This Law Firm Gets Social Media @allenmatkins
This is a guest post by Samantha Collier.
Every Tuesday I’ll be profiling a law firm that “get” social media here on Adrian’s blog. My previous guest post examined the social media activities of law firm Goodwin Procter, this week we’re looking at AmLaw 200, California based law firm Allen Matkins whose lawyers specialize in real estate, labor, tax, and business law. This post will discuss how Allen Matkins utilizes their website, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and blogging for marketing and business development.
Website
Law firm websites are notoriously famous for being bland, boring and extremely self promotional. Thanks to social media, and experts like Robert Algeri, more and more law firms are redesigning their websites to showcase the information their clients and potential clients are most interested in = lawyer bio’s, contact info, case studies and relevant social media information. Allen Matkins is one of those law firms.
The first thing you’ll notice when you visit Allen Matkins’ well designed website is a dynamic slideshow of attorney videos, awards and upcoming events. It grabs your attention and draws you in – exactly what you want from a law firm website. To the right of the slideshow are eight attorney video thumbnails displayed in a clean and simple fashion. Videos are watched without leaving the website, which is a great way of keeping visitors on your site. Social media accounts are displayed on the bottom of the page and include Youtube, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Personally, I love seeing social media accounts prominently displayed as long as they are kept current. The only edit I’d make is I’d link to the Allen Matkins LinkedIn Company Page instead of the LinkedIn Allen Matkins Group from the homepage. Attorney bio’s are easily accessed from the homepage and blogs are easy to find too. Allen Matkins gets an A+ from me in the website category. Read more
Thought Leadership 2.0
Originally published in the National Law Journal on November 17, 2011
In the world of marketing, and particularly with the explosion of social media, no term is more overused than “thought leadership.” Yet the expression is often misunderstood. To illuminate why, I interviewed James Durham, a lawyer and chief marketing officer of McGuireWoods. I hoped he could help me demonstrate that although “thought leadership” is overused, the underlying concept remains essential to legal marketing.
Durham has been speaking and writing about thought leadership for lawyers for more than a decade. Before becoming a CMO, he had his own consulting firm, working with hundreds of law firms around the country.
Thought leadership — which essentially means developing a reputation as a leading expert in a particular field — forces lawyers to highlight one specialty, and this can cause great discomfort. “Won’t my existing clients feel alienated if I market myself to a more narrow niche?” some might wonder. “Won’t it take me out of the running for all of the other types of work I do?” Read more
Web Traffic Will Tell Law Firms What’s Working
By Adrian Dayton and Adam Stock
Originally published in the National Law Journal on November 10, 2011
An entrepreneur who had just sold his business for $20 million explained two fundamental rules of business this way:
“There are really only two things that matter in building a successful business,” he replied. “How much one unit costs and how much you can sell that same unit for.”
He explained that nothing he learned in business school was more important than understanding the cost of goods and pricing. Those two factors more than any other determine the success or failure of a business.
Law firms need to understand a similarly vital calculation when it comes to digital marketing: How much are firms paying for each set of eyeballs that looks at their website? How can knowing this help firms make better strategic decisions in their marketing spend? Read more
Earning Trust: It’s Not All About You
Originally published in the National Law Journal on October 27, 2011
Charles Green shared a story about a doctor of more than 25 years’ experience. “In all my years talking to drug representatives,” he quoted the doctor, “I have never heard a single one recommend the drug of a competitor. Therefore, I can never trust them.”
Green, co-author of the management book, The Trusted Advisor, was illustrating a point — that selflessness is the path to earning trust. “The pharmaceutical industry is such a great natural fit to become an adviser to their clients,” he said during an interview. “Yet they are squandering this opportunity.”
We see this same problem in the legal industry, but now, with the proliferation of social media, lawyers have an opportunity to become advisers rather then pitch men. The first step is understanding what it means to be a trusted adviser. Read more
This Law Firm Gets Social Media @GoodwinProcter
This post is by Samantha Collier. Every Monday she will profile a law firm that does social media right. This week it’s Goodwin Procter, one of the nation’s leading law firms with offices all over the world including Boston, Hong Kong, Los Angeles and London. Goodwin Proccter LLP is also number 35 on the AmLaw 100 list for 2010.
Website
Goodwin Procter’s website is simple yet impressive. Read more
The ‘Moneyball’ Lesson for Firms
As originally published in the National Law Journal on October 10, 2011
I convinced my wife to go watch the new Brad Pitt movie, Moneyball, with me. The movie is based on the true story of an Oakland A’s baseball team that, with a payroll of $30 million, had to compete with teams like the New York Yankees, which spent more than $120 million. Many regional law firms face a similar dilemma, lacking money, advertising and name recognition. What lessons can they learn fromMoneyball?
Ask the Right Questions
Pitt’s character, Billy Beane, realizes that he can’t beat teams like the New York Yankees by playing their game. He is told by a recent Yale economics graduate that baseball teams are asking the wrong questions. They are locked on three statistics: runs batted in, home runs and batting averages, while overlooking the on-base percentage that takes into account when a player is walked. Beane changed the focus from whether a player will be an all-star to whether he would increase the odds of winning games. At law firms, instead of asking new recruits about law review and class ranking, we should be asking, “Can you bring in business?” Read more
Blogging levels the playing field
Originally posted on the National Law Journal on October 5, 2011
Late in September, in what can only be described as a David-vs.-Goliath battle, the New England Patriots came to Buffalo, N.Y., with all the swagger in the world. They had beaten the Buffalo Bills 15 times in row, boasted the leading offense in the NFL and showed up ready to extend the winning streak to 16.
Then the unthinkable happened. The Patriots lost the game on a last-second field goal. What happened?
In football, they have an expression: “On any given Sunday, anything can happen.” Which means that the team that should win can lose. Is this true in the legal industry? Is there a chance for small firms to compete with Big Law?
Social media and blogging are helping the smaller firms to do just that. This is due in part to “information democracy,” Dion Algeri of Great Jakes Marketing Co. explained recently during a conference in New York City organized by Hildebrandt Baker Robbins. Online, the content you create — whether blog posts, newsletters or alerts — speak for themselves. Good information is passed along, while poorly written and unhelpful information is ignored. Read more
BigLaw: Facebook Doesn’t Make Sense for Lawyers, Right?
Originally published in Technolawyer on July 07, 2011
The prevailing wisdom among law firms regarding social media goes a little like this: “LinkedIn is a great professional network so we should have as many of our lawyers on there as possible. Twitter has only minor relevance, and Facebook we should avoid altogether.” I hate these broad sweeping statements because they show little thought for how people — clients and prospective clients in particular — use these tools on a daily basis.
Facebook Is a Dinner Party, Not a Billboard
Facebook is extremely useful to help build existing relationships. Is it too personal? Absolutely. But that’s the point. When you have worked with a client for years don’t the relationships tend to get a little more personal? Don’t you want to know when your biggest client’s children graduate from high school or perform in the school play? These types of relationships are incredibly valuable and go beyond business. It is likely these people send work to you in part because they sincerely like you and you sincerely enjoy working with them. Read more
Why you can ignore Google+, for now
Originally published in the National Law Journal on September 19, 2011.
A couple of weeks ago, I traveled to Memphis, Tenn., to participate in the International Legal Technology Association’s national convention. During a discussion called, “What your lawyers need to know about social media,” we panelists were asked what we thought of Google+.
There was some serious backlash when I suggested that Google+ might fizzle out, just like Google Buzz and Google Wave (Google’s previous attempts to play in the social media sandbox) before it. The other panelists adamantly disagreed, and my poorly received comment was tweeted and re-tweeted across the Internet.
For those unfamiliar with Google+, it is kind of like Facebook but with more intuitive privacy settings. Each connection on Google+ is assigned to a circle — “friends” circle, “business people” circle, “strangers I haven’t seen since grade school” circle, and so on. This is really a great feature, and it makes it so easy to keep your business life separate from your personal life. The only problem is, there is already a very easy way to keep those two separate. It is called Facebook and LinkedIn.
I know what you’re thinking — wouldn’t it be better to have it all in one site?
Read more
Richard Susskind on Social Media, Legal Marketing and “Irrational Rejectionism”
As originally published in the National Law Journal on September 01, 2011
I had the chance to interview Richard Susskind, author of the bestseller, The End of Lawyers (Oxford Press 2008). I asked him about his perceptions of social media, marketing for law firms and the future of the legal industry.
Susskind is one of our leading futurists, keeping busy as a lecturer and consultant on information technology to large law firms and legal departments. Since 1998, he has served as adviser to a series of chief justices of England and Wales. He teaches at Oxford University and writes for The Times of London.
When Susskind began sharing his ideas 30 years ago, he felt like a “voice in the wilderness,” he said. Things have changed a lot in the last few years, but “it’s very hard to walk into a room full of millionaires and tell them they’ve got their business model wrong.”
This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this sentiment. During a meeting at a white-shoe law firm earlier this year, a frustrated marketing expert complained that the lawyers were making too much money to be interested in changing the way they did things.
“Do firms really need to change?” I asked Susskind. Read more
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Adrian Dayton is a lawyer and author of the book Social Media for Lawyers.
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