Law Firm Marketing

The following post was drafted by Carolyn Elefant at Nolo’s Legal Marketing Blog:

If you’re like most lawyers, you probably use Wikipedia for a variety of purposes, from finding a layperson’s explanation of a legal concept to getting the back story on current events.  Some of you may be avid enough users that you may have even registered for a Wikipedia account and contributed to some of the entries.  But chances are, you never considered creating a Wikipedia page for yourself or your law firm.

Truth is, up until a few weeks ago, I didn’t either.  But as I described in this post at Legal Blogwatch, most major law firms already maintain pages on Wikipedia.  What’s more, the
UK Law Society points out, Wikipedia has enormous reach:

Wikipedia is one of the largest reference websites — 684 million visitors yearly. For a sniff of its power, whether you like it or not, cogitate on this snippet from the New York Times ‘Bits’ technology blog on 30 March, entitled ‘Microsoft Encarta Dies After Long Battle With Wikipedia’: ‘Microsoft delivered the coup de grâce Monday to its dying Encarta encyclopedia, acknowledging what everyone else realised long ago: it just couldn’t compete with Wikipedia… In January, Wikipedia got 97% of the visits that web surfers in the United States made to online encyclopedias, according to the internet ratings service Hitwise. Encarta was second, with 1.27%.’ That’s how powerful Wikipedia is.

With that kind of traffic, a listing on Wikipedia could theoretically bolster a firm’s search engine visibility.  So I decided to test my theory and ran a couple of searches on some of the law firms listed in Wikipedia.  Sure enough, the firms’ Wikipedia listings came up within the top five to ten front page search results on Google.

Still, is a Wikipedia entry worthwhile for solo and small firm lawyers?  For starters, what kinds of information would you include in the listings?  Many large firms with long histories describe the firm’s origins and provide bios of firm founders and well-known alumni.  But solo and small firm lawyers might not have enough background material to include.  A smaller firm might also link to reported cases or cross-reference practice areas described on Wikipedia.  For example, a bankruptcy lawyer could cross-link to the entry on Bankruptcy in Wikipedia, thus providing a good resource for clients with basic questions.  Likewise, lawyers could cross-reference the city where they practice or hobbies they enjoy.

Ultimately, I don’t think that Wikipedia is an indispensable component of a lawyer marketing portfolio in the same way as a website or blog or business card.  But for lawyers looking for something different or who can devise a unique use for Wikipedia, it might be a marketing tool worthy of further consideration.�

I found this list on Search Engine Watch written by Erik Qualman, which that I thought would be very interesting for attorney’s considering which social media outlete to use.  The list details 15 fundamental principles of Social Networking:

1. Successful marketers will be more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy; listen first, sell second.
2. Consumers are looking to peers for recommendations on products, services, health issues, and more via social media. Only companies that produce products and services of great value will be part of these conversations; mediocrity will quickly be eliminated.
3. Social media’s ability to quickly disseminate information among friends and peers helps eliminate different people performing the same tasks (multiple individual redundancies), whether it’s researching the best vacation spot or smart phone. This results in a more efficient society.
4. The old adage that you can only have two of these — cheap, quick, or quality — doesn’t hold true within social media. It’s possible to have all three.
5. Successful social media marketers will function more like entertainment companies, publishers, or party planners rather than as traditional advertisers.
6. With the increasing popularity of e-books, there will be new digital media placement opportunities for brands. This is very similar to product placement in movies, only this is for books, and the placements are clickable and measurable.
7. The most successful social media and mobile applications are those that allow users to brag, compete, or look cool by passing it on.
8. The transparency and speed of information exchanged within social media mitigates casual schizophrenic behavior. Having a “work” personality and having a “party” personality will soon become extinct. People and companies will need to have one essence and be true to that essence.
9. Being “well-rounded” as a company or individual is less beneficial. It’s more productive to play to your core strength. This differentiates you from the competition.
10. Companies that produce great products and services rather than companies that simply rely on great messaging will be winners in a Socialnomic™ world. The social graph is the world’s largest and most powerful referral program.
11. Marketers’ jobs have changed from creating and pushing to one that requires listening, engaging, and reacting to potential and current customer needs.
12. Making multiple mistakes within social media is far better than doing nothing at all.
13. If you’re a large brand, you can rest assured that there are conversations, pages, and applications constantly being developed around your brand and by the community at large. The social community is “doing” social media even if your company chooses not to.
14. The information exchanged in social media in relation to job searching and recruiting has rendered it unrecognizable from the information exchanged 10 years ago. Appropriate matches between employer and employee have increased as a result of an increased information flow.
15. The overall achievement of individuals and companies will be largely dependent on their social media success.

There are so many aspects to social networking that the novice can loose themselves in just trying to remember what everything is.  More imporatantly, it is difficult to figure out which social sites will help out with law firm internet marketing and how much time should be spend on each.  For example, do you as a lawyer marketing your firm spend time on blogs and podcasts, bulletin board posts, Group emails such as soloz, or posting videos and photos to youtube and Flickr?

The typical lawyer spends 95% of his or her time on the practice of law and with so little marketing time left does not put very much effort into social netoworking.  The problem is that a good marketer is missing out on a huge opportunity. Social Netowrking can all be done much more effectively if you create a monthly social networking schedule the directs you to do what and when.

I suggest using your outlook calendar and set aside a minimum of four (4) hours per week on a given day to draft a blog article and then syndicate it on various content distribution channels.  I would also consider using social sites such as facebook and others to put your online friends on notice that you have published new content.  As far as Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, I would suggest only putting in the time, if you have relevent media to your practice. 

For more information on this and other SEO topics, contact our firm.

Whether it’s Youtube for videos or Flicker for photographs, the ever increasing demand for entertainment leads to the creation of more and more websites dedicates to displaying amateur “art” in the hopes of widespread popularity. As evidenced by the recent sale of YouTube to Google for $1.65 Billion, once a website gains widespread popularity, riches are not far away. This trend has increased the demand for new and entertaining content. Most times such services rely on self-submitted videos, photos or articles, but as more sites pop up, available supply dwindles. Consequently, a phenomenon commonly referred to as “website hacking” has become more and more popular. This form of hacking occurs when an individual uses some service or sight to put up their own video, photo or blog, in order to share that particular medium with known friends. Hackers looking for new and original content will often hack this information and use it on their own site, in an attempt to gain hits and popularity in the effort to be the next YouTube.Most times this form of hacking goes undiscovered, or alternatively, if discovered, the true owner of the personal copyright views it as too time or money consuming to go after the hacker. Whether or not you view it as such, this form of hacking constitutes theft. Unlike theft of tangible goods or chattels, this is theft of intellectual property to which only you have the right. When the theft, or hacking, rises to the level of intrusion where it becomes necessary to take action, a person must first determine how to go about putting a stop to the theft. .

The first necessary step is identifying the source of the original theft. When the intellectual property has been stolen for some period of time, this can be a difficult task. Most often the material hasn’t spread to the point where it is difficult to track down the original hacker. However, if you find that the information has spread, you should contact the administrator of each website and identify yourself as the primary source, and most sites will post a correction. If you can at least find a name or business name, you may then use certain directories to track down a mailing or email address [such as www.whois.godaddy.com, www.whois.sc and www.dns.com, among others].

The next step, without involving an attorney, is to contact the hacker using the information found regarding their site. You should first make a request that they stop broadcasting your material. The first request should remain polite, in the event that they truly don’t know their site is using your property. If your efforts are repudiated or met without a response, it may be necessary to contact an attorney to take further action.

If repudiated and you decide you would like to press forward, you should contact an attorney experienced in cyberlaw matters. A qualified attorney can help you begin to preserve evidence by creating a paper trail, gather information and properly establish ownership over the stolen material. Once ownership is established the attorney can help you to register your copyright with the United States Copyright office, since in the United States, it is necessary to register a work prior to enforcing your rights with regard to that work. Once registered, the attorney will likely elect to issue an inexpensive Cease and Desist order to the cyber hacker. Based on the Cease and Desist order, you should then contact those who advertise on the hacker’s sight, as well as associated search engines, and demonstrate to them that your material is the subject of a Cease and Desist order. Most search engines will immediately comply since Title II of the Digital Millennium Copyrights Act (DMCA) creates a safe harbor for these companies, preventing them from sustaining any liability when immediately pulling material in response to such a request. These steps, supported by the consumer oriented DMCA, enable cyber theft victims to minimize the damage done by the hacker.

If the cyber hacker still refuses to stop using your now copyrighted material, your attorney can properly advise you on how to proceed, and what type of court action may be necessary to ensure compliance with your order, and whether any form of damages may be available to you in your enforcement proceedings. Only an experienced cyber law attorney can efficiently and accurately guide you through the web difficulty which arises when personal content has been stolen by illegal cyber-hackers. Individuals must take steps to keep personal material personal and to ensure that the hackers are not allowed to continue committing their illegal acts.

A federal court ruled last week that it is not only a trademark violation any longer to use another company’s trademark to deceive search engine users in the paid ad headline. The court has further ruled, that you can not purchase a trademark as a keyword to bring up your paid listing on Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines. This decision stemmed from a national jewelry company, who bid on the term, “dating ring” to bring up their ad for the sale of the companies own diamond rings. The problem was that another company already had the trademark to the term “The Dating Ring”. When this term was entered by users of the search engines, the national company’s ad came up for the sale of rings.The defendant argued it never placed the trademarked term on any of its products or used the term “dating ring” on its Web site. Unfortunitly for the company, they did use the term in the content of their ad.

This ruling makes the practice of going after your competitors name very costly now. The issues as I see it may become the inability to use common terms that the causal user may search by, where they do not even know it is a trademark. In this case illustrated, the term, “dating ring” seems rather innocent to me. I had no idea there was even a company with that name. The law provides protection for companies name as it is used in commerce. However, when a company chooses such a general term for a name and does not have a large presence in the economy or even in the specific industry it conducts business, and then it seems unfair to require every company bidding on key words to conduct a trademark search for each and every term they will purchase. This type of investigation can prove to be most costly, where it is a standard practice in the P.P.C (pay per click) world to buy upwards of two to three thousand terms know as long tail terms, to bring in as many visitors as possible. The goal is of course to make a sale, collect information or what ever the desired conversion for the site may be. However, just because someone uses their web site in commerce and has purchased a term, that has a very plain or simple meaning, is not evidence that such a person or company intended to violate a small unknown companies trademark.