In my early days as a social media user, I had a small network and, as a result, a small voice. I was like an iPhone speaker fighting to be heard in a stadium full of people.
How did I find an audience? Very simple, I enlisted the help of allies.
Some of the allies had small audiences as I did, but by joining forces our combined audience was much larger. Then I met friends like Julio Varela, Gini Dietrich, and Justin Bracket and all of our networks grew together.
What did my allies do for me? When I was first writing my posts, they would share them with their networks. If the content was really good, they would comment about it in their blog posts. I was hitting more than ten times the number of people.
My audience back then: 1,000 followers
The combined audience of myself and my allies: 20,000+ followers
In the same way, lawyers within the same firm need to be allied with each other. When lawyer A writes a new blog post, lawyer B should share it with his LinkedIn network. When lawyer B writes a new post, lawyer A should do the same. Just imagine if every lawyer shared the content that their neighbors created. The potential audience of that content would go from 250 (the average number of connections on Linkedin by an AmLaw 100 lawyer, according to our research of over 5,000 profiles) to 25,000!
What about a crossover? What if some of them have the same connections? Will those connections feel like they’re being ‘spammed?’
Good question, but to answer the question we need to understand the nature of social networks. These aren’t inboxes filling up with information, they are rivers of information, with articles constantly flowing by. When the first article is posted, if you don’t happen to be online that morning, you miss it. The second article, you might just see when you log on to LinkedIn. If the article is posted repeatedly, you may think, “looks like this is something I should read, people keep sharing it.”
Crossover and shared connections are a good thing. We could take this to the extreme and ask, “What if 500 lawyers at the same firm share the same article at the same time?” This would not be a good thing. But let’s face it, does any law firm ever have the ability to get all 500 of their lawyers to do the same thing at the same time? At most, they get 10% to 20% of their lawyers to share something, but each will share what they want, when they want, in their own way.
The internet is a lonely place sometimes; That’s why you need allies. Every lawyer who is blogging, writing, and sharing online shouldn’t have to look any further than their own firm to find allies to help build them up and create a larger audience for their content.