Larry Bodine Law Marketing Blog : Law firm marketing, legal editor, legal marketing, attorney marketing, business development, marketing consultant, legal consultant, business development

Click here to listen to the original podcast, "Social Media Strategies for Lawyers." 

DiMONTE: There's so many social networks to choose from, and folks just don't know where to begin, how to start, what to do. Do you agree with that?

BODINE: That's very true. You've got everything from LinkedIn to JD Supra, to Plaxo, MySpace, Spoke, Facebook, Twitter.  It's overwhelming if you really haven't had a chance to sort through what's important and what's not. The advice that I give to attorneys is to pick one network and go deep on that one and spend most of your time on it. And one of the positive statistics is that according to a recent survey by leader networks, 78 percent of lawyers have joined one social network or another, so lawyers seem to be getting past their initial reluctance because of the second part of the survey found that 71 percent of in-house counsel have also joined networks.

So, attorneys have realized that there's business to be had from online social networking.  There recent research that shows now that corporations and in-house counsel are using online social networks to find attorneys. They're going to LinkedIn and looking up a lawyer's profile generally because there's going to be a lot more activity in a LinkedIn profile than a law firm profile. So that's what's pushed the trend.

DiMONTE: Obviously, if corporate counsel are looking for attorneys on sites such as LinkedIn, then it's really important for attorneys to be there with a profile, and you're going to share with us some tips here in a moment, but it's obviously important for them to have a presence where their potential clients are sort of playing or interacting.

BODINE: Absolutely. My favorite network, the one that really works the best for lawyers, is LinkedIn, and it's free.  So you simply go to LinkedIn.com, open a profile, put in your picture, make it public, and bingo! -- you've created a presence on an online social network. I think once the lawyers realize that they don't need to take a training class on how to use this, they're going to become more willing to use it.

DiMONTE: Can you share with our listeners some of your favorite tips and techniques and how you use LinkedIn to develop your business?

BODINE: The best way to answer that would be to give you an example of the best lawyer profile I've seen on LinkedIn.  I visit a lot of cities and look up the local lawyers, and the best one I found is a guy called Brian Burt. He's a partner at Snell and Wilmer in Phoenix. I'm not giving away any confidential information here. Anybody can look up Brian Burt and tell that he is really putting an effort into LinkedIn. He's really working it.

The first way you can tell is that he's got a fully complete bio, so you can find out not only where he went to school and where he's worked before, but he lists the types of clients that he represents. He discusses the sorts of industries that he's familiar with, and you know, ultimately this will lead to case histories Those are three things that business people and corporations look for in a lawyer. A lawyer bio should answer the questions "Do you know my industry? Have you represented any companies like mine? Have you ever closed a deal or won a case?"

So in the example of Brian Burt, you can tell he's working it because he's got more than 500 connections. So this is a guy who is inviting people to connect and accepting invitations and he's built his network.

Also, when you get a LinkedIn profile you get a web address and rather than just accept the machine-generated address that LinkedIn gives you, you can choose to put in your name and have that be part of the link, so when you go to Brian Burt, he's at LinkedIn.com/in/brianburt. So he's put in his own name. But I think the smartest thing that this guy has done is he's gotten more than 50 people to recommend him.

So from just these recommendations alone you can see he's a business leader. People refer clients to him with terrific results, and he's got a lot of entrepreneurial experience. Now these are all different kinds of magnets that are going to draw business to him. 

DiMONTE: And I think people do tend to trust the opinion of other professionals more than they would if you're just trying to pitch your services to them. They'd rather hear it from a client who's actually worked with you and had experience with you so that they can hear what the results were as opposed to your just feeding them information and doing the sales pitch that they probably don't want to hear.

BODINE: Right. It's always better to have someone else say how great they are as opposed to you walking in and saying, "I'm great."