Successful attorneys spend a great deal of time networking
to generate new clients, cases, and referrals. There is no better networking
tool online today to support these efforts than LinkedIn.
Some attorneys today
are literally building their entire practices through the heavy use of LinkedIn
while many others continue to struggle in fully understanding the potential
value provided by LinkedIn in helping to support their legal practice. The
following are seven of the most important aspects of LinkedIn that every
attorney should know…
LinkedIn is Now
Your Online Resume and CV
LinkedIn is now looked at as one of the most trusted sources
for professional and company information online. Gone are the days when a CV request is sent. Nobody
now wants to make this request and wait for the response when all they
typically need is now online and real-time with LinkedIn. Your LinkedIn profile is now your resume and
CV and it is now online – so make it work for you!
HELPFUL TIPS AND HINTS:
- Make sure you create and fully update your LinkedIn profile.
Add ALL of the pertinent information you would normally include in a CV – the more
detail the better. Also make sure to regularly update your information and include
important links to other online properties such as websites, blogs, etc.
Most
attorneys are on LinkedIn
According to recent studies, upwards of 95% of ABA members
currently have LinkedIn accounts. Moreover, roughly 770,000 members of the
legal community are also on LinkedIn. The bottom line is that LinkedIn is the
most widely-adopted social media / online networking site for the legal industry,
period. Marketing 101: Fish were the fish are. If you are not on LinkedIn now,
you are simply not keeping up with the legal industry.
LinkedIn Is the
Most Effect ATTORNEY Business Card Rolodex
Some of the most effective networking attorneys have
historically maintained a voluminous rolodex of business cards. With LinkedIn,
those days are gone – and the trees are now celebrating. The problems that
plagued business cards in the past have now been largely solved by LinkedIn –
namely; how do you best manage and utilize your contact data AFTER you receive
the business card? Moreover, with all of the other means of collecting contact
information (Outlook, Gmail, etc.), how can you manage them all together? Again,
LinkedIn is now the answer…
HELPFUL TIPS AND HINTS:
- You can import any of all of your contacts from Outlook and
Gmail into LinkedIn and make connections to them from LinkedIn. Save the time and manage them from one
location moving forward – it gives you far more options and capabilities.
- You can now easily find and create connections to your law
school and/or graduating class alumni in LinkedIn. You can also build your
connections by connecting with past clients. Why let past relationships fade
away when you can utilize them to your advantage moving forward. Need to build
up your referral bases? Why not start with people you already have various
types of connections to already? Through
the “advanced” search feature, you can select contacts from graduating schools
and classes that you may have lost touch with over the years. Connect and see
what happens to your referral network…
- When making LinkedIn
connection requests make sure to personalize your messages and try not to
use the default wording instead. The more personal, connecting and compelling
the message, the better the chance you will have in getting your connection
request accepted.
- Include a link to your LinkedIn profile in your email
signature, business cards and online profiles. Use phone number test: anywhere that
you feel compelling to promote a phone number should also include your LinkedIn
profile link.
- Download “cardmunch” to your smart phone and use it to scan
every business card you receive. Cardmuch fully integrates to your LinkedIn
account and allows you to scan and connect with other people within a matter of
seconds. Cardmunch is the most effective app for attorney networking on the
market today. The next time somebody
hands you a card, take out your smart phone, take a picture of it using
cardmunch and hand it right back to them…see what kind of initial reaction you
receive. Then tell them that they will
receive a connection request from you shortly in LinkedIn and ask them to
accept it. This is the future of networking and you will be potentially introducing
them to it firsthand. What will that say about you? Think they will now
remember you better?
- Build connections with “people with leverage.” Do you know
other attorneys who seem to know everybody? How about people who are well known
and respected in circles of people you want as clients? These are called people with leverage and chances are if they know everybody, they are connected with many
of them now on LinkedIn. Take the time and effort to connect with them on
LinkedIn and all of the sudden you will have access to all of their connections
and moreover, they can see you are a part of that leverage person’s network –
which potentially gives you added credibility.
LinkedIn
Supports Frequency Marketing
Ever wonder what Coca Cola runs highly expensive ads during
the Super Bowl? Every heard of Coca Cola before? Of course you have – we all
have, many times. There is an old saying
in marketing that you should touch your prospects (in one form or another) at
least 7-12 times a year for them to actively member you when they will need
you. That is the basis for frequency marketing. This also applies to legal
marketing as well.
Most attorneys rely on the majority of their business from
referrals from other clients and attorneys. Since many of these referrals tend
to happen infrequently with intervals ranging from weeks, months to even years,
how are these people expected to actively member you when they will potentially
need to send business your way? That is where LinkedIn can help…
HELPFUL TIPS AND HINTS:
- Provide news and/or
links to your blog entries in your LinkedIn profile. Why? Because this will
provide you with a means of actively staying in front of all of the people on
LinkedIn you are connected with so when they see your posts on LinkedIn, they
will more actively think of you. In the past, LinkedIn used to provide an App
called BlogLink that allowed you to do this automatically. Today, it has become
a manual process but should only take a minute to simply copy and paste from
your blog into your profile updates stream.
- Join LinkedIn Groups
– Alumni, practice area specific groups, target client profile organizations,
etc. are all waiting for you to join them. This will allow you to collaborate,
participate and help you build your awareness and network of contacts. Group
associations will also help you in making connection requests through increased
search options and mutual association.
LinkedIn
Allows You to Build a Better Referral Network
Referrals are the lifeblood of most legal practices. A
recent 2012 ABA study has shown that around 75% of corporate counsels regularly
use LinkedIn to help them select third-party counsel. Why? Because it is the
most effective way to find detailed information about other attorneys and
connect to them. The same applies for your referral network.
LinkedIn provides robust “advanced” search capabilities that
allows you to find and connect with other people and attorneys based on
location, demographics, education, position, employer, past employers, keywords,
title, experience, industries, groups they are associated with, etc. There is literally
nobody you cannot potentially reach and connect with on LinkedIn and since
roughly 95% of attorneys have LinkedIn profiles, you should be able to find
most everybody you want when you are building your referral network. The larger your number of connections, the easier
it is to build on them so don’t delay and get start today.
HELPFUL TIPS AND HINTS:
- Write recommendations for other attorneys – it is easy and VERY
effective. If you look at another attorney’s profile, you may or may not see
recommendations from others. Ask yourself: what impression do these
recommendations make over others who have none? Writing recommendations is also
good karma: you should to give in order to receive. Make the effort to write
solid and relevant recommendations for other attorneys and clients and watch
what happens in return…
LINKEDIN IS THE TOP WEBSITE FOR PROFESSIONAL RECRUITERS
Gone are the days when job boards like Monster.com and
others were the way for professionals to find and be found for jobs online.
Most recruiters today want easy access to search for and find people based on
their complete profile and job history. That is why good professional recruiters
today start most of their job candidate searches on LinkedIn.
LINKEDIN IS THE #1 SOCIAL MEDIA
TRAFFIC GENERATOR TO YOUR WEBSITE
Even though a broad-based social media strategy should be
utilized by a law firm, not all social media vehicles produce the same results.
According to the
Q3
2013 Audience Insight Survey,
LinkedIn drives fully 64% of website traffic
from social media sources (In comparison - Twitter: 14%, Facebook: 17%).
Like it or not, most LinkedIn profiles and pages for
attorneys and law firms are commonly in the top search results in Google. This
means that referral clients and other attorneys are commonly seeing your
LinkedIn information at the top of search results when looking for you and information
about you.
HELPFUL TIPS AND HINTS:
- If you haven’t done so already, create a LinkedIn companypage for your law firm. These are related to but separate from your individual
profile so make sure you have both. LinkedIn pages also DO NOT require that
users have connected access to review them – unlike profiles. When properly optimized,
they also tend to show up high in Google for law firm searches by name.
- If you have a website, blog and other social media, you should
also provide links to them from your LinkedIn profiles and pages. This will
both provide an easy access point to your other online properties but will also
provide link value authority to them as well.
LINKEDIN CLE CREDITS
/ TRAINING
As you can see, LinkedIn provides attorneys with a
combination of unprecedented capabilities to help grow their practices through
increased awareness, branding, referral networking, and new client and case
generation. If you would like to learn more about how lawyers use LinkedIn, you
can inquire about our
CLE
program on Attorney LinkedIn Networking provided by Dustin Ruge.
More information:
#lawyermarketing #CLE #LinkedIn
#DustinRuge
Dustin Ruge will be speaking again at the Colorado Bar Association's annual "Hanging You Shingle" conference on Saturday, August 16th at 10am on the subject of social media for attorneys. 
There is a good deal of discussion these days about client/case
conversion but what attorneys often fail to realize is something that the
insurance companies learned a long time ago: most people buy from the first
responder. Geico, who has literally spent billions of dollars on their brand
name alone, found in their own studies that most people will only get one
insurance quote and then buy from that firm. When it comes to attorneys, people’s
buying habits are no different. 
We know from the same FindLaw survey that 74% of contacts attorneys receive are by
phone while only 7% are by email and 2% by online contact form. We also know from other surveys that 80% of
callers will hang-up when they get a voicemail. I am still amazed at how many
times I will call a law firm on hours and off hours and receive a voicemail or
no answer within 5-7 rings. If a caller receives and voicemail and/or if they
hear 5-7 rings or more, you are sending them a message (intentional or not)
that your contact is not of high importance to them. If you do not have a live body answering the
phone quickly 24/7 you are losing client and cases – period! 
Today a story was released in the WSJ about a lawsuit filed against sites that host and manage customer reviews of their companies online. One of the most prominent review sites, Yelp, is at the center of the story. According to one carpet cleaning business owner, his business was negatively impacted by as much as 30% following a rash of negative reviews on Yelp.
There is an old saying in marketing that your prospective
clients need to see and/or hear you many times before they will buy from you.
This is why you still see Coca Cola and Ford ads during the Super bowl. Did you
not know what these brands were? Of course not. What they wanted to reinforce
through these ads was the repetition in which you see them. The “Rule of 7” was
adopted decades ago to provide a baseline for how many times (7) this needs to
typically happen in a given year. The problem is that this was before the
advent of the digital marketing age. With the increasing barrage of information
we receive today, I typically recommend that attorneys be in front of their prospective
clients and referrals at least 7-12 times a year in order to maximize this
effect. The problem is that most attorneys are not. 
When people buy, they go through three psychological stages in
the process: Need, Proof and Risk. Following the example above, the prospective
client had a NEED so he/she searched. When they found your web properties, they
found part of the PROOF for the search. The problem now is how does this person
really know you’re the best option
and mitigate their RISK by choosing you over another attorney? Is your BRAND
strong enough to convey this proof and mitigate the risk? 
Successful attorneys spend a great deal of time networking
to generate new clients, cases, and referrals. There is no better networking
tool online today to support these efforts than LinkedIn. Some attorneys today
are literally building their entire practices through the heavy use of LinkedIn
while many others continue to struggle in fully understanding the potential
value provided by LinkedIn in helping to support their legal practice. The
following are seven of the most important aspects of LinkedIn that every
attorney should know…
Like it or not, most LinkedIn profiles and pages for
attorneys and law firms are commonly in the top search results in Google. This
means that referral clients and other attorneys are commonly seeing your
LinkedIn information at the top of search results when looking for you and information
about you. 
