A brief review of notable news and law firm marketing tips

By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

It’s the time of year for awards. The People’s Choice Awards were just handed out. The Academy Award nominees are about to be named. And the 2011 Missouri Lawyers Awards, honoring Missouri legal professionals and law firms for their work in 2010, were recently revealed.

Special congratulations go to all of the Legal Media Matters clients who were among the honorees. Missouri Lawyers Weekly will present the awards at a Jan. 28 event in St. Louis.

In other news, Legal Media Matters is preparing to launch its Law & Gadget blog, providing technology, book and gadget reviews for busy lawyers. The blog will be available in both English and Spanish versions for lawyers and abogados. Stay tuned for more information.

Now, a quick roundup of noteworthy items you may have missed.

How to Write Tweets That Reach a Broad Audience

What can you possibly do with the 140-character limit of a single tweet? In this post, we provide a step-by-step guide to making the most of that limited space.

New Data: Post to Your Facebook Page Every Other Day for the Most Likes

Social media scientist Dan Zarrella tackles the question: “How often should I post to my Facebook page?” For those whose goal is to gather “likes,” Zarrella has crunched the numbers and found that posting every other day had the best rate of success. Posting once or twice a day was second best; anything over three times a day tended to be least “liked.”

Delete Me: Can Acrobat PDF Redaction Be Trusted?

As Mark Niemann-Ross notes in this article, published in this month’s Oregon State Bar Bulletin, when the Chicago Tribune published former Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s subpoena to President Barack Obama, it included not only the “official” subpoena but also all of the edits, because the PDF document had not been redacted. This article explains why Acrobat’s PDF redaction works.

Is 2011 the year in which you keep your resolution to publish regularly to your blawg?

Legal blogs are a good way to keep potential clients informed, rack up inbound links to your website, showcase your expertise and provide practice-related content to search engines.

For many busy practitioners, though, blawgs are also hard to maintain, another legal marketing to-do item that never quite seems to get done.

If your New Year’s resolution included posting more regularly to your blog but you’re finding that you need some help, contact Legal Media Matters. We create blawg editorial calendars and draft blog content for lawyers with blogs on a variety of platforms, including WordPress, Findlaw and Justia. Our blawg content writers are experienced lawyer/journalists who understand the law and know how to write for a broad audience.

If you need assistance in coming up with a blog topic strategy, someone to draft blog entries to intersperse with your own posts or a comprehensive solution that allows you to make the most of your blawg’s legal marketing potential, contact Legal Media Matters to discuss our high-quality content and affordable rates.

To ensure that you don’t miss out on these useful tips, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

]]> http://legalmediamatters.com/news-roundup-legal-marketing/feed/ 0 http://legalmediamatters.com/legal-marketing-take-a-referral-source-to-lunch/ http://legalmediamatters.com/legal-marketing-take-a-referral-source-to-lunch/#comments Mon, 28 Jun 2010 19:03:06 +0000 Geri L. Dreiling http://legalmediamatters.com/?p=1441 Use legal PR to reach your clients’ trusted advisors

By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

Yesterday I gave presentation to a group of students enrolled in a mediation training course offered by St. Louis attorney and mediator Marta Papa. The topic: how to promote your mediation practice.

In addition to volunteering information, I came away with some new ideas.

One of the PR ideas I highlighted is the importance of promoting one’s mediation practice to referral sources — trusted advisors whose recommendation carries great weight when it comes to the selection of an attorney or mediator.

As I discussed in my YouTube video, traditional marketing involves the attorney using PR efforts to reach the client directly.

But referral marketing is a three-step approach, best exemplified in this diagram.

Papa took it a step further and shared one of her favorite referral marketing strategies. She makes it her goal to meet three referral sources each week for lunch. A problem that has legal ramifications also often has a financial, medical or emotional component.

A family lawyer, Papa had an extensive list of professionals whose work complemented her practice, including:

• Certified public accountants
• Mortgage brokers
• Physicians
• Psychiatrists
• Financial advisors
• Stockbrokers
• Insurance agent
• Real estate agents
• Clergy
• Business evaluators

She approached the professionals not from the standpoint of how they could send cases to her but instead in terms of how the professionals could help her clients. Some of her clients needed the services of professionals, and they looked to Papa for recommendations.

Take-Away Tips:

1. Identify professionals outside the legal community who also help your clients deal with the underlying issues that gave rise to the legal problem.
2. Meet for coffee or lunch as a way to introduce yourself, learn about a professional’s business and describe your practice.
3. Remember that referral marketing must be a two-way street. Don’t ask for help without offering assistance.

To ensure that you don’t miss out on this valuable information, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

At Legal Media Matters, we provide legal public relations, law firm marketing and attorney website content writing services.

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• How To Create Strategic Referral Sources and Referral Partnerships (followupsuccess.com)
• How to ask for referrals as a financial advisor (slideshare.net)
• Building Referrals (thriveal.com)

Be sure to include these basic elements in your law firm’s next release

Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

In law school, students learn how to write legal memos for partners, prepare briefs for judges and draw up contracts for clients. But not  many ever imagine there will come a time when they must know how to write a press release for the media. Increasingly, though, attorneys are doing just that — yet few have access to the built-in public relations or legal marketing departments that are routine in most large law firms.

There are many reasons behind the growing interest in circulating a press releases.

From the promotional standpoint, a legal press release is a great way to attract media attention to a recent verdict or settlement and a useful and economical vehicle for announcing new hires, awards or honors that will be picked up by local newspapers, trade publications and alumni magazines.

A legal press release also confers search engine optimization advantages. When uploaded to a law firm’s website, it provides a new page of fresh content. (With Google's recent search engine updates, fresh content has become even important.) When circulated through a site such as BusinessWire, the legal news release provides an immediate search engine boost and inbound links to the law firm’s website.

In this blog entry I’ll discuss some of the basic elements of a press release that deserve particular attention during the drafting process. You'll want to make sure you include these items in a press release that is ideally no more than 400 words.

1.   Headline and subhead

The headline should include the law firm’s name and a brief description that immediately lets the reader know the type of release he or she is reading. Does it cover a verdict or suit filing, or announce the hiring of a new associate? The subhead should provide further detail.

In addition, the reader should be able to scan the heading and subhead to obtain a concise synopsis of the remainder of the release.

For SEO purposes, the headline and subhead are an ideal place to insert keywords. In addition to the firm’s name, be sure to include practice area keywords.

2.  The nut graph

The nut graph, the first paragraph of the release, concisely explains the news value of the story. It sums up the entire point of the release in a sentence. Writing the nut graph can feel counterintuitive to lawyers, who are trained to lay out the logic before writing the conclusion. It feels, in some respects, like delivering the punchline of a joke and then providing the setup.

3. Details that allow a reporter to easily verify the information contained in the release

A good reporter independently verifies the information contained in the legal press release. You can make his or her job easier by including a few obvious elements, especially if the release pertains to a verdict, settlement or suit filing:

• Style of the case
• Case number
• Filing date
• Verdict date
• The court in which the case was filed

4. Description of the firm

Consider the legal press release as another tool for educating the media and potential clients about your practice. Include a brief paragraph summarizing your practice areas. Hyperlink your law firm’s website and include a phone number and e-mail address.

Here’s a link to the Breaking News section of our website which contains both of the releases used for this blog post. If you would prefer to outsource your press release writing, contact Legal Media Matters; we prepare and circulate releases for law firms nationwide.

For more information, contact me by filling out the online contact form, calling or sending an e-mail to geri@legalmediamatters.com.

To ensure that you don’t miss out on this valuable information, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

At Legal Media Matters, we provide legal public relations, law firm marketing and attorney website content writing services.

An in-house lawyer wants to reach executives and explain the services a general counsel offers

By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, I invited my Twitter followers to pose a question (in 140 characters or fewer, of course) that I would take up on this blog. One lawyer sent a direct message wanting to know the best keywords to attract chief executive officers and chief financial officers who want to learn more about what their in-house lawyers can do for them.

The question is much more complicated than it might seem at first blush.

Here’s a driving analogy. If someone asks how to start a car, the easiest answer is: “Just turn the key in the ignition.” But there’s a complicated assortment of processes going on behind the dashboard and beneath the hood that are responsible for starting the engine.  Even though the key signals to the engine that it is time to start, it is the first piece of a complicated process.

In other words, simply possessing a key will not make a car run — and the same key won’t start every car.

As with cars, there’s often a multilayered process that is engaged in before keywords will work. As with car keys, the keywords that will deliver the best performance are going to vary; one size does not fit all.

Legal Keywords and Problem-Solving

Keywords help people sort through the huge pool of information provided on the Internet and find what they’re looking for. But vague keywords, or inefficient keywords in areas where there is a lot of expert competition, are like replacement keys that are almost exact duplicates: They’re not going to work in the way you want them to.

To discover what types of keywords might attract them to your website or blog, you must first figure out what keeps executives up at night. Once you’ve done that, you can explain how an in-house lawyer is a problem-solver and ally when it comes to providing solutions to those specific problems.

Is an executive looking for loan workout help or bankruptcy reorganization advice? If the company is located in the U.S., does the executive have questions about the new healthcare legislation and how it applies to his or her company? What are the legal pitfalls a domestic company looking to expand abroad must avoid?

Once you’ve brainstormed ideas, it’s time to test them. There are several free tools — among them Google Insights, Wordtracker and Google AdWords — you can use to conduct research. (For more on the mechanical steps of finding keywords used in actual searches and then including them in your content, read “Law Firm Websites: Seven Tips for Legal Content Writing.”)

For a test run, I chose the simple phrase “in-house counsel” to see what would come up.

At Google Insights, a worldwide search of the phrase revealed that the top searches involved finding jobs and salary information.

I went to Wordtracker and plugged in “in-house counsel” to see what would come up. The most-searched phrase turned out to be the most specific grouping of keywords (a “long tail”): “in-house counsel obligation regarding spoliation.” Several job search-related queries also surfaced. There were two searches recorded for the keyword phrase “evolving role of in-house counsel.”

At Google AdWords, the “in-house counsel” query once again pulled up several job-related searches. However, it also indicated that the phrase “general counsel” is extremely popular and that “attorney client privilege in house counsel” is one substantive area that receives some inquiries.

There are, of course, additional strategies and techniques to sort and sift the information, but this brief exercise illustrates four points:

1. When it comes to keywords, there is no virtual master key.
2. Avoiding certain keyword phrases, such as the ones related to job searches, is just as important as finding the phrases you want to use.
3. The best-performing site will have one page dedicated to each distinct phrase — for example, a page addressing spoliation, another explaining attorney-client privilege and a third discussing the evolving role of in-house counsel. (For more information on how to use your keywords on a page, read “Three Keyword Rules for Law Firm Website.”)
4. You must measure the performance of your Web pages and keywords. Most sites require monitoring and adjustment. Because keyword selection isn’t as straightforward as one might hope, you may find one set of keywords performing extremely well and another set underperforming. (For more information on measurement, read “How to Install Google Analytics to Measure Your Marketing Campaign.”)

Integrate Your Legal Keyword Efforts with Media Outreach

At Legal Media Matters, we research keywords, develop strategies based on the basis of our clients' goals and then write content. We also emphasize the importance of integrating online and traditional public relations strategies.

In addition to your online outreach, don’t forget traditional print publications as a means of reaching out to executives. Some of the best places for this type of outreach are the so-called industry bibles and trusted trade publications that accept guest articles. Review the editorial calendar to find an opening. (For more on this process, see “Writer’s Guidelines and Guest Articles,” and “Editorial Calendars and Guest Articles.”)

Another way to educate your audience is to post comments to articles related to your topics. In both instances, comments and guest articles can serve as the initial means of engaging your target audience. A website address or link back to your blog, if an executive is reading the information online, will allow him or her to continue the conversation — and may also provide valuable inbound links to your site, boosting its performance and the reach of your keywords. (For more ideas on finding your audience, see “Law Firm Marketing: To Draw Clients In, Reach Out.”)

If you need help researching keywords, writing content or devising a print publication placement strategy, contact Legal Media Matters. We can help you with your legal content writing project and tailor a legal marketing and public relations plan tailored to your firm’s unique goals.

To ensure that you don’t miss out on this valuable information, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.