Thursday, July 03, 2008

Are you managing your online firm reputation?

My colleague Rich Klein of Beckerman Public Relations (Hoboken, NJ) wrote an insightful article about the online reputation of law firms in the June 2008 issue of Strategies, The Journal of Legal Marketing. One good point he makes is that some attacks on a law firm's reputation online might end up offline, in print newspapers and on television and radio. Managing your online reputation is critical in the Web 2.0 world.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is an issue near and dear to my heart and one that I've spent a lot of time thinking about. I completely agree with you--and actually wrote an article for the Daily Record here in Rochester, NY about this very subject--http://nylawblog.typepad.com/suigeneris/2008/06/waking-the-slee.html

The legal profession--especially larger firms--has to stop ignoring the effects of online buzz upon their reputation. Rather than reinvent the wheel, here's a snippet from the article:

"Time has a way of changing things. The increasing popularity of social media, including the indisputable and viral effect of blogs, has finally caused those at the top of the legal profession to sit up and take notice.

The major impetus behind this change has been a number of notable public relations disasters occurring over the last year involving large law firms, that were, at the time, unfamiliar with the social media landscape.

For that very reason, that article notes that many large law firms, now painfully cognizant of the viral effects of online media, are trying to track blogs and other social media in an attempt to engage in damage control.

In response to the growing need to monitor social media, software companies have emerged which provide businesses with tools to track and measure what’s being said about their company online in real time, such as Techrigy, (http://techrigy.com) a locally-based technology start up."