You've heard the hype. Print media is dead. The Yellow Pages are passé. You have to be on-line to survive.
Websites aren't enough. After all, everyone has a website – big deal. The only thing a website provides is an on-line brochure of your firm. The typical website provides little or no ability to interact with current or potential clients.
You need something more. So what should it be – a blog perhaps? Or what about all those popular social networking sites you've heard about, like: Facebook, My Space, LinkedIn, and Twitter?
Do lawyers really need to do that stuff?
They do if they want to survive. I've read estimates that over 80% of people begin their search for a lawyer by using one of the popular search engines like Google or Yahoo. If someone searched for a lawyer on-line under your specialty, would your name come up at the top of the listings?
Even if you have a great website, the likelihood is that you need to do more to attract new clients and consistently be at the top of the search engines.
The lesson is clear: lawyers who ignore social media do so at their peril. Your legal competitors are on-line and using social media and are gaining new clients that in the past might have come to you. So stop what you're doing, become a little tech-savvy, and start getting involved in things. Now. Time's a wasting.
Oh, I hear your response.
"I don't even really know what social media is – how am I going to be part of it?"
I'll wager you know more than you think. Remember listservs, email groups, and message boards? Ever heard of wikis – like Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopedia that anyone can edit?
Well, those are the precursors of social media. After that came blogs – which as many of you know are basically websites that can be updated anytime using simple software. Blogs also allow comments to be made by readers. There are millions of blogs on the Internet – and thousands written by lawyers on every imaginable legal topic.
"I can't possibly do all those things and still have time to practice law, can I?"
Just as surely as computers have replaced typewriters, as email has taken over as a routine means of communication, and as legal research has gone from going to the law library to going on-line, social networking is here to stay. And if you don't participate, you'll be left behind – wondering why you don't have as many clients as you used to, why your bottom line keeps getting worse every year, and why your practice is slowly dwindling.
Social networking is not just a passing fad. It's being used by millions of people every single day – and it's being used by your current and potentially future clients too.
Social networking is just an extension of listservs, email groups, message boards, and blogs. But unlike those methods of communicating, it's often faster, more interactive, and provides quicker feedback between the participants.
LinkedIn, for example, allows lawyers to put up their resume and have it act sort of like a website where other can be invited to "connect" with you. You can send and receive recommendations, write email, join groups that interest you, ask and answer on-line questions, and in general be part of a wide-ranging professional social networking site.
Less professional and definitely more social, are sites like Facebook and MySpace where lawyers can post more personal information about themselves and let others – including clients that might be on the sites – get to know them better. They're often informal places where it's easy to discuss non-legal topics: interesting movies or on-line videos, local or national politics, favorite restaurants, the latest N.Y. Times bestseller … whatever.
The latest and (at least at this writing) most popular social media site is Twitter. On this site you post just 140 character messages about anything that interests you. Like other social networking sites, you have "followers" and interesting people you follow so that it becomes easy to follow what they're doing as you post what is happening in your life.
Twitter has been described as something like being at a big party with everyone talking at once. You're in the center of the room and have the opportunity to pick out a few folks at this huge party and carry on a conversation with them – while still being aware of all the hubbub going on around you.
Of all the social media tools, Twitter is the most immediate. It's sort of like instant messaging to as many followers as you have (which for some people is in the thousands) and seeing who responds. From there, the conversation can go anywhere. Hopefully, if you make enough connections, it'll lead to legal work.
Ultimately, all these social media sites are just another way for you to interact with people and promote yourself. Each site has its own rules or etiquette needed to fit in. But it's not much different that joining your local Rotary club, Chamber of Commerce or being a volunteer at the soup kitchen or any other involvement in your community. You become a part of a group to be part of a group, help your local community, make new business contacts, do something that is interesting, and hopefully meet some new friends.
With social media sites you do the same thing – only you do it on-line. So what are you waiting for?
This post supported by Injury Claims Lawyers.
It’s true that any lawyer who doesn’t want to adapt might not survive for long in the legal arena. But remember the ancient promise of technology in the 80’s? Paperless office! Wait, we still use paper, despite the advances. Now, the essentially same promise returns: paperless ads in the future. The funny thing is, its not the medium that matters (well it does), but how you advertise is usually the big problem. If you have the same tacky ad in the yellow pages and online, what’s there to expect? You still won't survive.
Posted by: Tom St. Louis | June 12, 2009 at 01:58 AM