Amy Campbell’s Web Log

Hurray! It’s Summer! Time to reboot… refresh… relax… and read something outside the realm of your everyday worklife. Here are a few bookmarks from my vacation week reading, that while outside the box of legal marketing, have some interesting ideas and lessons that apply. I always find it refreshing and inspirational to read information from other niches or industries and apply it to my world. Here are a few you may find of interest too. Enjoy!

Hotels:
Your customers are silently judging you right now

Consumer Goods:
Slideshow: Knowing When It’s Time for a Packaging Makeover
Article: What a Packaging Makeover Can Do For Your Company

Business C-suite:
The Most Dangerous Job in Business
It’s the chief marketing officer. Chances are, yours is just leaving.

Donuts:
Give ‘Em Something To Talk About
Your product may be good, but will it spark a conversation?

Lemonade Stands:
Slideshow: 10 Tips for Creating the Coolest Lemonade Stand Ever

Design Thinking:
CEOs Must Be Designers, Not Just Hire Them

Article pointer>>>: Is This Any Way to Recruit Associates? by Elizabeth Goldberg of The American Lawyer, takes an in-depth look at the U.S. law firm associate recruiting process and how it differs from major corporations and other professional services firms.

“Banks and consulting firms use sophisticated testing and interviewing techniques to hire talent. So do big law firms in the United Kingdom. While a handful of U.S. law firms are experimenting with new approaches, the vast majority of Am Law 200 firms are sticking with a recruiting system that hasn’t changed much since the early 1970s.”

Meanwhile, law firm recruits — particularly those from elite schools — describe a process fraught with “short interviews, shallow questions and a sheaf of boilerplate marketing materials,” according to the article.

Read the entire article here…

For all you legal marketers out there pushing for a shorter version of your law firm name, take heart. While your firm’s name may be a mouthful, just be thankful for what you’ve got.

Here are some real branding challenges offered today by the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog and its readers in the post, Law Firm Names That Are Funny. More evidence of a history of law firms being run on ego and so inwardly focused that they are blind to the perception in the marketplace.

Payne & Fears

Low, Ball & Lynch

Slaughter & Slaughter

Weiner & Cox

Smart & Biggar

See the WSJ post for more.

In the final irony, these links are already making their rounds on the internet due to the WSJ post, and said firms will likely reap a good amount of exposure from their funny names! Giggle, Gaffaw & Snorte!

Added August 14: Here’s a more serious discussion of law firm names and branding on Law.com, Name Games Loom Large in Mergers.

The annual ABA Legal Technology Survey Report is out and shows again that law firms are slow to adopt new technologies. There is a convenient audio summary by ABA’s Laura Ikens that discusses the results in brief covering e-discovery, blogs, and podcasts.

The interesting (though not surprising) piece to me was the low awareness and use of blogs in legal services (I first wrote on blogs as a law marketing tool in April 2003!)…

According to the ABA survey, even though it is recognized that blogs can be a great marketing tool, they are “not catching fire just yet.” Only 5% of firms (responding) produce a blog. And as awareness tools, blogs are still underutilized: more than 50% of respondents never use blogs for current awareness of current events, 22% use blogs less than once a month, 12% use them 1 to 3 times a month, and 12% once or more a week.

Furthermore, using RSS feeds and aggregators is even less common and less understood. 83% of respondents never use RSS (syndicated news feeds), and only 5% use them use them one or more times a week. Ikens reports that this low usage could be a matter of terminology as those who use tools such as MyYahoo! or iGoogle may not know they are using RSS feeds. (Aside: This is one reason why I developed Legal Marketing Reader, a web site that pulls together the headline feeds from the top blogs on law firm marketing, which sidesteps the user’s need to use or understand RSS, and just have an easy web site to bookmark for keeping up with law marketing news.)

As I said, I am not surprised by the ABA findings regarding law firms’ and attorneys’ slow adoption of these technologies, as my experience supports it. While I am sold on the benefits of blogging, lawyers as a group tend to be more cautious and risk averse. Similarly, the term and concept of RSS feeds is difficult for most people understand (see earlier post on slow adoption of RSS). And, RSS takes that little bit of extra time to set up and understand, that frankly, most busy professionals just don’t have.

That being said, the fact that others are slow to adopt these technologies, means that they are still very valid ways for motivated individuals, departments or firms to differentiate themselves, promote expertise, self-brand, and provide value to their clients and industry segments.

Go to this blog’s home page.

I’ve been meaning to post on another item of interest from RainToday.com’s “What’s Working in Lead Generation” (for professional services firms) that I originally referenced in this previous post. It is the question asking participants, Where would you spend an extra $100,000 in your sales and marketing budget? As you can imagine the answers were across the map, but the respondents most wanted to spend their $100k on a new web site. According to the report:

“Websites carry a special triple whammy regarding their addition to lead generation.

A) They generate leads in and of themselves through search engine placement.

B) They are the conduit for many other lead generation tactics. Regardless of how a prospect finds out about a firm, they almost always check out, and often make their inquiry through, the website.

C) Because websites are always “on” and everyone can look at them, leaders at service businesses are acutely aware of how they look, what they say and (often more importantly) what everyone else says about their website.”

I was happy to read this (as I help law firms develop their web presence) — and my experience confirms it. I’ve noticed a definite increase in firms (especially on the smaller end) realizing that they need to take the web more seriously. Traditionally, many lawyers have believed that they don’t really need more than a billboard web site as their business is “a relationship business,” and “we get most of our business through referrals.” But even in a relationship business, the web has become what I like to call, “the resource of first resort.” When a potential client does receive that all important referral, what’s the first thing she does? Turns to her computer and types your name into Google’s search engine.

Firms are waking up to the fact that their web presence plays an increasingly important role in how they are perceived and that it can be used to effectively to help build and strengthen existing relationships.

Other popular answers to the $100,000 question (which is nice to dream about, huh?): hiring additional staff, contracting with outside providers for branding/awareness and lead generation services, and more.

Where would you spend the dough?