Marketing: Keep the Personal Touch in the Mix
It's easy enough these days to hide behind your computer screen, iPad screen, or cell phone screen and engage in what passes for new client recruitment. But don't!
Social media - whether it encompasses blogging, a LinkedIn or Facebook page, a Twitter post, or any number of other new iterations - constitutes a powerful marketing tool for lawyers by combining personalized observation with facts and insights from the lawyer's area of focus to help create new client relationships.
However, it is important to understand that social media should not be used to actively recruit new clients. Rather, social media should be used to expose you and your services to people who might need your expertise and will thus choose to engage your services. The ABA's Commission on Ethics 20/20 Working Group on the Implications of New Technologies recommended in 2011 that social networking should not be used to solicit clients and should be viewed as general communication to educate potential clients.
This is as it should be. From blogging to social networking, technology has given lawyers more marketing tools than ever. There is a real danger, however, in becoming so infatuated with the tool that you forget the objective. Marketing legal services isn't about speed or worldwide presence. It remains fundamentally about identifying the people most likely to hire you for the work that you want to do, communicating with them to let them know who you are, and developing close relationships with these people so that they choose you to be their lawyer.
Social media relationships are no substitute for in-person relationships and more personal contact. Never forget that personal contact at meetings, on the phone, and through handwritten notes remain effective outreach tools. Using such methods today, when so many lawyers are scurrying about online, becomes a differentiating factor that gets a lawyer noticed. And getting noticed - with social media use as a key strategy but not the only one - is the foundation of effective marketing.
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