Flossing and Blogging

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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.)

Being Over Charged

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https://mockingbirdmarketing.wistia.com/medias/ey0whq6726?embedType=async&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=300

Mark Marenda Tribute

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Those of you who have been in the legal marketing world for a while now, were saddened by the untimely passing of Mark Merenda this March.  About 3 weeks ago I received the accompanying picture from Elisabeth Osmeloski, VP at Third Door Media who puts on both Search Engine Land and The Landy Awards.  Elisabeth is responsible for including Mark in memoriam at this year’s Landy Awards.  Its a classy, touching tribute from the tech industry and I’m reminded that of how lucky I am to work in the nexus of law and technology.

 

Why Won’t FindLaw Install GA?

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https://mockingbirdmarketing.wistia.com/medias/aqyc7hrq5x?embedType=async&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=300

In which FindLaw makes me so mad I devolve into incoherent expletive laden babbling.

MyGooglePages.com: Or, “How To Verify if that Phone Caller is Really From Google”

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Tired of receiving those calls from “Google”?  We got this forwarded to us from one of our clients last week:

Free website from Google huh!  Sounds awesome.  Let’s call “Peter from Google” back….

“thank you for calling mygooglepages.com – if you know your party’s extension enter it now, for the special offer, press 1….”

Except of course that a quick search for the phone number Peter left, let’s us know that the number is actually registered to a company called “You Goo First”, a Search Engine Optimization company scamming bullshitter, John Cheliotis.

And if you happen to go to their website – you WILL see a callout (gray on gray text) that they are specifically NOT Google.  BUT…. if you rely on the voicemail (“Peter from Google”) you’d be none the wiser.  Which, is exactly how they want it.

So, if you think you are talking with Google – probably makes good sense to verify it by asking for an email, which should come from @google.com (not @gmail.com).  And Peter and John…. perhaps this is all a big misunderstanding…. perhaps Peter’s last name is actually Frahmgoogel.

Is Your Brand Synonymous (to Google) with Personal Injury?

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Google AdWords broadmatch is very broad. In fact it’s broader than I had thought.

Essentially, AdWords knows that “attorney” means “lawyer” “law firm” and lots of other variants. It is so broad, in fact, that branded queries for law firms: (i.e. Smith Jones and Williams”) are starting to turn up ads for competing law firms, even though there’s nothing in the branded query that denotes a law firm specifically. Semantically, “Smith Jones and Williams” could be accounting, or a pizza restaurant, or a document or an island, or a treaty from the 1700s… but Google has learned that people looking for that specific firm are actually looking for a criminal defense lawyer and are showing ads for other localized criminal defense lawyers.

Here’s an example I did from my Seattle office, for a huge personal injury law firm in Texas. Note that three ads for Seattle based PI firms show up for the very specific query: “Glasheen Valles”.

 

What this means tactically:

  1. Lawyers should bid on their own brand name. This includes the firm as well as individuals.
  2. Broad match in AdWords may be a path towards spending a lot of money on expensive PPC terms. A sophisticated campaign should be MUCH more specific.

 

Mockingbird Mission

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Just got back from a recruiting trip to my old MBA haunts – the illustrious University of Michigan Business School – now known as “Ross” but in my days, a simple, UBMS.  (Future post coming contrasting U of M and  U of Washington BBA candidates).

The return to my MBA roots brings me back to things like marginal cost curves, NPV, the 4 Ps and…. Mission Statements.

Mission Statements feel like something, that are wisely crafted, set out at the beginning of a organization, a set of precepts that the organization has always had, that they can always look to, that always have defined their reason for being.  Truth be told, I’ve only recently stumbled across our mission statement – through the scribbles on the bottom of page 30 on the book, How Google Works:

Dramatically improve the lives of our employees and clients (in that order) through outstanding marketing.

I had jotted that down about a four months before a conversation with one of my coworkers who asked me a very important question during a quarterly 1:1:1 (everyone meets with their direct boss and myself for a candid conversation at least quarterly). “What would you see as success in a year?” This is a question I ask people all the time, but it was the first time someone had turned it around on me.  My first answer was immediate an inaccurate – “I have everything I want and need.”  That night, I mulled his question and came back to those notes jotted down on page 30.

Its our mission – we’ve just never verbalized it before.  There’s a lot packed into those words:

  1. I only want clients for whom we can deliver great results.
  2. We fire lawyers who are obnoxious, unrealistic or rude.  I’d rather terminate a client than lose a coworker.
  3. We aren’t constrained to a particular tactic – content, blogs, websites, advertising – but instead need to find those tactics that best serve the client’s individual needs.
  4. Coworkers are more important than clients – I believe, long term that creating an opportunity to dramatically improve the lives of our employees engenders the elusive attitude and commitment to excellence that delivers great results for our clients.

Enough high level, MBA style pontifications…. back to work.

Know What your Agency is Doing: Buying Links

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New client just forwarded me the breakup email exchange from her previous agency.

We pay for links monthly.

Know what your agency is doing. The reason the firm reached out to us, was because, despite all the money they had invested, search traffic hadn’t changed.  And then we go and find out that their agency has been torpedoing SEO efforts through an unsophisticated link purchasing scheme.  Now the client is going to need to pay me an extensive sum to undo the efforts of their previous firm – just to get them back to a reasonable starting point. We call this Janitorial SEO – the cleaning up of the messes of others.  It’s expensive and unnecessary.

If you don’t know what your agency is doing for you – it’s reasonable to assume they are buying links, torching your site and you are in for a huge headache (and invoice) down the road.