How lawyers can put their best foot forward online.

1. You’re Not A Dog: Putting Your
Best Foot Forward Online
Gyi Tsakalakis
@gyitsakalakis
gt@attorneysync.com

2. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner.

3. Are You A Dog?
Information About Legal Services
Rule 7.1 Communications Concerning A
Lawyer's Services
A lawyer shall not make a false or misleading
communication about the lawyer or the
lawyer's services. A communication is false or
misleading if it contains a material
misrepresentation of fact or law, or omits a
fact necessary to make the statement
considered as a whole not materially
misleading.

4. Social Mantras
Listen. Regularly monitor the comments about you, your firm, your subject matter.
Ask. Ask questions to glean valuable insights and show that you are listening.
Respond. Respond to questions, compliments and feedback in real time.
Reward. Tweet updates about firm news, awards, successes, changes in law, etc.
Demonstrate wider leadership and know-how. Reference articles and links about the
bigger picture as it relates to your practice.
Champion your stakeholders. Publicize and reply publicly to great shares posted by your
friends.
Establish the right voice. Use a direct, genuine, and of course, a likable tone from your
practice, but think about your voice as you share. How do you want your practice to
appear to your community?
Share. Share photos and behind the scenes info about your practice. Even better, give a
glimpse of developing projects and events. Users want the latest authentic information, so
give it to them!

5. Cocktails!
“Lately, when people hear the term social media, they tend to think of the fairly new
developments of sites such as Facebook and Twitter, but in reality, social media has been
around as long as we have been social and used media. Letters to the editor in traditional
print newspapers are an example of social media.”
- Vanessa Fox (Marketing in the Age of Google, pp. 185-186)

6. Who, What & How
• Who are my audiences?
• What are my audiences looking for online?
• Where are my audiences looking online?
• When people look, what do they find?
• Why are people looking online?
• How can I deliver information that supplies
their demand?

7. The Social Big 3
Maybe 4…

8. More Ways To Be Social
• Blogging
• Commenting on news stories.
• Commenting on social platforms.
• Commenting on blogs.
• Video
• Slideshare
• JD Supra
• Question / Answer Sites
• Avvo
• Reviews

9. No Ads!

10. Public & Permanent
Even if it seems private, assume
that everything you do online is
public & permanent.

11. Online Participation Guidelines
Rule 1.6 Confidentiality of Information
Rule 3.6 Trial Publicity
Rule 4.1 Truthfulness in Statements to Others
Rule 7.1 Communication Concerning a Lawyer's Services
Rule 7.2 Advertising
Rule 7.3 Direct Contact with Prospective Clients
Rule 7.4 Communication of Fields of Practice and Specialization
Rule 8.2 Judicial and Legal Officials
Social Media Policy?

12. Fear Itself
Of course, be
conscientious of your
state’s ethics rules.
But, don’t be afraid.
Are you afraid of your
cell phone?
Are you afraid of email?
Spend time learning
and listening.

13. You Be You

14. Avoid Stock Images

15. Avoid Stock Identities

16. #1 Rule
Authenticity

17. A Process: Listening
http://www.google.com/alerts

18. Reader
www.google.com/reader

19. Find A Topic

20. Effective Writing
‘for a blog to be successful your content needs to be
useful and unique to your readers’
‘Start with the customer – find out what they want and
give it to them.’
- Darren Rowse (ProBlogger.com)

21. Information Supply & Demand
Effective Writing = Supplying the online
demand for information of your target
audiences.

22. Share Your Post & Engage in Discussion

23. Testimonials?
Florida RULE 4-7.2 COMMUNICATIONS CONCERNING A LAWYER’S SERVICES
(1) Statements About Legal Services. A lawyer shall not make or permit to be made a
false, misleading, or deceptive communication about the lawyer or the lawyer’s
services. A communication violates this rule if it:
(J) contains a testimonial.

24. What Not To Do: Webspam
In computing, spamdexing (also known as search spam, search engine spam, web
spam or search engine poisoning) is the deliberate manipulation of search engine
indexes. It involves a number of methods, such as repeating unrelated phrases, to
manipulate the relevance or prominence of resources indexed in a manner
inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system. Some consider it to be a part of
search engine optimization, though there are many search engine optimization
methods that improve the quality and appearance of the content of web sites and
serve content useful to many users. Search engines use a variety of algorithms to
determine relevancy ranking. Some of these include determining whether the search
term appears in the META keywords tag, others whether the search term appears in
the body text or URL of a web page. Many search engines check for instances of
spamdexing and will remove suspect pages from their indexes. Also, people working
for a search-engine organization can quickly block the results-listing from entire
websites that use spamdexing, perhaps alerted by user complaints of false matches.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing

25. Comment Spam
FACT: Abusing comment fields of innocent sites is a bad and risky way of
getting links to your site. If you choose to do so, you are tarnishing other
people's hard work and lowering the quality of the web, transforming a
potentially good resource of additional information into a list of nonsense
keywords.
FACT: Comment spammers are often trying to improve their site's organic
search ranking by creating dubious inbound links to their site. Google has an
understanding of the link graph of the web, and has algorithmic ways of
discovering those alterations and tackling them. At best, a link spammer
might spend hours doing spammy linkdrops which would count for little or
nothing because Google is pretty good at devaluing these types of links.
Think of all the more productive things one could do with that time and
energy that would provide much more value for one's site in the long run.
- Google Webmaster Central Blog

26. Spam Police

27. My Advice
Don’t Spam.

28. Measuring It
How do I know whether this “stuff” is “working”?

29. Are They Subscribing?
Subscribers – How many people are subscribing to your
blog? Subscribing to a blog is a much bigger
commitment than following a Twitter account. These
readers have read your stuff and thought, this is
good, I’d like to hear more from this author. They opted-
in to receiving your content either in their reader or
even in their inbox. That’s a pretty powerful
endorsement.

30. Are They Commenting?
Comments – Comments were the social web before the
social web. They were one of the first ways that we
communicated with one another online. Motivating a
reader to leave a comment usually means that you’ve
engaged that reader. It also means that you’re fostering
community and discussion through your writing.
Whether a comment agrees, disagrees, compliments or
insults you, the fact that someone cared enough to
leave a comment means that you’re doing something
right. No one commenting on your posts/articles? Be
critical of yourself. Ask yourself what you’re doing
wrong. Chances are that it’s you, not them.

31. Are They Sharing You?
Shares – Similar to subscribes, natural social
shares are a strong indicator of how your
content is being received online. I’m not
talking about auto shares, shares by your
marketer or artificial shares that you paid for.
I’m talking about real people sharing and
discussing your content.
Whether it’s on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook
or somewhere else online, whether or not
your content is being shares speaks volumes.

32. Are They Linking?
Natural Links – Still the gold standard of online
editorial endorsement, natural links to your
posts are a powerful indicator of effectiveness.
It usually means that you not only connected
with a reader, it often means you inspired them
to publish something and reference you as a
source.
Of course, motivating someone to publish and
link to your site is challenging. Which is why it
has so much value. Which is also why Google’s
ultimate quest is to distinguish these natural
link endorsements from those that are
artificial.

33. Discussions?
Discussions – Measuring the number of tweets you
send? The number of followers you have? Here’s an
idea, measure the number of discussions you have. And
measure with whom you’re having these discussions.
Marketers? Spammers? Real people in your industry?

34. Time?
How much time should I spend doing this
stuff?
- How much time do you spend doing
other types of communication?
- How much time do you budget to
networking?
- How much time do you dedicate to other
business development activities.
Make small investments at first. Don’t spend
hours tweeting, liking, etc.
10 minutes morning commute, waiting in
court, at lunch, etc.
Make largest time investments into
developing content that people might
actually want to read and share.

35. Thank You!
+Gyi Tsakalakis
• @gyitsakalakis
gt@attorneysync.com