a chance to differentiate the firm not just by what it communicates to its clients and competitors, but how it communicates and why. Taking communication off autopilot and placing it in the hands of an active strategy is a potentially tremendous weapon in a firm’s competitive arsenal.

My last several posts here at the Law Firm Web Strategy blog have focused on law firm communications, specifically on the kind of habitual, rote, we’ve-always-done-it-this-way communications that characterize many law firms’ output. Going forward, I’ll be identifying ways in which you can use your communications to stand out in your marketplace, as part of a new and specialized Strategic Communications offering. Stem is an online strategy company, and in the Net-powered marketplace, the line between what we do online and offline has blurred. All your communications, no matter what they are, must be strategic now.

If you’d like to talk more about this area or find out more about what we can do for your firm, please drop me a line. Until then, you still have time to go pick up those Thanksgiving cards.

I’m now going to use Bob’s post to go off on a tangent, and talk about something that appears deceptively mundane: the use of middle initials by lawyers, and the fallout it causes online.

Part of the professional status associated with being a lawyer includes maintaining a sense of formality. When it comes to the use of initials on websites, and in particular for lawyer profiles, this formality seems to have carried forward. Think about, for example, the three-letter monikers lawyers use in most law firms.

In every firm I’ve ever worked for, I could tell you the name of each lawyer by their first, middle, and last initial. Even scarier, to me at least, is that I can still tell you the “lawyer initial conflicts” between those firms. Think about how many firms you’ve known where email addresses were assigned by that three-letter abbreviation, rather than by first and last name? I’ll bet you know a few.

All of which is to say, lawyer love their initials. Now, when it comes to law firm websites, or any online profile page for that matter, this formality ends up causing some problems.  A lawyer’s profile should back up his or her other marketing efforts, both online and offline.  If you give a presentation, or write a paper, or impress people in any sort of way, they are going to conduct an online search to find you. Now for the big question: which names are they going to search by?

Unless you’ve spent a career branding yourself around your initials — e.g.,  F. Lee Bailey, E.F. Hutton — no one is going to be searching for you that way. Very few people can brand themselves with the use of an initial — and I would suggest that if F. Lee Bailey was starting his career in 2010, he couldn’t either.

Lawyers might still treasure their formalities, but the informality of the web is trickling down through all our online behaviour and interactions, including how we search.  We also know that with the search engines, things have to match. You can’t go by “Ernie Johnston” to the world at large, then write your lawyer profile name as “Ernest P. E. Jonhston, Esq. “  People won’t find you. And they especially won’t find you if there are 35 other Ernie Johnstons in Google.

Now, let’s turn this post back to the practical. I’d like to offer a few tips.

Our goal is to have the maximum number of lawyers in your firm rank #1 in Google for the most common version of their “firstname lastname”. So:

• put that ‘Firstname Lastname’ combination at the very beginning of each page’s title tag.  If the law firm’s name must be in there, relegate it to the very end of the page’s title tag.
• use the alternate versions of names (short form, nicknames) in brackets in your title tags:  e.g. Lawrence (Larry) Smith;
• drop middle initials wherever possible, in the alternative, you can get away with leaving the formal name on-page, if you alter both:
  • the URL string: example: http://www.stemlegal.com/steve-matthews/ and not /steven-a-matthews/’, and,
  • the Title Tag: although matching all the page attributes is preferable, varying the webpage’s title tag to the less formal version is a reasonable fall-back position.
• Support the common form name using internal link text within the website.  Any time you mention an online publication within your firm’s web network, be sure the author citation uses the less formal ‘firstname lastname’ as the words over which you place the link.

Nonetheless, law firms (like other corporate entities) still strive for just a mention of the firm or its lawyers in a “major newspaper” or “national magazine.” I spent ten years editing an actual “National magazine” at the Canadian Bar Association, and I was struck by how much lawyers and law firms wanted to appear in its pages. PR agencies would constantly propose lawyers as interview subjects, and large national firms would ask for PDFs of an article featuring their lawyers to post on their websites. They clearly perceived some value or prestige arising from a mention in the magazine — even more so, I’m sure, in the Globe & Mail or National Post. But is the perception accurate? I’m not sure enough law firms ask themselves this.

Media appearances have long been considered a self-evidently valuable marketing effort. But just like any other such effort, they still demand a degree of ROI examination. Most lawyers would say they want the value arising from the imprimatur of legitimacy and respect that a media outlet bestows — “we were quoted in The New York Times!” And don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of power still invested in these legacy media brands that can make them powerful players in this new landscape. But from law firms’ point of view, “major media mentions,” in isolation, can’t automatically be assumed to have an effect on a law firm’s brand and business development. They need to serve a purpose.

I was often tempted to ask the law firm marketing professionals seeking an appearance in National: “You do know that only other lawyers read this magazine, right?” Because it sometimes seemed to me they were investing a lot of time and effort in getting their lawyers in front of their competitors rather than their clients. They might have had good strategic reasons; for example, a firm’s repeated appearance in a nationwide legal periodical could translate into recruitment and lateral hiring advantages. But just as often, I suspect, a request to profile or interview a particular partner was driven by that partner’s combination of ego and influence.

All of which is to say: before setting out to get you or your firm into any kind of media outlet, be certain why you’re doing it and what you hope to get out of it. Brand management, profile enhancement, business development, referral generation, expertise demonstration — these are all valid reasons for pursuing media exposure, but most won’t apply in every situation. Be strategic in your choice of media placement, just as you should be with every other marketing choice. For example:

• If you run a small family law practice in New Brunswick, will you get more value from a mention in the Globe & Mail or in the Fredericton Gleaner? The answer depends on whether you want a prestige injection or a business development opportunity.
• If you run a civil litigation firm in Montreal, do you want to be profiled in Canadian Lawyer or in the Montreal Gazette? The answer depends on whether you want referrals from other lawyers or higher profile within your local business community.
• If you own a full-service firm in Edmonton with a smaller Calgary office, do you need attention from the Edmonton Journal or the Calgary Herald? The answer depends on whether you want to strengthen your headquarters or develop your satellite.

Before setting out on media placement efforts, lawyers and firms need to ask themselves: where do we want to show up, what do we want to be noted for, and why? Answering those questions correctly will greatly amplify the effectiveness of those efforts.

His mistake wasn’t a mild one.  It wasn’t a bad call between sans serif or serif, or even an overly conservative fixation on Times New Roman.  No, instead  Mr. Gilbert’s choice was the ever mockable Comic Sans.  The design pundits on Twitter were chuckling about it so much, CNN was compelled to cover the story. Really. Over a font choice!

It’s a mild-wakeup call for all of us.  Not in terms of a potential embarrassment like this, but rather to reconsider the impression that different type face choices can make.  That while some font choices support the credibility of the writer, making the wrong one – Comic Sans topping that list – can do real damage to the message.  Need a refresher?  Check out the website Typography for Lawyers.  I can’t say I agree 100% with the advice, but a lot of it I do.

I’d also like to add a couple of my own tips:

1. Establish management buy-in first. Who stands up to the Partner that wants to choose their own font?  Or worse, wants to choose a new font every month? If the answer is ‘who cares…’, don’t bother investing your time creating standards.
2. When possible, however, creating approved firm standards for font face style & typography can help. Embedding those standards into printed work, forms production, templates, etc. can save a lot of headaches. It can also reduce internal bickering; and support those individuals tasked with maintaining consistent application.
3. For firms with a visual identity guide or style guide, be sure to include these font & typography standards. Define the font face usage not only in print materials, but also in digital placements. What are the acceptable line heights, kerning (space between letters)?
4. Delete Comic Sans off of every new workstation your firm purchases.  Nip those unsightly system fonts before they cause problems! :)

For the generations of lawyers who’ve spent the better portion of their lives absorbing marketing and advertising, especially via unidirectional channels such as television, there’s a real need to disconnect from that experience.  Those who grasp the concept of “paying it forward” early (think altruism, educating, and connecting) will most often develop a large and mature network of web-based relationships. Those that don’t…  are destined to invest hours into the tools, and gain little traction.

Point being? If you’re not obtaining new relationships with your web marketing efforts, it may be time to work a little harder on ‘outreach’; and ease off on the frequency (and intensity) of your marketing message.  Relationships are the number one objective for your marketing success online; which brings me to the second central message of the column, SEO without spam.

Great SEO is dependent on these relationships, especially relationships with other online publishers. Let me spell it out in SEO terms:

• a large social network translates into reciprocal linking (linking to and from others in your online social circle) ;
• that network of links will grow in size boosting your link popularity (Google PageRank, and the like);
• link networks are not only valuable when in sizable number, but also in terms of domain diversity (not the same people always linking in – new relationships help shape this diversity);
• websites that link in based on similar topic coverage are better aligned and authentic (also valued by the search engines);
• similar subject websites also generate links within the body of the page’s text (valued more by the search engines, compared to blogroll links or footer links).

Websites that are really great performers in the search engines – call it ‘link juice’, call it what you will,  have this kind of link network behind them. On-page SEO tactics aside, the real “silver bullet” to SEO rankings is relationships.  Kill those, and you kill your SEO potential.

Unsolicited (or unexpected) commercial messages (a.k.a. spam) kills marketing – good SEO & credibility are just the first casualties. Fortunately the answer is very simple: hang out your shingle and do your business on your website. If your web travels take you elsewhere…  be yourself, be professional, and leave the salesman at home.

By way of brief explanation: a Facebook Fan Page is a dedicated page on Facebook for your business, organization or other commercial entity. You use it to publicize and promote your business by publishing news, updates, information, offers and so forth, and by inviting your professional contacts and interested friends to become “fans.” These people show up as members of the Fan Page, they can post messages and engage in conversations on the page, and they receive new entries from the Fan Page in their Facebook update feeds. Considering there are now 400 million people on Facebook, there’s good reason to take it seriously as a marketing platform. Nicole Black has an excellent summary of how to set up and use a Facebook fan page for a credit union — you should go read that first, substituting “law firm” in the appropriate places, and then come back here.

Setting up a Facebook Fan Page for your law practice is one thing — turning it into an exceptional value-add for both its members and your business can be another. A lot of Fan Pages seem to just sit there, rarely issuing updates, not really telling visitors anything interesting about the company or taking advantage of the features Facebook has to offer. This silence suggests that their owners created the Page because someone told them to and haven’t given it much thought since. These desolate Fan Pages don’t give people any payoff for becoming fans, and their low member totals are duly reflective. Their lesson is: don’t start a Facebook Fan Page unless you intend to give it regular attention; like an abandoned blog, it can actually drive down your prestige by conspicuously collecting dust by the side of the road.

Many other Facebook Fan Pages are active, but they’re not always the right kind of active. Just like a lot of personal Facebook accounts and Twitter feeds, these Fan Pages suffer from IAAM Syndrome: It’s All About Me. Every update and every data point on the Page is all about the business: its latest accomplishment, its newest office, its most recent press release, and so on. Absolutely, there should be some of this content — part of the goal of a Fan Page is to keep your Fans engaged in what you’re doing and what you’re up to, and to use them to spread that word far and wide. But it needs to be balanced, if not outweighed, by content about and focused on the Fans and what interests them.

For every entry on your Fan Page about your firm’s activities or offerings, there should be at least one or two entries that focus on your Fans: a link to a mainstream news article about one of your key practice areas that your clients (and potential clients) care about; a question or opinion poll about a current-affairs issue that affects your client community; a conversation-starter that lets your fans kick around an engaging topic, serious or otherwise. As Niki says in her article, a good Facebook Fan Page is a community, and you should do what you can to encourage interaction, facilitate dialogue and build relationships within that community.

On top of that, you can make this community even more special by giving your Fans bonuses or insider access they can’t get from your website or your firm’s newsletters. Write an article that’s only accessible by clicking on a link from your Fan Page. Provide an exclusive offer — a half-hour’s free consultation, say, or free parking in your building, or a list of kid-friendly diners near your office — that only your Fans will hear about. Set aside one hour to do a question-and-answer session for your Fans on any legal subject of interest. Give people an incentive to become Fans and to pay close attention to every new announcement or addition to the Page — increase their sense of belonging and exclusivity.

What’s more, remember that Facebook offers you a lot of unique options for packaging your content. You can create Photo Albums of your office or staff members, maybe for a special event like a birthday or baby shower, helping to humanize the members of your firm who are otherwise only known through those stiff, posed, smiling photographs on your website. Schedule Events at your firm like in-house seminars or outside speaking engagements by lawyers. Post Videos now and again, either little three-minute advisories from the managing partner or links to a relevant and interesting item at YouTube. Use the RSS Grafitti application to send your Twitter feed directly to your Fan Page. Profile one of your Fans once a week or once a month, introducing him or her in more detail to the other members of the club.

In short: keep it active, keep it interesting, and keep it about your Fans. Those are the three keys to a successful Facebook Fan Page — and, not incidentally, to everything you do, say or publish under your firm’s banner.

Curious to see whether taglines have changed much since 2002, we decided to update the list and see if we could find more. We compiled the list by scoping out hundreds of US, Canadian, and international law firm websites, starting with the AmLaw 100 2009 and  Lexpert’s 30 Largest Canadian Law Firms and Magsitza’s big list from 2002. If we could quickly discern a tagline, we made note of it here. We left out generic-type taglines that really only refer to a state or city, or simply to the number of years the firm’s been around.

Taglines follow a variety of formats and styles; repetitive pairs, patterns, puns, and wordplay all figure prominently, and all with the goal of describing the firm’s philosophy succinctly and (hopefully) memorably.  (For more discussion of tagline formats, see this report from InterAct Marketing.)

Do they accomplish those goals? You be the judge!

101 Law Firm Taglines – 2009 Edition

AmLaw 100 2009:

1. Akin Gump: Power of Collaboration
2. Alston & Bird: Leadership. Creativity. Results.
3. Baker Botts : Deeper Understanding. Better Solutions.
4. Baker & Hostetler:  Counsel to Market Leaders
5. Bingham McCutchen: Legal Insight. Business Instinct.
6. Bryan Cave:  A Broader Perspective (SM)
7. Crowell & Moring: Experience. Creativity. Results.
8. Dickstein Shapiro: Experience Innovation
9. DLA Piper: Everything Matters
10. Faegre & Benson: More together.
11. Greenberg Traurig: We’re Built for Change (SM)
12. Haynes Boone: Setting Precedent (SM)
13. Holland & Knight: Industry focused. Relationship driven.
14. Howrey: The Advantage of Focus (SM)
15. Jenner & Block: When it’s a Matter of Importance. (SM)
16. Jones Day: One Firm Worldwide
17. Kilpatrick Stockton: Traditions of Innovation
18. Locke Lord: Practical wisdom, trusted advice (SM)
19. McGuireWoods: Relationships that Drive Results
20. Morgan, Lewis & Bockius: We’re In This Together. Your Team and Ours.
21. O’Melveny & Myers: Connecting Communities, Clients, and People
22. Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker: One Vision. One Firm.
23. Perkins Coie: Legal Counsel to Great Companies (SM)
24. Reed Smith: The Business of Relationships
25. Shearman & Sterling: Aligned for Excellence
26. Shepard Mullin: Our Mission is Your Success
27. Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal: Partnering for Progress
28. Steptoe & Johnson: When Experience Matters (SM)
29. Womble Carlyle: Innovators at Law

Other US law firms:

1. Adams & Reese: Out in Front
2. Andrews Kurth: Straight Talk is Good Business
3. Arnall Golden Gregory: Not If, But How (SM)
4. Barnes & Thornburg: Enduring Values
5. Bernstein: A Business Approach to Legal Service (SM)
6. Boyle Fredrickson: You’ve got ideas. We protect them.
7. Burr & Forman: Results Matter
8. Compatore Law: Legally Speaking
9. Connolly Bove Lodge & Hutz: IP Smart. Business Savvy. Client Connected. (SM)
10. Cozen O’Connor: The confidence to proceed.
11. Davis Wright Tremaine: Defining Success Together
12. Dickinson Wright: Great Lawyers. Great Law Firm.
13. Ervin Cohen & Jessup: It’s Not a Common Practice. (SM)
14. Foster Townsend Graham: Damn Fine Litigators.
15. Fox Rothschild: Let Our Experience be Your Guide (SM)
16. Fredrickson & Byron: Where Law and Business Meet
17. Gardere: Legal Knowledge. Human Wisdom.
18. Goulston & Storrs: thinkresults
19. Greenebaum: Breakthrough Law (SM)
20. Grodsky & Olecki: What makes us different makes us better.
21. Halloran & Sage: Your solutions start here. (SM)
22. Harris Beach: Lawyers you’ll swear by. Not at. (SM)
23. Holland & Hart: The Law Out West
24. Holme Roberts & Owen: Experience Listens. Be Heard. (SM)
25. Jackson Lewis: All We Do is Work (SM)
26. The Law Firm for Non-Profits: Helping Good People Do Good Things^®
27. Leonard Street & Deinard: Uncommon Wisdom. Common Sense. (SM)
28. Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith: Client Focused. Results Driven. (SM)
29. Miller & Chevalier: Discern the Difference (SM)
30. Morse Barnes-Brown Pendleton: The Law Firm Built for Business (SM)
31. Munsch Hardt: Right Firm. Right Now. (SM)
32. Murthy: We Know Immigration Matters (SM)
33. Phillips Nizer: Resourceful Representation (SM)
34. Quarles & Brady: Common Ground. Uncommon Vision.(SM)
35. RMKB: A Better Legal System (SM)
36. Rose Law Firm: A Heritage of Results
37. Sheehy Ware & Pappas: Experience you need. Results you want.
38. Snell & Wilmer: Character Comes Through (SM)
39. Strellis & Field: Experienced. Driven. Effective.
40. Watt, Tieder, Hoffar & Fitzgerald: Building Solutions (SM)
41. Wells Jaworski & Liebman: Effective. Efficient. Expeditious.

UK law firms:

1. Berrymans Lace Mawer: Clear Concise Advice
2. Bond Pearce: Clients First
3. Browne Jacobson: Law, less ordinary.
4. Charles Russell: Understanding Relationships
5. Clifford Chance : Committed to Helping Our Clients Succeed
6. Holman Fenwick Willan: Lawyers for International Commerce
7. Irwin Mitchell: Towards a Positive Future
8. Lawrence Graham: Lawyers. Just Different.
9. Linklaters: Globally Minded
10. Mischon: Not just any law firm.

Canadian law firms:

1. Aikins, Macaulay & Thorvaldson: Legal Expertise with You in Mind
2. BCF LLP :  …Making it Possible
3. Blake Cassels & Graydon: Business is our Signature
4. Borden Ladner Gervais: It Begins with Service
5. Brazeau Seller: Business people. Business law.
6. Clark Wilson: BC’s Law Firm for Business
7. Cox & Palmer: The Difference is a Great Relationship
8. Crease Harman: We Mean Business.
9. Fasken Martineau DuMoulin: Beyond Results (TM)
10. Field Law: Our Practice is Your Solution
11. Fillmore Riley:  Practicing Excellence
12. Fraser Milner Casgrain: Your Future is Our Business
13. Gowling Lafleur Henderson:  A Tradition of Excellence
14. Lang Michener: High Performance (R)
15. Langlois Kronstrom Desjardins: A large firm with a human touch
16. Macleod Dixon: Local Expertise, International Depth
17. McMillan: Take the Lead
18. Robinson Sheppard Shapiro: Our Independence Makes the Difference
19. Siskinds: Leaders in their Field
20. Stewart McKelvey: When Results Count.
21. Zvulony & Co: A Small Firm That Acts Big. (TM)

Reader-contributed taglines:

• Harrison Pensa: In any case.
• Boughton Law Corporation: Built on relationships (TM)
• Harris & Moure: The International Law Firm for Business
• Dolden Wallace Folick: Insurance Law Expertise…It’s Our Policy
• Hull & Hull LLP: Trust Experience (TM)
• Hoyt & Bryan: Partners in Planning, Friends for Life
• Bernson & Burnham, PLLC: “We look at the law differently.”
• Davis LLP: Nationally Established. Internationally Recognized.

Did we miss your firm? or get it wrong entirely? Drop us a note in the comments, or an email in the coming days, and we’ll revise accordingly.

And finally, a huge thanks to Emma Durand-Wood (who now has a profile on the Stem website).  Emma was responsible for pulling this idea from one of our brainstorming sessions, researching and then compiling the list! A great project, with valuable results!

Actually, it’s quite common for blog posts not to receive comments. In the legal industry, and especially with lawyer blogs, we see it all the time.  The truth is the majority of online readers are lurkers. It’s called the 90-9-1 Rule, where 90% of your readers won’t respond in any way, 9% will contribute and participate once in a while, and 1% will do the vast majority of digital interaction.

This can be a difficult phenomenon to explain, but it hardly means that you haven’t connected with your intended audience.  Remember: the more focused the subject, the smaller the target audience. Apply the  90-9-1 rule to most lawyer blog audiences, and it’s a recipe for a comment-free wasteland.  I also think it’s quite unfair to compare a lawyer’s blog comment numbers to the more news-y blogs out there. You can’t compare a lawyer’s substantive commentary to ATL or ABA Journal.

Two important points:

1. Some blog posts just don’t warrant a comment — case in point, see my last post on the sudden abundance of twitter experts our there. It’s received zero comments, but 41 retweets and 1500+ visitors. The post was a fun lark, but clearly not worth commenting on.  That doesn’t mean it didn’t strike a chord or find an audience.
2. There’s always a chance for commentary to connect with readers in the future — Another example: back in 2006 I wrote the Top 10 Uses of RSS in Law Firms.   Three weeks passed and it might have had 30 readers. It subsequently got picked up by Dave Winer, and took on a life of its own.  To this day, that post drives more visitors to my personal blog than anything I’ve written there since. … Side comment: This story is also one of the reasons I still believe in search marketing and the power of positioning content in front of audiences. Blog commentary & search exposure combined continue to have a long-term impact on my own content marketing.

Bottom line: Are comments nice?  Of course they are, but you have to see the big picture.  As most experienced bloggers will tell you, comments are only one form of feedback. Don’t forget to also watch:  site traffic (both post specific, and general trends),  social media mentions, email feedback, mentions on other blogs, and general increases in your profile (eg. offers for speaking engagements) & your personal network (eg. more industry-based friends & contacts).  You need to consider all the available metrics as a group.  Micro-measuring comment counts (or even counting interactions post-by-post…) isn’t going to cut it in face of the 90-9-1 rule.

If anyone reading would like to also take part, please include a #TEPitch hashtag.  And for those of you not on twitter, here’s what I came up with:

Stem does leg work to help law firms get noticed: in search engines & social web + build grass roots brands, trans 2 profile & MSM #TEPitch

Fitting everything into an entry like this is near impossible, so getting down to the company’s core services was essential.  Obviously, our phone rings here at Stem because we are a lawyer SEO company. That’s a foundation, so I’m putting it right up front. We also stick to working within the legal industry. I think that’s decipherable from the company name, but important for the message. Our development of new ideas, fleshing out of web brands, and the ‘trickle up’ effect on media coverage round out the last few words.

While we deliver a fair bit of consulting, both informally within our retainer service and via written reports, I always like to say that Stem executes projects on behalf of clients, and that our opinions come along for the ride. The word consulting is also a tough term to differentiate, so while ‘doing the leg work‘ may be too casual for some, at least for me, it’s a more expressive way of putting it.

I’m also overlooking some of the web development work we do, but again (& like any elevator pitch) something had to give.  I consider web development a ‘value add’ element we bring to client relationships, and (at least for now) not directly why we get hired.

So there you have it. My tweetable elevator pitch for Stem. If you’d like to try the same for your company or organization (or blog, or ???), please do. The more the merrier!

And… Happy July 4th to all our friends & clients down south!

Cheers,
Steve

The law centers are broken down into four core divisions: personal law, business law, government law, and law practice management; with each major area then divided into related sub-centers.

What I like generally about this addition, is that JD Supra seems much easier for the casual visitor. If you’re trying to track down an employment lawyer or personal injury lawyer, there’s now a single location I can point people to (or bookmark) that shows the latest postings, and who are leading contributors.

I also like the top-5 contributor list on each page’s sidebar, which is based on the publishing track record within the category. The top-10 contributor list on the homepage is great for larger groups or big contributors, but these top-5 lists are a great way to stand out with 20 to 50 documents.

And if I put my SEO hat on for a moment, the practice centers also offer a host of new landing page opportunities for topical searches from the search engines. Making legal content more accessibile is JD Supra’s goal, and the additional search exposure adds to that offering.  I expect the link value from the practice centers will distribute evenly across the site, and more importantly, into each of the content items. Both the contributor profile pages and the content pages should see an ongoing benefit.

But probably the biggest difference for me, is the balance JD Supra now has between search and browse. As many of my fellow law librarians can tell you, information seekers often vary in terms of their search-vs-browse orientation.  Not everyone is the same in that regard.  What JD Supra had been lacking, was the functionality to support the browsing style.  The practice centers, in my view, fill that gap and create a more complete service.

Congratulations to everyone at JD Supra!

And before anyone guesses wrong, the theme idea and craftsmanship was all John – So full credit to him!  And really, you don’t contrive a story like this.

What I would like to write about, web strategy wise, is the opportunity Blawg Review provides for legal bloggers looking to establish themselves.  Around since its first edition in April 2005, Blawg Review is one of the oldest and can certainly now be described as one of the strongest rotating blog carnivals. Each week someone new hosts the review on their blog, offering a personalized round-up of commentary (in this case, legal blogs) from the previous week.

Hosting a blog carnival has always been a solid web-marketing tactic, but like most things that work well in the online space, isn’t always easy to pinpoint why.

Two of the big issues I see with many new bloggers is that they are often: link-poor and (web) relationship deprived. Getting past those barriers, while difficult, requires: 1) writing commentary that is substantive & genuine in tone and 2) having the personal web-network of relationships that can help increase exposure.  Gaining attention in the blogosphere, simply put, requires both ‘the steak’ and ‘the sizzle’.

So how does hosting a carnival like Blawg Review help? A couple of ways. First, there’s a benefit on the link front – the host blog usually receives its fair share of quality incoming links. Links, I might add, that are based on substance (not schemes) and links that are strong on subject relevance.

And second, the host blog puts itself on the radar of the legal blogging community.  At a number likely over 5000 now, that’s not always an easy task.

Now let me make my confession (’cause Ed’s waiting for it) – I’ve never actually hosted Blawg Review.  So now that I’ve told you what a great idea hosting is, let me remedy my cobbler’s kids routine and say that I’m signed on to host while the Olympics are on in Vancouver (as is the Canadian Trademark Blog).

This is something I regret not giving priority to when I first started Stem, and probably a lesson to be learned by others who are looking to raise their own blogging profile.

The title of month’s article is a bit of a misnomer, and my suggestion of a rule is a mental guideline more than anything. The basic premise is to be careful about taking raw unfiltered conversational exchanges online, and automating (RSS imports, Widgets) their re-publication to your business network. As stated in the article:

My formal-to-informal rule is simply that it’s always ok to route formal commentary to informal and conversational web tools; but that unfiltered, informal, or conversational tools should be considered a place of final destination.

For those who consistently stay on message, don’t mix their personal & business networks, or see little use for flippant or sarcastic comments, having a content routing strategy may make little difference. Unfortunately, I seem to fail those tests on a number of fronts. :)  But that’s ok. The important message here is self-reflection in an honest way, and recognizing when fail-safe measures are required.

As I said at the end of the article, I don’t know if everyone else needs a rule… but it makes sense to me. And if it raises awareness of potential problems with content routing, especially for those lawyers with more conservative clientele, then mission accomplished.

As an aside, I’ve altered my personal publishing routine, and will now try to coordinate new article releases to Stem’s JD Supra account. The rationale, for those interested, is two-fold. First, Canadian published content isn’t treated as nicely in the US search results (a.k.a. geo targeting), so I’m attempting to improve cross-border search exposure; and second, I want those JD Supra syndication partnerships to help increase content distribution.