Spenser Baretz of Hellerman Baretz Communications LLC helped Ford & Harrison start the blog in 2006, and used it as a case study during the recent Law Firm Media Professionals (LFMP) social media panel discussion. Other panelists at the event included Russell Lawson of Sands Anderson (who also blogs about “Progressive Marketing” here) and the ubiquitous Peter Shankman of HARO; both of whom echoed the value of blogs in marketing for law firms and other professional services organizations.

But why are professional service and law firms such good candidates for blogging as opposed to other forms of social media? Lawson used a popular analogy to describe getting his firm started on social media: “it was like trying to drink from a fire hose.” (For more on this, check out the BlissPR blog post from Elizabeth Sosnow: 11 reasons why law firms should experiment with social media). To make the transition more manageable, Lawson limited the firm’s scope to blogs, and added Twitter and LinkedIn once they got more comfortable in the space. In addition to being perhaps the most manageable first step into the social media world, blogging is also a great medium to promote the ideas that are the backbone of what professional services firms are essentially “selling”.

Baretz also reinforced that social media is about promoting ideas and thought leadership that will be valued by clients. A blog is a great way to do this, as Ford & Harrison quickly found out. According to Baretz, associates at the firm were assigned blog posts each week, and were required to make updates immediately following each episode. This allowed them to capitalize on the high search volume for the term “The Office” thereby skyrocketing the firm’s SEO, and showcasing their employment law expertise to an audience of current and prospective clients. 

“That’s What She Said” has been a great success, and its strategy can be replicated for other professional services blogs. There seem to be three key pieces to the puzzle:

1. MAN POWER – A successful blog requires an extensive time commitment on behalf of the bloggers, usually the firm’s leadership. This blog is sustainable because it is driven by multiple associates at the firm, not just one person, and not by the partners who often do not have the bandwidth to regularly update a blog.  
2. FLOW OF CONTENT – Because this blog is linked to a weekly TV show, there is a regular flow of content sparking new ideas and raising new issues to blog about. This makes life a lot easier on the bloggers. What in your industry (or outside of it) could be used to spark regular content?
3. TIMING – Updates were posted immediately following each episode of The Office, keeping the blog relevant and SEO-friendly. Timing is critical across so many channels of media and PR, and linking a blog to something that will be newsworthy and relevant from a timing standpoint can be a key driver of success, as Ford & Harrison have demonstrated. 

Has your firm created a successful blog? If so, does it have any of the components listed above? What else helps to drive your blog’s success?

To reach Emily:

Phone: 212.840.8079
Email: Emily@blisspr.com
Twitter: @eweinman
LinkedIn: Emily Weinman

Last week, I had the opportunity to make a presentation to the St. Louis chapter of PRSA on this topic – which is based on multiple conversations with my fellow BlissPR colleagues about how we help our clients achieve their business goals. 

B2B service companies are great clients because they stretch us to come up with a clear vantage point on technical and often enterprise level matters.   But they can also be tough clients because they are very busy, as well as risk averse and slow to adopt change.   When we are faced with creating a new campaign, here are some of the things we think about to get out of the traditional “lather, rinse, repeat” kind of PR.  Here is what I said in St. Louis – what have I missed?  (Want to make sure you see this, @tressalynne)

1. Raise the Altitude.  First, get up above product.  If you are discussing the features and benefits of what the company sells, you won’t get the audience’s full attention.  It’s like looking at photos of someone else’s kids.  Find out what the audience truly cares about, and focus on that.  Here’s a great example of a major financial company surfacing the issues of concern to its customers, who are heads of HR:  MetLife’s 8th Annual Employee Benefits Trends Study.
2. Carve out an Issue to Own.  Second, don’t be afraid to make an idea the hero of the moment.  The idea can be an issue, a trend, a topic area – think “privacy” or “motivation” or “risk” or “capital flows” — but it’s not the product.  Then build a microsite or a blog or a strong point of view around that.  We have seen consulting firms take this tack, and predict that corporations will do so as well.  
3. Be of Service to the Communities you Care About.  What does your client know that can help the communities that they serve?   How can you help them do their own business better?  Often, research, benchmark data, opinion, counsel can be packaged in a way that galvanizes decision-making.  Here’s an example: BDO’s Retail Survey.
4. Enter the Ongoing Conversation. If your client is discussing a topic that matters, and has a point of view or research that extends the conversation, then you better be finding the right dialogues, and the people (bloggers) who are influencing them.  Addict-o-matic is a great way to find them. 
5. Learn to Share.  Once you have created your content, deliver it in many forms and formats.  SMPRs, video, data nuggets, how to advice, predictions.   And don’t be afraid to partner with a media outlet to deliver all that content goodness.  Here’s an example of what we mean:  Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com/Hay Group Study Identifies Best Companies for Leadership.
6. Don’t Hog the Microphone.  When your client is the only one talking –even if he or she is the smartest person in the room, it’s less interesting than if you invite other voices in to the discussion.  Open it up and more people will listen.    That’s what they found at McKinsey’s whatmatters microsite.   
7. Get Local.  If there’s a national trend – movement of some kind, whether it’s a rule change, a regulation, legislation – there will likely be local fallout.  Capture it!  People care about changes and problems happening in their own backyards, and are more likely to pick up the phone and call someone in their own area for help.
8. Build Your own Community.  In the old days, we used trade media to reach niche markets.  Not so much anymore.  Plus niche markets are getting nichier.  Sometimes you find them, sometimes you have to help your clients create them.  So if it’s CFOs of Canadian natural resources companies, or hospital facilities managers in the southwest, or med students who care about TB,  or meeting planners for financial services companies, sometimes it’s easiest to build your own audience.  

That’s what I came up with – what steps would you add? Click here to see the full deck or feel free to email me at abby@blisspr.com.

To reach Abby:

Phone: 212.840.0088
Email: abby@blisspr.com
Twitter: @abbycarr
LinkedIn: Abby Carr

Lee cites an article from the Harvard Business Review on customer loyalty in which the authors presented research showing that satisfied customers are not necessarily loyal.  Writes Lee: “on a scale of one to five [one being very unsatisfied and five  being very satisfied], a customer who marks a four is six times more likely to defect than a customer who marks a five.  In other words, there is a six-fold increase in customer loyalty between fours and fives.”  While Lee is examining patient/employee satisfaction and loyalty in hospitals, the implication for our industry is clear: loyalty is critical to the security of client-agency relationships – and therefore, it’s essential that we understand the distinction between satisfaction and loyalty. 

So, how can professional services PR firms build client loyalty?

1. Deliver quality work:  If your clients are not satisfied, they’re definitely not going to feel loyal to your organization.  Therefore, client satisfaction is a logical precursor to client loyalty.  While it might sound like common sense, it’s critical that you’re responsive to your clients and consistently provide quality work in a timely manner.
2. Anticipate your clients’ needs:  If you’re successfully delivering quality work, your clients are likely satisfied, but are they yet loyal?  Anticipating clients’ needs is an important step in moving from a four to a five on the client satisfaction scale – and making you an invaluable marketing partner.  According to Lee, “loyalty is generated by memorable things that happen that we didn’t expect.”  So, ask yourself: are you maintaining the status quo, or are you creating memorable moments by going “above and beyond;” consistently staying one step ahead of your clients and anticipating their needs, so they don’t have to.
3. Know your clients’ business:  In order to successfully anticipate your clients’ needs, you have to know their business, inside and out.  In a recent discussion with Dallas Kersey, former director of marketing at Towers Perrin and Edward Jones, he said the number one thing PR professionals can do to make themselves invaluable to their clients is to think of themselves as business professionals first, PR professionals second.  That is, “know your clients’ business.”  As Lee notes in his book, “doing everything to perfection…meeting all [of your clients’] standards of performance and courtesy” is not enough to build client loyalty.  As PR professionals, in order to build client loyalty, we must understand how everything we do fits into our clients’ overall marketing strategy and ultimately, how that’s tied to the company’s bottom line.  Without that understanding, you cannot cross the line from “outside agency” to true marketing partner.

These are just a few of the ways that you can work toward building loyalty.  What else would you add to this list?

To reach Aven:

Phone: 212.840.1661
Email: aven@blisspr.com
Twitter: @avenlea
LinkedIn: Aven James

1. Understand demographics:  A recent study of Corporate Counsel noted that 37% of the 30-39 year old age group had used Facebook in the past 24 hours and 48% have used it professionally in the past week. Do not forget that your senior partners – and their contacts – will retire sooner than you might think. Marketing will not always stay the same, even if you really, really want it to.
2. Harness LinkedIn:  There are probably more lawyers on this network than any other group combined. Your firm needs a profile and your partners need to take advantage of the networking opportunities, which will only increase over time.
3.  Deploy a targeted Search Engine Optimization (SEO) pilot: Your attorneys may not want to leap onto Facebook, but almost anyone is interested in the efficiency of their website traffic. What kinds of visitors come to the site? How long do they stay? What kind of content moves them to action? Take a look at what your Google Analytics are trying to tell you, then pick an important practice as a test case. Create content, deploy the right keywords and see if the traffic grows – that will get the attention of more than a few within the firm.
4. Improve your alumni and recruiting efforts: If you are a large firm, this is likely to be where you have a social media investment, if you’ve made one at all. Are they just a group you send information “at,” or are you building a genuine community?
5. Harvest analytics from every place you can find them: Email blasts, websites, search engine rankings and social networks each offer law firms a chance to finally analyze and “own” quantitative marketing information. Seize it!
6. Leverage legal marketing resources: There are lots of great thinkers in this space – set up a Google Reader so you can listen in. Some of my favorites are Jane Navarre, Heather Milligan, Nancy Myrland, Adrian Dayton and Kevin O’Keefe.

I’ve spent most of my career thinking about public relations for law firms…Now I wonder if I’ll spend the rest of my career thinking about social media for law firms? What about you?

To reach Elizabeth:

Phone:  212.840.0017
Email: elizabeth@blisspr.com
Twitter: @elizabethsosnow
LinkedIn: Elizabeth Sosnow

After all, most attorneys market in order to do one thing: identify new business “leads.” But that’s not the only reason to develop an online marketing strategy.  What about positioning key practices as leaders on client sector trends?  Is it important to strengthen the firm’s brand equity in emerging markets? Can we extend the life of our current thought leadership with a new distribution system?

In short, you can. Here’s a copy of the presentation, if you’d like a deeper dive:

In the meantime, here are my first 5 tips for getting started:

1. Recognize that you don’t have to start by getting “social:” While it may be sacrilegious to say, it’s possible to derive a huge amount of value from social media without ever becoming, well, social. Instead, think of it as your firm’s competitive intelligence engine.  You have an opportunity to gain sector, competitor and client market insights – why would you pass that up?
2. Benchmark and compare trends over time: What happens if you check once and your competitor hasn’t entered the space? Does that mean they never will? Of course not. 96 of the AmLaw 200 are now blogging…only 39 were in August 2007. Keep gathering data to guide your marketing decisions and investments.
3. Evaluate aspirational marketing leaders: Large law firms know how to do many things well, from attracting laterals to extending global scope. But it’s still possible to learn from smaller firms who can sometimes be more nimble and almost certainly have been experimenting longer. Don’t make marketing decisions based on what your exact peers are doing. It’s short-sighted.
4. Construct early warning systems:  You already have Google Alerts set up to monitor your partners, practices and peers. Take it a step further and look for comments on blogs and message boards.
5. Think small: Somewhere in your firm there are emerging rainmakers that have the trust of senior partners. They are already essential in critical deals, they have keen insights about the direction of their marketplace and they are hungry for advancement. To top it off, they have a little more time than your major rainmakers. Why not let them experiment with some targeted engagement on a network such as Legal OnRamp?

Tomorrow I’ll give you six more reasons to consider if social media has a place for your law firm. But what would you add to the list so far?

To reach Elizabeth:

Phone:  212.840.0017
Email: elizabeth@blisspr.com
Twitter: @elizabethsosnow
LinkedIn: Elizabeth Sosnow

According to a new survey – conducted by BlissPR, Bloom Group and the Association of Management Consulting Firms (AMCF) – consultants spend roughly 18% of their thought marketing budgets on social channels, up from 5% in 2005.  Over the next five years, firms expect the percentage to climb to roughly 33%.

While challenges abound – including cultural issues, resource constraints and the need for integrated traditional/social marketing plans – savvy firms recognize that social media is here to stay and are adapting accordingly.

Among the major benefits:

1. Professional firms are rich in content (data, methodologies, trend commentary, insights, stories), and content is the currency of social media.   At a minimum, social outposts (Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare, LinkedIn) are a natural way to extend the reach of existing content.
2. Social media reinforces traditional thought leadership marketing activities such as speeches, seminars, studies and books.  Firms that are experimenting with social media and breaking new ground (e.g., McKinsey, Cognizant), have found that online engagement increases attendance at offline conferences and readership of articles, white papers and studies.  It’s not an “either/ or.”   Social media and traditional marketing reinforce one another.
3.  Blogs and microsites enable firms to build a dedicated group of followers with deep interest on particular issues.   Microsites also allow firms to aggregate their thought leadership on a given topic, which makes the information easier to find via search engines.
4. Social and digital channels give professionals a cost-effective way to stress-test their ideas and collaborate with colleagues.  Increasingly, professionals are using social channels to develop thought leadership – as well as to promote it.
5. Social media is a cost-effective way to build personal and organizational brands, spread ideas and bring together decision-makers from around the globe. It’s also relatively easy to measure impact/reach, which satisfies leadership’s desire for quantification on ROI. 

Social media is already reshaping the way that many professional firms build relationships, promote ideas and, ultimately, go-to-market. 

How quickly do you think professional services firms will cross the digital divide?

To reach Meg:
Phone:  212.840.0095 
Email: meg@blisspr.com
Twitter: @megwildrick
LinkedIn: Meg Wildrick

Soccer is a funny thing for me.  I played when I was younger and enjoyed it, and I imagine that my kids will play as well once they’re a little older.  It’s a great game for young kids: Everyone participates and plays a relatively equal role, with no complaints about being stuck in right field or being stuck on the offensive line for every play.  At first glance, it doesn’t appear to have the same injury potential as baseball and football.  A child can play well without having to move quite so far up the skill curve as compared to other sports.

I’m just not convinced that it will be our future national game. 

Maybe because it seems too accessible.  We send our kids out to play soccer because it’s a fun game.  They can get some good exercise.   But when the game is over, we want to watch a game where we can be awe struck – seeing the 500 foot homer (maybe not anymore…), the flying dunk, the perfectly thrown pass.  And maybe appreciate the tradition and history – the societal investment we have in those other games.

But here’s the thing: I am enjoying the World Cup.  I enjoy seeing the finesse of these athletes at the top of their game.  I enjoy the “national pride” angle.  I enjoy the excitement of seeing an all-too-rare goal scored.  I even kind of like the buzz of 40,000 vuvuzelas played in unison.  I’m beginning to understand the macro-strategy that has fans so excited over a tie in the early rounds.  And it’s even inspired me a little in my day to day job.  

As a communications professional I think I can all learn something from their teamwork and their commitment to the end goal and one another. I can probably stand to better listen to and respond to my colleagues, learn how to anticipate their needs and support them in reaching their individual goals as well as helping us as a firm reach bigger goals. 

So I’ll watch for the next few weeks.  I’ll fall in to the excitement. I’ll support my co-workers and take the extra minute to listen to their play by play of last night’s game. And I’ll appreciate the skill of the players.  But when it’s over, I’ll go back to the Big Three that have marked the changing seasons better than any calendar. 

And maybe I’ll look forward a little bit to 2014…what about you?

To reach Donna:

Phone:  212.584.5479
Email: donna@blisspr.com
Twitter: @donnamcsorley

1. Data does not equal strategy. Data is available at our finger tips, which makes it powerful to B2B organizations; however the click of a mouse does not automatically equal strategy or give companies a competitive advantage.  
2. Strategy at the speed of light with the life of a firefly.  Kiechel offers that “in the 1980s it was expected that consulting services would yield a strategy in eight months, today that time line has been shortened to six weeks, including deliverables.”  Strategy sets goals and designs actions to achieve those goals – it is not born, nor does it die over night – the best strategies stick to a thread but are open to a constant evolution.
3. Are directors of strategy necessary? According to Kiechel and his colleagues, if a consulting firm is asking this question, it has missed the boat.  Professional services firms’ today have a more decentralized notion of strategy and so it might not be wise to pin all the responsibility on one person. A central person can be useful to ensure continuity but it is important that ideas are collaborated on and collected across the organizations. Marketing directors, CEOs, heads of PR, directors of thought leadership are all involved in strategy and the sharing and dissemination of ideas across an organization.
4. Don’t underestimate creativity. There are a lot of left brain thinkers in businesses, thank goodness, but right brained thinkers are just as vital to an organization. And being creative isn’t about playing an instrument or being able to draw – it is a way of thinking and viewing the world.  Darrell Rigby from Bain & Company believes that “the pairing of creative and more business minded people creates longer term ROI in companies.” I agree – some of the best and most innovative brainstorms I have been a part of include both types of thinkers. And innovation is the special sauce in most strategies.

What considerations are most important to you in developing B2B strategy?

To reach Cortney:

Phone: 212.840.1661
Email: cortney@blisspr.com
Twitter: @cortneyr
LinkedIn: Cortney Rhoads Stapleton

“But I need to stay on top of emerging trends,” I hear you say. “This next tool might be the key to a successful digital PR campaign.” It’s true — online engagement analysis is not for the weak of heart. But I tried to offer some hope during a May presentation in Shanghai to the Worldcom Public Relations Group, the world’s leading network of independently owned public relations firms:

My 7 Best Practices for Social Media Tool Adoption:

1. Understand your assessment context before you begin. Why do you want to test the tool? To help your staff? Outwit your competitors? Give a boost to a marketing campaign?
2. Pick 2 tools to experiment with at a time: You’ll wind up discarding over 50% of these tools, ultimately, but you need to keep experimenting and “churning.”
3.  Read “tool master” reviews to give you a sense of the pros and cons: Insights from smart people like Jason Falls help make my job easier.
4. Use colleagues to divide and conquer analysis: If you work for a PR agency, please don’t make the mistake of delegating this work to your junior staff. Senior PR practitioners need to understand how these tools fit within a larger marketing strategy.
5. Find online buddies who are having fun with the tool: It may not be your idea of giggles, but you still need to develop an educated opinion on why the tool is attracting attention, anyway.
6. Discard tools relatively quickly if you aren’t finding value: There’s always an emerging tool to replace a dud. But don’t assume that you can rule a tool out forever, the playing field can change instantaneously with the right upgrade.
7. Protect clients and employers by waiting to share tools until you are sure they are worth the time: Tools are the last “stop.” Start with Forrester’s POST approach, and fold the tools in later.

Take a peek at my 20 minute speech if you’d like to hear more about the tools I use daily to support our own digital PR strategy, including:

• Feedera: bundles your friends’ “most shared” Twitter content daily
• Bit.ly: offers a metrics dashboard to understand if your content excites people
• Backtype: flags keywords in blog comments
• Google Reader: organizes your RSS feeds, but has the potential to be your top competitive intelligence tool
• Wordtracker: identifies “starting point” keywords without the cost of an SEO

This presentation also shares the tools and networks that I’m experimenting with: 

• LinkedIn: Realize that “sleeping beauty” is waking up and has real potential for B2B companies
• Foursquare: Understand how acquiring audience location data could impact your marketing strategy
• Flowtown: Mine social data from your email address list
• Authority Labs: Track search engine positioning for your site’s critical keywords
• MobiReady: assess if your site is ready for mobile use
• Flickr: use visual tags to get lots of Google “love” 

Did I stop your “shakes?” How do you solve Social Media Tool Exhaustion?

P.S. My time in Shanghai wasn’t all work. Head over to my Flickr account to see a few pictures of our visit or to YouTube to see a couple of video clips of my favorite pavilions at the World Expo.

To reach Elizabeth:

Phone:  212.840.0017
Email: elizabeth@blisspr.com
Twitter: @elizabethsosnow
LinkedIn: Elizabeth Sosnow

Social media has changed the way we develop and implement marketing and PR programs, and in doing so, has influenced the question: “to partner, or not to partner?” Today, traditional media partnerships can provide excellent content for social media campaigns. Partnerships now present an entry point, not a barrier, to additional coverage and ultimately, awareness for your brand and/or product.

A recent study by client Hay Group (a global management consulting firm) shows how traditional media partnerships can fuel social media campaign success. 

Study: Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com/Hay Group Best Companies for Leadership Study

Strategy: Partnering with an online outlet gave us the opportunity to develop a robust, proactive social media campaign to extend coverage beyond Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com and drive additional traffic to Hay Group’s website. As part of that strategy, we:

• Developed a social media press release (SMPR): We used Pitchengine.com to create a release that included video interviews with Hay Group’s consultants, pull-out data points from the study, an easy to “re-tweet” Twitter pitch, links to coverage of the study on Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com, and access to other relevant resources. Be forewarned – producing an SMPR can be time-consuming, but the result is a more comprehensive and exciting way to share your information. And, it’s more conducive to sharing online via Twitter, LinkedIn, blog comments, etc. It also can be a useful marketing tool to include in email campaigns, webinars and other marketing communications. 
• Conducted targeted outreach to leadership and HR bloggers: As Kevin Briody notes in his post The Very Basics of Blogger Outreach, the first step to conducting blogger outreach is to identify the right bloggers – and get to know them. There’s a robust community of bloggers discussing management and leadership issues that we were able to engage before, during and after the Best Companies for Leadership study was released. If you’re looking for bloggers who reach your target audience, there are a number of tools that will help you identify them, including Alltop, Google Blog Search and Technorati, to name a few.
• Initiated an awareness/engagement campaign on Twitter: As with blogger outreach, to effectively use Twitter to reach online influencers you must identify the right people and engage them. It’s critical that you’ve built your followers before you launch your social media campaign. Adam Holden-Bache provides 6 useful steps to find your B2B audience on Twitter in his post on Social Media B2B. 

Results: There are many ways to measure the impact of social media marketing, all of which should be based on a specific set of objectives, goals and tactics identified for your specific campaign. Below are a few metrics that we used to gauge the success of our campaign. Within the first month of the launch:

• The SMPR had been viewed more than 1,800 times, cited in more than 30 blogs (including On Leadership, Leading Blog, Three Star Leadership and Great Leadership, among others) and “Tweeted” by more than 350 people (with 356,650+ combined followers) 
• The ten leadership stories that appeared in the “Best Companies for Leadership” special section on the Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com were among the top five most-clicked stories on BusinessWeek.com for a few weeks post-launch
• Hay Group’s website received a boost in traffic, with more than 2,926 visits in the first 24 hours alone (a huge increase over average traffic)

There are many ways that traditional PR initiatives can be leveraged through social media. What tactics have you used?

To reach Aven:

Phone: 212.840.1661
Email: aven@blisspr.com
Twitter: @avenlea
LinkedIn: Aven James