Law Firm Marketing by Mark Merenda | Smart Blog

Blogging From 38,000 Feet

I am writing — and posting — this blog entry from 38,000 feet, thanks to an American Airlines flight from Dallas to Orlando that features GoGo wireless connectivity. I have also been merrily Tweeting (is there a mile-high Tweet club?), emailing, and amusing myself with some of my favorite YouTube videos — like this one: 

Enjoy.

Well, That's One Marketing Technique, I Suppose

Hat tip to Rebecca Wiess and Patricia Joyce for this one:

Law Firm Taglines, 2009 Edition

I have written before about law firm taglines, those short, descriptive phrases that seek to communicate either what the firm does, or how it does it. Now comes Steve Matthews of Stem, a Canadian company that offers various web marketing services, with an updated list of 101 law firm taglines. 

My favorite: Lawyers you’ll swear by. Not at.

According To My Email

According to my email, there is a position open for me as a secret shopper. According to my email, I can get an advanced college degree without actually going to college. According to my email, someone sent me an e-card and I should open it right away.

According to my email, I can get discount ink cartridges, free flower delivery, and a loan modification. Also there is an investment opportunity in oil wells in Alberta, a chance to exchange links with lots of similarly minded website owners, and the door is open to a purchase of email lists of doctors, IT department managers, and librarians of all kinds.

According to my email, my sex life needs a lot of help. I could use "male enhancement" to "upgrade my masculinity", a supply of Viagra at 85 percent off, and romantic involvement with a number of very attractive Russian girls.

According to my email, I could lose a lot of weight by ingesting Acai berry in various forms, and would look snazzy in a brand new replica watch.

According to my email, website builders in China and India will build sites for me for next to nothing, my bank (as a security measure) is changing lots of stuff and needs me to furnish my passwords, I can buy a 1941 Chevy Flatbed replica, and someone who addresses me as "dear one" needs some help obtaining an inheritance.

According to my email.

Do It Yourself?

On one of the listservs where I hang out, there has been an interesting discussion about the increasing commoditization of legal services, with more and more people opting to "do it yourself" with the help of document websites like legalzoom.com. 

Coincidentally, yesterday I had to visit my mechanic because the air conditioning in my car wasn't really cooling, and I needed an extra shot of freon.

Wait, there is a connection between these two paragraphs, I swear!

In chatting with my mechanic, I asked him if the recession had helped or hurt his business. My thought was that with fewer people buying new cars, that would mean more repair and maintenance on older cars and thus more work for him. He said, yes it had, kinda....but....

"Lots of people don't even want to pay the repair shop. They want to try to fix their cars themselves," he said. "And then it's a real mess."

How do you handle that, I inquired. He pointed at the sign in his repair bay:

Labor: $95 per hour
If you watch: $125

If you offer advice: $150

If you already worked on it: $175

Maybe attorneys could learn something from him. 

Ted Kennedy And An Unidentified Young Man, Circa 1976

If you are from Boston, it is likely that, whatever your personal or political convictions, you were saddened this past week by the passing of the last Kennedy brother, Sen. Edward "Ted" Kennedy, at age 77. The Kennedys were as much a part of our landscape as the Red Sox and clam chowdah, and the mourning last week — as evidenced by the huge lines of people around the JFK Museum waiting to pay their final respects — was widespread and intense.  A 33-year-old photo below has come to light, showing the late Senator chatting with a very slim young man with a full head of tousled hair. 

Ted Kennedy, R.I.P.

Tell Me What I Want

Here's a truth that many attorneys don't understand. Your clients want you to listen thoroughly and completely to what they have to say, and then tell them what to do. 

It's something that I realized early on in my own practice. I would say to clients "What do you want? Brochures? We can do that. Corporate identity? We can do that. Seminars? We can do that. Website? We can do that." 

I would say to them, in effect, tell us what you want and we'll execute it. 

But I soon learned that this was not what my clients needed. They were paying, in part, for my guidance. They needed me to tell them what they should do — whether or not that is what they originally  thought they wanted. 

Your clients are looking for guidance. They want you to be an authority. 

It can't be false authority. And it can't be cookie-cutter guidance. It needs to be insightful guidance, backed by authority. 

What conveys authority? Lots of things. Speech, gesture, clothes, props, confidence, to name a few. (More on this in my next blog post.) None of which will hold up if you don't know what you're talking about. I think most people invoke a variation of the Potter Stewart rule: I don't know much about air-conditioner repair, but I can recognize a guy who does know, when when I hear him talk about it. 

This point was driven home to me a couple of weeks ago. I decided that after ten years of service, my mattress was ready to give up the ghost. I went shopping for a new one at a mattress store. They had a big showroom with maybe 40-50 mattresses scattered around. As soon as I entered a salesman approached, asked a couple of questions, and soon had me trying out mattresses. 

First, I felt like an idiot because I still dressed in my business clothes, and here I was walking around lying down on one bed after another. Second, I felt like an idiot because I didn't know what I wanted, couldn't much tell the salesman what I wanted ("I kind of like the mattresses in the fancy hotels I stay at") and couldn't feel much difference in the mattresses I was trying, other than one felt a little softer and one felt a bit firmer. 

I eventually got frustrated and the salesman got frustrated with me. "Well," he said, after the tenth mattress I tried, "how does that one feel? Is it better than the last one?" To which I replied, "I don't know."

There was another salesman there, sitting at his desk, watching this situation develop. Maybe he was the sales manager, I don't know. He got up and approached us.

"You said you liked the beds in the hotels you stay at," he said. 

"That's right," I said.

"Where do you usually stay?" he asked.

"All of them," I replied. "Lately, I've been staying in the Hyatt a lot."

"They use the Hyatt Grand Bed," he said. "Because they get so much wear, they tend to be on the firm side." He led me over to one of the mattresses I had already tried. He pointed.  "You'll be happy with this one," he told me. "This is what you want."

"Okay," I said, and bought the mattress. 

End of story. I just needed someone — someone who was credible, who had authority — to tell me what to do. Don't offer me a lot of options and choices. Ask me what I want, sure.  But then tell me what I really want. 

OMG = ABANDONEE?

Some of my friends were at first amused, some even irritated, several years ago when I started using Internet acronyms like LOL, BTW, BRB and TTYL. Not to mention ROFLMAO, DIIK, and LMGTFY.

This sort of thing has seeped its way into popular culture in the form of TV ads ("Mom! I was texting with my BFF Judy!") and cartoons (my favorite is from the New Yorker, of course: "The IMs of Romeo and Juliet").

But, for those of you who decry this debasement of the language (which hardly needed further debasement), you should know that this not the first nor, one suspects, the last time technology has changed the popular idiom. In this article, the New York Times describes how the telegraph (that's a mechanical Twitter to you youngsters) required the same economy of characters as Twitter, and resulted in similar codes. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

When The Going Gets Weird, The Weird Turn Pro

As noted by that great philosopher Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Here at Comic-Con ("dedicated to creating awareness of, and  appreciation for, comics and related popular art forms") in San Diego, many thousands have apparently turned pro. In fact, attendance is said to be around 150,000 and 140,000 of those have clearly forfeited their amateur status. You can check out a nice selection of photos at the Huffington Post.

The charming couple above right invited me for a threesome and said my costume — that of a middle-aged, balding white guy in a business suit — was the wildest thing they had ever seen. I quoted some Ferlinghetti to them ("The pennycandystore beyond the El/is where i first/fell in love/with unreality") and took a rain check. They seemed impressed.

Follow The Leader

Many attorneys remain skeptical about social media: Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Twitter most prominent among them. I am a fan of the marketing power of three of those four. MySpace still seems to be mostly adolescent in its orientation and uses.

Still, for many of my clients, and the attorneys I talk with at conferences, it's hard for them to imagine that these methods can be truly effective. I know they can be, and have given my thinking on the subject before. But for those who like social proof, here's a big one from today's New York Times advertising section:

FedEx, an advertising bellwether, is unveiling its first Web-video advertising campaign, five three-minute comedy sketches...

FedEx’s spots — for the last 20 years by BBDO Worldwide, New York, part of the Omnicom Group — helped pioneer office humor in ads, and often had their premieres during the Super Bowl. So when the company announced that after 18 years it would forgo advertising during the last Super Bowl, because it could not justify the expense during the downturn, the news resonated.

“That hurt the Super Bowl much more than any other advertiser, because FedEx is a market leader,” said Jerry Della Femina, who is chief executive of Della Femina Rothschild Jeary & Partners and has worked on Madison Avenue since the early 1960s. “Look, you never bet against Federal Express, because they’re smart, and when they’re doing something, it’s well thought out.”

The company is certain to be watched closely Monday, then, as it unveils its first Web-video advertising campaign, five three-minute films that feature the actor Fred Willard. 

If YouTube is good enough for FedEx, maybe it's good enough for you?