This is another one from our 100 online legal marketing tips redux series.
Maybe tattoos aren't that permanent anymore.
Sitting at your desktop or tapping away on your smartphone can feel like a private activity. But we all know that what we push into the web ether is neither private nor temporary, right?
Seems like a pretty straightforward rule to follow.
Unfortunately, many lawyers forget this simple rule which can sometimes get them into hot water. Others think that they can avoid the general rule with various privacy setting configurations. Let me save you some trouble, you can't. Or perhaps more accurately, you ought not rely on privacy settings when your reputation, license to practice or your professional obligations to your clients are on the line.
Which brings us back to the basic assumption of public and permanent.
While public and permanent should give you some pause, it really shouldn't cripple you. We can think of plenty of things lawyers can post online that shouldn't get them into trouble. Pictures of cats, what they had for breakfast... Okay, so maybe those don't represent the best examples.
Nonetheless, you might find that the "stuff" with which you are most comfortable publishing publicly and permanently, is also the "stuff" that people want to find about you online.
This might include stuff that shows your personality or provides insight into how your practice "works."
When we report on the "performance" of relevant social networking metrics, we commonly find that the more social posts are the ones for which audiences provide the most engagement. Put simply, people prefer to engage with lawyers who are interesting, entertaining and yes, in very rare instances, actually funny.
Most lawyers conclude that social networks are about getting their "marketing message" in front of their audiences on a regular basis. They take the Burger King approach. Expose people to 400 tweets, status updates, posts, etc, every single day and these people will think of you when they are in need of your services.
Unfortunately, more often, they end up filtering you (unfollowing, blocking and reporting you for spam). You see, that is not what people want and it is certainly not what they love.
Over the years, law firm prospects have sent us reports from just about all of our competitors. Unfortunately, even today, some law firm marketing agencies still mislead their clients via "reporting." One particularly egregious example comes in the form of ranking reports. Which prompted this LinkedIn post. To my surprise, I received a lot of […]
John Wanamaker supposedly said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." In an an effort to figure out "what half is working," attribution was born. Coupled with a transition from traditional, offline ads to digital media, attribution became the holy grail for analyzing advertising spends. But […]
I recently asked ChatGPT, "What are some of the top personal injury law firms in Chicago?? Actually, first I ask "who are some of the top personal injury lawyers in Chicago?" ChatGPT couldn't handle that one, so I modified the prompt. ChatGPT listed five very well-known firms downtown. Can you guess the other four? That's […]
If you're like me, you have some degree of AI, ChatGBT, Bard, exhaustion. Now don't get me wrong, this is stuff is remarkable and is changing, well, a lot. But before you hook up the ChatGPT API to your WordPress API and crank out 10,000 pages, here are a few things to think about. Let's […]
If you know me, you know my opinions about links and SEO advice from Google. If you don't, here's the TL;DR: Meh, links! Meaning, all things being equal, links still remain a competitive difference maker for ranking. Take Google's SEO advice with several grains of salt. Google has no economic incentive to help your site […]
The best marketing advice I can give you is to be authentic. Of course, you don't find that very helpful in terms of meeting your growth goals. So, you might decide to game the system. As I'm writing this, one of the more popular ways to gain the system is to pay for engagement. This […]
The following post was written by ChatGPT. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt or context. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way that businesses, including law firms, market themselves to potential clients. One way that a law firm could use […]
How long does SEO take? When can I expect to see results? What results should I expect to see? These are all reasonable questions that we field from lawyers every day. And, like many legal answers, the answer is: It depends. Yes, I know that's not the answer you wanted. But it's the most honest […]
And how much time should they spend doing it? I recently had the privilege of chatting with Tyson, Jim, and Conrad for an upcoming episode of The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. If you're not familiar with The Maximum Lawyer community, you should definitely check it out. Jim asked a really great question about who should do […]
