I am a bit of an internet nerd, as far as attorneys go. You may or may not realize this, but attorneys are incredibly slow to adapt to new technology. They tend to like things the way that they are, and don’t want to take the time and effort to learn a new way of doing things, if the old way of doing things already works.
While of course that is a generalization, I think it’s a fairly accurate one.
When I left a larger firm to start my own estate planning practice, one thing that I was committed to was using computers and the internet to be more efficient — both in the way that I serve my clients, and in the way that I market my practice to others. I was convinced that through “social media” and “social media” alone, I would be able to quickly develop a thriving practice.
I was only part right. Social media, whether Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogs, Digg, and even old-school Listservs is about building relationships with other people. “If you build it they will come” is not true. But networking online is not that much different in networking “in the real world.” By communicating with other people, whether in person, through the phone, through email, twitter, of Facebook comments, you get to know them, and develop a mutual trust.
Sometimes the question is, “how do you find the people that you would like to meet.” This is an important question for both meeting people online, and offline. In this post I’ll focus on online only. One thing that I do is that I have a constant search running on Twitter for certain topics, including “Estate Planning” and “Estate Tax.” I hope that I will be able to meet and communicate with people interested in Estate Planning not just here in Fort Lauderdale, but around the country. In fact, I have already been referred a client from an estate planning attorney in Los Angeles and I have referred a client to an estate planning attorney in Michigan.
None of this would have been possible without properly using social media. Before I sent or received the referral, I had already built relationships with the other attorneys. Which brings me to the subject of today’s post. One of my automatic ongoing searches came up with the following Tweet, “Florida Estate Planning Attorneys: Florida Estate Planning Attorneys, lawyers, lawfirms, real estate, http://bit.ly/7XooVi.” Curious, I clicked the link in the tweet which brought me to this page on Digg. That page was also entitled “Florida Estate Planning Attorneys.” However, it didn’t contain any information. From there, there was yet another link to this page, which is nothing but a poorly formatted list of attorneys, along with some Google Ads for other attorneys that you can clickthrough.
What did I learn from this internet wild goose chase? Nothing. Someone thought it was a good idea to take the time to set up a webpage that is nothing but a list, then set up a Digg page that links to it, and then Tweet a link to the Digg page. What’s the point of that? While I suspect that some “internet marketer” may be making a few dollars off of the Google internet ad links; or maybe some attorneys had to pay to be listed (I don’t know if they did or not). Either way this is not an effective way to use social media for attorney marketing. It’s just a series of links to a list. There’s no one to talk to; no one to communicate with. In the end, it’s just a billboard or yellow page listing.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some attorneys hired a marketer to do this, and when it doesn’t work (it won’t), they’ll give up and go back to their old ways of doing things.
I’ll keep doing things my way though, and I’m always looking forward to meeting new people, whether online or off.