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

Today's post is pulled from the Law Firm Marketing Blog of LexisNexis.  It features a portion of the LegalTechNY Panel Discussion I participated in. Here is the link to the original post.

Most of us live in two worlds — one consists of our personal relationships with friends and family, the other is made up of our professional interactions with clients and co-workers. It can be very tricky to keep these worlds separate in the online world where comments and images are so easily disseminated.

Steve Mann, chief marketing officer of the Research & Litigation Solutions business at LexisNexis, was asked this "professional vs. personal" question by an attendee at our LegalTech New York 2013 panel — "Taming the Wild West of Social Media: The Secrets of Social Media Success in the Legal Profession" — and the responses from our experts were instructive.

I drew a distinction between personal and professional uses of social media. If someone looks me up on social media platforms, they will see lots of content about lawyers and law firm marketing — but you're not going to know what I had for lunch.

You can view a short video segment of this piece of the panel discussion. Stay tuned next week for more details from the session.

Robert Hodge, a Law Firm Marketing Specialist with LexisNexis, offers 4 advantages of using Pay-Per-Click over search engine

Immediate launch — We quickly develop a targeted keyword campaign for Google, and ads can go live within minutes.

Flexible budgets — We can set daily and monthly budget caps to ensure you never spend more than you're comfortable with.  We will change keyword bids and budgets on the fly to respond to the dynamic auction environment.

Highly targeted — Geo-targeting and geo-modified keywords means you can more easily reach the consumers near you or in targeted markets.

Control — Have a high level of control over your marketing message. Paid search advertising lets advertisers control what your listings say and how they look on the Google results page.  We also specify targeted landing pages, so you're able to drive users to the page that has the exact information they're looking for.

The recent Attorney Selection Research Study by The Research Intelligence Group (TRiG), taught us all sorts of things about where consumers go to search for attorneys online, how they obtain legal information from the Internet and even the specific types of devices they use to do this online searching.  Last week, we concluded our look at the substantive findings by sharing results regarding which areas of legal practice are the most popular when consumers search for an attorney.

Armed with this data, it would be fair to ask: So what? Does it really matter if we know about the online searching habits of consumers with legal needs, if we don't know what happens AFTER they complete their online research?

Follow the link to read the remainder of Amy Kovar's post.

From the Wall Street Journal:

"In the last few months, law firms have become increasingly aware that training lawyers in marketing and business development is a key way to drive business. According to a February survey of 120 marketing directors at large law firms -- conducted by legal market researcher, BTI Consulting Group -- business development is one of the few marketing areas where law firm executives are most willing to increase spending. Nearly 70% said they planned to provide more marketing coaching to lawyers.

"Marketing coaching fills in where law school falls short on training. Firms are enlisting coaches who work one-on-one with their lawyers on how to keep up with existing clients and court new ones. While it's certainly not a new concept to the legal world, this kind of strategic networking becomes critical as business wanes. "As business falls off everywhere, all of us need to have an eye on where the next thing is coming from," says Edward Winslow, partner at Brooks, Pierce, McLendon, Humphrey & Leonard LLP, an 85-lawyer firm based in Greensboro, N.C.

"Larry Bodine, an Illinois-based law firm business-development consultant, has been working nights and weekends to accommodate his new influx of clients, which has tripled from 20 to 60 lawyers since January. "Business development is not something taught in law school," he says. "Basically you spend three years reading appellate court opinions and you don't learn anything about building a clientele," he says.

"While many firms are looking outside to hire coaches, others are ramping up internal efforts. At Boston-based Nixon Peabody, where the marketing budget is down 20% this year, chief marketing officer Mark Greene says there has been a distinct shift in how resources are allocated, with more emphasis on coaching individual lawyers. "A year ago the department was more focused on marketing in the traditional sense of brand creation," says Mr. Greene. "We have shifted resources toward one-on-one relationship building."

For more about business development training, visit www.ApolloBusinessDevelopment.com