I am often asked by attorneys where to get started with social media. Many lawyers find social media overwhelming and they just don’t know where to dig in.

I believe there are 7 core components that must be part of a basic social media plan.

First, facebook is the epicenter of social media right now. You have to have a strong presence on facebook to be taken seriously. That means you need a page with professional graphics, a landing page, critical mass and a plan for regular updates.

Next, I suggest that you turn your sights to YouTube. If you are not currently producing web videos on a regular basis, you need to be. Technology costs are so modest that you can literally purchase a small HD equipment package for a few hundred dollars. I would look on amazon.com and order the Kodak Zi8 along with an external microphone, a high speed sdhc card and a table top tripod. That will give you full 1080p HD video. You also need to have an editor so that you can make your videos look a little bit polished. Or you can use a program like iMovie or Vegas Movie Studio and do your editing in house. I’m certain you can find a teenager that could handle this for you quite capably for $10 ro $12/hr.

A content creation plan is no longer optional. The way to get online visibility is through great content so you have to be creating great content on a consistent basis. One of the easiest ways to do this is by creating short 90 second videos faqs. Have a member of your team make a list of the top 10 questions you get from clients. Then put an attorney with some screen presence in front of your camera and have him/her answer them. A little bit of editing and you have a series of 10 videos faqs that can be used on YouTube, facebook, repurposed as a podcast, blog posts, articles, etc. It’s not difficult but it requires the ability to take action rapidly and consistently.

It’s not enough to create the content, you also have to have a content distribution plan. You should be distributing your content on multiple platforms. We live in a world of thousands of media options and people like to consume content multiple ways. You need to accommodate as many as possible by repurposing your content many ways.

We used to talk about list building. We now call it tribe building. You want to be constantly working at capturing contact information on people that have chosen you or asked for information from you. This can be done by setting up landing pages, using email blasts, newsletter opt in offers, running various campaigns, etc.

The sixth step of our seven step integrated social media plan is to include a mobile aspect of everything you do. This can be as simple as creating 2D barcodes for your campaigns. You may also want to set up sms campaigns. You can build a mobile website using software such as mobitsitegalore for about $50.

And finally, you need to be tracking key metrics for everything you do. This is an area that many law firms overlook. I am a fanatic about tracking and when I ask my attorney clients about tracking they will say things like – everything seems to be working ok. But when we break it all down, often everything is far from ok. You must be tracking your cost per call, cost per case and conversion ratios on everything you do.

If you will put a seven step plan like this in place you will be setting yourself above most of your competition.

Last year I remember speaking about the fact that as attorneys and small business owners we need to be publishers. And that is still very much the case. We all want online visiblity and the way to achieve that is by creating and strategically distributing great content. But let’s face it, creating original content consistently can be daunting.

In comes the digital content curator. I consider myself to be a curator. What that means is that I endeavor to filter and organize quality content from many credible sources in a manner that provides my clients/attorneys with succinct summaries that are most relevant to them. Phew! That’s a mouthful! But the fact is that in an age of information overload, there is no ONE authority source for any topic. There are many credible authority sources for every topic and so as curators our challenge is to filter and organize. And the biggest value in all of that is – it saves the end user hours and hours of time.

I recently did a one hour webinar on digital content curation. You can watch it below.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Have you heard that? I know I have many times and for the most part I have agreed with that. However, the landscape has changed in the last year or so and frankly, there is a lot of opportunity in this new media world to implement strategies that just can’t be conclusively measured.

The brand building and top of mind awareness that can result from a strong social media program are very difficult to measure. Because of that, some firms abandon them and prefer to stay with 100% traditional direct response mass media marketing.

In my opinion that’s a lot of missed opportunity. Social media is here to stay whether or not you can directly measure it. So, for those of you that are embracing new media strategies and learning to navigate this new landscape – bravo to you. You will be standing at the end of the day when your competitors fall as traditional mass media strategies become less and less impactful as compared to online video, social media and mobile campaigns that are embraced by the visionaries.

I was reading a blog post by one of my favorite marketing guru’s Seth Godin this morning and here is what he had to say:

Ralph Lauren is a billion dollar brand. Totally unmeasurable. So are Revlon, LVMH, Donald Trump, Andersen Windows, Lady Gaga and hundreds of other mass market brands.

There are two things you should never do:

1. Try to measure unmeasurable media and use that to make decisions. You’ll get it wrong. Sure, some sophisticated marketers get good hints from their measurements, but it’s still an art, not a science.
2. Compromise on your investment. Small investments in unmeasurable media almost always fail. Go big or stay home.

If you want to read the post you can find it here: Seth Godin Post

In these short videos you will be introduced to what we believe is a unique and powerful turn-key legal marketing system.

If you’d like to see the slideshow of Tony Hsieh’s recent presentation to a group of Internet Marketers, you can view it below.  To reiterate, Tony is the brilliant CEO of the billion dollar company Zappos.com.

I believe it was June 26, 2008 that our group of 20 attorneys from 13 states and 11 law firms decided to undertake the writing of a collaborative book on personal injury law. Today is Feb 5, 2009 – just slightly over 7 months later and we have our first physical proof. When it arrived today I grabbed a little video camcorder and shot some footage.

Here’s a great interview of Guy Kawasaki by Robert Scoble.  It caught my attention because another of my favorite guru’s Kevin O’Keefe highly recommended it.   Guy talks about his new book, Reality Check.  In the course of the interview he says something really astounding – “I am just so sold on Twitter…I think that Twitter is arguably the most powerful branding mechanism since television.” 

Happy New Year!  I don’t know about you but I am truly excited about 2009.    The New Year is a time that I generally focus on goals and priorities and that process tends to be invigorating.  One of the first new projects for our team in 2009 is the launch of Legal Marketing Cafe TV.  www.LegalMarketingCafe.com.  

As with most things we do at Speaker Media and Marketing, we anticipate that this project will evolve over a period of time.  Our philosophy is to kind of roll up our sleeves and test and measure as we go.  We’ll keep you posted on our progress!

In early 2008 my clients and I had our usual “New Year” discussions.  Part of that was to choose a few large priority projects for the year.  One of the projects we talked about was to write a book…  Wow!  If I had known then what I know now.

In late June we had our first group teleseminar to launch the plan.  We decided on a collaborative book on personal injury law and 11 firms determined to co-write the work.

At the end of October the book was finished.  The journey did not go quite as planned.  (It never does)  However, the finished product is something that we all feel very proud of.    So to answer the question – how many attorneys does it take to write a book — let’s just say that it took a few more than expected.