personal branding

Subscribe to personal branding via RSS
jay_harrington2
This is my friend Jay Harrington - you should follow him!

My friend Jay Harrington often speaks my language on social media and content marketing topics – but especially in his recent post on how lawyers can use LinkedIn to harness business development success. If you aren’t yet following him, you should! And if you like this topic, join me and Jennifer Simpson Carr at the LMA Annual Conference where we will be presenting a deep-dive workshop on this very topic on day two of the LMA Annual Conference on Wednesday, April 10 at 1:30pm at our program on “Beyond Branding: Aligning Social Media Strategy with Business Development Goals” – we promise two hours of interactive, useful takeaways for marketers of all levels and firm sizes.

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! 

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). 

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.” 

Stefanie LinkedIn Speaking at LMATech
That's me at LMA Tech in Chicago!

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. 

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.”  

8

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.

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.

client centric 2

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: