Raising the Bar: Valuing Social Media

by W. Blair Meeks
Communication Strategist
Jackson Spalding

If Facebook stock is any indication, it seems investors are having as hard a time as many others in the business community placing a value on social media. There is no doubt social media are an incredibly important development in the world of communication. They’ve given voice to the voiceless, helped topple governments and put incredibly powerful tools of influence in the hands of everyone who has access to the Internet. But what is the value to business, attorneys and the legal community? Many are struggling with that question. This month’s Raising the Bar will provide some answers.

A consistent challenge in the public relations field has been determining an exact dollar value for the work we do: how much is it worth for everyone in town to know you’re the smartest lawyer in your field? The knowledge itself has no monetary value, but when that knowledge influences action it is extraordinarily valuable. The very existence of PR as a profession centers on the fact that people make business decisions based on reputation, connection and relationships. With social media, you can now build those reputations, connections and relationships without having to go through some other media outlet to reach your audience. Of course, it’s still great to have the Wall Street Journal quote you on its front page as a national expert in your field a few times a year, but now, through social media you can build your own audience by consistently delivering useful, engaging information to people in the subject matter areas where you want to be involved.

So how do you do that? Here are the steps our Social Media Director Stefany Sanders suggests taking to achieve the best value possible:

Set a goal – determine what you want to accomplish with the social channel for your business. Is it finding new clients? Networking? Becoming established as an expert? Associating your firm with a specific practice area of law? Driving traffic to your website? Listening to the social buzz on topics relevant to you or your firm? Know what you’re trying to do, first and foremost, to anchor strategies and tactics as well as provide a baseline for determining success.

Set policy – a social media policy that guides use among employees of the firm helps protect the firm’s reputation. A good policy matches a firm’s culture and contains information about who can use social media on behalf of the company, and how employees should conduct themselves as representatives of the firm. Law firm policies should cover the use of social media during litigation and who attorneys or clients should or should not be connected to online.

Determine audience – based on your goals, find where your target audience is online. You can survey clients or peer firms. You can use monitoring platforms like Social Mention to find discussions in areas where you want to be considered an expert.

Take action – it’s important to get involved and stay involved. Getting value from social media is like most things in life – consistency is essential. You don’t build muscle lifting a weight every once-in-a-while. Everyday effort is what it takes. With consistent effort through social media you can:

• Guide conversation – in your subject area, about your firm, about important people, developments or breakthroughs through Facebook, Twitter and other outlets.
• Provide thought leadership – by starting a blog or contributing to industry publications in print or online.

Track results – so you can determine if you’re getting results or wasting your time. For example, if you’re on LinkedIn for lead generation (you’ve built a reputation answering questions on contract law and people are starting to ask for representation), you need to find a way to track how your clients find you. Maybe someone on LinkedIn referred you to someone they know, or you wrote a guest blog post on contract law on a popular law blog and suddenly you’re fielding a bunch of calls at your office – you need to understand how they found you to know if you should keep doing what you’re doing, do more of it, or scrap it and find another tactic.

One final, overriding piece of advice for social media interaction in the legal community: you should be very careful not to say or do anything that will compromise the firm, clients or, of course, the judicial process. Follow this advice and the steps listed above and, quite unlike Facebook at the present time, your stock will soar in value both in the social media world and in the business world as a result.