Blogging To Achieve a Successful Merger
Craig Soderstrom, Chief Marketing Officer of Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner was in charge of marketing a merger of his firm He did a lot of things right to achieve his goal of assuring that the firm would be 100% operational from a marketing standpoint on the effective date of the merger.
A key part of it was an internal Daily News Blog. Here's what Craig wrote about it:
The firm developed a Daily News Blog that was launched on the effective date of the merger. This allowed the firm’s leaders to communicate in real time to all lawyers and staff about important merger-related issues.
The Daily News Blog provided not only information about the merger; it also allowed the firm to create an ongoing information source for all firm news. This included everything from office moves and marketing updates to open houses and holiday parties. The Blog was developed by our PR manager and staff, but it was used to communicate only on an internal basis. This allowed us the flexibility to publish information valuable to our internal team but not necessarily appropriate for external readers.
In the early months after the merger, the firm’s leaders made a special point to publish cross-marketing success stories on the Daily News Blog. This provided valuable insights on how the attorneys were collaborating to increase new business with our clients and also served to keep this key priority at top of mind.
Today, the Daily News Blog, which resides on the desktop of every one of our firm’s computers, is an integral part of our firm’s infrastructure and culture. A typical daily update includes an article and photos of our associates painting a school in
We are currently integrating our Blog technology platform with our external web site, which will allow us to have all our communications content for internal and external audiences in one centralized database.
As a firm moves through a merger of this magnitude, you simply cannot over communicate. Creating a resource like a Blog provides a platform to make this vital communication a daily imperative.
For the full story, see Overcoming Marketing Challenges When You’re Faced with a Merger on the LawMarketing Portal, www.lawmarketing.com.
