Stefanie LinkedIn Speaking at LMATech

Use LinkedIn today. Not tomorrow. It is THE most important networking tool for professionals and will help you quickly build and grow relationships, strengthen your brand and stay top of mind with key individuals in your professional network.

Today, networking online is just as important as making in-person connections. And in the professional world, LinkedIn continues to be the most important social media channel for business development.

Don’t forget that your LinkedIn profile is often the first or second Google search result when someone searches for you online. LinkedIn is powerful, period. 

I had the opportunity to interview my good friend Andy Laver who is about to take center stage as the co-chair of the 2019 LMA Conference, which will be held in Atlanta on April 8-10, 2019.

To say that Andy is active in LMA would be the understatement of the year. In fact, his list of LMA accomplishments and volunteer activities is quite impressive. Andy was the president of the LMA Metro Philadelphia Chapter in 2014, joined the LMA’s Governance Committee in 2015, served as co-chair of the 2nd Annual Philadelphia Conference in 2016, served on the 2017 LMA Annual Conference (Las Vegas) Advisory Committee and is currently serving as a co-chair of the LMA Governance Committee (ok, now I’m going to take a breath!). In addition, in 2018, Andy served as a co-host of the Facebook Live reporting team for the 2018 LMA Conference in New Orleans along with me (more on that in a bit), following an successful LMA Facebook Live launch at the 2017 Conference in Las Vegas. 

LMANE Pet Contest - Stefanie Marrone and Charlie the dog

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.”  

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“I don’t like a bargain” said no one ever. You’ll often find me scouring the aisles at T.J. Maxx or Nordstrom Rack for a good deal like a hungry raccoon hunting down its next meal, so it’s no surprise that I’m writing an article on how to keep costs down on social media (my favorite topic).

It doesn’t matter if you are at a small firm, a mid-sized, or large firm, today everyone is looking to keep costs down and to maximize the latest technologies that will enhance marketing efforts and streamline processes while effectively engaging with clients.

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! 

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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.

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I learned something really important at this year’s 2018 LMA Annual Conference: Successful people are not necessarily happy. But happy people are more likely to be successful.

The takeaway? You should really care about incorporating happiness into your life. Here’s why: In addition to being more successful in their careers, happy people are more productive in their jobs, experience better health and therefore live longer lives. They are also kinder, less hostile and more productive, and the list goes on. To me this seems like the most enthusiastic PSA for happiness in the history of PSAs.