In the August 10th edition of Forbes Magazine, writer David Carr interviews Clara Shih, formerly of SalesForce.com, on her book, The Facebook Era. In it Shih says that Facebook (and by extension most social media applications) has changed (or should have changed) the way companies (particularly small business, i.e., law firms) promote their products and services in order to leverage the word-of-mouth, referral marketing landscape:
“There are two ways in which I think it [Facebook] fundamentally transforms sales and marketing. One way is with hypertargeting,–the ability to identify these segments and really tailor marketing for customers and prospects.
The second way I think it’s very different is that these services are, by their very nature, social. So when you do something or talk about something, it gets broadcast out to your friend network. There’s a huge word of mouth and referral opportunity there for businesses of all sizes. And this also means the value of cultivating loyalty from your customer has never been higher.” (emphasis mine)
In our Radius of Influence Whitepaper on relationship marketing for law firms, we talk extensively about the opportunities available to innovative lawyers who segment their marketing as Shih suggests. In fact, “segmentation” is one of the “Three Big Ideas” we associate with successful word-of-mouth and referral marketing. Are you segmenting?
In a separate interview in the New York Times, Shih is critical of companies that attempt to apply offline advertising techniques to inherently social new media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, et al. This is a problem we see all too often in personal injury law marketing.
“I think a lot of the established players, though, they’re still trying to bring old world concepts and paradigms to the new world, and it just doesn’t work…. The new paradigm is … controlled by the user, … where information flows through social filters and gets socially distributed.” (emphasis mine)
This is Seth Godin’s meatball sundae concept. One example of this phenomenon? Cramming tired lawyer TV ads onto YouTube and firm web sites followed by Tweets of “come see my newest TV ad on how I’ll get you justice!” This type of message is simply filtered out by living, breathing, human beings via their “social filters.” There is little of value for them to pass along to their network of friends (and your potential clients). Since the beginning of the web, content has been king, and it still is. Just make sure you’re not creating content for the sake of creating content. Make it interesting. Make sure it is something people want to read, not just something you want to say. Otherwise, you waste your time and don’t make it through the filter.
On whether social networking is a “fad”:
“The first thing I would say is, some people thought the Internet was a fad. Frankly, a lot of the same criticisms that are said now of social networking were said about the Internet. How do you measure it? What’s the ROI? Does this make sense for my business? But it’s not true. Technologies and specific vendors may come and go, but massive cultural transformations and new kinds of relationships? Those don’t go away.”