We bring you another obvious but instructive nugget from marketing guru Seth Godin and how it pertains to IT in organizations: make promises and keep them. His context is companies and marketing, but this is just as relevant for how IT should approach its customers within a law or professional services firm. Don't over-promise. When you make promises, follow through on them. If you need to "over"-anything, over-deliver.

IT often complains of a lack of respect from the professionals in the organizations they serve. Here is a sure fire way to get some. Everyone respects the person who delivers on what they promise. They are reliable, trustworthy. That goes for individuals, departments, and consultants. Making overblown claims about the benefits of a new software or equipment that you can't back up is the way to lose respect. Set realistic expectations and then exceed them. Doing so will garner tremendous respect.

For some of our web site clients (Washington Express and GigaBiter, for example), we have been following the dust-up over Google’s alleged change to PageRank. PageRank is the mathematical algorithm that ranks web sites in the almighty Google search engine. According to some informed speculation, Google is fighting back against people trying to game its system for higher search engine rankings, dinging the rankings of some popular sites like the Washingtonpost.com in the process. No matter what the actual cause, this is a never-ending war raging between Google and those seeking every advantage when their companies live or die by their Google ranking.

What has been our advice? Don’t get caught up in the arms race--it can only hurt you. You can’t win. Only Google knows how PageRank works and can change it at their whim. Everyone else is guessing, often badly. Trying to game the system will only lead you to do bad things, like “link farms” and writing geared for Google’s search bots rather than real human beings. The first can get you blacklisted from Google, the second from your potential customers.

What can you do? PageRank is still about links coming to your site, and the sites that link to yours. Maximize links to your sites, especially from large directories and media outlets that have a ton of incoming links to them, too. Blog. Ask your customers and partners to link to you. Work the public relations and get stories about your firm and people in trade rags, web sites, and the local/regional media. Write a case study for your customer that links to your site. Also, find a respected SEO (Search Engine Optimization) adviser, one that makes sure the basics are covered, doesn’t offer frivolous services, and offers prudent measures that don’t overstep the line. Lastly, don’t believe that the SEO firm can deliver you to the top of the charts with some cold cash but no hard work.

Via the Legal Blog Watch, some law firms—or at least some web savvy people inside them—are going all Web 2.0. They are creating social networks on Facebook and updating their Wikipedia entries. Some even appear to have succumbed to the temptation to edit the Wikipedia pages of the competition to cast them in an unfavorable light!

While law firms are notoriously conservative when it comes to technology, this is a rather quick adoption rate in an industry that just migrated to Windows XP in the last couple of years. Networking and research seem perfectly logical arenas for firms to try out these new forms of web interaction. So how long will it be before videos go up on YouTube?

Internet and digital technologies remove many of the constraints to providing niche services and reaching audiences across much wider geographic areas. For small and medium-sized law and professional services firms, especially “Boutique” firms that specialize in niche areas, this means that the advantages many large firms and their superior resources once enjoyed are diminishing.

Broadband Internet, Wi-Fi, and VoIP allow small firms to communicate easily with customers that may be half the world away. Collaborative technologies like extranets, web conferencing, and Skype makes servicing far flung clients practical and efficient. Using social networking services like LinkedIn, the cost of acquiring a customer drops dramatically, eroding another advantage of large firms. As access to information and other resources becomes cheaper, the resource advantage large firms once held is shrinking daily (think of the Google vs. Lexis/Nexis subscription for basic research, or RSS feeds compared to costly clipping or news aggregation services).

The phenomena rapidly attracting the public’s attention is “The Long Tail:” large numbers of small sales and niche services that looks like a tail when viewed on a graph of demand. The point is, the Long Tail rivals the “hits” at the head in revenue and profitability. Apply this idea to law and professional services firms, where big firms are the “hits” at the head, and small and medium firms are the long tail. Before the Internet, that tail was much shorter, and couldn’t rival the big firms for revenue in the aggregate. But now, that’s changing.

Reputation and quality of service become deciding factors over sheer resources in many cases. There are still instances throwing lots of people at a problem are warranted, but that’s is becoming less so everyday. As part of the “Long Tail,” small and medium firms can often rival the giants.

What do you think of our new home page? For now, beauty is indeed only skin deep, as the rest of the site is still awaiting a refresh after three years. While the site has held up very well over that time, we had some pressing needs that required we focus on the home page. Our goals were:

• list all our services and products up front;
• better describe our services and value-added for the legal and professional services firms.
• integrate with our Wisdom Journal blog and Events; and
• highlight our services like OnSight, MindPort, and affiliate partners in a compelling fashion.

There are a few features that will be added before the year is out, like the ability to resize the text, complete accessibility, and improved navigation controls in the vignette area. The new home page also suggests the design direction the rest of the site will head.

Please give us your feedback on the new home page? What do you like about it? What improvements would you make?

Earlier this month, we posted on how to use social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and ma.gnolia to capture the collective intelligence of your employees and turn them into news feeds for everyone to see. Today we will discuss how you to use social bookmarking to put your firm, organization, or department at the heart of your network of clients, colleagues, or employees.

Sharing bookmarks through del.icio.us provides an easy and low-cost way to keep up a constant stream of valuable information. Some examples are:

• Keep employees aware of tips,tricks, tutorials, workarounds, or reference materials.
• Stay in constant contact with clients by feeding them important developments or identify opportunities and potential hazards.
• Attract prospects and establish your expertise with them.

Since del.icio.us creates newsfeeds (RSS feeds), everyone in your network stays current without the need for update e-mails that might be ignored or trapped in spam filters.

Social bookmarking also allows you to tap the collective wisdom of your network. With del.icio.us, you can invite each member in the group or other colleagues to share their bookmarks with you. Be sure to edit those bookmarks so they fit your purpose or theme. Everyone benefits from having more eyes keeping watch, and more brains thinking of useful and thought-provoking content.

As the fountainhead, you will become firmly established as the hub of your network, and will become indispensable to your clients, employees, and colleagues.

• If you are still not down with RSS, we added a way to get updates through the e-mail with Simply Headlines, a nifty little service that delivers newsfeeds in a newspaper layout to your inbox once a day.
• We also made it easy to save Journal posts to del.icio.us, but better yet...
• ...we are sharing our del.icio.us bookmarks with our readers. Check out what our stable of experts in IT engineering, support, programming, and design are reading on the web. Del.icio.us even turns it into an RSS feed, so you can get updates in your new browser or favorite newsreader.
  

Think your web site is a bunch of marketing mumbo jumbo?  Well, General Counsel's across the country use that mumbo jumbo as their primary decision to hire outside counsel according to the recent Annual Chief Legal Officer Survey. Just edging out legal directories like Martindale Hubbell, companies use a law firm's web site to choose outside counsel to represent them over 44 percent of the time. When you add in the 21 percent who used search engines like Google, the law firm's online presence should be its primary marketing focus.

That said, are your areas of expertise and your "value proposition"--in other words, the benefit you offer prospective clients--right on the front page?  Or do you have some self-congratulatory letter from the managing partner or tired and cliched pictures of board rooms and your beautiful, glass enclosed building rather than content written for what prospective clients need? Huh?

SAGE President George Nicholson and Creative Director Peter von Elling are speaking at the Association of Legal Administrators Region 2 Conference on Friday, October 27, 2006 in Louisville, KY. The session, "Blogging: The Best Marketing You Aren't Doing" will cover the basics of blogging for those new to the format, and focus exclusively on law blogs. We will discuss the tension between the free-flowing, run-it-up-the-flag-pole-and-see-who-salutes nature of blogging and the desire many firms have to carefully script all communication with clients and prospects.  Also, we will discuss the new landscape of law firm marketing in the age of participatory web sites, where it's important to be Digged, be Del.icio.us, and have those RSS feeds hit newsreaders.

If you are attending, please come hear George and Peter speak and then meet them afterwards. We will be providing sneak previews here on our blog before the Conference, and more from the presenation afterward.