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Stefanie M. Marrone

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Stefanie Marrone helps law firms and legal service providers effectively tell their stories and find their unique voices. She has worked at some of the most prominent law firms in the world, developing and executing global revenue generating, business development, internal and external communications strategies, including media relations, branding, multi-channel content marketing and thought leadership campaigns. She has particular experience in helping B2B companies and their employees effectively utilize social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for business development, revenue generation and visibility.

Stefanie advises law firms of all sizes, professional service firms, B2B companies, recruiters and individuals on the full range of marketing and business development consulting services designed to enhance revenue, retain current clients and achieve greater brand recognition. She also serves as outsourced chief marketing officer/marketing department for small and mid-size law firms.

Over her 20-year legal marketing career, she has worked at and with a broad range of big law, mid-size and small firms, which has given her a valuable perspective of the legal industry.

Connect with her on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram,  sign up for her email list and follow her latest writing on JD Supra.

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LinkedIn Live

Content marketers now have a new way of reaching their target audiences on LinkedIn using live video.

Recently, LinkedIn, the most powerful social network for professionals, added a livestreaming option in beta to a select group of users.

Called “LinkedIn Live,”  the platform will provide its 600 million plus members and businesses the option to share and stream live video content such as  Q&As, events, conferences, earnings calls, award ceremonies, company announcements and more.

According to Social Media Today, it makes perfect sense for LinkedIn to put increased emphasis on video content because its users are 20x more likely to share a video on the platform than any other type of post (wow!). To further support video on its platform, LinkedIn also launched video sponsored content and video for company pages early last year. The addition of LinkedIn Live will also enable LinkedIn to build on the ‘record levels’ of engagement that it says it is currently seeing on the platform.

LinkedIn has lagged behind its competitors when it came to providing users with video content options. This is interesting because because the platform says that video is the fastest-growing format on its platform alongside original written work, shared news and other content, so it seems like it’s in LinkedIn’s best interests to embrace in the technology that will support what its users want.

Launching first in the United States, LinkedIn Live is invite-only for now. In coming weeks, LinkedIn will also post a contact form for others who want to join. It’s not clear when and if LinkedIn will make it possible for everyone to create LinkedIn Live videos, but it is expected that is what will occur given how they rolled out LinkedIn Publisher.

So what can law firms do with LinkedIn Live? Here are some ideas (just keep in mind that your content must have a topical/timely aspect to it in order for it to be worth going live). 

Stefanie Fordham

“Be yourself” was one of the most important pieces of advice that I gave to students at Fordham University School of Law when I spoke to them about about how to build a strong professional brand. I told the students that I’ll never be someone who wears conservative black suits to work every day and that’s okay (notice the French bulldog shirt that I’m wearing when I spoke to them – I also often wear my lucky Darth Vader earrings when I’m giving a presentation because they make me feel fearless).

Maybe you love bow ties or have pink hair or wear something signature that speaks to you. It’s important to find ways to express yourself, inject your personality and be unique while also being professional. You CAN do both and still be successful in corporate America and at professional service firms. Find the type of work environment that lets you be YOU. Also, it’s never too early (or late) to build your brand or reinvent yourself. 

Quite possibly the worst thing about dealing with the loss of someone you loved is the anguish when you forget that you just can’t call or text them to tell or ask them something.

On a weekly basis, I think of things – an impossibly funny situation that happened to me on the NYC subway that morning, a question about a family recipe I am about to screw up, general family gossip or advice – that I desperately want to discuss with my mom, and then I painfully realize that I will never be able to do that again with her.

Three years ago today, I lost my mom Lucille to Multiple Myeloma, a rare blood cancer of plasma cells. It causes cancer cells to accumulate in the bone marrow, where they crowd out healthy blood cells and lead to a lot of terrible things, such as irreparable damage to the kidneys, heart, lungs and bones.

My late mom Lucille and me

My mom had this awful cancer for many years and responded well to treatment for many years from the best oncologists in New York City – a cocktail of groundbreaking drugs, chemotherapy, even an auto stem cell transplant – but then just when she thought she was in the clear, it came back with a vengeance.

Then there is a dear friend of mine who lost her husband (who was also a close friend) at the age of 35 last summer. She is now a 32-year-old widow. They were married for less than two years. He was an accomplished law professor who graduated first in his class at law school. He was also an opera singer. For months I have been trying to make sense of his passing, and how life can be so cruel and unfair, and then so wonderful sometimes. I am in awe of my friend’s strength and cannot even imagine what she carries around with her every day.

Lately I feel as if everyone I know has experienced a personal tragedy or profound loss of some sort – the death of parent, a beloved pet, a grandparent, a miscarriage, the diagnosis of a terminal illness – maybe it’s our age. Maybe it’s bad luck. Whatever it is, it just plain sucks.

Here’s the thing though – you can choose to wallow in tragedy, or you can choose to make hardships and the worst times of your life teaching moments and turn them into something good. You’d be surprised just how resilient each of us are if we just believe it.

Also, some of us must choose to be happy at certain points in our lives in order to turn the tide around or just to carry on and not to fall into a dark hole of despair. Happiness doesn’t always come easy to everyone all the time (more on that in a bit). Sometimes a tragedy can serve as the catalyst to cause us to reevaluate what we want from our lives.

Unfortunately, time doesn’t stop just because we are going through a personal tragedy. The sun still rises and sets, and we all still must get up and put on our game faces and go to work, and take care of our families, and just keep going no matter how hard it is.

This article is intended to help those who are facing something profoundly difficult in their personal lives and those around them so that those people can hopefully become more understanding and empathetic toward others, because you just never know what someone else is going though. So many successful people are trying to hold it together when inside they are struggling with loss and grief. I just wanted them to know that it’s okay and that they weren’t alone in this feeling.

enhance

In this article, I provide 16 easy ideas to incorporate into your social media, business development and branding efforts for professionals at all levels because it’s never too late or early to shake up your marketing efforts, and the new year is a great opportunity to start fresh and add new activities to our business development and marketing mix.

A word to the wise for young professionals – you should build your network before you think you’ll ever need it. Your peers will be tomorrow’s business leaders. And a word to the wise for seasoned lawyers who don’t think they need to spend the time on business development – today it’s not enough to just be a great lawyer.

You need to market yourself as well as churn out exceptional legal work. One day your steady stream of work could dry up or something unexpected could happen where you need to rebuild your practice.

Also, you never know who can turn out to be a client, referral or future employer. I always tell the lawyers with whom I work to never underestimate the importance of every person and connection. Be friendly and kind to everyone. Because you never know. Read the full article for the 16 tips. 

lma pic for video

I’ll be presenting a workshop at the 2019 Legal Marketing Association’s Annual Conference (which is the premier yearly gathering of legal marketers) on how to align your social media efforts with your business development strategy with Jennifer Simpson Carr on day two of the LMA Annual Conference (at 1:30pm on April 10). This is going to be a hands-on, immersive program with lots of actionable takeaways for marketers of all firm sizes and levels. It’s another reason that we hope you stay until the end of the #LMA19 conference. Here’s a sneak peek of our session! Thank you to Rob Kates for filming this segment. 

Mark your calendars for March 7 for a Legal Marketing Association webinar titled, “How to Build Your Personal Brand Using Social Media Tools Before, During and After #LMA19” with me, and good industry friends Roy Sexton and Andrew Laver on how to use the upcoming #LMA19 conference in Atlanta on April 8-10 to build and enhance YOUR personal brand using social media! We’ll provide actionable takeaways and ideas for marketers of all levels, including how to build your network before, during and after the conference, how to master the art of the “humblebrag,” how to become a thought leader and published author (even if you’re not a great writer) and how to use free online tools to add eye-catching visuals to your social posts (like the one I created in this blog post, which I used to promote the program on social media as well). Join us! 

clients want

If you could hear directly from your clients about what they want and need, wouldn’t you jump at every opportunity to listen? And even better act on it?

With that in mind, I try to attend as many events featuring in-house counsel as I can, even if what they largely say is the same, because I appreciate their insights especially when it comes to what they value most when working with outside counsel. And every year, what they say they need and want most from their outside counsel – transparency, responsiveness, cost-sensitivity, understanding my business, anticipating my needs and providing value-added content and educational add-ons – continue to be a challenge for some firms and their lawyers to consistently hit the mark in all areas.

A law firm’s most precious assets are its clients, which are the source of both today’s business and tomorrow’s referrals. Therefore, you’d think that firms would strive to integrate the voice of their clients into all they do. But not all of them do, or maybe they try but just can’t.

Law firms always need to remember that their clients do not need to work with them. They need to want to work with them. And it is all within the power of law firms (and their lawyers) to achieve true client satisfaction and long-term loyalty by providing the highest-quality legal services, quickly resolving client issues, being a fierce client advocate who anticipates and solves problems and adding consistent value throughout the client lifecycle.

In today’s competitive environment, law firms must adopt a client-centric perspective in everything they do in order to remain competitive. Every single touchpoint matters and will be remembered, and a misstep can be very costly.

Here are some ideas from recent panels featuring the voice of the client that I hope inspire you on how to enhance attorney/client relationships at your firm: 

Amplification

If you build it, they will come. Well, not necessarily. Today with the abundance of content being created and pushed out via so many various channels – email, social, etc., it’s just not enough to create good content, you have to distribute it to the right people at the right time, and through the right channels. And it takes focus, diligence and patience to build a strong following and to have actual ROI (meaning leads, a more recognizable brand, more speaking engagements or writing opportunities – and the holy grail – more clients – or whatever you decide that your ROI is) on your content. Here are steps you can take to ensure that the content that you spend the time to create actually gets read.