Law firm marketing is never easy in these times, but with the oldest Baby Boomers approaching 70 years old, it's important for legal practitioners to understand how succession can impact their marketing.  If you're trading on the names and business of your senior partners, you'll want to have a succession plan in place to make sure that your firm lives on beyond any one person's contribution.  Keep reading to understand what you can do to make sure your marketing doesn't take a hit even when a partner dies or retires from practice.

Step 1: Start Marketing Younger Attorneys Sooner

Many firms make the mistake of making their marketing materials mostly about senior partners.  While it's important to market using the people in your firm with name recognition, it's also critical to ensure that your younger attorneys are being put forward in your materials.

For example, if you're going to draft press releases about cases, make sure that you're fully acknowledging the contributions of junior attorneys.  You may also want to include profiles of up and coming lawyers in your firm that have real prominence in your firm's external communications.  This kind of recognition can also be good for employee morale among younger attorneys.

Step 2: Encourage Attorneys To Engage in Marketing

In addition to including younger attorneys in your marketing materials, you should also help them understand how to incorporate marketing into their own days.  For example, attorneys should be made aware of the ways in which their activities for charities and the community can be used for firm marketing, and should be trained in how to market themselves and your firm in their daily lives.  Personal connections and referrals still account for a great deal of legal business, so it isn't enough to hope that online marketing alone can keep your firm afloat through a transition or succession.

Step 3: Train Younger Attorneys

Young attorneys shouldn't just learn about their potential role in marketing your firm.  It's also critical that your firm is working to train and educate young attorneys about current developments in law.  By keeping your attorneys trained and ensuring that they are doing meaningful continuing education, you'll keep them winning cases and gaining referrals.

Skimping on training expenses due to current cash shortfalls is like selling your paddle when you're already up a creek.  Make sure that you're always budgeting for sufficient training, or your succession is likely to turn into a disaster.

Step 4: Evaluate and Mentor Potential Leadership

When you've got a large number of attorneys working for your firm, not all of them will have the same potential to become a leader.  Don't assume that easy metrics, like number of hours billed per week or year, necessarily indicate leadership potential.  Just because an attorney knows how to bill hours doesn't necessarily mean they'll have the project management skills or interpersonal abilities to lead a group of people effectively.

When you find people who are interested in leadership and seem like they could become effective leaders, have a mentoring program in place to help these attorneys.  Make sure that there are open lines of communication with senior partners at the firm—it's better to cultivate talent that has “grown up” in your law firm's unique climate than to have to hire new talent at the time of a succession transition.  Attorneys who have existing loyalty to your firm and an understanding of your brand are worth even more at succession time, if your firm in 20 years is to have any resemblance to how it is today.

Step 5: Always Have a Succession Plan

The biggest marketing mistake that you can make during a time of transition is to lack a comprehensive succession plan that covers the death or incapacity of a partner.  While some firms don't want to think about these potential issues, the unexpected can happen at any time.  It is far better to develop a plan that will never see the light of day than to have to manage succession at an incredibly stressful time with no plan and several factions jockeying for their favored succession ideas.

Step 6: Maintain a Consistent Brand Image

Your marketing doesn't need to change significantly just because there's a transition occurring at your firm.  Keeping your brand image consistent will help your clients understand that your firm will maintain its high quality and client service standards.

Don't just have a brand image—make sure that all attorneys at your firm, from the most senior to the most junior, have a comprehensive understanding of the image you are trying to project.  Without it, you may find that your lawyers start talking at cross purposes with your marketing department, diluting your brand image overall.

Step 7: Have Young Attorneys Do More Online

One of the places where young attorneys can really step up to the plate in your marketing efforts is by creating a social media presence for your firm, or by creating blogs.  Often, these technological tasks are perceived as being a waste of time by senior partners, and older attorneys are less likely to have an in-depth understanding of online marketing technologies or the norms of internet communities and social networks.

This means that your young talent is in a perfect position to start transitioning your firm's marketing materials to the online world.  When your younger attorneys develop a social media presence, they make succession proceed more smoothly for business development.

Step 8: Know When To Seek Outside Talent

It's important to realize when you have a bench that isn't deep enough to continue effective marketing after your Baby Boomer partners retire.  When this happens, it's important to start making some lateral hires now.  There's no shame in seeking outside talent, but make sure that you have some plan for the continuation of your law firm's business at all times that doesn't rely on overuse of attorneys with insufficient experience or skill levels.

If you want to get ahead in the social media game—and, with over half of legal referrals now coming from online sources, who doesn't?—you need to understand the right and wrong ways to engage with the internet community at large.  If you don't seem internet savvy, it's easy to make rookie mistakes that can actually affect people's perception of your law firm for months or even years to come.  In this guide, we'll explore some basic do's and don'ts of the social media world, so that you know some best practices for online marketing while also learning some of the biggest pitfalls to avoid in legal marketing.

DO: Use Your Personal Connections

Some attorneys, especially those who are new to legal marketing efforts, feel like they shouldn't make too much use of their personal connections.  Because social media can sometimes seem to blur the line between purely social relationships and business or networking connections, it can sometimes be confusing to know what side of the line to walk on while marketing your business.

In general, its a good idea to have a personal social media account that is locked and only visible to your close personal friends—if for no other reason than to make sure that you have a place to put your personal observations that just don't belong on a news feed used for marketing purposes.  However, your business social networking accounts should also connect to people you know personally.

Why?  Because these personal connections can actually be one of your best sources of referrals.  When someone already on your friends or connections list refers a new client to you, they'll already be able to see the connection when they message you.

DON'T: Get Fake Followers

One way that many businesses have used to get a higher search ranking for their social media accounts is to purchase followers.  Many businesses online allow people to buy followers, often by the hundred or thousand.  However, these “followers” are really anything but—most or all of them tend to be accounts run by spambots, rather than by real people.

While these kinds of services can sometimes grant a temporary jolt to your search rankings, at the end of the day they don't really help you build quality social media backlinks.  They're the empty calories of the social media world—they seem like they're doing something, but there's nothing in them that will give you any kind of lasting nutrition.  If you're found using services to purchase fake followers, depending on the service you're using, you may also find your account suspended.

DO: Make Content To Attract Social Media Attention

You'll be able to market your content online better when you make it ready to go viral.  Don't make articles too long, and don't make them so short that people are left feeling like they wasted the click.  Design social media friendly content, including easy to read lists and quick analysis of current cases in your field of expertise.

DON'T: Make Up Identities to Post Content Online

While it may be tempting to use false identities to try to propagate your content, including by posting fake comments to blogs or by posting submissions to social bookmarking sites, this strategy is actually incredibly risky.  Called “astroturfing,” this fake grassroots lobbying for your firm is actually more likely to lead to people finding you out and thinking that you're being unethical.

If you want to post your content, do it ethically: be clear about who is posting the content.  You might try doing a question and answer session, or talking to people about common issues in your legal field.  Use your expertise to your advantage, rather than trying to hide it in the name of having “buzz.”

DO: Post Content Regularly

You should only join as many social networks and online groups as you have time to actively participate in.  While you may want to belong to some of these groups only to read, if you're making posts in a location, do so consistently.  Usually, blogs should be updated at least once or twice a week, and Facebook updates can be done one to two times per day without giving your audience pause—as long as the content is of sufficient quality.

DON'T: Repeat Content or Spam Followers

On the flip side, even having a few Facebook posts a week can seem like too much, if your content is boring and repetitive.  If you're just spamming people with what amount to ads, you're not using social media correctly.  Social networks are designed for two-way interaction—to talk with people, not at them.  You'll lose followers and friends by posting advertising instead of entering into dialogues, asking questions, and giving tips.  Follow other law firms so that you can see what other people are doing to talk to their clients without being perceived as spammers.

DO: Make It Easy For Site Visitors to Connect

When people connect to your website, they should be able to connect to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ accounts with just a single click.  If they can't, you may be losing out on valuable business opportunities.  Make sure that your website includes easy to use buttons that connect users to the individual and firm-wide social media profiles you're using to market your services.  Internet users today, especially younger ones, often see social media as the natural first place to check to make sure that someone's personality will mesh with theirs.  By projecting a confident brand persona in your social media accounts, you'll make it easier to get business from these web users.

DON'T: Require Social Media Connections For Content

While some companies think that it's a good idea to get followers by having contests or other content that requires “friending” to access, this is not overall a winning strategy for attorneys.  People who are looking for lawyers don't want to have to jump through additional hoops, and these strategies can seem manipulative and even petty.  You may find that forcing people to follow you leads to few new followers and a significantly increased bounce rate away from your website at the point where friending is required.

On the internet, trends come and go with a relentless pace.  What works one year will sink your marketing efforts the next, and keeping up can be tough.  What strategies are still working in 2013?  What should your law firm focus on, and what should it give up to adapt to new focus areas?  In this guide, we'll explore seven different trends that have been played out.  If you're still on board with one of these trends, it's time to transition out and find new ways of marketing your firm.

#1: Traditional SEO

Not too long ago, the best way by far to get your law firm ahead in search rankings was to very carefully monitor keyword counts and do traditional search engine optimization.  However, keyword density has become almost irrelevant to the new search engine marketing.  If you're still focused on it, you're not just wasting your time.  If Google detects that you're using any of the old SEO tricks, from links that come from spam comments on blogs to keyword spam website content, you can expect to have your website “sandboxed.”  

What does that mean for you?  It means that searches will no longer direct to your page, or that it will be significantly reduced in the results.  Since huge majorities of people don't look past page 1 of their search results, this means you'll lose out on almost all of your potential online business with even relatively minor penalties.

#2: Broad Spectrum Pay Per Click Ads

Many attorneys like to use pay per click ads online for a few different reasons—they're easy to start up and they can deliver immediate returns, unlike some types of online marketing.  However, if you're still using pay per click ads, you've probably also noticed some disadvantages.  High bounce rates, low conversions, and the worst part—as soon as you stop paying, the new business dries up immediately.

Generally, the reason that attorneys have bad luck with pay per click advertisements is that they're not taking enough care to target their ideal clients and the types of clients they most commonly get.  There's no need to waste your time advertising to people who are a long way from your office, or who are outside of the age ranges where you tend to do almost all of your business.

What's more, even if you want to target several different groups, you should be targeting them with specific pay per click ads for their target market.  These ads can take them to a microsite that specifically addresses the concerns of their demographic.

#3: Fake Followers

If you have blogs or business social media accounts, you've almost certainly gotten emails from people who say that they could get you new followers and friends.  While these offers may sound tempting—like an immediate big internet presence on the biggest social media networks—the truth is actually a lot more disappointing.  When you pay for followers, you're not paying for the kind of quality following that actually generates discussion and buzz.

The reason that people with a lot of followers are influential isn't because of a number on their screen.  It's because people like what they have to say, and find them interesting.  You won't gain influence with fake friends.

#4: Tagging Websites

Foursquare and other “tagging” sites seemed like one of the fastest growing trends in social media for a few years.  The problem that made these a trend on their way out is that they had relatively limited appeal.  Most of the web audience simply never made room in their browsing day to tag where they were.  Others had privacy concerns, which would have only magnified if any of these tagging services had ever caught on in a bigger way.

#5: Generalized Websites

If your website has something for everybody, that may be great for an overall firm site, but you need to understand that your main firm website may not be your best marketing tool site.  Instead, the big trend now is to create a large number of targeted microsites.  Microsites should be relatively conversational and informal compared to your main law firm site, and some firms have dozens of these websites.  You can often get very descriptive, long URLs for this kind of microsite.

#6: Flash Intros

A few years ago, many websites had big introductions made with Flash, which had functionalities that made websites more multimedia-oriented.  With the multimedia focus in today's marketing, you may think that a Flash intro would be a good idea for a contemporary law firm website.  However, Flash intros are cumbersome, take a long time for users to download, and runs into incompatibility problems on older computers and on smartphones.

Keep your website HTML, rather than Flash, based and you'll have much better luck getting people from mobile operating systems to use your website and become your clients.

#7: Parody Videos

It's one of the quickest and easiest ways to write something funny for the internet about just about any topic.  Themed parody videos might seem like a fun way to have your law firm do something different with its marketing, but at this point you have to ask: is whatever you're doing really that different?  At this point, so many legal parody videos exist—many created by law school students for an annual contest—that in order to stand out in a good way, you'll need to have polish, production values, and lyrics that aren't terrible and sound great with the original rhythms of the song.

If you're dead set on making a parody video, get professional production and make sure that you have people look at it before you make it live.  More often than not, parody videos today are perceived as more embarrassing than awesome.  You'll be more likely to go viral with something that is both funny and unique.

Social bookmarking websites are some of the fastest growing and most exciting places on the web today, with over 300 million unique viewers going to the five top social bookmarking sites every month.  However, less than a third of law firms are using social bookmarking sites as part of their link building strategy—and if you're not, you're making a big mistake.  If you're hesitant to jump into using social bookmarking websites because you're not sure how to use them, keep reading.  You'll find out how to interact with users of the top social bookmarking sites in a way that will lead to good publicity and better link building opportunities.

#1: Get More Readers For Your Law Blog

If you're already keeping a blog, social bookmarking websites are perhaps the best way to get new readers and more links.  Most of the top social bookmarking sites are divided into many different subcategories, so that people can more easily look for links that pertain to their interests.  By posting your links in relevant subcategories of social bookmarking sites, you'll be able to put your blog in front of the readers most likely to be interested in the topics you're covering.

Make sure not to just post and run—sticking around to answer questions about your law blog can make you much more well-liked on social bookmarking websites.  Some social bookmarking sites will even allow you to do an interview (for example, Reddit calls this an “IamA,” as in “I am a lawyer who specializes in tax fraud and evasion defense, AMA [ask me anything]”).

#2: Attract People to Your Youtube Videos

Video is much more likely to lead to conversions than text, so if your law firm is primarily consumer focused, you may want to use top social bookmarking sites to promote your videos.  Social bookmarking websites often promote videos and images much higher than blog entries, so consider this as an alternative if you can't seem to make any headway by posting blog entries on social bookmarking sites.

In order to get the most views from top social bookmarking sites, you'll need to put your video link into a subcategory that gets a large amount of traffic and that would be interested in what you have to say.  However, if you use smaller subcategories, you may rise higher in these categories even if you get fewer page views, making your reputation on social bookmarking sites grow.

#3: Answer Legal Questions and Start Dialogues

Social bookmarking websites have also become a place where people ask questions about anything in their lives, from relationships to career opportunities to legal problems.  If you're good at conversing with people about legal issues, take that talent to the top social bookmarking sites so you can use them for link building.

Make sure that you don't include links to your website in every comment you make on social bookmarking websites.  If you do, you're going to be called out as a spammer and may be banned from most social bookmarking sites.  However, even on the top social bookmarking sites, an occasional relevant link is welcome and can help you bring in traffic and even convert clients in addition to improving your SEO.

#4: Find Like-Minded Colleagues For Networking

By sticking to subcategories of social bookmarking websites with large numbers of other lawyers or other types of professionals you work with on a regular basis, you give yourself many networking opportunities.  The really interesting advantage that social bookmarking sites give you is the ability to check out what else someone has said, learning a lot about them, even if they haven't yet added you as a friend or connection.

By finding like minded colleagues on top social bookmarking sites, you'll be able to generate more opportunities for link exchange.  This is also a great way to use social bookmarking sites if you get most of your business through referrals from other attorneys.

#5: Debunk Legal Misconceptions

Is there something about your field of law that everybody seems to just get wrong?  Social bookmarking websites can be a great way to help them get it right.  By posting on top social bookmarking sites about common legal misconceptions, you'll be giving people content that they are very interested in, and proving your subject matter expertise.  Social bookmarking websites have audiences who are hungry for more and better information, so if you can explain these misconceptions well, you'll get a lot more connections on top social bookmarking sites.

While this kind of activity on social bookmarking sites won't always generate client leads (remember, people visit top social bookmarking sites from all over the world, not just your geographic area), the leads they do generate are likely to be excellent.

#6: Talk to Law Students

Once upon a time (perhaps not that long ago!), you were a nervous law student unsure about where you'd be working after graduation.  Today, many law students spend time both in and out of class keeping up with social bookmarking sites.  Top social bookmarking sites often have a specific category for law school students.

These students may be very interested in your work, and what's more, putting a link to your firm's homepage is pretty much always acceptable when you're talking to law students—they'll want to know where you work and what you do!  Inbound links like this won't get you banned or chastised, but instead will be considered value added for that part of the website.

#7: Create Inbound Links for SEO

Why is this the last tip, even though many of the other techniques in this guide can help you build links through social bookmarking websites?  Because you should always keep in mind that building inbound links should never be your only goal when using social bookmarking sites.  Top social bookmarking sites have little patience with businesses that only use their sites as free advertising without participating in the community.  You should therefore consider building inbound links with social bookmarking sites to be a secondary priority, and focus mostly on putting your content in front of interested eyes.

It's not difficult to find a list of social bookmarking sites on the internet, but with hundreds of millions of users every day on these sites, you don't just need any social bookmarking list.  You need a social bookmarking sites list that can actually get you the inbound link traffic you're hoping for.  Unlike other guides, which are pushing a particular list of social bookmarking sites or want you to purchase a program with a social bookmarking sites list already programmed in, this guide will teach you how to build your own, custom list.
 

Why Should We Have a List of Social Bookmarking Sites?

Today, it's really not enough to just post on a single social bookmarking site.  If you're just talking to one audience, you're missing out on millions of people, any of whom could become a client or the source of a referral or inbound link.

However, not all social bookmarking sites are equally useful for law firms.  For example, the current #5 most popular site in this category is on almost every social bookmarking list: Pinterest.  Pull up pinterest.com in your web browser, though, and you'll see what it is: a place for people (mostly women) to share interesting photos about fashion, style, food, travel, parenting, and so on.  Unless you have a very niche law practice (fashion law?), you shouldn't have Pinterest on your social bookmarking list.

That's why any list of social bookmarking sites you get that isn't specifically tailored for attorneys—and, more specifically, attorneys in your specialty practice area—won't necessarily be very useful to you.
 

Which Websites Should Be Part of Our Social Bookmarking List?

Any social bookmarking website that you include in your list of social bookmarking sites should have at least some areas that are highly relevant to your practice area.  You should also make sure that every site on your social bookmarking list is being used by Americans—there are some sites that are used much more by people in other countries.

In some legal specialties, you'll actually have a lot more relevant websites than in some others.  For example, if you're in tech or IP law, Slashdot and other similar techie-oriented websites should be on your list of social bookmarking sites.  Someone specializing in divorce law for fathers, on the other hand, may have better luck posting links in the “men's rights” sections of Reddit, which often covers these stories.  You may have to do a fairly large amount of research to get your social bookmarking list just right.

You should also make, as part of your list, sub-lists that include subcategories from each website you've chosen.  These subcategories should be carefully curated for maximum relevance, so that you don't have to look around for the right place to post your new link every time you want to get more inbound links from your list of social bookmarking sites.
 

Should We Automate Posts To Our Social Bookmarking Sites List?

The automation question is a big one for people using social bookmarking sites in 2012.  Automated link building can, in some cases, be an adequate short term link building solution, but in the long term it can actually make your website less easy to find.

Let's say you start using a list of social bookmarking sites that comes from a computer program you've purchased to automate your links. Usually, this social bookmarking sites list will include a wide variety of websites, from the most popular to some more obscure ones.  What you may notice about this type of social bookmarking list is that it's so wide-ranging that most of the websites don't even have a tenuous connection to the area of law you're practicing.

Even if you edit the list of social bookmarking sites so that the program is only automating submissions to your curated social bookmarking list, you can still run into trouble.  Automating submissions to your social bookmarking sites list could lead to your submissions being seen as spam when websites realize you've posted the same content everywhere.  Even if websites don't notice that you've been using a big list of social bookmarking sites and spamming them, Google will.  Google can sandbox, or penalize, your website for automating submissions to a social bookmarking sites list.
 

How Should We Use Our Social Bookmarking Sites List?

Once you have your social bookmarking list, you should start to learn about the websites on the list before posting anything.  Each website is its own community with its own rules—which can be written or unwritten.  Since it can sometimes be difficult to recover your reputation on these websites, try using a personal login first before starting to submit links to your website that could potentially reflect on your entire firm.

Every social bookmarking list will have some websites that work better, and some that don't work as well.  Feel free to update it so that any website that seems to delete all of your posts is no longer part of your list of social bookmarking sites.
 

Keeping Your Social Bookmarking Sites List Up to Date

It's important to always make sure that any list of social bookmarking sites that your firm maintains is kept up to date.  Periodically, you should check subscriber numbers for every site on your social bookmarking list.  If you're seeing subscriber numbers taper off and you notice that the amount of traffic per link is going down, you may want to replace that entry on your social bookmarking sites list with a website that is still in a growth phase.
You should also keep up with some blogs about search engine marketing and social bookmarking.  If you're doing this, you'll be among the first to hear about new sites, and can add them to your social bookmarking sites list before most other law firms have even heard the name of the website.  Pay special attention to any websites that are explicitly law-related, because these need to be toward the top of your social bookmarking list.