Hourly based work seems like the right approach…especially when it comes to marketing services. You only pay when you need something and you pay a pre-determined, agreed upon amount. Concerns over contractors delivering deliberately slow work aside, hourly engagements are easy to understand, and for an agency, easy to agree to. Furthermore, hourly engagements enable consultants to be called into battle when needed.
Hourly billing makes it very easy to bid on work – there’s no need to scope the requirements of a specific client and there’s flexibility to increase or decrease budgets as necessary. As a marketing agency, hourly billing also plays conveniently into one of our 10 Commandments: It Might Not Be Our Fault, But It’s Still Our Problem. When we have a client who has some emergency, we drop everything to address that emergency. An hourly billing arrangement makes this very simple.
Despite that, hourly billing is a horrible way to structure an arrangement with a marketing agency because it encourages a reactive, instead of proactive relationship.
A brief non-legal anecdote….
We just fired our accounting firm after a nagging feeling that everything wasn’t being done both on time and entirely well. (btw – we’ve signed up with a firm called Accountfully that seems to approach their business in the same way we approach ours.) In our kick off call with Accountfully, they uncovered time and time again, stupid sloppy errors from our previous firm. Of course, we were getting what we paid for – or paying for what we got – the time it took to do 90% of the job well. But of course, with accounting (even more so than with marketing), I don’t want a 90% well done job. I want a third party, outsourced, I’m-not-going-to-worry-about-this-because-an-expert-is-already-proactively-looking-out-for-me peace of mind. So we’ve transitioned our arrangement from an hourly bill to a monthly retainer. And yes, I’m going to spend more money on accounting this year than last…except of course that that final 10% – the proactive part that ensures we keep the tax man happy is going to be managed proactively for me.
The reality is, we were paying our accountant for what they did…it’s just that what they did wasn’t a) done well and b) what they needed to do. A retainer (with a good firm) means you have someone proactively monitoring your business instead of reacting to your requests. And for a function you don’t understand or hate (in my world – accounting), that’s the way it should be.
My new accounting team – billing us on retainer instead of hourly.
Yesterday I wrote about how using ROI is an almost impossible task for agencies (ROI – the Marketing Catchphrase Agencies Just Don’t Get), despite the fact that so many of them use the term regularly in their marketing efforts. One of the biggest problems with a simplistic approach towards ROI is that fallacious assumption that your marketing efforts primary business metric should be to maximize ROI.
Why?
Because ROI is expressed as a percentage, maximum ROI should rarely be the goal of a marketing effort. I’ll use the simple case of YellowPages advertising to illustrate my point. Now, we all know that nobody looks at the Yellow Pages anymore. And nobody advertises in them. Like never. Poor starving Yellow Pages. This widespread consensus has led to rapidly declining costs for Yellow Pages advertising – the laws of supply and demand being what they are.
BUT
Some people do read the Yellow Pages. And that back of the YP book cover that used to cost $50,000 is now only $500. And that ONE client a month who called you that year because of that ad…generated a huge ROI b/c the cost of acquiring them was only $41.66 ($500/12 months). Yet a law firm does not subside, let alone grow on one client a month. So this massively profitable campaign, which generated the firm’s highest ROI across all of their marketing channels should never be thrown out, but it should never be depended on either. An agency following the “Maximize ROI” maxim from their marketing materials would have put this law firm out of business.
At every single legal marketing conference I’ve ever been to, I hear agencies, thought leaders, gurus, ninjas, and experts teaching pitching from the podium returning to that good old standard metric:
“ROI”
It’s one of those easy ways for agencies to make it sound like they are business focused and have their clients’ well beings top of mind. – “maximizing ROI” – “ROI driven campaigns” “websites that deliver ROI”.
And I’m quasi guilty as well. One of my favorite refrains is that marketing should be looked at as an investment and not a cost. And it should. But calculating ROI is so far beyond the reach of marketing agencies that none of them should be using the catchphrase at all. But let me step back first:
Let’s start with this: you lawyers don’t know what ROI is. At the last conference I spoke at, I surveyed the 200 people in the audience asking someone to raise a hand and tell the group what ROI was. Crickets. So, as you are reading this, ask yourself, honestly, what is the formula for ROI? What’s a good ROI and what’s a bad ROI? How is ROI expressed…. a dollar value? a ratio? a percentage? Stumped? Uncertain? Don’t worry – you aren’t alone – your agency probably has no idea how to calculate ROI either. Ask them on your next review when they tell you they are optimizing your SEO for ROI. Bleckkkk.
First you must understand the basics of ROI. In investment terms, this is the (gain from the investment – cost of the investment)/cost of the investment. To translate this to legal marketing, it is the (gain from the client – cost of the marketing)/cost of the marketing. Simple right? The key is the nuance around the word “gain”. In the legal world, gain = revenue – costs. So in the legal world, you need to know not only the revenue generated by a certain case, but also the cost associated with generating that revenue. Now, depending on your practice area, most of you can probably guess at the first: revenue. But very few of you have internal cost accounting systems sophisticated enough to accurately track and report on the second (i.e. the cost of working on a case – not the billables, but the actual cost). And if you did have both revenue and cost – are you sharing those figures with your agency (you should, but that’s another conversation altogether.)
Without access to both of these numbers, your agency has absolutely no way of tracking ROI, yet alone optimizing it. Which is why, many of them talk about ROI in their marketing copy and pitch decks, but none of them actually report on it in their monthly reviews. So the next time you hear an agency talk about ROI – ask them what it is.
Yesterday brought news of Avvo’s sale, 12 years after the company was founded. The news sent me scurrying back to the old site where I noticed (I think) something new…. the Avvo Rating no longer displaying on Lawyer profile pages. See Avvo GC, Josh King’s profile below.
Now, I’m not sure this is a)brand new and/or b)intentional – as in…. was this taken down because of the acquisition or is it just sloppy coding – which would be unusual for the Avvo dev crew. If you view a profile, you can see the AR still loads momentarily (right under the picture where it says “Not Yet Reviewed”, but then quickly flashes out.
I joined Avvo back in 2006, when it was just the flea of an idea. Today Avvo announced they’ve been sold to Internet Brands for an undisclosed 🙂 amount. Congrats to Mark, Sendi, Sachin, Josh and the rest of the team who made this happen and many thanks – especially to Mark for kicking off my career in Legal SEO over a decade ago.
Over the years, I’ve written a variety of posts to help law firms separate the SEO wheat from the chaff herehere and here. It seems the same level of either gross ineptitude or deliberate opportunism has firmly planted itself in the AdWords world as well. So I bring you, four very uncomfortable questions you should ask your current or prospective AdWords agency.
Access – Do you have access to your AdWords account? We provide our clients with Admin level access to their AdWords accounts. If you don’t even have read access to your account, what is your agency hiding? My perspective is that it is YOUR account, we get to work on it, not the other way around. Without access, this means that if clients leave their agency – they have to start all over again – this is a great model for the agency, but horrendous for the law firm.
Reporting – Does your AdWords accurately track all types of conversions through sophisticated reporting infrastructure to get granular on conversions – phone, form, chat and even text messaging. This means you can dial in to the actual keyword, or ad within an A/B test to tell you what’s working.
Payment Transparency – we are crystal clear with what % of our spend goes to Google and what goes to us…. Ask you agency the same question and see just how straightforward they are with your dollars.
Exclusivity – I don’t believe we can effectively (or ethically) advertise on the same Channel (AdWords) for two different clients in the same market at the same time.
And note, I’m not getting all high and mighty suggesting you should only hire a Google Premier Partner. There are a (sprinkling) of solid AdWords agency’s not in Google’s program, BUT they are few and far between.
I was bemused to see a tradeshow booth from .law at the recent AAJ conference in Louisville (which was awesome btw). And further bemused to know that Carl Jaeckel would be speaking to the conference about the TLD. To be honest, I sat in the back of the room, huddled with fellow internet marketing shiny object curmudgeon, Gyi Tsakalakis as we plotted gotcha questions to fry Carl on stage.
To catch you up to speed if you know nothing of .law…. in 2015, this new Top Level Domain (TLD – think “.com” “.gov” and now “.law”) was introduced and aggressively advertised as an SEO silver bullet by the marketers behind .law. (IMO $200 a year for domain registration seemed a beyond slightly excessive.) This marketing included a bogus “case study” conducted by SEO veteran Bill Hartzer, vigorous PR outreach, a slick brochure (which seems to have been purged from the web), “sponsored” articles placed in legal and marketing blogs and a backlash from Google directly. Regardless, the case study was touted widely among those selling the new TLD, including FindLaw and John Morgan of Morgan and Morgan, the chairman of the new domain selling service.
Over the past two years, our firm dealt with more than 10 .law domains that failed to generate anything in the way of Search Traffic – at great expense to the lawyers duped into purchasing the domains on the false pretext of SEO awesomeness.
But…. Carl (Morgan’s former CMO and COO of .law from the very beginning) gave us the straight honest truth, albeit two years late. At the AAJ conference, in response to a point blank question about the SEO benefits of the new .TLD, Carl replied:
I’d love to sit here and lie to tell you that you put on a .law and it will amazingly shoot you to the top of the search rankings. – Carl Jaeckel
So there you have it…. the .law marketers were lying all along (and they knew it… there’s a very good reason John didn’t move forthepeople.com to forthepeople.law.) When I introduced myself and spoke with him later, thanking him for his candor, Carl blamed the “marketing people” for the false SEO promises.
But, when someone comes peddling these new domains (and they will), don’t fall for fuzzy vagaries of what Google may or may not do in the future to change their perspective on TLDs. The SEO silver bullet will NOT be based on “a new .law suffix that could set off a domain gold rush” (which was the 2015 title of an ABA Journal article that has also since been purged from the site, at whose bidding, I don’t know).
Back in October of last year, Mockingbird received another Cease and Desist Demand – this time from Jesse Brodsky at Lawyer’s of Distinction. Turns out he was miffed at our post “When the Top 10% Means Nothing” which exposed his company, Lawyers of Distinction’s Top 10% Award as a charlatan scam. In short, Jesse makes his living peddling overpriced plaques to naive or egotistical lawyers.
I’ve posted a full transcript of Brodsky’s C&D letter, but here are some of the true gems amidst his defamation claims:
Your article is actionable and we will be initiating lawsuits against the author individually, as well as Mockingbird Marketing if this post is not immediately removed from the internet.
Among Jesse’s major concerns:
you refer to our offices as being in a strip shopping center, when in fact we have a corporate office in a traditional office building.
I’m not certain exactly how I was supposed to remove content from the Internet – apparently Jesse doesn’t really know how that Internet works. But, because Jesse threatened not only me, but also the author directly (Kelsey – one of our best people at Mockingbird) – I enlisted the counsel of renowned Ethics Counsel Brian Tannebaum*, to allay Kelsey’s concerns over being personally targeted by an overzealous lawyer. Brian’s reply to her:
if I were you, the thing I’d be worried about right now is what you are going to eat for breakfast. After that I’d start concerning myself with lunch and then plans for the weekend. I’d put worrying about what you wrote right below whether you are soon to run out of toothpaste.
Naturally, I told Brodsky to go stick his head in the sand.
Jesse – So nice to finally put a name to your distinguished company. Congratulations on the new office space – if you could kindly forward me the dates of your office upgrade, I’d be most appreciative. Finally, our post will stand. As you may suspect, it is almost impossible to remove a post from the Internet, regardless of pugnacious lawyers.
Good luck with your future endeavors. I trust you won’t need to reach out to me again.
Regards,
Conrad
Like a true bully, Brodsky backed down, never coming good on his litigation threats. To be fair, I was admittedly hoping my snark would inspire a lawsuit so we could further introduce Jesse to the practical practice of law and Florida’s anti-SLAPP legislation, but he didn’t bite. I thought we’d dig just a little deeper into Lawyers of Distinction. First their vetting process, which their Eligibility page describes as the following:
Independent Research to Identify Potential Candidates – Verdicts, Settlements, Experience, Reputation, Honors, Awards, Special Licenses, Bar Certifications, Professional Activities, Community Service, Pro Bono, Scholarly Writings, Lectures, Educational Background, Public Service, Other Outstanding Achievements
Nominations & Invitations – Candidates are identified either by nomination or by the Lawyers of Distinction organization directly. Nominations are accepted from members of Lawyers of Distinction, fellow attorneys, and current or former clients.
Review Application & Background Check – Lawyers of Distinction conducts independent research and background checks to ensure all potential candidates meet LOD standards. The attorney must have no ethical violations within the past five years.
Confirmation of Membership – All attorneys who meet the criteria of our screening process have demonstrated a high degree of peer recognition and professional competence, placing them in the top 10% of all attorneys in the United States.
They also claim in their footer that:
Lawyers of Distinction members have been selected based upon a review and vetting process by our Selection Committee… These potential candidates who meet the criteria of our screening process have demonstrated a high degree of peer recognition and professional competence, placing them in the top 10% of all attorneys in the United States. Attorneys may nominate other peers they feel warrant recognition or may nominate themselves. These candidates undergo the same rigorous review process.
So I thought I’d evaluate the vetting process, applying to Lawyers of Distinction membership, on behalf of my kid’s pet chicken, Zippy. Surely their “rigorous review process” would disqualify a 3 1/2 month old Golden Wyandotte? (Ignoring for the moment that lawyers can self-nominate, which must be the epitome of egotistical self-supplication.)
Zippy and me celebrating her nomination to Lawyers of Distinctions Top 10% of Lawyers Award
First, I fired up an email address for Zippy through Yahoo and then impersonated retired comedian, Jon Stewart (no email address needed) to nominate Zippy:
I thought the Jon Stewart reference might be a red flag for Lawyers of Distinction, but a few days later, Zippy’s Yahoo account got mail announcing her nomination and inviting her to take the next step…..
The key to this email is this sentence: “upon completion of your application you’ll have access….” So, all Zippy needs to get the plaque is a completed application and $775? Seriously?
Surely they wanted to know more information about Zippy. What about the background checks? Independent Research? and Zippys scholarly writings? Verdicts… Settlements…. Bar Certifications? Surely that would follow in the next phase of the process; at a minimum, LOD would want to know what state Zippy was licensed in? a bar number? or a release to perform the background check? Some of her awards? Some bio information? But alas, the application required nothing more than a name, address and a domain (although, I felt certainly someone would at the very least check out www.deshickeenlaw.com, find out it was not operational and then reject Zippy’s application…)
Apparently no one at LOD bothered to review Zippy’s non-existent website, www.DeShickeenLaw.com before shepherding me to the payment screen. In the next step, LOD was very happy to order up a plaque for a 3 month old hen, placing her in Top 10% Among Lawyers.
And the most insidious part of this is the literal fine print, the part that says, “The membership shall renew annually unless Lawyers of Distinction is notified of non-renewal.” So every year, Zippy’s credit card is going to get pinged for another $775. That’s a pretty good revenue stream. In summation, after impersonating a comedian, nominating a chicken and submitting nothing more than a non-existent website, I can purchase an annual subscription for a plaque for a tidy sum, for a hen who is still too young to even lay an egg.”
Dogs Among the Top 10% of Lawyers
Now, while I couldn’t bring myself to send Jesse $775 via credit card, apparently, not one, but two different canines footed the bill and have made it through Lawyers of Distinction’s rigorous vetting process. Meet, Shasharoosticus a Lawyer of Distinction (My Dog is Better Than Your Lawyer) and canine to (real) attorney Andrew Tolchin and wait till you hear teacup poodle, Lucy’s acceptance speech.
Brodsky and Baker….
I wanted to know more about Jesse… who is this guy duping lawyers into these overpriced lacquered boards? Turns out Jesse Brodsky sent us our C&D just 4 months after being admitted to the Florida State Bar….
Now, Lawyers of Distinction has really upped their marketing since Brodsky has come on board. Recently I’ve started seeing them more frequently, advertising in legal rags, Twitter and prolifically on Facebook. And they’ve been around since before Brodsky’s first year of law school. I had thought perhaps this was the entrepreneurial endeavor of a feckless law student – as I was unable to find anyone else associated with the company. So I looked up Lawyers of Distinction in the Florida Business Directory to uncover, the long term owner, attorney Robert B. Baker of Baker and Zimmerman, who registered the business back in 2009. Ironically, the Baker and Zimmerman site is devoid of any mention of Lawyers of Distinction – in fact neither Baker nor Zimmerman is a recipient. According to Avvo, Baker has been suspended in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York and was reprimanded by the Florida Bar. I’m pretty sure if this makes him decidedly under qualified to vet the Top 10% of Lawyers.
The First Amendment and Bogus Awards
All of this brings about serious first amendment issues. During my time at Avvo, we ran into challenges of our right to publish the Avvo Rating and ended up working with Bruce Johnson of Davis Wright Tremaine, the country’s foremost expert on the intersection of the 1st amendment and the Internet. I’ve invited Bruce to join us next week for a webinar called Blogging and the First Amendment. We plan to discuss the legal framework for publishing online content as it pertains to the First Amendment, including the right of Lawyers of Distinction to publish the clearly bogus awards as well as our right to call them to the carpet for doing so. I’d invite you to join us, January 9th at 1:30 Pacific time.
And if you’d like a running log of lawyers duped into this service, try the Lawyers of Distinction Twitter Feed. But you won’t find Zippy on there… she’s too smart.
*Brian Tannebaum is not a lawyer of distinction. The only plaques he displays are of his prodigious high end wine collection, and then, only upon specific request.
Ahhh… new years resolutions. Like “I’m going to blog more.”
I remember my business school friend, Josh Strauss proudly proclaiming to our MBA section that his new years resolution was to floss – and now I think of him every time I pick a stray strand of overcook beef leftover from lunch from my teeth with some waxed string.
Its early January and lawyers across the country are reinvigorated and optimistic – time to “take their firm to the next level” and “up their game” with a renewed commitment to marketing. Which often entail promises of blogging to feed the “Content is King” beast. (Turns out content is NOT king, but I digress.)
Blogging is a commitment – call it an annual commitment and not one to be taken lightly. And just like that tiny roll of overpriced string in your medicine cabinet – if you stop half way through the year, things start to decay. Nothing looks sadder and more marketing pathetic than a blog long abandoned but still posted on the homepage.
“This post from 2015…..” screams “I’ve given up and I have nothing left to say.”
Now, don’t get me wrong – blogging is super valuable. (Especially when you do it on your own site to improve your SEO performance and not another domain, but I digress again.) Blogging can generate links. Can generate inbound traffic. Can establish your thought leadership. Can forge relationships. Can generate business. These are all good things.
But.
If you are going to abandon your blog, just like Josh abandoned his flossing regimen some time around April, you are better off not getting started at all. My guess is that those of you with the self discipline to pull out that floss once a day will do just fine blogging, but otherwise… try something else.
(oh – and incidentally, less I turn into a hypocrite – my new year’s resolution…. publish something every business day.)
