Thanks to database technology and various analytics that we have access to we are able to more narrowly define and target subsets of our clients and prospects.  This is often referred to as vertical marketing.

It’s been interesting to me to reflect on our industry over the past 12 years and see the very significant differences in the way that we practice business development and marketing in 2008 versus that way it was done in the 1990’s.  Marketing is no longer as effective when done with the shotgun approach.   Mass media still works, but other types of relationship driven strategies are becoming far more effective.

Are you engaging in a conversation with your clients and propects?  Is there a developing relationship?  Have you embraced social networking and all that it has to offer?

Over the last few months I conducted a series of market research surveys in law firms throughout the country.  One of the things I assessed is the most important factors for choosing a law firm.  The number one answer was “someone you trust recommends the firm.”

Let’s think about that.  If your clients are most likely to come to you because someone they trust recommends you, then doesn’t it makes sense for us to spend far more time building relationships…the kind of relationships that lead to great word of mouth on your behalf?

I am writing this post from Coeur d’Alene in Idaho.  The M&L group has just finished the first day of their 3 day conference at this beautiful lakeside resort.  I haven’t been to M&L for a few years, and it has been so nice to see friends that I haven’t seen for quite some time.  Of course, Bill Berg is one of my favorites.  Bill is the one that first took a chance on me when I left my position with a Philadelphia law firm and ventured out as a consultant.  My friend and client Terry Bryant is here.  I always get such a kick out of Terry.  We share a thing about time.  I had to laugh yesterday when I was leaving the Spokane airport for the 40 minute trip to the resort.  Terry and a few other attorneys were waiting to get on a shuttle to make the trip.  As I walked by Terry heading towards my rental car he was looking at his watch saying that the shuttle was not meeting his time schedule.  So Terry and 4 others jumped in the rental car with me and we had a fun trip over.  I’ve been working with Rainwater, Holt & Sexton for quite awhile now but we had never actually met in person until yesterday.   Mike is holding down the fort back in Arkansas but both Stephen Holt and Bob Sexton are here. 

A couple of my Atlanta clients came in this afternoon - Tom Ashenden and Bruce Millar.  Greg Stokes, also from Atlanta will be here tomorrow.  Greg has a terrific marketing director, Melanie, and I was so glad to get to meet her this evening.  Melanie gets things done.  It’s great.  She is a mover shaker!

I could go on and on but the hour is late and I want to wrap this up.  I do want to mention one resource that I discussed during my talk today and that is www.ustream.tv.  I have a test site set up and it’s at this link:  www.ustream.tv/channel/legal-marketing-cafe.

Las Vegas attorney Richard Harris and I chatted at the cocktail party tonight and we set Richard up on UStream.TV.  If you want to take a look, here is a link to his show site:  http://www.ustream.tv/channel/las-vegas-personal-injury-lawyer.  Obviously he hasn’t done a broadcast yet but my guess is that he will before long!

 If you’d like to know more about UStream.TV, feel free to email me at cindy@cindyspeaker.com and I’ll help you get started!

Ustream.TV is catching on like wildfire.  It’s a technology that allows virtually anyone with a $100 webcam to broadcast a live TV show over the Internet.  And that’s exactly what I did for the first time tonight.  You can see the rather rough and raw video at the link below:

Live Video streamed by Ustream

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/legal-marketing-cafe 

Don’t be too critical - I wanted to capture my first attempt so that hopefully we will witness a progression as a better understanding of the interface emerges!

If you’d like to know more about Ustream.TV, check out this 6 minute video with the vision of the two West Point founders.

I’ve been hearing about a web 2.0 site called “Twitter.”  When somebody uses twitter they are said to “tweet.”  I have to tell you that this terminology really didn’t strike me as anything that I would ever be involved in.  However, tonight I signed up for my own twitter account and now I tweet!  As a matter of fact if you go to the calendar page on my website you will be able to follow my twitter account. 

Here’s why I did it.  I continue to study and explore social media and tonight I am listening to a series of videos, one of which is about www.twitter.com.  The forecast is that this is a rapidly growing phenomena and I so I want to understand it. 

Recency often replaces authority.  Google is giving us an in to page one as they continue to change the rules.  How is it affecting media?  When I search for something that is current, I see results on news from places like PR Web.  How do we get there?  We do a press release.  If we want to dominate and play with the big boys we need to write content and do media everyday.  It’s pretty intense.  Twitter will track you as you do that.

I am now set up to syndicate my twitter updates on facebook, my space and my website.  I can simply send a text message and all 3 places will be instantly updated so that anybody that wants to know what I am doing can quickly see that.

Web 2.0 is an exciting arena.  Twitter is just a small part of it.  If you want to try it, go to www.twitter.com and sign up for a free account.

Last month I held a teleseminar for my Inner Circle group of attorneys on the web.  One of the hot topics that we discussed was pay per click advertising.  I believe pay per click can be a very effective strategy when done based on careful research, ongoing testing and tweaking.

Today I want to share a video with you that gives detailed steps for an optimized pay per click campaign.  You will learn how to determine decisions such as:

1. Do I turn off the content network or not?
2. How do I decide how much to bid?
3. What position is best for my ads?
4. Do I use standard delivery or accelerated delivery of my ads?
5. What do I do about ad scheduling?
6. Should I enable position preference?
7. Should I rotate my ads equally?

This video was done by an online marketing organization called Stompernet that I have been involved with and think very highly of.  They are a real quality organization and I think that this video will be valuable to you if you are involved with pay per click advertising or intend to be in the future. 

The meat of the video starts at 8 minutes.   Here is the link:

 http://www.stompernet.net/goingnatural3/vid1_adwords_triangulation_method

Enjoy!

I’ve known Shirley for about 5 years now and she’s one of my dearest friends.  Shirley just celebrated her 85th birthday and she still runs circles around most people.  I stopped by her house today and she told me a story.  It was about 2 different department stores that we have all heard of.  She visited them both today and one provided great service and one was substandard service.  As she told me the stories I thought about it from a marketing perspective.  What makes this account especially fascinating to me is that Shirley is what I would call an “influential.”  Shirley is a “go to person” for many of her friends.  She is very bright, knowledgeable on numerous topics and has lots of life experience and common sense.  Besides all that she is absolutely delightful, entertaining and lovable!

So here’s the story.  Shirley happens to have a 55 year old handicapped son, Glenn.  She brings Glenn home every weekend.  Well, with summer approaching and Glenn’s birthday being in the summer, she was out shopping for an air conditioner for his room today.  She began the story by telling me this - “Target has so many helpful people all over the store that it’s just wonderful.”  As she began her shopping excursion in the store several employees were helpful right off the bat.  She was having trouble finding the air conditioners and so she asked for help.  A very pleasant employee told her to look just beyond where she was and pick up the phone.  He told her that somebody would then come to help her within 60 seconds!  Did you get that?  60 seconds.  Shirley’s next words to me were “58 seconds later, I had help.”  A woman arrived, she had a walkie talkie and she was heard saying - “I’ve got it, I’m here.”  It almost sounded as if a team of people were standing by to make sure Shirley got her help.

There’s more to the story than that but this struck me.  If I perceive this story correctly, I believe that Shirley was very pleased with the service but she was WOWED by one particular policy and that was the focus of her great “word of mouth advertising” on behalf of Target.  It was the “60 second rule.”

I can tell you that it is very likely that the Target experience and the 60 second rule will be repeated multiple times because Shirley is an influential and she talks to a lot of people.  It was a little thing, but I think that is a big part of her VERY favorable impression of the store.

What happened next was also fascinating from a marketing perspective.  Shirley then went to another department store that will remain nameless.  The first thing she said about it was this - “there was no one around anywhere to help me.”  For me as a listener, I immediately had a bad impression of the store.  But as she went on I learned that she got some great prices and some other very favorable things happened at that store.  She also said that she “finally found someone and she was very nice.”  But Shirley had already compared this store to Target and their 60 second rule.  Target won by a landslide.

Application for us?  What kind of word of mouth do you think your firm is getting?  What do your clients say about you?  They are probably not talking about your legal skills.  As I’ve said before, your competence as an attorney is assumed.  They are probably talking about service issues.  They may be saying - they’re a great firm, but it’s hard to get somebody to call you back.

Here’s my marketing recommendation for the day.  Put a system in place so that every client phone call - whether new or existing - is returned in 60 minutes or less.  That doesn’t mean that you need to have an attorney call back with an answer.  It means you need to have a knowledgeable and professional staff member call back to say - “we got your call and Mr. X will be following up with you tomorrow morning.  Is there a good time to reach you?”

How are you creating the WOW factor?  As I survey PI clients across the country I can tell you that the top 2 things that they consistently report as being most important to them as clients are:

1. Phone calls are returned promptly
2. Legal staff is knowledgeable

What are your “Shirley’s” saying about your firm?  If you instituted a one hour call back policy - I bet that would be part of what they’d be talking about…

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 92% of Americans ages 18 to 29 use the Internet; 85% of those 30 to 49; 72% of those 50 to 64; and 37 percent of those65-plus.  As I look at these statistics I am reminded of a recent analysis Speaker Media and Marketing conducted on the average age of a personal injury client.  Although the average age was about 40 what we found is that only a small percentage of clients are between 38 and 42.  What we also found consistently across the country is that the ages of personal injury clients criss cross every age category with statistical significance between the ages of 25 and 60.And this study clearly indicates that the clients we serve are on the Internet. 

It is no longer true that our clients “just don’t use the computer very much.”  In fact studies show that a full 85% of our primary age demographic is on the Internet.  Hmmm, maybe we should be putting more of our resources on the Internet and less on yellow pages…

I came across a segment from 60 Minutes on a gentleman named Bill James.  They call him “Stat Man” and he has developed a whole body of work that interprets baseball stats in a different and as he believes, more meaningful way.  You can watch the segment below.  What caught my attention most was one particular comment by a player.  He said that “what we’re realizing is that the teams that pay attention to all of these stats perform better.”

I love that!  It parallels my feeling about the legal industry.  It can be tedious to track and measure everything, but the firms that do - well, they outperform the firms that don’t.

Vivaty is a start-up based in Menlo Park, Calif.  An article in the New York Times today talked about their developing 3-D virtual chat rooms that can be added to web pages and social networking profiles on the sites where they spend most of their Internet time.  They are apparently planning to test the new technology on Facebook this week and then release it in wider form this summer. 

The reason this article captured my attention is because of the following statement:

“…The company plans to make money partly by allowing companies to start their own virtual rooms on their own Web sites, where they can control the decor and their marketing messages.”

One more avenue for interaction on the web.  Why is it important that we evaluate these types of opportunities?  As I continue to conduct both quantitative and qualitative market research on Client Advisory Panel members in law firms throughout the US, I am finding a clear trend.  These participants, who generally represent a firms best clients, are very heavy internet users.  A vast majority spend 2 or more hours on the web daily, and state that they research everything on the web.  Approximately 1/3 of these individuals state that their friends often refer to them as “computer geeks.” 

In light of these findings I believe it is imperative that we continually evaluate new web based marketing opportunities.  Vivaty is simply one of them.

Lee Iacocca said this:  “In my lifetime I’ve had the privilege of living through some of Amercia’s greatest moments.  I’ve also experienced some of our worst crises:  The Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Kennedy Assassination, the Vietnam War, the 1970’s oil crisis, and the struggles of recent years culminating with 9/11.  If I’ve learned one thing, it’s this:  You don’t get anywhere by standing on the sidelines waiting for somebody else to take action.”  He then goes on to issue a call to action.

Action is what separates the truly successful from the moderately successful.  I remember reading years ago that “great ideas are a dime a dozen.”  And it’s true.  Most people come up with numerous really great ideas in their lives.  But a much smaller number take action on their great ideas on a consistent basis. 

In talking with attorneys I can tell you that I hear a lot of great ideas.  I really do.  But what really excites me is when an attorney evaluates ideas and then consistently allocates the resources necessary to create action plans that lead to implementation.