Reflect Who You Are to Your Readers

Guest post by Donna Seyle

I recently came across a post by 16-year-old Nigerian entrepreneur named Onibalusi Bamidele called Blogging with Influence in 5 Steps. Besides being so moved by the fact that such a young man has been able to comprehend and distill the elements of a good blog, I was left with a bigger question: how do lawyers combine information with compassion?

These are the 5 steps Onibalusi includes:

Content: “Your content is you; you are your content. The power your content can hold, the influence it can add to you should not be underestimated.”

Passion: “Your passion is a building block for your content. If you seriously have passion for what you do, it will definitely reflect in what you write.. . . Your passion has a lot to do with your content (which is a building block to your influence).”

Care: “Do you care for your readers? Caring for your readers is a great element that should not be neglected if truly you want to have great influence on them.”

Authority: “Let people know you are an authority. You don’t need to be subjective but let there be sounds of authority, assurance, and affirmation in anything you write.”

Distinction: “The final step to influential blogging is distinction. You should be able to distinguish yourself from other bloggers. You should be different.”

Any good blog coach will tell you that your blog must reflect who you are so your readers can begin to know and trust you. It must show that you care about your audience, that you’re passionate about your subject matter, that you know what  you’re talking about, and, as if that weren’t enough, you must do it differently. When you’re talking about law blogging, that is not an easy task.

Grant Griffiths at Blawging Lawyers puts it this way:

Blogs build trust and reputation “organically” by allowing potential clients to see the people behind the law practice in action, not mediated by slick marketing. Ironically, this is the most powerful form of marketing there is.

By providing information to the public, you become a trusted and reputable resource. Trusted and reputable resources get clients, period. . . It is well-known in marketing and consumer psychology circles that people prefer to do business with other people they like and who are like them. People cannot like you if they don’t know you, and a normal Web site doesn’t give them a chance to know you and like you.

But we’re talking law, here. We’re talking about an intellectual exercise that requires considering permutations of thought that challenge the best of minds.  How do you present this kind of information in a blog post that will reach out and touch someone and invite them to rely on you?

Here’s some ideas that will help you create a blogging perspective that combines substance with style:

• Have a conversation with your best friend. You are not interacting with your monitor, or even the (hopefully) masses of people that will read your post. You’re talking to your best non-lawyer friend, chatting about an interesting situation he/she encountered and wondered how that would be viewed from a legal perspective. It’s a conversation at the end of a golf game over a good, cold beer on a beautiful sunny afternoon. Enjoy yourself.
• Assume your friend knows you and trusts you. You’ve been friends for 15 years. There’s a reason for that. You’re likable, reasonable and you know your stuff. You know you are held in some esteem by your friend, so there is no reason to shy away from asserting your knowledge with confidence.
• Use a “How to” approach. The majority (I don’t know the exact statistics) of online searches start with the phrase “How to. . .” Now, your friend has presented you with this dilemma or desire. Approach your response from a practical point of view. What can/should one do in that situation to resolve the dilemma, or what steps should he/she take to achieve the desired result? You can use some limited legal analysis to give credibility to your advice, but only for that reason. Your friend won’t benefit from a full-blow diatribe on how the courts have viewed the subject, and doesn’t really care.
• Embellish the topic with an example. Giving examples of similar situations and their outcomes shows you are really relating to the topic and feel strongly about it, so much so that you remember once about 10 years ago when. . . Just remember it MUST BE FICTIONAL. An amalgamation, perhaps, of several different scenarios. But you must respect your ethical obligations to your clients and your attorney/client privilege, and write accordingly.
• Speak from a preventative point of view. No one wants to get entangled in a lawsuit anymore, it’s just no fun, it costs too much money and you hardly ever get what you want, anyway. Give your friend advice about how to be sure to avoid the dilemma in the future, or the most important things he/she must do to prevent the lawsuit monster from visiting when he/she has achieved the desired result.

You can decide to blog because someone told you to, and hate it. Or you can embrace it as an opportunity to help someone, to use your specialized knowledge to advise someone on how to stay out of trouble. The former will never turn into a success story, but the latter surely will. Play with it, have fun with it. No one will laugh (unless you tell jokes) and if they do, you won’t know it!

About the author:

Donna Seyle is the founder of the Freelance Law Firm, a resource for lawyers and law firms who find themselves without the resources to take on new business or respond to matters needing immediate attention, and to in-house counsel faced with a temporary overload of projects. The firm provides real estate and business firms or practitioners and in-house counsel with cost-effective, time-saving, high quality legal services so they can increase their billings without increasing their overhead.

How to Choose Your Medium Wisely

Guest Post by Stew Friedman

When Stevie Wonder first sang "I just called to say I love you," no one wondered whether he would have been better off tweeting his message instead of picking up the phone. Not so today.

Recently, in my Wharton MBA course on leadership from the point of view of the whole person, we grappled with the challenge of how to choose among the various media options available today for connecting with important people in all the different parts of your life. We came up with 17 different media currently in use for interpersonal contact, including face-to-face (verbal and non-verbal), phone, email, snail mail, text and video messaging, blogs, podcasts, online forums, even music sharing and online gaming, among others. Quite a few of these did not even exist ten years ago, reminding us that we are all still very much in learning mode when it comes to the social and psychological principles and methods we need to take advantage of the incredibly powerful, and sometimes bewildering, array of choices we have.

Digital technology has added both relief and stress to our lives. These tools can make it easier to move rapidly from one part of life to another and give rapid access to the people who need you. And you can broadcast with them, making communication extremely efficient. Yet instead of realizing all the potential benefits, most people find themselves trapped by the demands imposed by the enormous amount of information surrounding them every hour of every day. A thought experiment: If I told you right now that you had to give up all your digital devices for the next day, how would you feel? Relieved? Terrified? We've become enormously dependent on these tools, and yet we've not spent nearly enough time thinking about how best to use them so that we gain the benefits while keeping them from reducing the quality of our lives.

People complain that using new technologies reduces social interaction and sense of community while others rant about being expected to be available for work 24/7 with zero response-time to urgent messages. While the promise of new media is freedom, choice, and control, the reality for most is crippling overload. On the employer side, many bosses wonder whether people are really working when they are connecting virtually. They also worry about how to foster team spirit when the "team" is invisible. Finally, when performance is measured the old-fashioned way (by time spent in an office) and not on the basis of results (no matter where and when they are produced), digital communications can seem to undermine productivity.

But what if you could use the media available to you to build trust and gain greater flexibility? And what if you could do this without being enslaved and constantly bombarded by your Blackberry, iPhone, laptop, or whatever? You'd feel more whole, better able to integrate the diverse pieces of the social puzzle in your life.

You can learn to use new media to shift time and place in ways that work for all your key stakeholders, including yourself. But the intelligent use of the various media we now have isn't just a matter of doing more digital. Rather, it's a matter of more consciously allocating your use of different modes of communication: for example, making face-to-face communication a priority for those stakeholders with whom it's needed, while using digital less. It all depends on what's going to work best for you and for them.

Studying your forms of interaction will help you generate ideas for how you might capitalize on the benefits of each communication mode (e.g., face-to-face is best when trust is on the line) while minimizing the liabilities (e.g., emails can miss nuances better conveyed on the phone or in person). This might mean shifting to more in-person time with certain stakeholders (such as your children or clients) and less with others (such as with your boss or the people who report to you) while taking advantage of the flexibility of virtual media as a means of staying connected with others.

Here's one way to stimulate creative thinking about exploiting various forms of communication. Think about the media you use to communicate with the five most important people or groups at work, at home, and in your community. For each of these stakeholders, estimate the percentage of your interaction time that is conducted through each of the following forms of communication: face-to-face(F2F), virtual synchronous (shifting place but not time, such as phone, IM, and videoconferencing), and virtual asynchronous (shifting both time and place, such as voicemail and email) communication. For example, you might spend 50% in F2F with your boss, 20% with her on the phone, and 30% by email and voicemail. After you do this analysis, look for patterns. Consider how using different forms of communication affects your capacity to achieve your goals in each part of your life and to align them better by asking these questions:

• What opportunities are there for you to use different forms of communication more effectively?
• Are there stakeholders with whom you should be devoting more time F2F and others less?
• With whom would it be better to use virtual more regularly?

The real value in this analysis is to become more aware of media preferences (yours and theirs) and to learn more about how you can be more effective in meeting expectations by using a given medium. Look for opportunities to explain to your people why you have a preference for one medium over another for certain kinds of communications. For example, if you prefer email, and can justify it as the option of choice to a friend, your father, or a co-worker, that conversation about your preferences will probably make the entire process of communicating go more smoothly. The technology choice should be based on a mutual understanding about why, how, and when you're going to communicate.

Staying mindful of the preferences others have means looking for chances to talk about when, where, and how you use different media to stay connected, including when you're available and when you're not. You might, for instance, discuss what it would be like to shut off the digital information stream for a specific period — even for just an hour or two — to focus your attention entirely on one thing.

With so many options, there are plenty of opportunities for you to experiment, even just for a week or so, with how you use media. Try something different, with the deliberate goal of performing more effectively in all the different parts of your life, and see what happens.

This article originally appeared in the Harvard Business Review on March 12,  2010.

About the author:

Stewart D. Friedman is Practice Professor of Management at the Wharton School. The former head of Ford Motor's Leadership Development Center, he is the author of Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life. For more, visit www.totalleadership.org.

Networking works best if it is done with "marketing aforethought."

Here’s your game plan for an effective networking event.

Where to Go

The best meetings for networking are the ones your clients and referral sources go to. Every person in business belongs to a trade association. Simply ask your clients what meetings they go to and suggest you join them. At the meeting, have your client introduce you to others (who are prospective clients). If anyone asks what you’re doing there, tell them you want to learn the industry better, to meet people and to ask questions.

Bar association meetings can be a great source for referrals – if you’re a litigator and you attend bar meetings to meet transactional lawyers, or you can meet out-of-state lawyers who may call you when they have a matter in your city.

Making a Plan of Action

Most people erroneously think networking is shaking as many hands as possible and spreading out as many business cards as possible at an event. This is incorrect. You should go to an event with the aim of having one or two meaningful conversations – that’s it.

A premeditated networker going to an event checks the membership or attendee list ahead of time, and highlights 3-5 people to meet. That way he’s not walking into a huge room full of people he doesn’t know. At the event, the networker asks the president to introduce him to a few of these targets.

Additional Tips

• Come early to meetings and stand by the table where nametags are handed out. Let everyone at the meeting see you are there. Say hello to everyone you know.
• Have the staff working the desk identify the people you are looking for.
• Pick out whom you're going to sit with and put your purse/jacket across the chairs at the table.
• Introduce yourself to the speakers and get their business cards; briefly chat them up about the topic they're speaking on. Do this at the front of the room so everybody can see you attended the meeting.
• If possible, bring a second person from your law firm to the meeting and have them do the same thing; be certain that you split up from the second person and sit at separate tables and talk to different people.
• It's also important that, when you talk to these three to five people, you focus on their needs and not on broadcasting what you do. Learn as much as you can about them first, and then, if it fits into the conversation, tell them how you can help them. Employ the art of active listening in that you ask open-ended questions to keep your fellow networker talking (about her and her business). When you move on (in about 5-7 minutes), she will think you are the most interesting person in the room.

About the author:

Larry Bodine is a business development advisor who helps law and other professional firms get more clients and generate more revenue. With 18 years of experience, he trains lawyers in selling legal services and coaches them in creating and pursuing business development action plans.