Who doesn’t wish there was more time in the day? Do you ever feel like you aren’t giving 100% to anything because you just run out of time? Personally I just want some more quiet time to think and less time being chained responding to my email, which I could spend days doing.

It seems like we are being pulled in so many different directions that it’s difficult to keep track of, let alone stay on track of the multiple projects and to do’s we are constantly juggling in our professional and personal lives. (I admit that I sometimes lose the post-it notes that are supposed to help me manage my projects.) So when I saw an invite for an LMA event that would help me become a better project and time manager featuring leading recruiter and trainer Eva Wisnik, I immediately signed up for it (and made the time to attend it).

I also had the opportunity to interview Eva after the event to ask her for her top project and time management tips (thank you to my trusty producing partner Rob Kates for filming it). During the interview, we also talked about how to enhance our ability to manage the ever-increasing demands on our time and what trends Eva is seeing in the recruiting market today.

There are countless articles on best practices and tips for what to do on LinkedIn (including quite a few by yours truly), but I wanted to focus on what not to do on the platform because I see so many LinkedIn users – who are often very successful business professionals – make the same mistakes over and over again. I thought I would jot down a quick list of what not to do on LinkedIn in the hopes that it would prevent future gaffes on the platform. So many people set up LinkedIn profiles but don’t really know what to do with them. In some ways, I think it’s more important to know what not to do on LinkedIn. It’s never too soon or late to start learning how to use LinkedIn to build your professional brand!

I hope that you did great things on the marketing and business development fronts in 2018. With the new year here, we get a great new opportunity to start fresh and add new strategies and tactics to our marketing mix. My new JD Supra article “16 Easy Ways to Enhance Your Business Development, Social Media and Branding Efforts in 2019” provides actionable ideas in the business development, social media and branding areas to incorporate in your marketing and lead generation efforts in 2019 regardless of your firm size or budget.

The tips include: getting to know your clients better, setting achievable business development goals for yourself, creating a target list, incorporating evergreen content into your social media strategy, refreshing your biography several times per year, providing personalized, value-added content to clients and contacts,  being more active on the conference circuit, getting to know your clients better, becoming a smarter networker, developing a smart and inexpensive visual content strategy, becoming a LinkedIn master and more! 

JDSupra Logo

What a great way to end the year – in addition to being included on JD Supra’s list of top 10 business development articles of 2018, I learned my same article “Build a Stronger Professional Network Today with These LinkedIn To-Do’s” made JD Supra’s list of top marketing articles for the year, taking the number 3 place! I’m honored and thankful that my articles seem to be helpful to some of you. I promise to keep writing in 2019 so please keep reading them!

Stefanie 12 days of social image

I was recently asked to provide my top social media tips and priorities for the year as part of the Legal Marketing Association’s 12 Days of Social Media content series (hint: think visually, align social media efforts with business development and lead generation efforts, think about show versus tell in every post you create, promote your firm’s good works using social media to engage with clients, and utilize the power of evergreen content to bolster your editorial calendar). 

LinkedIn Mobile Editing Twitter kind of

LinkedIn has been slowly rolling out enhancements to its company pages over the past month or so to its millions of users all over the world, and one of them is something that many administrators of company LinkedIn pages have been asking for a very long time – drum roll please – the ability to manage company pages from a mobile device.

When I realized late Friday night that I can now manage the company LinkedIn pages for which I am an administrator, I almost jumped for joy on a very crowded Manhattan street.

But then I realized that you can’t really manage the page from your mobile device and to do what you really need to do editing wise, you still need to be at a desktop computer.

This was a huge bummer for me, and I’m sure many other marketers who are constantly on the go and want the ability to post from their phones just like we can for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I continue to be surprised that LinkedIn’s platform doesn’t yet enable users to have the full range of tools that you do on its desktop version when you are THE most powerful and important social media platform for business professionals.

Read on to learn what you can and cannot do from your mobile device.

LinkedIn Update

If it seems like new LinkedIn features are popping up almost every day, it’s because lately they are (too bad LinkedIn doesn’t really announce new enhancements). LinkedIn has launched a new feature providing users with a host of new options for choosing the audience and visibility of each of their posts.

The new “Review Your Post” feature now gives LinkedIn users the option to select a unique audience for each individual post instead of sending it to everyone in their network, which was previously users’ only option. One size fits all is no longer the default on LinkedIn, which is a long overdue enhancement to the platform. You can even now add your post to Twitter at the same time you push out your post on LinkedIn (that is, if your Twitter account is already linked up to your LinkedIn account – which you can easily do in the settings section – and the post is under the Twitter character limit).

Here’s what you need to know about it plus one more cool new enhancement to the platform.

CMO image

I recently listened in to a Legal Marketing Association CMO and Small Firm/Solo Marketer webinar featuring the perspectives of three chief marketing officers on a variety of topics (many of them submitted by LMA members themselves), including staffing, hiring, delegating, maximizing time with firm leadership, and their best tips for setting yourself up to be a successful leader in your firm.

This is the kind of webinar that is helpful for legal marketers at all levels and at any size firm, but especially for someone like me who is also a CMO at a smaller firm. 

Thankful-Printable

In our busy day-to-day lives, it’s easy to forget to take the time to be thankful for all that we have and all of those who helped us get there, but that is what the Thanksgiving holiday is all about, right? Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving, I wanted to reflect on some of the things for which I am most grateful over the past year. I encourage you to do the same – make a list of everything and everyone for which you are most thankful (you can do this for both your personal and professional lives). It can be really inspiring to take a step back and realize all of the wonderful bounty that you have in your life. Here are nine reasons why I’m thankful this year. Happy Thanksgiving!

Blogger

There are a lot of law firm blogs competing for market share, they are a huge commitment and not all blogs wind up being successful.

So are they worth it? The short answer, yes, IF you can find a niche and a strong team committed to its success.

Blogs are great branding and lead generation tools – they can often lead to speaking engagements as well as new clients (the holy grail of content efforts). As Susan Kostal writes in her latest article for Attorney at Work, “blogging is also a significant equalizer for those in small and midsize firms. With consistency, many authors from less well-known firms compete more than ably against those in national brand-name firms.”