The Business Of Law

As the Chief Marketing Officer at Sokolove Law, I spend a good deal of my day thinking about the two audiences we care about most.  Our co-counsel firms—essentially our customers, and the people who come to us seeking legal assistance—our clients.

As the largest marketers of legal services in the country, we know a lot about how to reach potential clients, and that’s why so much of our marketing is now done online.  Whether it’s through traditional internet advertising, or community sites like our award winning Mesothelioma Resource Center, of the hundreds of thousands of potential cases we vet each year, more enter the pipeline from the internet than from television advertising.  That’s pretty astounding when you think about it.

But Internet marketing is about more than just web sites and banner ads.  Instead, social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and emerging technologies like Google’s recently launched Sidewiki are changing the way people get their information, make their purchasing decisions and how they interact with companies.  Consider some statistics:

Facebook
•    There are more than 200 million active users of Facebook.
•    100 million of them log on at least once a day.

•    All told Facebook users spend 2.6 trillion minutes on Facebook daily. source

YouTube
•    There are more than 70 million videos on YouTube.
•    It would take 412 years and 4 months to view all the videos on YouTube.
(sources here, here and here)

Blogs
•    There are more than 346 million people who read blogs.
•    77% of active Internet users read blogs.
•    There are more than 900,000 blog posts in a 24 hour period. source

Twitter
•    There have been more than 1 trillion Tweets to date, (see an up to the minute count here)
•    There are more than 3 million Tweets per day.

While these stats are enough to make any marketer pay attention, the real value of social media is a little more nuanced.

There’s a great article that I came across recently that makes a very basic point about social media:

“Social media is more than just communication, it’s customer engagement. If you’re not engaging with customers using social media, you’re not maximizing your effort.”

That really is exactly the point.  Social media has made it possible for savvy companies to engage and interact with their customers instead of just communicating at them.  And that can make all the difference.

One of the things that makes the Sokolove business model unique is that we seek to develop deep relationships with our co-counsel and our clients rather than just churn the lead machine.  These relationships are based on trust and partnership.  For our clients, we are the trusted source of legal advice and the last safety net in a system that has likely failed them tremendously.  For our co-counsel we are a valued partner providing them with the marketing tools to grow their practice and expand their business.

Over the past thirty years, our success has been built on these relationships, and they are critical to our growth, which is why we are constantly on the lookout for new ways to interact, not just broadcast at them.   If you’re engaging with your customers, and in our case our clients, then you’re deepening that fundamental relationship.