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Want Hard Proof that LinkedIn Works? Ask a Lawyer

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This article is more than 9 years old.

This is the story of an old friend and new convert to social media marketing, a lawyer in Northern California named Mark D. Poniatowski who runs a small practice with just a handful of partners.

They suffer from the traditional business development issue most small professional services firms have:

  • When they are busy, they have no time to prospect for new business.
  • When the business eases up, they find themselves in a dry patch, and hustle to reconnect with past clients, business networks and other referral sources.

This cycle drives them crazy, but they have always considered it a cost of keeping the firm small (which they like quite a bit.)

Good marketing pal that I am, I begged to differ, and pressed them to make better use of social media tools to keep their referral sources warm while they worked long hours on cases.

With the advent of his latest “break” from a heavy work load, he agreed to dedicate the time to test a plan he felt he could manage within the demands of his day:

  • He chose one online networking tool to test, which was LinkedIn .
  • He spent one hour cleaning up his profile.
  • He spent about three hours reaching out to all the people he knew professionally, and connecting to those whom he found on LinkedIn.
  • He set a thirty-minute appointment for a late weekday evening each week to work on building up his network of contacts, and engaging that network via pings and content sharing.

Results came within a couple of weeks:

  • Many connection invitations came right back with social conversations, and were happy to reconnect.
  • A handful had business that they could place with him right away and were “glad he reached out.”
  • Within those few weeks he had referrals worth $12,000 in billable hours that he would not have had without his 3-5 hour LinkedIn campaign. That represents a 8-10x ROI on the time he dedicated to it.

The pace has calmed since he harvested that low-hanging fruit, but he reaped one other big benefit:

Connecting with distant clients – An international manufacturer and a national food distributor both use Mark for their commercial lease work in California. He can only justify one trip a year to each of their Midwestern headquarters. But, using LinkedIn to follow the people who manage his part of their legal affairs has made the trips much more powerful.

  • He keeps track of position changes that impact him.
  • He can research key people ahead of each trip.
  • He set up introductions using his current network, and reaches out to the new connections prior to the trip to kick-start the new relationship and make the in-person meetings much more useful.

Here is how Mark sums up his experience:

“I immediately recognized that I was able to connect with attorneys and clients that I worked with over the years and had lost touch with, so it was actually a fun exercise.  Some of them were good friends as well and we’ve since gone to lunch. I think that the business generation aspect has been a natural fallout of reconnecting and will increase. I did find that the best LinkedIn for me is during the commercials while watching sports!”

LinkedIn does nothing for you but set up the channel of communication. You have to reach through that channel to electrify your network. It isn’t Rocket Science, but it does take commitment. Here are some of the tried and true steps to take to get into a rhythm. (I am sure commenters can adjust and add to this list!)

  • Set up a social media management widget like HootSuite to make updating your content easier, and your activity more easily tracked.
  • Select a manageable set of professional groups and join them. Connect your updating/sharing widget to those, too.
  • Participate in discussions that are relevant to your area of expertise.
  • Seek advice within your targeted groups on questions that are not your area of expertise (this is very much viewed as good behavior within many professions, so capitalize on it.)
  • Use the widget at least weekly. Find something germane and interesting, add your own insight to it, and post it.
  • Leverage your own ongoing education about your craft. What you discover through studying provides a steady stream of content you can use to keep your sharing fresh and interesting to others.

This vignette about how useful networking is for a professional services firm it isn’t new, and “networking” hasn’t changed strategically since professions were invented millennia ago. All the tools have improved, though, and can put your efforts on steroids with just a few hours a week, right from your desk. Indeed, one dedicated hour at home with LinkedIn may outperform two hours (plus travel time) at an industry cocktail party. Both have their benefits, neither should be neglected.