Quid Pro SEO
May 8, 2013 8:48 AM   Subscribe

In Reluctant Defense of the Curmudgeon Malcontents. A Baltimore-area attorney explains how online marketing is hurting the legal profession: There is for the conscientious ethical attorney a balance between eremitic life in a Byzantine-era monastery and nonsense online carney barking, but none of these non-attorney folks deserve a seat at the table in that discussion. And the more you see of the online marketing nonsense that's out there, the more sympathetic you become to people with poor home training who reject that nonsense in language you wouldn't want uttered aloud in your grandmother’s house of worship.
posted by Cash4Lead (22 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
I began to notice the vacuous messages of many attorneys who used Twitter.

See? You looked and you noticed. On-line marketing works. Ignore the malcontents.
posted by three blind mice at 8:58 AM on May 8, 2013


There's a lot of really inept attempts at online marketing by professionals who are not familiar with the medium and who are sold a bill of goods by less-than-ethical marketers.

There's also a lot of grumpy attorneys who are hostile to anything resembling marketing (or business, for that matter) and throw around 'ethics' talk as a means of criticism, rather than from any legitimate ethical concerns.

I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle.
posted by leotrotsky at 9:08 AM on May 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


It became pretty clear that the audience for these communications wasn’t clients or attorneys or the inquiring public or the Bench, but Google’s SEO algorithm. Maybe this is an OK way to sell pizza or ringtones, but not to offer attorney services.

What's the difference between a pizza and an attorney anyway? Both give you indigestion.

And real lawyers do blog. (18 days!)
posted by mrgrimm at 9:10 AM on May 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


I really dislike this stuff when I come across it but I have to admit my wife and I chuckle every time the commercial for the Stephens Johnson Syndrome class action suit comes on TV. Because my name is Stephen.
posted by srboisvert at 9:12 AM on May 8, 2013 [3 favorites]


We do online marketing for a couple of local full-service lawyer shops.

SEO doesn't really cut it - it's the equivalent of naming your company "123ABC lawyers" in hopes of showing up as the first listing in the Yellow Pages.

Instead, we're doing some really interesting "content marketing" with these clients (lawyers typically like to spend a lot of money on advertising, and reject smaller campaigns) where we're doing video interviews and online profiles that provide useful information.

They also fund a small, niche online publication that covers XX sector in the local economy, so we can do some interesting quasi-journalistic stories, and cover topics that aren't really reported on in the local mainstream press.

That's the way to do marketing these days - providing useful, relevant information that allows local businesses like lawyers to engage with customers.

Spammy crap gets demarcated by Google, and we don't want to work with ambulance chasers anyway.
posted by KokuRyu at 9:20 AM on May 8, 2013 [9 favorites]


AdWords does the job for me! But I'm in a super specialized field.
posted by Ironmouth at 9:23 AM on May 8, 2013


Can't be any worse then the TV ads they've been running.
posted by delmoi at 9:23 AM on May 8, 2013


Effectively marketing legal services is hard, especially through social media. Been there, done that, glad it's not my job anymore.
posted by asnider at 9:40 AM on May 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


We've found that the senior partners understand the need for high-quality, appropriate marketing, but the junior lawyers are focused (understandably) on billable hours, and view assisting us with marketing (the partners are playing golf or whatever) as a serious opportunity cost. Thankfully we have the resources to try out different activities, but it can be quite frustrating. But they keep paying us!
posted by KokuRyu at 9:56 AM on May 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


leotrotsky: "I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle."

That's a joke, right?
posted by kenko at 10:37 AM on May 8, 2013


What's the difference between a pizza and an attorney anyway?

Well, one difference between legal services and (most) other products or services you'd promote online is that there are penalties for practicing without a license in various jurisdictions - and the internet is bad at respecting jurisdictional boundaries. Of course there are disclaimers and "this site does not constitute the practice of law" boilerplate and whatnot, but you need to fulfill those disclaimers and boilerplate by not in fact engaging in the practice of law online. So you really can't do a lot of things that other types of businesses can do online, like directly selling your stuff, or "kind of" selling your stuff by offering a sample or a coupon or a consultation. Well, I guess you could offer coupons.

Another difference is that, if you do anything resembling offering services to a particular person, you run the risk of establishing an attorney-client relationship with that person, which imposes all sorts of burdens on you, like keeping their confidences, continuing to defend their interests within the scope of your representation, and not taking any positions adverse to them. It all sounds reasonable (and it is), but if you offer services that are mostly relevant to a certain type of business, you could inadvertently end up in the situation where you're "attached" to one company who is now your client, but has paid you next to nothing, and prevents you from being hired by any of their competitors. Ooops.

I'm not saying I'd go full-curmudgeon, but there are ways in which legal services are genuinely difficult to promote online. Online marketing, especially social media marketing, is all about engagement and getting to know each other, while the rules about the practice of law are all about establishing boundaries until all appropriate formalities are met. It's just not always a good fit.
posted by Joey Buttafoucault at 10:42 AM on May 8, 2013 [6 favorites]


We get around this by not talking about law, but referencing it (ie, the legal services our client might offer) in passing. Makes it difficult for SEO, since Google cares about the relevance of the keywords assigned to the page versus the actual content of the page.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:49 AM on May 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


"See? You looked and you noticed. On-line marketing works. Ignore the malcontents."

If you RTFA, you'll see that he addresses specific instances, e.g. specialization claims, that are unethical or prohibited by law, as well as ways in which the mechanisms available can actually be harmful for clients. So, noticing is not the end of the circuit, and your comment reads as pretty dumb and knee jerk because of that.
posted by klangklangston at 11:11 AM on May 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


I tend to think Twitter is a binary thing - either it works or it doesn't. It's a lot of work, really, and it means actively engaging with people all day, every day. If you don't do that, it's sort of a strange way to spend your day, shouting into nothing.
posted by KokuRyu at 11:19 AM on May 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


There is for the conscientious ethical attorney person a balance between eremitic life in a Byzantine-era monastery and nonsense online carney barking.

This is why embracing the "tech will eat everything" attitude is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thing.

Even within the industry, I can't sell apps without being besieged by skeezy companies who scrape my information and try to sell me reviews and other things that less scrupulous developers can use to gain an advantage. It's even worse when these bad actors invade other industries with the "we know it so you don't have to" angle. At least they're playing to my strengths so I can tell its bullshit.

now all you "online marketers" get off my lawn!
posted by frijole at 11:54 AM on May 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


On the technology side, the biggest challenge we have an as agency are clients who build products without ever talking to customers.
posted by KokuRyu at 12:17 PM on May 8, 2013


It's crazy, though - I'm working remotely today and the workspace is blaring local pop-rock radio with plenty of local ads. Any one of the local businesses advertising on radio really ought to consider switching to online marketing. They would spend much less money and send more local customers to their websites (and make more money). It's nuts how businesses will just throw money away on marketing tools and tactics where they can't even measure the results.
posted by KokuRyu at 12:28 PM on May 8, 2013


If you don't do that, it's sort of a strange way to spend your day, shouting into nothing.

And yet we keep coming back to MeFi.
posted by Sangermaine at 12:33 PM on May 8, 2013 [3 favorites]


But at least on MeFi we get responses. I could write a hundred tweets a day and never receive even a retweet. I imagine there are plenty of people like me.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 12:50 PM on May 8, 2013


We get around this by not talking about law, but referencing it (ie, the legal services our client might offer) in passing.

Yeah, but aren't you kind of conceding the point, then? If the best you can do to market a certain type of service online is to not even talk about it directly, that particular service is a bad fit for online marketing, no?

Anyway, another part of the linked post that stood out to me was this:
Rachel Rodgers’ website and “manifesto” I have addressed elsewhere at length and won’t rehash here. In Rodgers’ presentation and other active online marketers’ sites I began to notice overstatements and inappropriate affect and language. Words like “unsuck” and “awesome” and “epic shit” don’t belong in professional discussions any more than “stupid bitch” does.
First of all, I definitely agree about the "stupid bitch" part. But as to the rest of it - yeah, that stuff is "unprofessional," but let me tell you what else: 75% of everything that happens at golf courses or extended client dinners or post-networking-event bar hopping is unprofessional as hell, and these are classic places where relationships that result in meaningful business development are built. Legal business development has always been based in substantial part on informal, "unprofessional" interactions and I suspect it always will be. Maybe twitter-based marketing is becoming nothing more (or less) than the contemporary replacement for these "old boys' club" type events, which are less and less of a thing as time goes on anyway. If so it's a pretty banal achievement, but at least it could have the salutary effect of increasing gender and ethnic diversity. Here's hoping.
posted by Joey Buttafoucault at 4:30 PM on May 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


Better call Saul.
posted by Smedleyman at 10:52 AM on May 9, 2013


Online marketing, especially social media marketing, is all about engagement and getting to know each other, while the rules about the practice of law are all about establishing boundaries until all appropriate formalities are met.

I find this a really interesting compare and contrast, because in many ways I wish online social media was more about establishing boundaries until certain formalities are met more than it is, and I suspect that's part of why I don't engage much in social media. The partial-expectation of candor and continual connection (I say partial expectation because I suspect this is more of a "keeping up with the Joneses" version of expectation than anyone explicitly saying someone has to share their day-to-day events with twitter or facebook) along with the lack of limits (you can literally type almost anything) and implication of privacy (we do, after all, engage with social media in private - on our phones and computers - not in public) makes me deeply uncomfortable.

There seems to be almost a knee-jerk rejection of the idea of setting limits and boundaries these days, which I think makes it more difficult to navigate social media as personal and professional people - a thought bourne out by the rise in people being fired or censured for things they record on the internet.
posted by Deoridhe at 1:21 PM on May 9, 2013


« Older Knight Vs Giant   |   Every meteorite since 861 AD: watch them fall Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments