In case you want to know a little more about me, how I got started in legal marketing, what I enjoy most about what I do and why volunteering for the Legal Marketing Association has been so rewarding for me, here’s an interview that I did with the LMA Northeast Region last year when I served as the secretary on the board of directors in 2017 and 2018.
Speaking at a conference has many benefits – it helps you build your brand, establish yourself as a subject-matter expert, increase your professional network and open doors that can lead to new connections, jobs, referrals and so much more. Kara McKenna and I recently had the good fortune of serving as co-programming chairs of the 2018 #LMATech Midwest Conference, which was a great way for us to get to know each other better and also learn what makes a good and bad speaking submission.
We learned about innovations taking place within our industry and those legal marketers who are leading them. We also picked up some helpful skills on what makes a compelling speaking submission and the reverse of that – what does not.
After reading through more submissions than we can count at this point, we feel like we are in a position to give advice on how potential speakers can make themselves stand out from the pack. We put some tips together in an article for JD Supra “Want to Be Selected as a Conference Speaker? Here’s How to Increase Your Chances.”
Lately I’ve been exploring concepts related to how to effectively engage with clients, prospects and other key influencers using social media to both strengthen your brand but more importantly, to generate new business.
At the end of the day, every single social media marketing effort should be designed to support your firm’s business development efforts. That being said, not every post can focus on the business of the firm. Sometimes the highest-rated posts are actually the ones where a firm showcases its “softer” side. For example, pro bono and community service activities, as well as the people of the firm engaging together.
It’s time to get excited: For those of you who manage your company’s LinkedIn pages, I have some really great news (in case you didn’t already discover this yourself): You can now edit posts on company pages!
This limitation on company pages was a huge pet peeve of mine (and overall grievance on LinkedIn), because previously, if you saw a typo, or wanted to make any kind of change to a post, you needed to delete the entire post and then post it again, leading to lost page views and analytics, not to mention a loss of your precious time.
While users have been able to easily edit their personal posts, the same option did not exist for company posts. That is, until now. Now to edit a post on your LinkedIn company page, just go to the top right of the post to where the three little dots are and you’ll now see “Edit Update” as the very first option (see screenshot above). Voilà!
It’s so important to maximize every networking event, writing and speaking opportunity, and social media interaction to your advantage. Here’s my secret sauce on how to effectively engage with clients, prospects and other key influencers to strengthen your brand and to generate real business.
Some of you may have seen Andy Laver and I around the #LMA18 Conference this year armed with a microphone and a camera crew led by Rob Kates. Some of you may have been confused about it. Others were a bit intrigued. Others were just annoyed. And a small number of you actually enjoyed watching our interviews with LMA leadership, speakers, sponsors and other members of the LMA community.
Regardless of how you felt about Andy and I (we hope you felt somewhere between great and lukewarm), serving as the official Facebook Live reporting team for LMA18 gave us a unique perspective on the conference. Here are some of the things we learned from our 2018 LMA Facebook Live reporting experience.
I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend (and speak) at the LMA 2018 Annual Conference, which is THE largest annual meeting of legal marketing and business professionals in the industry.
If your experience was anything like mine, you learned a lot, you made many new valuable connections, you reconnected with industry friends, and you spent a lot of time in the exhibit hall talking to leading service providers about their products and technologies. You likely saw Mario Lopez and quite a few wrestlers in town for Wrestlemania in the common spaces at the Hyatt Regency, and you returned to the office with a ton of information to digest and ideas to implement, which is exciting but also quite overwhelming.
At the heart of this year’s Legal Marketing Association’s 2017 Southeast Conference was the importance of integrating the voice of the client in all marketing and business development efforts.
The message: firms that are successfully able to adopt the client-centric mindset and delight their clients will have a significant advantage over their competitors.
It’s important to remember that the role of the client can be different things to different professionals. For example, if you are an in-house legal marketer, your clients are not only your traditional external clients, but also the lawyers at your firm, your colleagues in other administrative departments, your COO, etc. And if you are a business partner/service provider, anyone and everyone can potentially be a client or a referral source.
I was lucky enough to once again have the opportunity to speak at LMASE17 (more about that a bit later). A talented group of industry speakers provided attendees with actionable and innovative ideas under the conference’s theme of “mapping the future.” Here are some highlights:
I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to speak at the 2016 LMA Southeastern Chapter Conference last week. It was my first time attending this conference, and it was well worth the trip to Orlando as it was the perfect size to facilitate networking, collaboration and learning.
A talented group of industry speakers provided attendees with actionable and innovative ideas to inspire under the conference’s theme of “grow, innovate and succeed.” Some highlights included: