From Oscars Flub to Fake News: What We’re Reading Now

By Jackie Sofia

‘Envelopegate’ and the Power of Public Memory
The PR nightmare continues for PwC in the wake of this year’s Academy Awards, during which the accounting giant somehow mixed up the envelopes announcing the coveted “Best Picture” award winner. Jaws were left visibly hanging after Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway handed the golden man to the wrong man.

After the debacle, PwC was spotted on Twitter trying to bury their shame amongst unrelated news content about the firm. The distraction was not very effective; CBS News reports that the two individual accountants involved will never work the Oscars again, and the relationship of the entire firm is “under review.” While PwC’s reputation is now tarnished, they may have inadvertently buffed up the image of several other accounting firms just in time for tax season. One man’s loss is another man’s win.

An Instagram How-To: Multiple Image Posts
Instagram continues to advance its offerings for users. A new feature allows users to post multiple photos at once with a slideshow effect. The digital flip book allows you to post up to 10 photos simultaneously and already has been implemented widely by advertisers on the platform.

Marketers can use this feature to relay more extensive messages to their audience, or get creative and compile step-by-step guides for their products and services. Speaking of step-by-step guides, here’s a tutorial explaining how to use the new feature.

What the CIA is Saying About the New Wikileaks Document (Vault7) 
Wikileaks released its latest batch of CIA documents, a series titled “Vault7.” It’s a cool name, but the contents may be more sobering. The information released this past week includes thousands of documents that describe software tools and techniques for breaking into people’s phones, televisions and other electronic devices.

CIA spokesman, Dean Boyd, said of the surprise release, “We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents.”  Michael Hayden, the former CIA and NSA director, tried to further soften the blow by assuring viewers on CBS’ The Late Show that these purported tools would not be used inside the U.S. unless a domestic agency received court permission. The jury is still out on whether these leaked documents will be followed up with additional details, and whether the agency will have to come up with a more pointed public response on the matter.

Facebook Launches ‘Fake News’ Flag
Facebook has finally taken steps towards identifying “fake news” on its platform. The company launched the beta version of a two-pronged initiative back in December, which allows users to “dispute” an article if they think it’s fake. The reported dispute is then passed on to third-party fact checkers who determine whether the article receives the label permanently.

Granted, Facebook isn’t known for its transparency, so it’s unclear whether this will be a truly crowdsourced initiative, or whether a select few will have their say on the back end.

Meanwhile, be prepared for disputes over whether a news source should be marked as disputed.

Battle Alternative Facts with a Customized, Fact-Based Infographic
If you still have reservations as to whether Facebook is doing enough to combat the spread of fake news, take your own initiative and fight the good fight with a sharp infographic. People process visual content 600,000 times faster than text, and retain 80 percent of what they can see, compared to only 20 percent of what they read.

This is reason enough to ensure that your visual content doesn’t get buried among all the alternative facts. We’re digging this step-by-step hack for uploading custom-sized graphics along with your Facebook posts.

Should Solo and Small Firm Lawyers Use Chat and Photo Apps Like Snapchat for Marketing?

By Gina F. Rubel

I am of the opinion that lawyers don’t need to be early adopters of new technologies, and that includes many social media tools.

As with most businesses, law firms have a finite amount of time and money to invest in marketing. Limited marketing budgets, particularly for solo attorneys and small firms, should be focused on social media platforms that already have been tested and proven effective for legal marketing. For example, I advocate that all lawyers should have robust and active profiles on LinkedIn. And attorneys with consumer-targeted practice areas like family law, criminal law, wills, trusts and estates, workers’ compensation and social security disability also should maintain robust firm pages on Facebook.

But social media changes rapidly. Some platforms will flourish while others will fade away - think Ping, Orkut, Xanga, Digg, Friendster, Myspace and a myriad of other sites, many of which you’ve probably never heard of.

That means that until some of the newer photo and chat apps are tested by those aforementioned early adopters and found to be effective for legal marketing, law firms should focus their time and attention elsewhere. For example, Snapchat, What's App, Pinterest, Instagram and other chat / picture applications used by entrepreneurs are probably not good investments in legal marketing for most firms in 2017.

There are some legal marketers who would disagree with me on this, particularly as it relates to Snapchat, and others who are in full agreement. My biggest issue with Snapchat is that the majority of users are female between the ages of 13 and 25. Of those who are considered Generation Z (born after 2001), none of them are the target audience for law firms (yet).

Snapchat For Lawyers - Various Points of View

Snapchat for lawyers – is it really happening by Kevin O’Keefe
Lawyers Need to Pay Attention to Snapchat by Casey C. Sullivan, Esq. for Findlaw
4 Things Lawyers Need to Know About Snapchat by Monica Zent for Inside Counsel
Practical and effective social media use for lawyers: Snapchat edition by Scott MacMullan for The Daily Record

If your law practice is focused on reaching young millennials and, more specifically, millennial consumers, you should by all means keep a cursory eye on the social media platforms as they evolve. Until they are proven to work well enough to justify a return on your marketing investment, you likely will be better off focusing on creative ways to use existing social media channels for which content marketing best practices already have been developed.

Does your small firm use social media for legal marketing purposes? What kind of results are you seeing? Tell us in the comments.

And the Winner Is…

By Karen Preston-Loeb

Entering your company into awards competitions is an important aspect of your company’s marketing plan. Awards programs administered by reputable third parties bestow recognition on your company and help position your executives as leaders in their fields – all of which helps validate your business to existing customers and can help attract new customers.

While the daily grind can push entering awards contests to the back burner, making the effort to complete awards applications boosts the chance that your business brings home a shiny new trophy. Multiple entries can raise your chances of winning, as long as the entries are smart and well thought out. Undeniably, awards entries are time-consuming and can seem costly at potentially hundreds of dollars per entrance, but the benefits generally outweigh the labor involved in completing the application or nomination.

Benefits of award submissions

• Increase name recognition: Whether you win or not, if you are among your competitors in appropriate awards categories, your name gets out there as a credible member of the industry.
• Retain and acquire employees: Gaining accolades boosts employee morale and entices potential future talent.
• Generate great public relations: If you win a particular award, a press release can be distributed to generate free publicity for your company. Don’t forget to post it to your company’s website to drive traffic and further spread the news. 
• Gain customers: The free publicity generated can lead to new customers and more business—especially if you win.
• Improve industry positioning: Once you’ve won an award, your company’s marketing language should incorporate such descriptors as “award-winning,” which again acts as validation when seeking new business or retaining existing customers.

Awards submissions sometimes may be greeted with an inter-office groan, as they can be perceived as “extra” work that is outside of daily tasks. Though they can be time-consuming, awards entries can be tackled more easily when your company has an awards submission plan.

Tips to make your contest-entering process less daunting:

• Plan your award strategy by researching the types of awards your company would be suited to enter.
• Once determined, make a list of due dates, submission requirements and entry fees for each award.
• For annual awards, keep a calendar of due dates and set reminders as submission dates are approaching for the following year.
• Throughout the year, maintain a folder of projects that would be appropriate to enter into awards competitions. By saving PDFs of media coverage, marketing collateral, reports, data and other supporting materials, the amount of work needed to track down the items needed for entry requirements at submission time will be substantially lessened.
• Evaluate the impact of your initiatives once the awards have been announced to determine future award submissions.

When your company does win, take advantage of the PR opportunities to announce your achievement. In addition to distributing a press release to local media and posting it to your website, share the news in email newsletters, congratulate your company on social media platforms, and display your trophy or certificate with pride in the office for co-workers and visitors to view.

The awards-submission process may seem daunting but the payoff is worth the investment of time and effort. And remember – you can’t win it if you are not in it.

5 Social Media FAQs for Lawyers

By Gina Rubel

We recently discussed the top social media trends that we are likely to see in 2017, many of which apply to organizations that have been active on social media for some time. Still, we field questions all the time from lawyers and law firms about whether social media should be a part of their marketing plan. During a recent legal marketing webinar hosted by MyCase, I addressed the basics of digital marketing for lawyers. Here are links to a full recording of Digital Marketing for Law Firms along with a MyCase recap of the webinar on their blog.

This program discussed the reasons why lawyers should be engaging on social media, in blogging and what types of content draw the most attention. Here are answers to some of the most common legal marketing questions that came up.

Should companies that have various office locations make separate profiles for those locations, particularly on Facebook?

For companies such as franchises, the answer to this question is yes, and there is a framework in Facebook that allows users to do that. There is a Facebook discussion on the issue at Can you set up multiple locations for a business’ Facebook page?

For law firms, however, I do not recommend setting up separate social media profiles for each office location. The bottom line is that it dilutes the firm’s brand, increases marketing costs unnecessarily and decreases marketing productivity, thus diminishing the return on investment in marketing.

How often do you recommend lawyers update social media?

Social media is just that, “social.” Pick one platform to start with and make sure it’s the one that is used by the majority of your clients and referral sources. Remember, people do business with those they know, like and trust. Then spend 10 to 15 minutes each day updating your profile, connecting with people and sharing relevant information. That’s it.

If I’m posting on LinkedIn, do I really need my own blog?

If you are publishing on LinkedIn Pulse already and you are sharing that out, you do not necessarily need a separate blog. LinkedIn Pulse is essentially a blogging platform, but remember that it is not branded for your business nor does it have a URL that is unique to your practice area or location, which helps with search engine optimization.

Is there an application that will allow you to post on Facebook and Twitter at the same time, for efficiency purposes?

At Furia Rubel, we use Hootsuite for some clients and CoSchedule for others. There are many other apps that allow you to share on multiple sites and schedule your shares. Keep in mind, however, that when scheduling your social media shares, if something happens in the media, your posts can be easily misconstrued. For example, you don’t want to be advocating for Second Amendment Rights on the same day as a mass school shooting.

What is a reasonable ‘investment’ in SEO? Recommended budget figures seem to vary widely.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in many forms. “Organic” SEO is supported by creating and sharing content such as blogs, images, videos, and making website updates, distributing online press releases, garnering online media coverage, and just about everything we do at Furia Rubel for our clients. Organic SEO is a strategic byproduct of well-thought-out marketing and public relations initiatives. On the other hand, there is paid SEO services, which vary greatly from company to company, practice area to practice area, and region to region.

A good place to start in determining your SEO budget is to read “How much should you spend on SEO services,” published on Search Engine Watch, which provides more technical and detailed information about search engine marketing.