Should Professional Networking Be Part Of Your Marketing Strategy?

Tom Kane, at the Legal Marketing Blog, poses an interesting question in his recent blogpost called “Should You Pay Attention To The Social Networking Craze?”.  Kane notes that social networking is exploding on the internet today as more and more people create and/or join social networking sites. More importantly, he notes that social networking sites are potentially becoming the new marketing tool used for business development by attorneys and law firms as well as other business professionals on the internet . 

I haven’t been sold on the legal marketing ROI relative to these sites generally, nor have I heard that they currently produce serious amounts of work for law firms. Yet, I’m definitely coming around to the point of view that they will become one more important tool in the marketing toolbox. Not sold completely, but moving in that direction.

Recently, Tom attended a webinar conducted by Kevin O’Keefe at Lexblog which focused on the social networking site “LinkedIn”. After the webinar, Tom had this to say:

"It was enlightening for me to say the least, and so I’m working on beefing up my LinkedIn biography."

Here’s an example of a LinkeIn profile. 

Also, John Jantsch over at Duct Tape Marketing concurs in the importance of social networks in reporting on a survey by Universal McCann that shows the popularity of social networks, RSS feeds and blogs. It does seem clear that a web site is no longer enough of an Internet presence. As John puts it “And that means if you’re not participating in social media, you’re not really online.

David A. Barrett over at the linkedinlawyer blog equates LinkedIn with Yellow Book plus relationships and recommendations and references and interesting article at VentureBeat.com which provides some valuable information regarding LinkedIn’s service provider feature. 

"If you are searching for an attorney, for example, no point going to the phone book. You can click on the “services” tab at LinkedIn, then select “attorney” and see if anyone in your network as recommended an attorney in the field you’re looking for (see the graphic below for the example of what we see when we select attorney; we see several recommended attorneys one degree away from us).

If we select one of the attorneys, LinkedIn takes us to the recommended attorney’s profile on LinkedIn, if he has one; if he doesn’t, it takes us to a basic description as provided by the contact who recommended him."