Carnival of Marketing -- Day Five
3 items for today's installment:
Believe it or not, many professional services firms don't believe in having a sales staff. James Hassett has a great interview with marketer Stephen Barrett on the Law Firm Business Development blog. Steve is the new Chief Marketing Officer at Drinker Biddle & Reath, a 450-lawyer Philadelphia firm with 9 additional locations. A seasoned veteran, Steve has been the top in-house marketer at Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault in Boston, Perkins Coie in Seattle, Paul Hastings in Los Angeles and Choate Hall in Boston. Steve says that in professional services marketing, "there's still a long way to go." According to Steve, "At the top, you have about 10-15% who get it now," and Steve believes that new training programs should build on these opinion leaders. Sales training will have the greatest impact with the middle 70% to 80% who are receptive to selling and who have a lot to learn. "With the proper training, many will become consistently productive business generators." So the acceptance of legal selling may not be building as fast as we'd like, but it is building. "The lawyers in their thirties get it first... It's ridiculously more competitive out there, and lawyers simply must start selling to survive." 
Carolyn Elefant has a delightful post on her My Shingle blog about a Nevada attorney, Glen Lerner, who is challenging an ethics decision that prohibits him from calling himself "The Heavy Hitter," according to this article, Lawyer to Sue Over Heavy Hitter Name. What's even sillier than the title "Heavy Hitter" is the bar's reason for banning it: the bar believes that Lerner's use of the term is misleading because it gives the public the impression that he is the only Heavy Hitter. Previously, Lerner had a run-in with the bar over a television ad where a giant phone falls on a victim - and the bar believed that the ad could generate undue anxiety. Carol concluded, "But one things for sure. With this kind of reasoning, the Nevada Bar shows that it's a lightweight." 
Problogger has an excellent piece on Tag, You're It! Leveraging Tagging For Your Blog. If you've been around social networking, or many of the next-generation web services out there (such as del.icio.us or digg) then you certainly know what tags are. They are really just labels. Blogs can utilize tags as well. Tags are erroneously confused with categories but there are some key conceptual differences. Categories are structured; Tags are unstructured. However, tagging provides more of a granular way of organizing content and it follows more of a "brain storage" approach. In a case history, author Aaron Brazell says "For me, the goal was to have every single entry one to (at most) three clicks away from home. One of the ways (and there were other tricks used as well) I did this was by implementing tags. Instead of finding all of the entries on "politics," users can now find all entries on politics or, say, "The Patriot Act." - This concludes my week as host of the wonderful Carnival of Marketing. Jumpin' Jack Flash, It's a Gas! Next week it moves to Jack Yoest's blog. Have fun, Jack!
