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Advertising, Online Reviews, & Managing Your Reputation
Stacey E. Burke

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+
Introduction

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+ Social Media: By The Numbers
Number of active social media users: 3.4 Billion
Number of Internet users: 4.2 Billion
Total worldwide population: 7.7 Billion
Average time spent on social media: 116 minutes per day
Average number of social media accounts per person:
5.54
Social media users grew by 320 million between
September 2017 and October 2018
That equates to one new social media user every 10
seconds

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Number of Users by
Social Media Channel
2.271 billion users
1.5 billion users
1 billion users
900 million users
562 million users
326 million users
186 million users

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You Are Your Reputation

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Reputation
 Much of a lawyer’s value is his or her reputation in
the legal community.
 Even before you’ve begun working, your positive
reputation can start building loyalty with a potential
client. As he or she learns more about you online, it
can start to feel like the solution to the problem at-
hand is just a call or click away.

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+ Value of Reputation
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to
ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” –
Warren Buffet

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+ Social Proof
Social proof has always existed in the form of word-of-mouth referrals.
The distinction today is that consumers across the board are willing to
put their faith in the word of complete strangers. The legal industry has
the second-highest rated average star rating.

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How Digital Consumers Shop

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Needing Something More
 Finding an attorney with a good reputation
reassures legal consumers that they’re heading
down the right path.
 Legal consumers are feeling intense emotions,
many of which aren’t positive. Connecting with them
requires more than a dispassionate list of academic
credentials and career milestones.
 You need the social proof of
other people sending a
positive message about
your firm and its lawyers.

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+ Why Reviews Are Important
 About one-third of all legal consumers first turn to the
Internet to find out information about attorneys.
 This further emphasizes the fact that law firms and
individual attorneys need to have an online listing
presence and favorable customer reviews to attract
more clients.
 In online searches, attorneys with client reviews get
14x more queries than those with no reviews — both
search engines and clients trust reviews.

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+ Have Review, Will Travel
75% of adults who looked to hire an attorney in the past year went
online at some point in the process. Additionally, potential clients
are willing to travel further to meet with an attorney at his or her office
if his or her reviews are higher than other attorneys located closer.

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+ The Proof is in the Numbers
84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal
recommendation, and 58% of consumers say the star rating
of a business is most important.

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Online Reputation
Management (ORM)

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+ What is ORM?
Online reputation management (ORM) is best described as
a means of controlling the conversation surrounding your
brand on the Internet.

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+ But even more than that…
It is the practice of crafting strategies that shape or influence the public
perception of an organization, individual or other entity on the Internet. It
helps drive public opinion about a business and its products and
services.

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And Why is ORM Important?
 Your clients will be looking for an attorney worthy of
their trust, time, and money.
 For this reason, online reputation management
(ORM) is an especially important part of business
strategy for today’s attorneys.
 You can’t prevent people from rating
and reviewing your firm. But you can
and should monitor and manage
your online reputation.

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Managing Your Online
Reputation

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Do This First:
 Claim your profiles
 Ensure you own all relevant domain names and if not purchase
them
 Set up alert notifications
 Conduct an online audit
 Clean up profiles with outdated or incorrect information
 Respond to any existing reviews, good or
bad
 Create a dedicated lawyer reviews page on
law firm website
 Ask your clients for reviews
 Share good reviews on social media

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+ Consistency is Key
68% of customers said they would not use a business
with the wrong information displayed online.

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Alert! Alert!
 Setting up alerts allows you
to know immediately when
information is made public
on the internet about your
firm and/or your employees.
 It provides you with the
opportunity to act quickly if
necessary.
 Ahrefs Alerts
 Mention.com
 Brand24
 Google Alerts
Why? Good Sites to Use
Set up alerts for your firm name AND the
names of your lawyers.

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Five Major Sites To Monitor

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These are the Big Guns:
Google
Yelp
Bing
Facebook
Avvo
(Lawyer Directories)

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Google My Business Listing
 An iLawyerMarketing study found over 60% of
participants deemed Google reviews to be the most
important source of third-party reviews.
 Your goal should be to populate the top 20 reviews on
Google with positive content about your firm, which in
turn may help to keep negative content out.

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Yelp
 By having a Yelp listing in place, you make it easier
for those who are already using the app or site to
find your law firm when searching for a service
provider to fit their needs.
 At one point, Yelp was the most trusted website for
lawyer reviews.

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Bing Places
 The Bing-powered listing helps local businesses
attract new clients by easily and conveniently
displaying their information when a potential
customer searches online for any goods or services
the business provides.

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+ Facebook
In recent years, Facebook became the second-most popular
review site, which is all the evidence you need to create a
Facebook Page for a firm or individual attorney.

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+ Avvo (Lawyer Directories)
There are also several lawyer-specific sites that are worth
your time. Avvo is an obvious choice because 97% of all
lawyers in the U.S. are listed on the site.

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Dealing with Negative Reviews
and Ratings

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+ Turn Clients into Advocates
If you avoid asking your best customers for reviews, you
may end up with more negative reviews than you would
have wanted.

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Don’t Feed the Trolls
 Research suggests a single negative review may cost you as
many as 30 customers. They say the client is always right. I
know that sometimes they are not, but consider whether
arguing with your customer is worth your reputation.
 Some negative reviews are more of a problem than others. It all
depends on if and where they rank, and if they receive a lot of
traffic.
 To push a bad review down, point
one or two good links to a good
review, which will push that
negative review down.

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Connect with Stacey:
 Facebook: @MarketingLawyers
 Twitter: @staceyeburke
 Instagram: @MarketingLawyers
 LinkedIn: /company/stacey-e-burke-p-c
 Website: www.staceyeburke.com
 My e-newsletter: http://bit.ly/StaceyMail