In Part 1 of this series, we covered reasons why digital reputation is becoming increasingly important for attorney job seekers and I advocated the AIM Model for growing a targeted online reputation.  In Part 2 of this series, we discussed “assessment” strategies under the model and in Part 3 we discussed “influencing” your reputation under AIM.  Today, we talk about monitoring and maintaining the online reputation that you’ve worked so hard to establish.

Don’t Forget To Monitor & Maintain

If you do nothing else but read this series of posts, please pay attention to this next piece of advice.  Even if you do everything described in the series, please likewise pay heed.

Set up Google Alerts for your name!

Setting up these alerts allows you to receive email notifications advising if your name is referenced on the web in the future.  Personally, I have these set up for myself, my husband and my young daughter, as well as my employer and everybody else whose web fortunes can impact my personal reputation.

If anybody so much as whispers about you on the web, you want to know about it.  If something nice is being said, go say “thank you.”  If something less flattering is being said, take appropriate curative steps.

Set these alerts up for all possible variations of your name, including maiden names.  Have the alerts sent to an email address that you check regularly.

Besides setting up the alerts to monitor your name, there are also maintenance steps to implement in building your rep.  Calendar a quarterly reminder to tour your online digital assets to assess whether they still accurately reflect your marketing message and target audience, and make changes accordingly.

Good Luck & Get Started

Following the steps outlined in this series of blog posts will get you off to a great start in affirmatively building your digital reputation, and put you miles ahead of many of your fellow new lawyers.  There are big changes afoot in the legal industry and digital marketing savvy has never been more important.  Jump in now with both feet!

“See” you on the web!

To see Part 3 of this series, click this link

To see Part 2 of this series, click this link

To see Part 1 of this series, click this link

In Part 1 of this series, we covered reasons why digital reputation is becoming increasingly important for attorney job seekers and I advocated the AIM Model for growing a targeted online reputation.  In Part 2 of this series, we discussed “assessment” strategies under the model and today we discuss “influencing” your reputation under AIM.

Influencing Your Digital Reputation

You will never own your own digital reputation!  You can only influence it.

Read those last two sentences three more times.  They are that important.

What do I mean by “own” a reputation?  Just as with offline life, outsiders can come along and hurt (or help) your digital reputation.  A spiteful ex-girlfriend or any other random person can digitally post negative information about you (or somebody with a name like you) and it can turn up under a search for your name in the search engines.

So how do we control what we can control (aka “influence”)?  By acquiring as much digital real estate as possible where we can put up our desired (focused) message.

Each little acre of digital real estate you acquire on a different platform gives you the ability to snag one spot in the list of results that come up when somebody searches your name in the search engines (“Search Engine Results Pages” or “SERPs”).

To see an example of this, google my name “Tracy Thrower Conyers” and you’ll see my name in connection with a slew of different little digital “houses” – some that I control and many that I don’t.

What digital real estate do I recommend for lawyers just starting their professional careers?

At a minimum, I highly recommend that you register a .com domain name related to your professional marketing name.  If you do nothing else with this domain name other than register it, you’ll have at least locked it up for later expansion of your digital empire.  You should also set up an email address attached to this domain name for your professional marketing.

For tips and more information on choosing and registering domain names for your digital empire, and setting up email accounts branded to your domain names, see Domain Name Branding For Lawyers.

Next, set up a couple of profile pages on prominent social networking sites.  You don’t “own” this digital real estate (unlike having your own website where you “own” the site), but you do control the message you contribute.

For creating profiles that rank well in the SERPs, I recommend Google Profiles/Google Plus, LinkedIn and About.me.

As an aside, About.me, is one of my new favorites.  Not only is it a place where I can aggregate links to my other digital real estate, About.me also partners with a printing company called Moo. com.  With just a few clicks, you can get free business cards (you pay shipping) with your contact information and a printed QR Code so that smartphones with bar reader apps can read your code and take their owners directly to your About.me profile page with all that great information about you and links to your other digital assets.

And yes, new lawyer, you definitely need business cards as a job seeker.  Hand them out everywhere.

When setting up your profiles, make liberal use of your “keywords” discussed above.  Equally important, don’t add any information to your profiles that doesn’t support (or worse, contradicts) your concise (focused) marketing statement.

Let’s say, for example, that Jane Doe is a marathon runner.  Should she include that in her profiles?  If her target audience (the firms she wants to work for) can appreciate the discipline and dedication that go into marathon training, then she should add it.

On the other hand, if her target audience is more apt to interpret this activity as something that will prevent her from working 80 hours a week – and work weeks like that are prized by the firm – she better keep that activity to herself.  Analyze every piece of information you add to your profiles in a similar manner (i.e., with your target audience in mind).

Why do I recommend the particular profile sites above?  All of them rank well in the search engines and will help push your name to the top of the SERPs when somebody searches your name.  LinkedIn has the added importance of being the platform where most social recruiting takes place at this point in time.

If you want to put your digital reputation on steroids, I advise using the domain name you registered to create a social media resume.  For more information on building social media resumes for lawyers, see Digital Resumes For Lawyers.

What about all your hard work building and influencing your digital reputation after you land the job you’re seeking?  Your efforts now are a smart investment in your future.  Your keywords might change as you evolve your focus to demonstrating thought leadership and start marketing to potential clients, but the formula remains the same – laser focus on your name and mindfully chosen keywords for a well-defined audience.

Summarizing Influence

If you’ve followed my advice to this point, you’ve defined your digital reputation goals, you’ve assessed your “today” picture and you’ve started to influence your existing reputation.  It won’t take long before you can google your name and start to see the seeds of your chosen digital reputation taking root.  And because you’ve been so diligent in your use of keywords, you’ll see a consistent message presented.

As time goes by, you’ll want to add more and more digital content to the web aligned with your evolving marketing statement and audience.  You’ll start writing articles, blogging, micro-blogging, joining social conversations and otherwise developing your role as a thought leader in your niche.

This might sounds like a lot of work, but this is occurring over the course of your entire career.

Besides, it’s kind of fun to be master of your own message. 

Tomorrow, monitoring and maintaining the online reputation that you’ve worked so hard to establish.

To see Part 2 of this series, click this link

To see Part 1 of this series, click this link

In Part 1 of this series, we covered reasons why digital reputation is becoming increasingly important for attorney job seekers and I advocated the AIM Model for growing a targeted online reputation.  Today, we discuss “assessment” strategies under that model.

Assessing Your Digital Reputation

The first assessment step is defining your endgame.  Who is your audience and what do you want them to know?  In the case of junior attorneys looking for jobs, the audience is who you see yourself working for, whether that’s a small firm, large firm, in-house law department, non-profit entity, governmental agency or the like.

What do you want your audience to know?  You want them to know that you’re a new, ambitious, hardworking attorney with x, y and z special talents.  As you work to define your audience, what that audience is looking for (based on research, not wishful thinking), and what you offer that is attractive to your audience, you are developing your “marketing statement.”

The idea of “marketing” might be a foreign concept to junior lawyers, but trust me as a longtime attorney and legal recruiter when I tell you that marketing and mindful self-promotion are skills critical to your ultimate success as an attorney.  At some point, law schools will wake up and start teaching these concepts.

In the perfect world, you’ll be able to articulate your marketing message in one or two sentences, commonly referred to as an “elevator pitch.”  If you haven’t heard this expression before, it refers to having the length of time it takes to ride an elevator to introduce yourself to somebody important to you, including your value proposition (i.e., what makes you valuable to your audience).

Here is an example:  “My name is Jane Doe, and I’m a recent UCLA law school grad interested in using my background as a software engineer to join a small, busy IP practice.”

What does this say about Jane and her value proposition?  It says that she is disciplined enough to get into and obtain a law degree from a highly respected law school, and that she has special skills that IP attorneys desire in associates.

Her “key” words are “Jane Doe” (because Jane is marketing herself as the “product”), “UCLA law school grad” (descriptive of Jane and particularly important if she is addressing a fellow member of that community or another audience that values UCLA’s law school), “software engineer” (because this is a valuable skill set to IP practitioners) and “small, busy IP practice” (members of this audience are Jane’s primary targets for her message).

Write your own pitch down and circle words that are “key” to your pitch.  If what you articulate doesn’t seem quite right, don’t worry about it.  “Sit” with it for a few days and try again.  Try to keep your finished product very simple and, whatever you do, don’t let striving for perfection prevent you from moving forward.

The reason for articulating a marketing message and identifying key words or “keywords” will become clearer when we discuss the “Influence” aspect of the AIM Model, but this part of the process is critical for focused marketing.  The less focused your marketing, the more effort you have to put out to obtain a similar result.  “Focused and efficient” should be your marketing mantra.

The second step in assessing your digital reputation is to get a snapshot of your “today” footprint.  Do this by putting different variations of your name in quotation marks into one or two of the search engines.   At a minimum, use Google.  To be extra conservative, try Bing and Yahoo! as well.

What do you see?  Nothing?  That’s easy to address.  Unflattering photos?  That’s usually easy to fix.  Somebody with a similar name?  That might require a more aggressive strategy to distinguish yourself from that person, but it can be done without too much heavy lifting.  The goal is to influence and develop whatever you see into something that supports your focused marketing message.

Now that we’ve defined our endgame and reviewed our “today” picture of our online digital footprint, we turn out attention to the “Influence” portion of the AIM Model.  Tomorrow, we look at simple strategies to grow and influence your online reputation.

To see Part 3 of this series, click this link

To see Part 1 of this series, click this link

There is no question that Web 2.0, with its inexpensive tools and exponential reach has changed much of the way business is conducted these days.  Recruiting is no exception.

Today’s graduating law students may not even remember Web 1.0, but in early web days, web information was a one-way flow of information that website owners published, and then sat back and hoped visitors would find.

The next iteration of the web – “Web 2.0” – was much more interactive, and invited conversation and development of community.  Early sites like MySpace (known as a gathering place for entertainment-minded people) and Facebook (known as a gathering place for friends and family to have digital conversations and share photos) contributed to the social revolution.

Flash forward to today and “social media” is ubiquitous.  Recruiting is a natural context for encouraging inexpensive social conversation – hiring entities can showcase their companies and advertise their jobs.  Employee candidates can shop opportunities in great detail.

Lawyers and law firms, with their heavy emphasis on historic precedent and conservative natures, have been slower to adopt social recruiting to the same extent as their corporate cousins, but they are increasingly making their way to the social media party.

What does this mean for attorney job seekers?  It means that you must, must, must (did I mention “must?”) pay attention to your digital footprint and take affirmative steps to grow and manage that footprint.  Employers are either looking for you, or where they already know you, they are checking you out with a “social media background check” prior to extending an offer.

Taking Aim

Some of us already have a footprint that we’re either unaware of or ignoring.  Take the case of Justin P. (not his real name), a late 20-something patent agent that I presented to an AmLaw 30 firm.

I hadn’t yet started digitally vetting candidates at the time, but when I put his name and email address into my Google contacts list, Google diligently fetched a matching profile picture for me from the web.  I’d never seen the system do this, and I nearly fell out of my chair when the contact record auto-populated with a photo of a shirtless guy waiving a beer.  Amusing picture, but surely not one that my stuffy AmLaw 30 client was going to like.

When I mentioned the photo, Justin immediately knew the one and sheepishly told me he’d “forgotten” of its existence.  That photo would likely have surfaced during a later social media back-ground check.

Jobs are hard enough to come by these days with-out putting yourself through the whole process on a particular job, and then finding yourself rejected because a past indiscretion surfaces on the web.

What if you know for a fact that you spent the first 25 years of your life in the library and there can’t possibly be a digital skeleton in your closet?  Do you need to pay attention to the advice in this article?  Let’s just say this – if the job comes down to two equal candidates, and one has demonstrated marketing savvy by building a positive digital footprint, the job goes to the marketer.

Why?  At the end of the day, law is still a business and lawyers are starting to recognize the importance of web marketing savvy in client acquisition and retention.  If two candidates are equal or “equal-ish,” online marketing savvy and experience are premium tools for you to bring to the party.

Is digital reputation building expensive or time consuming?  It is definitely not expensive and it’s scaleable, meaning that you can start small and grow your reputation over time by adding more tools and strategies.  Junior attorneys already have written resumes and that’s half the battle in starting the process.

Where to start with building your digital reputation?  I advocate the “AIM Model” for digital reputations – Assess, Influence & Monitor.  Tomorrow, we dive into Assessment strategies.

Google+ is An Important Piece of Your Online Presence

by Stephanie Sammons

You may have heard some recent buzz about Google+  as it has been rolled out in beta over the last several weeks, I’ve been spending a bit of time there in addition to reading many articles about Google’s version of a social network. Its Google’s way of thinking about how people find and share content.

I do think Google+ is going to potentially redefine the way we discover, share, and consume information online. It’s going to make the process much more intelligent based on our social graph, which is who we are connected to and how we are connected to them.

Now you don’t need to abandon any of your existing social media efforts on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and You Tube. Networks will come and go over time, but it’s important to claim your stake in the ones that can help you be found by your target markets, connect with your target markets, and enhance your online reputation.  In addition, your community is portable to an extent…you can bring your connections with you or easily cross-promote your social profiles. What makes Google+ matter at this point is that it will help your online reputation and here’s why:

Google+ matters because Google dominates online search. Online search should be important to you because if you don’t have any kind of a web or social media presence, you don’t have credibility. When someone searches your name to learn more about you, you’re going to need to have your website, blog (content hub), and complete social media profiles to create positive gateways to you and your business. You should not leave a Google+ profile off of this list. It’s a freebie for steering your online reputation.

Google has been quietly incorporating “social search” for awhile now, where the results you get vary from the results anyone else may get because those search results are based on who you’re connected to, what those individuals are sharing, and where you’re located from a geographical perspective. That makes search much for relevant than it once was for a financial professional who is focused on building contacts in a local community. You really do have the opportunity through blogging and social media to establish yourself an an authority within your target markets.

Google+ is an extremely intelligent extension of Google search because it makes your search experience more social. Why would you, or your clients for that matter, need to go beyond what a few trusted friends, business connections, or thought leaders are sharing or recommending every time they search on a topic? Google+ makes it easy to get relevant answers and information from the people you are connected to, and the people you follow. In addition, as you continue to build your own trusted network of connections and followers, you’re able to have significant influence through the content you create and the insights that you share with that community.

The recent introduction of the Google “+1″ button allows anyone to give a positive vote for your content and allows for you to vote for anyone else’s content to essentially curate the best resources for your community. Just as the Facebook “Like” button can be found across the web, so goes the Google “+1″ button. The Google “+1″ button is the new currency for measuring the value of content. Now with Google+ and the Google “+1″ button together, Google has an interesting way to display your collection of content through a tab on your Google+ profile. If you focus your votes on high quality content that is relevant and valuable to your target markets, they can see what you’ve found right on your profile.

How Google+ Differs from Twitter and Facebook

Google+ is more expansive than Twitter. You’re not limited to 140 characters, so automatically, your social stream becomes a lot more colorful than scrolling through tweet streams. Like Twitter, Google+ allows you to follow anyone by dropping them into a “Circle“, and they don’t have to follow you back by reciprocating.  Google+ is different from Facebook because it’s just down right more intuitive to control what you share with whom, and what is public or private. Like Facebook, you can share text, links, images, and videos in Google+.

Google+ has 3 primary benefits:

1)  You can connect and share with others on your terms, publicly or privately

2)  You can share rich media (links, images, videos)

3)  You own your content and have full control over your privacy

A few of the killer Google+ features

1)  Circles

A simple way to categorize your connections by putting them into circles that you can custom label. Circles give you complete control over who you share with and who you want to hear from. You can actually filter your social stream based upon the Circle(s) you choose to view. For example, let’s say you create a Circle entitled “My Professional Network”. If you choose to view this Circle only in your stream, Google+ will show you posts that have been shared by the people in this Circle. Additionally, you can choose to only share items with certain Circles that you’ve created.

2)  Hangouts

Very simply, Hangouts are video chats with up to 10 people that cover any topic and can run at any time. I expect this feature to grow in popularity over time, similar to the way we use Skype today.

3)  Sparks

Choose and follow topics of interest leveraging the power of Google search. Track keywords and alerts all in a single, comprehensive stream from your Google+ Profile.

Why you need to build a Google+ Profile Now

If you want to be found by ideal clients and prospects, Google is the number one place to begin building your presence and shaping your reputation. In fact, read more…

The next closest engines were MSN with just under 8% of the market and Ask.com with about 3-1/2%.

According to Hitwise, there are 48 other search engines out there, but their share of the market combined is less than 2%.

Real estate searches were not specifically referenced in the press release, but other major categories, including travel, entertainment and business/finance saw significant gains in their traffic from search engines and, specifically, from Google.

What does this mean for you and your advertising strategy?  Google is the happening place for search engine advertising.  Dominating marketshare will likely allow Google to be more expensive for sponsored advertising, but you’ll get more exposure.  Exposure is good for long term branding purposes.  If you don’t need thousands of website visitors to support your business, try comparing click prices, but for our money around here, we focus on Google.

To your unlimited online marketing success!