Law Firm 4.0 Blog

If it were REALLY a good idea . . .

Marketers hear this throughout their careers. Of course, the complete declaration is, "If it were really a good idea, someone would already be doing it." Thankfully, I haven't heard this much in recent years, but I still frequently hear, "Who else is doing it?" (Whatever "it" might be on that particular day.)

Tom Fishburne, the "Marketoonist" emailed this today and it's a perfect Monday kick-off to your week. Don't get discouraged if you hear this from your firm leaders. Take a lateral step and find the way around it. This occasional obstacle has, for me, resulted in resourcefulness, Without the put-down, I might not have dug deeper to find answers that would resonate with the slower-to-adopt firm leaders. Enjoy the digging - it will pay off.

Do the leaders of your law firm use social media? Employees trust leaders who do.

By now, most law firms have inked social media policies, yet leaders' fears are still cresting at the thought of firm employees' fingers running amok and damaging the firms' reputations in some way. It seems this trepidation is a one-way street, however, as BRANDfog's 2012 Social Media and Leadership Survey found.

BRANDfog surveyed hundreds of employees in companies ranging in size from start-ups to Fortune 500 behemoths asking about company executives and their use of social media to communicate with them and the rest of the world. 81% said that CEOs who use social media are "better equipped" than their peers to lead companies in this contemporary business environment. This included "communicating values and shaping corporate reputation."

82% said they were more likely or much more likely to trust a CEO and other top executives who use social media. And 78% said that they'd prefer to work for a company whose leaders regularly use social media.

Most respondents agreed that social media significantly aids leaders' engagement with key stakeholders:

1. 89.3% said executives can better communicate with customers
2. 84.7% believed that it improves communication with employees
3. 66.3% said executives should use it to communicate with investors
4. 71% said executive engagement in social media enhances your brand.

But you can't fix a company environment that's broken, they said. Only 45% believed that you can improve bad company morale via C-suite social media use.

Erik Sass of the MediaPost Blog The Social Graf notes: "All this makes interesting reading when juxtaposed with actual rates of social media engagement among CEOs and top execs. According to figures cited by BRANDfog, while 61% of Fortune 500 brands use Twitter to engage with customers, just 2.5% of Fortune 500 CEOs are actively using Twitter."

What can law firm leaders take from this? Employees want more communication from you - not just staff, but your lawyers, too. There is a readily available platform you can use to post your musings, and to show how you understand today's world of business communication. I know you have a lot to say -- roll up your sleeves and plan your communication strategy for the next 12 months. Choose the social media forum that makes the most sense for you - LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or a blog - and commit to it.

Your firm's clients will be listening, too. And they will finally have a chance to know why you have been chosen to lead your firm.

Brilliant strategy and brilliant execution - are they strange bedfellows?

The CMO Network on LinkedIn has an interesting discussion sparked by the question: What is your opinion on Execution trumps Strategy?...Do you agree?... This is both a rapid and rabid-responding group, and those who have come down hard on the side of strategy (as they slap-slap the faces of the proletariat executioners), suggest that execution won't ever distinguish you if the strategy isn't sound. Fair enough.

As someone who has built a career around designing and executing strategies in the legal industry, I can't imagine execution without the clear, guiding light of strategy. When it comes to technology implementations (websites, experience databases, proposal centers, CRM tools), the reason that these initiatives are under-serving their firm stakeholders is that there is no strategy driving the execution. I wrote about this a few blog posts ago, while quoting Richard Hsu from King & Spalding.

Every initiative worth investing in demands strategy at the outset. If you can't clearly articulate what it is, then don't start your execution - you aren't ready. It will fail. What does failure look like? Scope that can't be defined, budgets that increase at all phases, expectations that won't be met, timelines that extend months or years beyond the original launch date, and dissatisfaction that runs up and down the organization. I have seen this failure side-swipe many careers.

I have also seen "strategy" kill law firms because the firms were ill-advised (i.e., the wrong strategy for the firm) or because the firms didn't have the commitment to execute (i.e., invest in the right people to do the job).

The first law firm for which I served as marketing director from 1987-1992 hired one of the industry's largest legal management firms to develop a strategic plan. More than a million dollars later (in 1991-92 dollars), the firm was completely ill-prepared to survive the recession of the early nineties. How the planners could have missed the economic and competitive indicators pointing to the financial collapse of the real estate and banking industries was astonishing to all of us. I never heard what the strategy was supposed to be because I moved on, but the firm failed two years later.

I also believe that one of the most strategic things marketers and IT professionals can do is brilliantly execute. That's where the results live. I have seen both teams wanting to be defined by how strategic they are, believing that the roll-up-the-sleeves parts of the job are too "blue collar" and that they are somehow a lower-class stepchild of strategy.

Designing a successful execution team is highly strategic. Too often we hire people to fill job openings comprised of job task lists, frequently without fully understanding how their daily work will support broader strategy, or how it will fit into the execution assembly line. The hIring of key law firm positions is often handled so far outside the executive office (and thus removed from firm strategy and goals), firms end up with well-intentioned people who have no idea what they should be doing. They are given orders by supervisors who are also too far removed from the strategic core of the firm. These new hires are doomed to be unhappy because their execution may never measure up. How can it? It isn't supporting strategy.

This goes for the hiring of young associates in corporate law firms as well. They are given discrete tasks to complete without a full understanding of what the client hopes to achieve. What opportunity is driving this research? What problem are we hoping to solve? What horizon issue are we hoping to get out in front of? I think, perhaps naively, that attrition among the young associates would lessen if they understood that the work they were doing was tied to a client's bigger goal or purpose. They could feel a part of something, as opposed to churning hours day after day.

The term "strange bedfellows" was first used in Shakespeare's The Tempest, when, according to Wikipedia, Trinculo crawls under the cloak of a man he believes to be dead to shelter himself from a storm, saying, "Alas, the storm is come again! My best way is to creep under his gaberdine; there is no other shelter hereabouts: misery acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows."

Strange bedfellows is defined as "a strange alliance, often formed between parites who would normally be enemies who have come together for a common, often urgent cause." I posit that brilliant strategy and brilliant execution should be so intertwined that they can't be separated. There should be no choice of one over the other. They are inextricably linked and both fundamentally essential to the success that we want to achieve.

 

Columbia Business School study proves that ROI is an elusive partner to marketing departments

Senior law firm marketers have been seriously talking about ROI since at least the mid-1990s. Believing in its relevance and importance to financial decision-making, this "proof" has frustratingly been like a mirage in the desert. For years we have relied on anecdotal data and stories - an RFP or pitch that was won, a lawyer who cross-sold another practice, a client interview that resulted in new work.

We have always coveted the sound financial management that corporate-America marketers have had. Well, until now. According to a just-released Marketing Measurement in Transition study by Columbia Business School Center on Global Brand Leadership and the New York American Marketing Association called "Marketing ROI in the Era of Big Data," it appears that our perception of how rock-solid corporate marketers are in their ROI tracking and management is skewed.

The researchers interviewed 253 marketing executives from large corporations and were hoping to "gain a better understanding of changing practices among large corporate marketers in the following areas: data collection and usage, marketing measurement and ROI, and the integration of digital and traditional marketing." Among others, they asked the following questions:

1. Which organizations believe that they are doing well with respect to measuring marketing ROI?
2. What are they doing that allows them to succeed in measuring marketing ROI?
3. What are some of the barriers organizations face in measuring marketing ROI?
4. How does knowing their marketing ROI affect how they view and use metrics?

The headline for the ROI section of the report is this: ROI – Marketers Know They All Need It, But Can’t Even Agree What It Is

Here is an excerpt from the results:

Marketers think that they should be measuring their marketing ROI …

Marketers know that they need to justify their decisions financially. 70% say that their marketing efforts are under greater scrutiny than ever. 39% go so far as to say that they consider it important to spend only on marketing activities where the financial effects can be measured.

…but many managers aren’t measuring marketing ROI either consistently or effectively.

Only 43% of organizations are establishing their marketing budgets based on marketing ROI analysis. By contrast, 68% base their marketing budgets in part on “historical spending,” and 28% on “gut instincts.” When it comes to specific marketing spending decisions, 21% are using financial metrics for little or none of those specific decisions, and 7% are making all or most of those spending decisions with no metrics at all.

Instead of marketing ROI, managers continue to use many traditional metrics such as recall, brand favorability, purchase intention, and willingness to recommend. Of those using some kind of universal metric, 22% make all or most of their marketing decisions with brand awareness alone.

What organizations are satisfied with their measurement of marketing ROI?

Overall, 45% of the organizations surveyed are satisfied with their ability to measure marketing ROI. Those most likely to be satisfied with their ability to measure marketing ROI are large organizations (55.5%) - sales of $25 billion or more - and service organizations (48.8%).

Only 33.1% of consumer product organizations and only 26.1% of industrial product organizations are satisfied with how they measure marketing ROI. Satisfaction depends on your viewpoint: 54% of CMO’s are satisfied with their ability to measure marketing ROI, but only 43% of those below the vice president level are satisfied – perhaps because they are closer to the problem of determining how to most effectively measure marketing ROI.

A call-out says, “37% of respondents did not include any mention of financial outcomes when asked to define what “marketing ROI” meant for their own organization.” The Advertising Age report of this study says, "...57% don't establish their budgets according to ROI measures."

The report goes on to say:

To what extent is marketing ROI used for decision-making?

Among the roughly half of marketers that are very or somewhat satisfied with their ability to measure marketing ROI, 57% use marketing ROI for their budget decisions and 59% use financial metrics to evaluate their marketing spend. 54% go as far as to say they consider it important to try to spend only when they have financial metrics.

Understanding what marketing ROI is

In the organizations surveyed, however, managers do not appear to have a consistent understanding of what marketing ROI is. When asked to define marketing ROI, 37% of the respondents did not mention financial effects and 82% did not mention that ROI consists of both financial return and spending. 31% think that just measuring the audience you reach is “marketing ROI.” Even when prompted, 19% do not think that “measuring the financial impact of our marketing” is marketing ROI.

In place of marketing ROI, many traditional measures are used. 37% of the respondents claimed that they used brand awareness as a universal metric to make marketing decisions. More troubling, of those using brand awareness, more than 60% said it was their only marketing ROI measure. To be useful, brand awareness must be coupled with some measure of brand perception. Brand awareness by itself is a lagging indicator of brand strength. Using it as the sole or main measure to make marketing decisions is truly managing by looking in the rear view mirror.

So, how do you have "ROI" without financial outcomes? You may have "return on something," but it's not ROI. (Think about your brokerage accounts. How would you like it if your stock portfolio advisor measured returns other than financial ones?) There are plenty of valid "returns" on marketing investments - things that can be measured, and thus managed. But don't call them ROI.

I'll report on how these corporate marketers are integrating digital and traditional marketing in a future post.