Supercharge Your Referrals with Technology

By Steve Matthews and Reid F. Trautz.  Steve Matthews is the Founder and Principal of Stem Legal, a company dedicated to bringing web visibility to the legal industry.  He can be reached at steve@stemlegal.com and 604.826.8072.  Reid Trautz advises lawyers who seek excellence in the practice by providing superior legal and customer service to their clients, while maintaining a balanced quality of life. He can be reached at 202.507.7647 and rtrautz@gmail.com. This article is based on a presentation they made at ABA Techshow 2009.

Social networking sites are free services to connect to others through your existing relationships in order to obtain business referrals and build new alliances for future business.

All social and professional networks are free to join. For those readers unfamiliar with the concept, here is a general overview:

The first step on all of them is to build your "profile.” Basically speaking, it is putting your resume on-line for others to see. Your profile should include business information, a professional photo, and links to your on-line presence -- like your website, blog and other social networks.

Next, start adding connections to other people. Basically speaking, it is taking your contact list off of your computer (or desk) and putting out for the rest of the world to see. The more people you connect with, the more people can connect with you. No longer do friends have to call you for the name of a (fill-in-the-blank) they can get it on-line. More importantly, now potential clients can get your name on-line when they need a referral to a lawyer!

Finally, use the tools on the networking site to improve existing relationships with clients, former clients, colleagues, friends, family, and others -- recommend people, add new connections, communicate with others. Be sure to check in frequently (daily, if possible) to see what is going on with the people in your network. Almost all of these services have a public timeline of your contacts changes and latest news - so getting up-to-date can take mere seconds.

Know that every time you participate in your network you make small deposits into relationships in order to maintain them and have them grow.

Becoming involved in social networks helps us manage our existing relationships and build new ones. Spending time through social networks is an investment in future business. Increasing communication is an important aspect of social networking -- more frequent, more varied to deepen your relationships. However, like so many marketing activities, many lawyers are loath to invest that time, preferring to “just be a lawyer.” Social networking is more fun and less drudgery, especially if you are not comfortable in face-to-face interactions.

• Illustration: An often untapped source of quality referrals is an individual's past, and sometimes distant past: childhood friends, elementary and secondary school classmates. While most people will think to reconnect with University peers from their past, one of frequently told benefits of social networking is 'the excuse' to re-connect with people we've known in the early part of our lives. Interestingly, these bonds can be exceptionally strong; and can be especially beneficial when an individual comes from affluent background.
• Illustration: If you represent businesses, use your social network connections to add more to your client roster. As part of your overall marketing efforts, identify businesses that you would like to represent and find the names of their top decision-makers. Then search for those names across social network websites (all of them provide this simple service), then find people in your own social network to help you get an introduction to the decision-makers.

Finally, know that you may never meet these people in person, but you will still know who they are. These on-line relationships, while seemingly shallow to some of us, are part of the entire societal movement to an Internet-based world.

Benefits of social networks include:

• Improving Relationships
• Establishing New Relationships
• Permission Marketing: Social media connections have given permission to communicate about your business; this is meant to be less aggressive, so don’t violate the “rules”
• Competitive Intelligence on existing clients
• Provides public-facing knowledge about a lawyer and their practice -- knowledge and experience
• Intangibles like temperament (black and white vs. shades of grey) reduce the risk of entering into business transaction
• It makes the intangible more tangible; makes the invisible more visible

Common Social Networks for Lawyers and Professionals

The common social networks for lawyers today (not necessarily in order) are LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, LegalOnRamp, and Plaxo. Here is our quick take of each:

LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) - LinkedIn is a social networking site developed exclusively for business professionals (unlike Facebook). It’s widely used by the Fortune 500, and currently lists more than 216,000 lawyers. The value proposition of LinkedIn is putting your formal CV online where it can easily be found by other business professionals.

• Related statistic: All 500 of the Fortune 500 are represented in LinkedIn. In fact, 499 of them are represented by director-level and above employees.
• LinkedIn is an excellent way to back up word-of-mouth, personal referrals and other forms of traditional marketing. One of the first things most modern professionals will do post-referral is to 'Google the person's name.' LinkedIn profiles tend to rank very well in the search engines for individual names; and provide more depth for potential clients to conduct diligence research.
• LinkedIn's 3 degrees of separation between contacts can often provide a network-based route into a potential target client. Leveraging existing relationships to forge new ones is a good example of working smart online.

Facebook (www.facebook.com) - One of the largest networks originally populated by college students. Some larger firms are blocking Facebook access in the name of business productivity. Justifiable? Perhaps. But for solos and small firms this also represents an opportunity. Identifying and targeting relationships with key industry decision makers, especially when a younger and less formal demographic is involved, can be good for business.

• Started out as a university-exclusive network, but has evolved into the world's largest social network with more than 200 million users.
• Not just for kids any more: Fastest growing segment is users over-35.
• The legal industry is growing rapidly on Facebook, including law firm profiles, industry discussion groups, personal document collections.
• Even more than email, younger lawyers are using Facebook as a primary method of keeping in contact with university peers. The often cited benefit is keeping social communication out of their inbox. Many younger lawyers will use email for formal and business communication, and social networks for informal messaging.

MySpace: Not for law firms. Yet.

LegalOnRamp:

• 9,000 members, over half are in-house corporate counsel and GCs. If your existing clients are in this space, they may already be on LOR.
• Fairly active discussion boards: shows that people aren't just joining, but participating.

Plaxo:

• Similar to LinkedIn, without the online CV component, or the adoption rate. Completely focuses on charting relationships.
• If you have a blog, the RSS feed can be connected so your content is syndicated out to your network of contacts.
• Easiest interface for adding contacts (photo based)