With so many new publishing tools available, thought leaders have begun to build their own credentials without the aid of distribution companies. I recently spoke at the Zeughauser Group Client Roundtable in Washington, D.C., along with Rick Klau from Google and John Corey from Greentarget, both who understand the underlying technology and market need for this activity.
In our discussion about the findings in the Corporate Counsel New Media Engagement Survey, it is clear that prospects and clients come to the web for relevant content—and are coming more frequently than ever before. Blogs are growing as the credible source for legal information, with 27% of the respondents ranking lawyer-written blogs as “most important” for helping them research an outside counsel for potential hire.
The consensus view in the room was that credentialing via self-publishing is a massive opportunity for legal professionals. However, we also discussed the difficultly in creating meaningful content to consistently populate these channels. It presents a challenge and requires a coordinated effort between the lawyers and their marketing organizations.
So what? Creating credentials for yourself through self-publishing is a great way to gain a competitive advantage and the sooner you start doing it the better! We are already seeing more and more people relying on the internet to gain information on purchasing decisions. Taking a step into self-publishing is a necessary one, but it is difficult to get your feet off the ground. Trust me, I know from personal experience. When we started Ezults, we believed we would be acting as a “concierge” for most of our clients—actually helping them implement social media. We still have to do that, after all, the tools are still relatively tricky to use (for example it takes 36 steps to put an optimized profile into LinkedIn). However, we have had to quickly adopt our own business model to include training and coaching in order to work with the marketing departments of organizations. As we partner with marketing organizations, using the Ezults’ Framework, we can address everything from the detailed implementation settings, like how to set privacy settings on Facebook, to tackling the sourcing of content to enhance our client’s publications. Ezults also stays on top of the constant changes with social media so our customers don’t have to. We prefer to implement social media for our clients by working in close partnership with them to send out an authentic message and we love seeing our client’s marketing team join in to lead the process.
