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[Please Welcome Guest Blogger,
Andy Hines, author of ConsumerShift]


As a futurist, I’ve interacted with several library groups over the last few years. No surprise there, as libraries are living through nothing short of a seismic shift in the industry. Many of the groups are well aware of digitization and Google and related trends that are reshaping what libraries are and what librarians do. A common and laudable strategic response is explore for ways to provide more value-added services, that is, to differentiate their offerings and services from, if you will, people thinking that all they need is Google and the like to meet their information needs.

I do not pretend to have the magic formula that will address this challenge. One area that I think I’ve been able to help is in providing an understanding how client (or consumer or customer or end user, etc.) preferences are changing.

Many of my clients across industry have had some sort of client segmentation that they refer to when devising new offerings or thinking about their strategy in general. But they are static snapshots of the present (or more often, of the recent past). But what about the future segmentation? Can we get some insight into what clients of the future might be different?

It’s with these questions in mind that I wrote ConsumerShift:How Changing Values Are Reshaping the Consumer Landscape. It brings together my research and work over the last dozen or so years in helping clients understand the patterns in how client preferences are shifting. I found that values–defined as “an individual view about what is most important in life that in turn guides decision-making and behavior”– are the single best source of insight for understanding this shift. I analyzed more than twenty systems of measuring values (and that’s not all of them) and identified the common the themes. The real “home run” in terms of supporting data is the World Values Survey run out of the U of Michigan over the last 40 years on a global basis. Spiral Dynamics is another great system.

So what’s shifting? The text box summarizes four types of values. The newly emerging types on the scene are Postmodern (about 25% of the US population now) and Integral (perhaps 2%). Most of the clients I’ve worked with especially in long-established industries, e.g., vehicles, food, and yes, libraries, are used to and quite comfortable dealing with clients with traditional and modern values, and have designed strategies and offerings suited to them.  But many are at sea when confronted with the much different preferences of the Postmoderns and Integrals.

To cut to the chase, I’ll suggest four relevant changes to law librarians from Postmoderns/Integrals:

  • Distrust of institutional authority: (yikes, how can that be in our profession?) they put their trust in their personal networks — witness the explosion in social media and networking
  • Desire for co-creation and active participation: they are not passive consumers, particularly for offerings that are important to them; they want a say in how offerings are designed, and in some cases will actively participate – see the Open Source movement as an example
  • Desire for appropriate technology: they are turned off by technology for technology’s sake; they don’t reject technology, but see technology as a means to an end; they are less concerned about having the latest and greatest, but more concerned with what gets “results”
  • Desire to “give back” to the local community, the experience, and the personal touch: While outsourcing has great economic appeal in many cases, the postmodern/integrals recognize the tradeoffs and are more willing to consider local and personal options that contribute to overall community benefit

I suspect your initial reaction might be “huh?” Or “not in my firm!” Or “we’re bottom-line here.” These shifts may indeed be at odds with your mainstream culture. But take a deeper look, what are the innovators in your firm like? How about the newer hires? And are their some “closet” Postmoderns and Integrals that keep a low profile, because the organizational culture is not quite ready for this? I suspect yes. And I also suggest, as you think about your long-term future in this industry, to be aligning yourself with emerging client preferences (of course, by no means overlooking the mainstream). The trends suggest they will eventually be the mainstream.

Andy Hines, www.andyhinesight.com

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[Guest Blog from Cindy Adams]

As research has evolved in recent years, we all have seen decreased foot traffic within our libraries. Attorneys rarely need print materials and are able to complete most tasks on their desktops. If no one comes to visit the library, is the facility, and its staff, still relevant?

In addition to the evolution from a physical presence to an online presence, our Atlanta office faced a special challenge. When the building was being designed more than 20 years ago, I begged management to put the library on a floor with attorneys. Sadly, I was overruled. So, for 17 years our Research Team has been at least three floors and two elevator rides away from our customers.

As research became an activity conducted by attorneys in their offices, we saw less and less of other people. As time went on our visitors became fewer and fewer, and requests came to us more frequently by phone, and now, via email. Over the years we were cut off, quite literally, from our customers.

Even though we were out of sight, the number of requests was not decreasing. As email emerged as the standard of communication, our work continued to grow. Using a unified Research Team approach, every research request is shared with every Team member. Research Team members, who are located in three of our 10 offices, respond to requests from people they may never meet. The library is no longer a physical location, but rather a virtual service. Our face-time with our customers was becoming a thing of the past, and face-time can be critical to building and maintaining relationships. Our research load proved that we weren’t out of our customer’s minds yet, but I knew we needed to do something to become more engaged with other people in our Atlanta office.

I didn’t want my team to be toiling in obscurity – faceless voices at the other end of a phone line—or signatures at the end of an email. How could we become more involved in daily interactions with other people at the firm? At conferences, I heard the mantra over and over – Get up from your desk and walk around. But who has the time? How could we leave our phones and computers?

Then, one day last summer, the light bulb came on! Our librarians no longer needed to be located with the print materials, which have become the least relevant part of our research arsenal. We were on the computer most of the day, rarely visiting the stacks. Why did I persist with the notion that we need to be near the books? The librarians needed to be with the attorneys, so that’s where I proceeded to send them.

First, I needed to sell the idea with all stakeholders. To get the ball rolling I proposed the idea with the librarians themselves. Initially there were reservations, but as we discussed ways to put the plan into practice, the affected team members saw how this could improve our relationships with attorneys. Each librarian is partnered with a practice group. They are the experts in a topical area, to whom other members of our Research Team turn for assistance. Each librarian would be moved to the floor with the attorney teams for which they were the expert researchers. For example, our corporate specialist would be moved to the floor with the corporate attorneys – a few steps from her best customers.

After the team began to see the possibilities of such a move, I approached my supervisor who enthusiastically approved it. I then crowd-sourced the idea with attorneys from the affected practice groups, who were excited to have a librarian accessible. Buy-in from firm management was obtained. Indeed, the most difficult challenge was finding suitable offices for the librarians. To date, one librarian has yet to move to her practice group’s floor as there is no office available.

The moves took place over several days. We sent announcements to practice group members advising them of their specialist’s new location, and sent a general email to everyone in our Atlanta office. Our three librarians were welcomed to their new floors by attorneys and staff.

My office also remains on the floor with the print collection, along with our technical services assistant. We’re here to offer assistance to persons wanting to use the books. That said, my floor has become as quiet as a graveyard.

So what was the outcome? This challenge became a huge opportunity. Our Atlanta team members are now actively engaged with attorneys, paralegals, marketing personnel and secretaries on a daily basis. They hear what’s going on while visiting the coffee machine or copier. Attorneys stop by their offices, just to visit. By being physically present, we hear what’s going on and have become more proactive in providing research assistance. We’ve seen a marked increase in live requests from attorneys. Many attorneys – including partners – have told me how much they appreciate having a research expert nearby. We are no longer on a floor far, far away. Every day our librarians are engaged with our customers. What a change!

The librarians speak with each other every day, even though we may not see each other. We hold monthly meetings where we share firm news and research challenges. In essence, our Atlanta team communicates in the same way we work with librarians in our other offices. We are truly a virtual team.

If you’ve seen foot traffic and visits to your library decrease over time, you may want to consider this nontraditional approach. Out of sight, out of mind? Not us!

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There has been talk for the last few years about the unsustainability of the Graduate School program in the United States. For many of us, we have heard the segment that talks specifically about law schools, and have watched as many of the schools are caught in… shall we say, stretching the truth about hiring rates and salaries after graduation. Unfortunately, these issues are not limited to law schools, they are affecting practically every graduate level program in the United States. The cost of obtaining a graduate level degree is not necessarily being off-set by the employment opportunities out there that require these degrees. However, students still persue them; graduate colleges still accept them and increase tuition and fees each year, and; Federal Student Loans are guaranteed by the US government insuring that schools get paid, banks get paid, and students get left with massive amounts of debt.

Everyone Else is to Blame


Last week, I ran across a few things that reminded me that this problem isn’t going away anytime soon. First of all, I had lunch with my co-blogger, Toby, who reminded me that no one involved in this situation thinks that they are the problem. He told a story of how years ago he sat in a room with people representing law schools, bar associations, law firms, and lawyers, and how it became a “everyone is to blame but me” session. He mentioned that everyone knew the system was flawed, but that the flaw lay in someone else’s area of responsibility.

The second thing I saw was a tweet from Jim Milles from this week’s Association of American Law Schools’ annual meeting:

Jim Moliterno on Washington & Lee’s 3L curriculum reform. This is a great time for reformers because there’s demand to do better. #aals12

I responded to Jim and asked him how in the heck can there be reformers in an environment when no one thinks they are the problem?? His response was that he thought it “was a little bit of encouragement from Dean Moliterno” on the subject. So, does that mean this is not a call to action, but more of a wish that someone would step up and be the reformer that law schools need? Best of luck with that.

So once again, law schools know there’s a problem, yet aren’t ready to step up to the plate to fix it.

Industry Responsibilities


What about the Bar Association?? Well, apparently they aren’t to blame either, according to the ABA President, William Robinson. In a Reuters interview, Robinson placed the bubble blame squarely on the shoulders of the students who go to law school:

It’s inconceivable to me that someone with a college education, or a graduate-level education, would not know before deciding to go to law school that the economy has declined over the last several years and that the job market out there is not as opportune as it might have been five, six, seven, eight years ago…

Robinson’s suggestion to the problem is if a student does decide they are willing to take the risk of entering a down-market job industry like legal, at least do it through a cheaper school. Robinson then picked up the ball and squarely punted it away from the ABA by saying that the ABA was completely powerless in holding down the cost of a law degree.

So the ABA isn’t to blame, it must be the Schools or Students fault.

Students Responsbilities


That brings me to an article I saw regarding students and the burden they have with debt after grad school. On the Life Inc. portion of the Today Show’s website, there was an interview of two law librarians titled “Loving the job, but hating the student loan debt.” At first blush, I have to admit that I wasn’t very sympathetic to a couple that took on more than $150,000 in student loans, and was having a hard time meeting those obligations even though their combined income was more than $100,000 a year.  While reading this, it made me wonder if William Robinson’s assessment that students are idiots for jumping into grad schools, and taking on massive amounts of debt for a potentially moderate paying profession is correct.

Is it wise to go to a grad school that charges in the neighborhood of $40K a year in tuition, as this librarian did by getting a degree at Drexel instead of a state school?? If the median wage of a law librarian is $54,500, does it make sense to go to a program that will cost you somewhere between $80K and $100K to finish? Jennifer Wertkin nailed the situation perfectly when she tweeted a response to this story and said “Law librarians overeducated & underpaid.” Although it is required for most law librarian jobs to have an advanced degree like a JD or an MLS, can that be sustained in an economy that doesn’t produce the pay to support the debt needed to enter the workforce?

Pressure to Take the Risk 
In a way, the whole situation reminds me of the recent housing bubble. Think of the similarities of the home ownership pressures and the pressures that the higher your education level is, the more successful you will be. We are told that college graduates are more likely to make tens of thousands of dollars more than their high-school counterparts. Grad school graduates make more than undergraduates. It reminds me of the argument we heard about home ownership equaling success (think of those home owners vs. renters stats for crime, income, stability, etc.) So, there is pressure on the students to take on more education than they probably need. Add to that, the easiness of credit for college tuition (conveniently backed by the Federal Government in most cases), increased tuition costs, and add in a sudden economic downturn, and you got yourself a bubble ready to burst.

Free-Market and the Big “POP!”


Earlier this year, I heard futurist Andy Hines make a comment at the AALL Future’s Summit, that Higher Education in the United States is in for an implosion in the next ten years. I think he may be right on that topic, and I think I might know what will cause the implosion. Of course, this is all speculation on my part, so I could be wrong, but bare with me on this. Just think about what would happen if the Federal Government decided to adopt some austerity programs, and one of those programs was to stop guaranteeing student load debt? Suddenly, the free market would kick in and students would have to practically prove that they have employment lined up in order to get a student loan for grad school. No loan guarantees would essentially sink most grad programs. It will be at that time that you will hear the giant “POP” in this bubble.

This is the last in a three part series on the evolution of marketing. Parts 1 and 2 looked at fundamental changes in the marketing landscape, Part 3 will look at how marketing is responding to these new challenges.
The Reaction
As with most new technologies, there have been mad rushes to adopt certain channels as the ‘go to’ options for getting customer attention. These rushes have also been followed by the traditional backlash, with businesses not realizing hoped-for returns on their marketing efforts for a given forum. With all this chaos and constantly changing environment, it is challenging for businesses to focus and direct their marketing in the right channels with the right kinds of messages.
In some respects, it is back-to-basics for marketing professionals as they need to re-examine their customers’ wants, needs and habits. What is different are the dimensions of those factors. Now different customers chose different channels for their content. And they even chose different channels for different types of content. For example, someone may read a hard-copy morning newspaper, but then immediately switch to RSS feeds for their industry updates. So a business not only needs to understand the type of customer they want to reach, but also the probable methods for how these customers prefer to consume content related to their products and services.
What Does This Mean?
Marketers need to look at the entire universe of channels and plug into the high value ones with the appropriate messages. And as they do this they need to engage with their customers in a positive dialog. The return on that effort will be valuable, direct customer input along with new messages actually designed by the customers and passed on to their own, expanding networks.
In defense of the legal market, there are some providers proactively approaching the Marketing 2.0 challenge. Even some large firms are actively engaged with Twitter. However, as challenging as marketing has become for the entire market, the late arrival and slow-to-adopt-change nature of the legal profession, means the challenge is rapidly increasing.
Like most aspects of change presented by the New Normal, the legal profession is in great need of ground-up reassessment of its marketing practices. Starting on this now (or yesterday) would be a good idea.
This concludes the three-part series on Marketing 2.0. We explored the shift in marketing power from provider to customer and the qualitative change from one-directional messaging to a chaotic conversation. With change becoming a constant, we can expect further dynamic shifts in the role and purpose of marketing.

Larry Hawes reminded me yesterday of a web content summary tool I reviewed a while back. Unfortunately, it turns out that the product no longer exists. So, I got to looking for other options that were out there and came across a few that I tested using Zena Applebaum’s Competitive Intelligence and Know Your Client post from yesterday. I reviewed five products, but there are many more out there for you to find (or comment about here, if you know of some good summarizing tools.)

Here are the products and the results:

Summly

Summly only works on iOS platform (iPhone and iPads). You can go directly from the App itself, but I found the plug-in for the iOS Safari browser to be a better way of getting a summary of the web content on the smaller screen of my iPhone. Here is the results for Zena’s article:

Know Your Client in 2012 – Why You Need CI, Now!

– So in 2012, answer the cry for CI and KYC!
– If clients want smart in-the-know lawyers, then I cannot think of a better way for lawyers to nurture their client relationships, differentiate themselves in a crowded competitive landscape, and maintain their roles as trusted business advisors, than through engaging in and supporting a robust CI program.
– Legal services have evolved to a point where it is assumed that if you are a qualified lawyer, you and your firm can provide any necessary legal work.

Here’s what it looks like in the app:

GistWeb

GistWeb is an online resource that allows you to click on a bookmark and it will take the webpage you are currently viewing and create a summary of the content.

3 Geeks and a Law Blog: Know Your Client in 2012 — Why You Need CI, Now!

63% Reduction Achieved (245 words)

In the last several years, Know Your Customer or Know Your Client (KYC) legislation has come to the forefront. Professional service firms everywhere write about KYC rules, and law firms themselves are creating new processes and procedures for dealing with the KYC rules.

From the first day of starting to work in the legal industry, whether as an articling student, a legal assistant, a law librarian or a marketer, you are taught that in this business (and it is a business as much as it is a service) it is all about client relationships and the service provided to those clients. Legal services have evolved to a point where it is assumed that if you are a qualified lawyer, you and your firm can provide any necessary legal work.
If clients want smart in-the-know lawyers, then I cannot think of a better way for lawyers to nurture their client relationships, differentiate themselves in a crowded competitive landscape, and maintain their roles as trusted business advisors, than through engaging in and supporting a robust CI program. Contrary to popular belief, CI is not about competitors or who did what deals, CI is about the competitive landscape for both firms and clients.
So in 2012, answer the cry for CI and KYC!
No better solution than meeting your clients personally to make sure that the detail you want to know is correct.

GreatSummary


GreatSummary is a website that allows you to plug in large amounts of text into a textbox or you can put the URL of a website and it will summarize the content found on the website. I found that copying and pasting the content of Zena’s article worked better, as it didn’t pick up all the extra content found on our blog that was unrelated to the article:

GREATSUMMARY

Highlights

Top 10 highlights automatically generated by GreatSummary

Source: User Text
  • Knowing your client, their market, their industry, their issues and their pending challenges from both a legal and business perspective is CI. Knowing your client is about knowing who are the C-suite and in-house counsel team. (0)
  • Professional service firms everywhere write about KYC rules, and law firms themselves are creating new processes and procedures for dealing with the KYC rules. (0)
  • From the first day of starting to work in the legal industry, whether as an articling student, a legal assistant, a law librarian or a marketer, you are taught that in this business (and it is a business as much as it is a service) it is all about client relationships and the service provided to those clients. (0)
  • Every time I see an email circulate in our firm about KYC training for associates or new KYC procedures, it makes me think — there is more knowing your client than finances and ethics. (0)
  • More importantly, the difference between research and CI, is that CI will help keep the answers consistently and routinely up-to-date, so when a client calls, the service provided is second to none. (0)
  • Clients should not be left waiting in the reception area; boardrooms should be comfortable and help clients feel at ease; legal opinions should be expertly drafted without any errors; client entertainment should be of the highest caliber. (0)
  • Knowing the client includes knowing where your firm’s relationships with the client exist, if at all. (0)
  • Legal services have evolved to a point where it is assumed that if you are a qualified lawyer, you and your firm can provide any necessary legal work. (0)
  • Contrary to popular belief, CI is not about competitors or who did what deals, CI is about the competitive landscape for both firms and clients. (0)
  • If clients want smart in-the-know lawyers, then I cannot think of a better way for lawyers to nurture their client relationships, differentiate themselves in a crowded competitive landscape, and maintain their roles as trusted business advisors, than through engaging in and supporting a robust CI program. (0)

Free Summarizer

Like the GreatSummary site above, Free Summarizer also allows you to paste in large amounts of text into their webpage and create a summary. You can pick the number of summarized sentences for it to return, and it will display the results on the results page, plus you can have the results emailed to your as well.

Here is the summary:

Knowing your client, their market, their industry, their issues and their pending challenges from both a legal and business perspective is CI.

From the first day of starting to work in the legal industry, whether as an articling student, a legal assistant, a law librarian or a marketer, you are taught that in this business (and it is a business as much as it is a service) it is all about client relationships and the service provided to those clients.

Clients should not be left waiting in the reception area; boardrooms should be comfortable and help clients feel at ease; legal opinions should be expertly drafted without any errors; client entertainment should be of the highest caliber.

Knowing the client includes knowing where your firm’s relationships with the client exist, if at all.

If clients want smart in-the-know lawyers, then I cannot think of a better way for lawyers to nurture their client relationships, differentiate themselves in a crowded competitive landscape, and maintain their roles as trusted business advisors, than through engaging in and supporting a robust CI program.

TopicMarks

I’ve used TopicMarks in the past and have been very impressed with the integration it can have with Google Docs, Google Reader, and other resources. Unfortunately, it was not working at the time I wanted to test it, but I did want to include it in this list so that you can go to it in the future (hopefully this is just a “Saturday Morning Maintenance” issue. TopicMarks is a cloud-based service that will store your information and add to it automatically through your feeds or Evernote.

In the last several years, Know Your Customer or Know Your Client (KYC) legislation has come to the forefront. Professional service firms everywhere write about KYC rules, and law firms themselves are creating new processes and procedures for dealing with the KYC rules. Every time I see an email circulate in our firm about KYC training for associates or new KYC procedures, it makes me think – there is more knowing your client than finances and ethics. For Example, what about client current awareness, business issues, pending legislation, outside counsel of record, board of directors and the C-Suite. To me, KYC is a cry for competitive intelligence (CI) help!

From the first day of starting to work in the legal industry, whether as an articling student, a legal assistant, a law librarian or a marketer, you are taught that in this business (and it is a business as much as it is a service) it is all about client relationships and the service provided to those clients. Legal services have evolved to a point where it is assumed that if you are a qualified lawyer, you and your firm can provide any necessary legal work. And many firms focus their marketing and branding efforts around the client experience. Clients should not be left waiting in the reception area; boardrooms should be comfortable and help clients feel at ease; legal opinions should be expertly drafted without any errors; client entertainment should be of the highest caliber. But the true differentiator between firms is in the service and the commitment to the client relationship. It is not the lavish entertainment, or even the right coffee brand in the boardrooms that makes the difference. Expertly crafted legal opinions and practical defensive contracts will certainly help, but buyers of legal service everywhere will tell you that what they really want from a law firm is a group of lawyers who are responsive and smart. Clients want lawyers who meet their needs by delivering timely targeted advice. In other words, clients want lawyers who know them, understand their business needs and their industry issues.

If clients want smart in-the-know lawyers, then I cannot think of a better way for lawyers to nurture their client relationships, differentiate themselves in a crowded competitive landscape, and maintain their roles as trusted business advisors, than through engaging in and supporting a robust CI program. Contrary to popular belief, CI is not about competitors or who did what deals, CI is about the competitive landscape for both firms and clients. Knowing your client, their market, their industry, their issues and their pending challenges from both a legal and business perspective is CI. Knowing your client is about knowing who are the C-suite and in-house counsel team. Knowing the client includes knowing where your firm’s relationships with the client exist, if at all. Knowing the clients means knowing what pending legislative changes will impact a client’s business – you can offer legal and business advice to mitigate any risk or vulnerabilities. These are all the questions that a quality CI program can help you answer at a moment in time. More importantly, the difference between research and CI, is that CI will help keep the answers consistently and routinely up-to-date, so when a client calls, the service provided is second to none. The goal of a robust CI program is to keep firm lawyers current about their client’s business – it would be as if the lawyer is embedded in the client’s office, market and industry.

So in 2012, answer the cry for CI and KYC!

The second post in this series on the evolution of marketing, explores the shift from one directional marketing (provider-to-customer) to interactive, multi-directional marketing. In the first post we discussed how things shifted from a scarcity of the number of available marketing channels to the scarcity of customer time and attention. This interactive aspect has a bigger impact on marketing and therefore gets a bit more attention here. Again, editorial on how this change applies in the legal market is added in italics.
The Next Layer
The persuasion aspect in the original marketing method directed content in one direction. Business crafted a marketing message and wrapped that up in various forms of advertising to push it in front of customers. Customers only served in a receive mode. To stay fresh, these messages became more dynamic and creative and actually drifted away from product descriptions to emotive appeals. Knowing your car had power breaks was useful, but imagining you powering through the curves on the Pacific Coast Highway was compelling.
With the rise of the Internet not only did the number of channels spike, but the ability for the customer to participate actively blossomed. This was Web 2.0. Here we saw the rise of Blogs and Wikis, followed by social media platforms such as MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. Beyond the scarcity dynamic, this Web 2.0 environment presented a qualitative change in the way customers consumed information about products and services. Instead of passively accepting the information presented by the provider, they could participate in the development of the marketing message.
What emerged was a conversation between business and customer. Although this continues to present a challenge to business, it also presents an incredible opportunity. Businesses can find out directly and almost immediately how customers react to a new offering, price and brand. And any deficiencies will be quickly identified with possible solutions coming right from the customer.
Lawyers are trained in talking at people not talking with them. They present to courts and juries and give advice and counsel to clients on deals and regulations. As well the ethics rules generally frown on marketing interactions as that may create attorney-client relationships. Therefore ‘interactive’ does not come naturally to them.
This new interactive environment also drove a shift from persuasion to value in the style of messages being presented by business. In addition to appealing to their emotions, customers now need to find some direct value in a message, even if it is just entertainment. In other words, to get customers’ attention, business needs to motivate them via their self-interest to consume marketing content.
Successfully meeting this new-style value challenge presents a qualitative increase in the value of marketing. Valuable content, combined with an interactive, participatory audience, leads to customers extending a message much deeper into a market. This multiplier effect means one customer finding value in content will pass it along to their own network with no additional cost to the business. Multiply this effect out and well-crafted messages can reach an audience of millions at a very low cost.
Where business has stumbled in this arena is attempting to deliver old-style, one-direction messages in this interactive environment. Businesses push out a message and then either don’t engage with the customers or attempt to defend their message when it is critiqued. As might be expected, customers have not reacted well to these attempts. Business continues to struggle with this challenge, as it is a bit of a moving target.
Lawyers are stumbling – to say the least. Many legal blogs have comments turned off out of fear someone might ask a question. This eliminates the interactive component. Blog posts are are the typical newsletter style of content and tweets are mostly ads. This misses the mark on providing value over ad copy and their messages die before becoming part of any conversation.
I predict this interactive aspect of marketing will remain a substantial obstacle for lawyers.
In Part 3 of this series, we will explore how the market is reacting to these fundamental changes and what it all means for marketing going forward.

Later this month I will be co-presenting with Jordan Furlong at the ACLEA Mid-Year Meeting in New Orleans. Our topic is using social media as part of your web presence and your overall marketing strategy. This prompted me to write a paper (for the handouts) on Marketing 2.0. I wanted to put a stake in the ground on how marketing is evolving in general and use that as a foundation for us to explore the value of various social media options in the presentation. I am breaking the article up in to three pieces for the blog and adding in some editorial (in italics) about how each article segment impacts or applies to the legal market.
Marketing Origins
Marketing, as we know it now, was born in the mid 20th century. The growth of radio and TV provided the means and impetus to get the attention of customers and persuade them to purchase products and services. In those days the limiting factors were the scarcity of marketing channels. We had 3 commercial TV stations and a limited number of radio stations. There were daily, weekly and monthly papers and magazines as well. But the main point here is that the owners of the distribution channels were in a position to determine who had access to their growing list of listeners, readers and viewers.
The scarcity of marketing channels has been even more pronounced for lawyers due to their late arrival to the marketing world (Bates in 1977) and the lack of knowledge on where their customers look for product information. This scarcity situation lead to lawyer referral service channels via bar associations and ultimately, the ubiquitous local TV ads for personal injury lawyers. Even today lawyers use of traditional marketing channels is quite limited. Their advertising dollars tend to be focus on client trade publications and other narrow channel options.
Now
Over the past 10 or so years, this scarcity situation was changed dramatically. Now what is scarce is customers’ time and attention. The number of potential channels for delivering content to the market is now effectively infinite. So as a marketer, instead of competing for space in the channels, you are competing for position in the various channels along with individual customer’s attention.
The challenge of being late to the game is compounded in the web 2.0 space. As lawyers find the need to actually compete for position on the web, their lack of market knowledge about their customers is a tremendous handicap. Additionally their style and impulse is one-direction marketing. They are used to being the expert who others come to. The primary marketing experience for lawyers is letting customers know they are experts and thus someone they should hire. In an environment where the ability to even spot your customer is a basic skill, the ability to actually get one’s attention in the mass chaos of web content is well beyond lawyers’ current skill-set.
However the web is full of opportunities and resources for lawyers to easily access. So there is hope for playing catch up.
In Part Two of the series, we will look at the interactive nature of web 2.0 marketing options and explore the impact of customers participating in the marketing dialog.

Milano, DiMucci and Mastroangelo

Fred Milano passed away on Sunday at the age of 72, just three weeks after being diagnosed with lung cancer. Milano is best known for his place in Rock and Roll history as being in the doo-wop band, Dion and the Belmonts. However, Milano had a second career later in life as a Legal Coordinator at the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City.

According to Milano’s obituary, he taught a legal research class and assisted inmates with researching their cases. Karen Powell, director of the law libraries said that Milano had lots of energy and you knew when he was in the building “because we’d hear him singing and skipping up the stairs.” Milano was still performing with the Belmonts just weeks ago at casinos and other venues.

Here’s Milano, along with Dion DiMucci and Carlo Mastrangelo on American Bandstand singing A Teenager In Love.

There are a couple of projects out there that I wanted to point to everyone. First of all there is the Citizen Archivist Dashboard created by the Archivist of the United States (AOTUS), David Ferriero. Second, there is the campaign/petition by Carl Malamud to start a nation effort to digitize all public government information. Both are noble projects and are worth a look, and your support.

Citizen Archivist Dashboard

The idea is simple — use the idea of crowdsourcing to improve the National Archives and use the efforts of “the crowd” to:

Carl Malamud of Public Resources.Org and John Podesta of Center for American Progress are petitioning the Federal Government to start a Federal Scanning Commission, and have but a couple of weeks to gather 25,000 signatures. In their letter to President Obama, Malamud and Podesta list six questions that they would like a Federal Scanning Commission to answer:
  1. What are the holdings of our national institutions? How many images, documents, videos, and other objects are there?
  2. How long would it take to digitize these materials?
  3. How much would it cost given current technology? Is there directed research or are there economies of scale that would bring those costs down?
  4. What is the strategy for digital preservation of these materials? How will we avoid digital obsolescence?
  5. What is the strategy for identifying restrictions on use of the material? How does one identify and safeguard materials that have copyright restrictions, contain personally identifiable information, or contain classified materials?
  6. What are the economic and non-economic benefits of such an effort?
    • What are the cost savings to government?
    • What are the economic benefits? Would this effort enable industries that build on top of scientific and technical information, spur innovation in the legal marketplace, or enable our creative industries to create more effectively?
    • What are the non-economic benefits? Will such an effort lead to better STEM and other educational efforts? Will it promote a more informed citizenry and better access to justice?
Go take a look at both of these efforts, and if they address a need you think needs to be address, then give your support to them.