I’ve long maintained that there are some serious challenges for professional services firms wanting to engage effectively with and through social media, as I wrote about earlier this year in relation to financial advisers.
The flipside is that there is a lot of opportunity for those professional services that make the effort to develop a good understanding of the social media sphere, create a workable strategy and take action determinedly and consistently.
But it’s not easy to find appropriate case studies against which to benchmark, as I discovered when I went looking for some in the financial advising industry and discovered also applies in the legal industry. when I went searching recently as part of my preparation for an upcoming seminar for lawyers in Brisbane, Australia.
So I thought that rather than go for case studies I would make the search simpler and look for something less rigorous, namely success stories.
As I often do with such searches, I turned to the LinkedIn community and placed a question on LinkedIn Answers. I asked the question “Does anyone have direct experience of successful social media engagement by a law firm or firms?” As the answers show, a number of people weighed in with links to people who would know or to individuals who seem to be using one or other social platform, say blogging, effectively.
There were only a few examples of evident integration across platforms: i.e. being active on more than one platform and having the activity on the different networks linked. Two of these that stood out for me were the UK’s Chrissie Lightfoot and the California firm Allen Matkins.
Chrissie Lightfoot has very clear links from her website home page to her blog, Facebook page, LinkedIn profile and Twitter account, and takes advantage of features providing for cross-posting across platforms.
For anyone interested in implications of the intersection between technology and the legal profession, I recommend reading her blog post (with link to a fuller version) The iCyborg Lawyer is Near?
Allen Matkins have prominent links to their several blogs on specific practice areas. Links from their web home page to their presences on various social platforms – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – are not obvious (they are at the bottom of the page, as far below the “fold” as can be) but there is a clear integration. I was especially impressed by their very professional videos, using YouTube and embedding the videos also in their web site.
More to come soon
In addition to the above and other success stories linked in the responses to my question on LinkedIn Answers, I plan to post some further examples here of successful social media engagement by law firms, under the heading of Law Firms and Social Media Success Stories.
If you have such a story to share, either for your own firm or another, do please share the information in the comments here.
