Law Firm 4.0 Blog

Get your money's worth from Martindale.com

I am speaking at the LMA Ohio chapter meeting this Wednesday, January 27, 2010.  The title of my presentation is: "New Rules for Marketing in a Recovering Economy -- Tactics to Improve your Success and Reach."  It makes sense to critically analyze your marketing investments to ensure that you are getting your money's worth.  ROI is sometimes elusive in law firm marketing departments (more on ROI in future posts) -- the best place to start is to get more benefit from the commitments you've made.

Since Martindale-Hubbell continues to be in the cross-hairs, this post is devoted to sharing ways to get greater benefit from your Martindale investment.  Many firms aren't ready to eliminate Martindale entirely - this post is for them.

1. Add lawyer photos to your profiles.  Brian Salmanowitz, a blogger for Martindale, wrote a post called "Lawyer photos drive traffic" on September 2, 2008.  He stated that an analysis they did showed that firms who publish lawyer photos alongside the profile have 33% more click-throughs to their Web sites and 17% more emails sent to them through their listings.
   
   In an email exchange two days ago, I asked Brian for more current statistics.  They haven't done a recent analysis, but he did confirm that the stats are still "directionally correct." 
   
   Given that Martindale continues to be on the budget hot-seat, I recommend that they commit to this type of analytics review on an ongoing basis.  It can only help its credibility. 
2. Ensure that your "Law Firm Snapshot" accurately reflects the work you do.   Many of the law firm profiles have these snapshots that are compiled from a variety of third party sources.  If your strongest, most profitable practices are M&A and IP Litigation, ensure that your snapshot reflects this.  If your snapshot isn't presenting a current picture of your firm, speak with your Martindale rep.
3. Employ best practices as you compile your listing.  Add your firm logo, tagline, email addresses for lawyers, list all practices and industries for your firm (much better SEO results if you include all of them), link to your Web site, and maximize SEO by cross-linking (or as Martindale calls it, cross-referencing) inside your listing. 
   
   I also suggest (I don't know if Martindale currently allows it, but they should) adding the Vanity URLs to your lawyers' individual listings.  For example, Brian D. Goldstein is a shareholder at the terrific Boston-HQ'd firm, Goulston & Storrs.  His Vanity URL is www.goulstonstorrs.com/briandgoldstein - clicking on this from his Martindale profile would take a visitor straight to his bio.  A great advantage to the visitor (saves time getting more info on Brian) and to Brian (his Web site analytics can track this direct referral to his bio).
4. Join Martindale Connected.  This is a fairly new social media community for lawyers and others serving the legal industry.  It's free, you can freely share opinions and engage other like-minded professionals (including corporate counsel) in blogs and discussions about the law, billing trends, client relationships and more.  It's still in beta, but according to Martindale, the new site will be launched soon. 
5. Dig in to your Web site analytics to learn how Martindale performs as a referrer to your Web site.  Read my January 4, 2010 post, The efficacy of Martindale.com as a referrer to your Web site.
6. Understand how visible your profile is within Martindale.com.  Martindale tracks the visibility of your law firm profile, as compared to other firms in your market, and to all other firms with listings in Martindale.com.  For example, today, Davis Wright Tremaine, (www.dwt.com) a Seattle-headquartered firm, ranked #1 in weekly views when compared against all other Seattle law firms (1,371 of them).  And DWT ranked #91 out of 210,910 law firms overall.  Those are terrific numbers for DWT. 
   
   

"Word of mouth is all grown up" - says Eric Fletcher

With all the talk, all the brouhaha about social media, it's grand to find a simple, practical appraisal of it.  Read Eric Fletcher's post about social media and Bob Garfield's new book, The Chaos Scenario.  Eric is the CMO of McGlinchey Stafford PLLC. 

Word of mouth has been coveted as a favored means to drive new business and new audiences to for-profit and not-for-profit organizations.  Today's social media references about a person, theater play, law firm or lawyer risk being unfavorable as often as favorable, and as Eric points out, every opinionated person has access to global distribution channels. If we want to carefully manage our online (and therefore, our offline reputations), as Eric and Bob Garfield say, we have to listen to what people are saying about us.

Referencing my earlier post this morning, however . . . it's easy for us to discount the online grumbling of disgruntled associates, unhappy clients and staff.  But the raving posts and videos do linger, whether published by fans or lunatics.  It's hard to predict what the shelf life is - but assume it's very, very long.

How do you keep law firm associates on your good side?

Chat boards, blogs, Facebook pages, tweets and more are the ready receptacles for associate gripes, whining, belly-aching and wailing.  I am amazed at those who passionately defend their constitutional right to free speech, yet haven't the foggiest clue about exercising good judgment, being self and employer respecting, and otherwise selfishly guarding one's own reputation online.

Yesterday, New Jersey Law Journal reported that a federal judge would issue restraints against a disgruntled former associate of Levinson, Axelrod who has trashed the firm on the Internet.  This now-solo lawyer was an associate at the firm for six years, but now has such animus that, by all appearances, he has devoted all his waking hours to disparage this law firm.

Good for Judge Anne Thompson.  She hasn't published her final list of "restraints" yet, but I hope she editorializes plenty about the trasher's bad judgment. 

Associates:  Don't do this!  Whether Above the Law or Facebook or Twitter, exercise judgment and think long term about your career.  This virtual vitriol will hang in the air over your head for years.

The efficacy of Martindale.com as a referrer to your Web site

A law firm's Web site should be at the center of its business development.  With the evolution of Web 2.0 and social media tools, site visitors can customize their experiences, interact with the firm and its lawyers, and stay up-to-the-minute on the latest laws and industry developments via video, podcasts, alerts and Webinars.

But how do people who don't know your firm name find your Web site?  Presumably the largest law firms have no trouble being found - although, we might argue that every firm can use more visitors - and more qualified visitors are always better. 

There continues to be a lot of buzz among senior marketers, COOs and others about the value of Martindale listings - or at least the cost/benefit of the listings.  This is not a post that details the advantages or disadvantages of participation in the industry's oldest ongoing advertising medium.  Rather, it is to relay a simple datapoint that is worth considering before you eliminate Martindale from your integrated marketing mix.

In LMA, ALA and other speeches I've given the last several years, I have urged firm marketers to study their Web site analytics data to see from where visitors are coming.  In other words, what are the Web sites that consistently refer traffic to yours?  Historically, Martindale was appearing in the top ten referrers to the sites we studied, and often the top five.

Curious about how the holidays affected the traffic on the Web sites that we developed and host, today I browsed Google Analytics to check out referring sites.  Without naming names or URLs, below is data on just a few sites (150 - 600 lawyers) for the December 3, 2009 - January 4, 2010 timeframe:

Site A: Martindale was the #2 referrer (out of ten listed) with a bounce rate of 7.69%. Google was the #5 referrer with a bounce rate of 83.33%. (Bounce rate defined by Wikipedia: A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry-standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software.)

Site B: Martindale was the #4 referrer with a bounce rate of 11.9%. Google was the #7 referrer with a 12.5% bounce rate.

Site C: Martindale was the #1 referrer with a bounce rate of 12.58%. Google was the #6 referrer with a 66.97% bounce rate.

Site D: Martindale was the #4 referrer with a bounce rate of 3.23%. Google was not in the top ten referring sites.

Site E: Martindale was the #3 referrer with a bounce rate of 20%. Google was the #9 referrer with a bounce rate of 68.75%.

In spite of this small sample size, we can conclude that Martindale is sending more qualified visitors to these Web sites than Google. How do we know they are more qualified?  1.  Because corporate counsel and law firm lawyers are the primary users of Martindale.com, and 2. Because visitors referred by Martindale are spending more time and visiting more pages on these Web sites than the visitors Google delivered. That's what Martindale's much lower bounce rate tells us.

And that is the goal of every law firm Web site -- to be relevant, and to quickly deliver the best content to the most qualified visitors possible.