Law Firm Social Media Strategy : The Five W's and How
LexBlog’s President, Kevin McKeown, is renown for preaching strategy first, tools second, when it comes to lawyers and the use of social media to create an effective online identity.
Danna Vetter, Vice President of Consumer Strategies at ARAMARK, is in total agreement in her post, “Without Strategy, There Is No ROI.” To get the most out of your social media strategy it is important to come up with a detailed plan before you begin. You need to make decisions upfront instead of just winging it.
Have you ever started a meeting without an agenda? Driven your car with no destination? How about gotten surgery before diagnosing a need? While some of those options may seem like refreshing changes, it’s not the way you run your business. But that is exactly what it’s like when you start a social media campaign without a strategy that ties to real business needs.
Just like traditional forms of marketing, your social media strategy needs to have clear objectives and measurable goals. If you don’t have a strategy, you will have no way of knowing if your marketing efforts are working.
Without a strategy, there can be no ROI. The “R” in ROI implies that there is in fact a return to be had. As such, the return must be defined through objectives and ultimately strategy development.
Seeing results could take time. Most people want to jump right in and launch multiple channels at once and simply worry about the strategy later. Chances are that won’t go well. You want your pages to be a representation of your brand.
When you create channels and get to strategy later, your site is more likely to fail. There is a good chance you will start with a full head of steam. But by giving yourself no real direction or the accountability of a strategy, your channel has a high probability of dying a very public death, joined possibly by a hallow Twitter egg, months or years of inactivity, and, oh yeah, the company name.
Vetter advises business partners to start simple. To get their teams off the ground look at the following 5W’s + How (with some adaption for the legal community by me)
- Who: Identify and target the people you are trying to reach. Clients and prospective clients may not be at the top of the list. Influencers and amplifiers of those two, such as A-list bloggers, reporters, association leaders, and conference coordinators may be more important in shaping a lawyer’s idenity.
- What: Learn what they are saying and what is important to them. Listening is more important for lawyers and legal marketing professionals in the use of the Internet today. It’s not a broadcast Internet world anymore – you need to listen to thought leaders to engage them.
- When: Determine how often are they engaging and when to engage in real-time and at the right time. Marketing for legal marketing professionals today, through social media, is about engaging your target audience. Marketing is a conversation. You’ll get heard, you’ll get followed, you’ll get cited and your content will get shared.
- Where: Discover the networks, communities, and technologies that facilitate conversations as you design a “build and/or join” approach. Legal professionals ought to listen and learn where their target audience is engaging. Around what subjects? On what social media? For lawyers – blogs, twitter, LinkedIn.
- Why: Define why we should engage, why customers will value our engagement, and why this makes business sense for us based on our objectives and goals. Legal professionals must ask why we are doing this. Is it important for this lawyer or group to have a strong word of mouth reputation and a growing network of targeted relationships. Is this an area we want to grow?
How: Develop a strategy that communicates how you will add value to the community, the bottom line, and the technologies and channels that will enable engagement and desired outcomes. Adding value is so key for legal professionals to understand. It’s not about pushing your content, it’s about sharing and offering insight on what others are saying/writing. This gives you ‘social media equity’ and enables you to build trust, relationships, and a strong reputation.
Develop a strategy and true working understanding of social media. Otherwise your lawyers and your law firm will go down as just another firm who tried social media and failed to realize the high returns other lawyers and firms are experiencing.
A strategy is not we’re going to start to use LinkedIn, have a blog, have firm twitter accounts, and have a law firm Facebook page. Those are tools.
It’s strategy first, tools second.