Why Social Media, Why This Blog?

I am a Motoring Lawyer by day and run Motoring Lawyers Online. As the name suggests all of the marketing and advertising is done online. I started this firm in 2009, my passion was to run an law firm taking advantage of Social Media. By that I mean places like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Ecademy etc. All of these are places where you can share ideas, learn and from a marketing point of view, be seen.

Traditional lawyers were/are against any form of social media, in the firm where I was a partner before setting up my own practice Facebook was banned and most people hadn’t heard of twitter or if they had they didn’t ‘get it’

I was convinced that there was a place for social media for lawyers and the last 18 months have proved that to be correct. I have met with some fascinating lawyers who use social media very well, learnt a lot and even gained clients from social media. I have also come across some awful examples of people jumping on the social media band wagon and just not getting it at all.

I want to use this place to give my own views on social media and how it can work for lawyers.

For me Social Media for Lawyers, or anyone else is not about advertising, yes it can be about marketing but not advertising. Social media is not about broadcasting, it is not about spamming messages offering services nor is it about auto tweeting the same message throughout the day.

Advertising is one sided, the advertiser advertises and the reader reads, except they don’t, not any more. No one reads or listens to adverts. At the moment there is a very good TV advert showing a flash mob at an airport singing to passengers as they exit. The 2 sings I have seen are ‘return of the mac’ and ‘ the boys are back in town’. I love watching the expressions of the ‘victims’, they are cool adverts well designed, except for one thing…… I couldn’t tell you who they are advertising.

I get around 150 emails a day, mainly spam, I assume the majority are spam and  I read the first line of the ones that make it past my spam detector. Normally that is enough to be send to the trash folder. Obviously the ones that tear at my heart strings with a plea to help them release $15,000,000 in return for 10% I read more carefully, after all who would turn down an offer like that?!

The point is there is so much noise, so much crap that we have stopped listening, stopped reading and the only people that advertising works for is the people getting paid to sell advertising.

Done properly Social media is not advertising, it is not one sided. That simply doesn’t work. If your aim in social media is to tell and sell you are not doing it properly and are wasting your time.

Social Media is about interaction, it is two sided, it is about building a relationship where the aim is no more than that. Simply building a relationship, one day you may be able to help that person, one day they may be able to help you, but if you start off with the aim of creating a business deal you will fail, people will see through that and you will be added to the noise or worse still the spam.