Rob Kahn, Director of Business
Development at Fenwick & West LLP, and Elizabeth Lampert,
owner of Elizabeth Lampert PR, just wrote an
article for the National Law Journal about social
media. The publication date was July 4, 2011. After reading it, I
searched for "social media" on the NLJ site - http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/index.jsp -
and got 1,298 results in just this one publication. With all the demands
that lawyers and legal marketers have on them, it's impossible to stay on top
of this amoebic phenomenon. There are thousands of people writing
and speaking about it, but few firms have comfortably embraced it, understood
the power - and risk - of jumping in with both feet.
The Kahn/Lampert article is a
helpful resource for professionals who wonder, "what's out there about
me/us/my firm?" There are several tried-and-true ways of reputation
monitoring, such as signing up for Google Alerts, but
this list below (extracted with permission) from their article is the
Web 2.0+ version of buzz monitoring.
BUZZ MONITORING
There is an abundance of free
research tools that marketers can use as part of a successful social-media
strategy. Sites that monitor keywords and key phrases are important to any
marketing strategy, and they give a user the essential information related to
the words and phrases he or she is monitoring. They indicate what's being said,
when the conversation is happening, who is talking about a law firm and where.
This research can help a law firm
marketer decide how to approach and engage. A few examples of these monitoring
sites include:
- Google Insights: With Google
Insights, a user can choose the terms he or she wants to compare in trending,
which is helpful in discovering if one word is used more than another, or
perhaps one person is more popular than another.
- Twitter Trends: Looking
into the trends that happen on Twitter can be quite interesting. A law firm
marketer can track trends in Twitter, monitor his or her own Twitter reputation
and get alerts when people tweet about keywords he or she is interested in
(such as the law firm name).
- Technorati: A law firm
marketer can use Technorati to help the marketing team find key influencers in
its community to build relationships. By searching on either "Blogs"
or "Posts" for certain key phrases, a user can discover who are the
key bloggers who have some sort of sway with their followers. A user can jump
on their bandwagons, engage in their conversations and invite them to follow
him or her, as well, or monitor their discussions for opportunities to engage.
- Trackur: Trackur scours
Technorati, blogs, Flickr and other sources and attempts to find all mentions
of the key phrase a user enters. With the release of its Twitter influence
statistics, a law firm marketer can see who's sharing the firm's content and
tweeting about its brand, which is great news for law firms running Twitter or
social-media campaigns.
- Social Radar: Social Radar
offers the ultimate in social-media marketing with an overview of content from
blogs, social networks, feeds, news and forums.
- BlogPulse: Nielsen
BuzzMetrics' BlogPulse offers automatic trend discovery on blogs, and what's
going on in the blogosphere.
- PostRank: Using PostRank,
one can find the most talked-about posts on any RSS feed. A user can find out
what people pay attention to - in real time.
Read more insight at the Law Firm 4.0 Blog.
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