How Attorneys Can Use Social Media for Mass Tort Marketing

Social Media Marketing – How Can Attorneys Use it for Mass Torts?

Social media has become “the next big thing” for those of us involved in Internet legal marketing. Because most attorneys are late adapters, there aren’t a lot of law firms getting clients from social media. When attorneys do use social networks, it’s deemed worthy of a Wall Street Journal article. But I believe I can show you how attorneys can successfully use social media in a mass tort legal marketing campaign.

One caveat at the outset: I’m 7 weeks into a social media/Internet project involving the Gulf oil spill, and so far I haven’t even tried signing up clients over the Internet. I have clients with property on the Gulf Coast, but I’ve been “covering” the Gulf oil spill story with social media because I view it both as a cause and an opportunity to experiment with social media in a mass tort context. I expect to begin trying to sign up clients at some point, but so far my time has been devoted totally to the social media/blogging aspect of this mass tort. I haven’t had time to handle client intake. But I believe the lessons of the past 7 weeks can be useful to anyone who wishes to use social media in a legal marketing campaign.

How Does an Attorney Start a Social Media Marketing Campaign?

Attorneys can always start a do-it-yourself campaign, perhaps using employees who are familiar with social media, or you can choose from one of the multitude of social media consultants that are available these days. But you need to understand that a  well-conceived social media campaign requires more than just signing up for Facebook and Twitter. First you need to answer an important question:

Social Media Marketing: Why Will People Come to My Facebook Page?

The Wall Street Journal asked this question yesterday, and it’s a question everyone should ask before spending time or money on a social media campaign. If you think people are going to follow you just because you’re a great lawyer or they like your law firm, you’re probably going to be disappointed. You need to have a target group that you want to engage, and a strategy for engaging with them.

Businesses with consumer brands have been experimenting with social media marketing for some time. The successful ones use things such as contests, discounts, coupons,  and customer service to get people to follow them on Facebook and Twitter. I don’t want to use those things in marketing campaigns involving mass torts, and I suspect you don’t either. Fortunately, there is something else that may work even better:

Social Media Marketing and Mass Torts – Victims Have an Insatiable Thirst for Information.

I learned this during my first Internet legal marketing campaign ten years ago, when my partners and I signed up over a thousand Rezulin clients. We believed that people who used the Internet for research in their everyday life would be likely to hire attorneys who provided a very informative website, so we packed ours with legal and medical information about Rezulin, the liver problems it caused, and the wrongful conduct of the drug manufacturer. I’ve followed that formula in every mass tort marketing campaign I’ve run since that time, and it continues to work. Victims of mass torts want to understand  what went wrong, who is to blame, and what they can do about it. And attorneys who give them that information have a better chance of being retained than attorneys who don’t.

Before the widespread use of Twitter and Facebook, getting fresh information to potential mass tort clients was slow. We had to edit web pages, and it took 2-4 weeks for new information to show up on Google. Now, with Twitter in your toolbox, you can quickly and easily send out headlines as news happens. What that means for your social media campaign is:

Mass Torts – If the Story is Big, You Can Provide More Information, Faster, Than CNN.

You can use Twitter to put out 140-character alerts whenever something newsworthy happens. The wide availability of news articles (“content”) published throughout the 24-hour news-cycle has led some people to say that content is no longer king. Now, they argue, “Curation is king.” (Go here for a contra view). I believe there is merit to both arguments. But from a social media standpoint, curation may have the edge.

If your marketing efforts involve mass torts, there are likely to be news articles posted about subject(s) throughout the day. You can follow news stories throughout the day on Google News and the cable news networks, and use Twitter to send out 140-character headlines all day long. You can use a tool such as HootSuite to schedule tweets to be posted throughout the day. When you tweet about a news article, you can put a link to the article inside the tweet, so a follower can click on the link to read the full article. Using HootSuite, you can tell exactly how many readers click through the links in your tweets to read the full articles. I just checked my statistics; in the past thirty days, there have been 6,458 click-throughs on headlines I’ve posted on Twitter about the Gulf oil spill.

While Twitter allows you to be a mini-broadcaster of news headlines, Facebook allows you to create a community where people can share opinions, links to news articles, photographs and videos. The BPOilNews Facebook page has 1,721 fans, many who post news articles, comments and opinions. We’ve also got a Facebook Group titled: “Dear Pres. Obama: Please take over the Gulf Oil clean up and send BP the bill.” There are 760 members of that group. And all of the members are passionate. Which brings me to this:

It Helps to be Passionate About Your Subject.

You can hire people to run a social media marketing campaign, but if they aren’t enthusiastic about what they’re doing, you’re wasting both their time and your money. Pick up a few books on social media marketing and you’ll see that they all talk about the need to be genuine, transparent, and honest. That’s one reason that mass torts are particularly well-suited for a social media marketing campaign. People tend to feel passionate about mass torts. And they expect their attorneys to feel passionate, also..

You can’t mistake the fact that I’m upset about the Gulf oil spill, and I’m genuinely angry at BP. I live in Alabama, and I’ve vacationed at Panama City, Pensacola, Seaside, Orange Beach, and Gulf Shores countless times. I know people with businesses and property on the Gulf, and for me, sharing information and pictures with Gulf Coast residents has been a gratifying experience. The online community that we’ve created shares information about the condition of beaches, telephone numbers for reporting oil on the beach and oil-soaked wildlife, and telephone numbers and websites for submitting Gul oil spill suggestions to BP and the Coast Guard. It’s also been a way for people to share Gulf oil spill pictures, and share information about BP’s attempted media blackout. And every member of the community is passionate about the Gulf oil spill.

If you’re going to use social media marketing, make sure that your marketing revolves around something important enough to care about, and find someone who does care about it to run the project.

Once you establish your Twitter and Facebook accounts, you can add more traditional Internet marketing techniques and:

Put It All Together.

When I started using social media to cover the Gulf oil spill, I put up a blog at BPOilNews.com to provide information about the disaster. I hired a free-lance journalist to write a few articles so we could quickly get some good, interesting content on the site (remember the “Content is king” proverb). I also set up an @BPOilNews Twitter account and a BPOilNews Facebook fan page. And whenever new articles are posted to the BPOilNews blog, a Twitter post goes out with a link to the blog article.

Include Your Audience in the Conversation.

Good social media marketing consultants counsel that social media is supposed to involve a conversation. I’ve tried to include people in the conversation as much as possible. One way this has worked is that people spontaneously began posting suggestions on the blog for dealing with the Gulf oil spill. BPOilNews has now received over 2,000 oil spill suggestions so far. Its coverage of citizen suggestions has been mentioned by the BBC and the New York Times. A suggestion that I made for President Obama (to federalize the Gulf oil spill cleanup) got quoted at length by a coalition of environmental groups. They liked the idea so well they suggested, “We think someone should put Evans in charge.”

Don’t Forget to Measure.

Don’t just open a Twitter and Facebook account and assume things are working. There are all sorts of metrics you can use to measure your success. And sometimes sheer numbers don’t really mean very much. As I wrote recently in “How to measure influence on Twitter,” an interview with a researcher in the Harvard Business Review says that it’s a fallacy to focus on the number of followers on Twitter. A better indicator of influence is “retweet rank,” which measures how often followers “retweet,” or send out your tweets to their followers. The retweet rank for @BPOilNews has ranged from 902 to 2,022 (99.89 percentile) recently. For a comparison, movie star Ashton Kutcher has a retweet rank of 21,470.

There are also metrics available from Facebook. And, of course, Google Analytics or another software program can give you information about traffic to your website(s). Mass torts usually create intense competition among plaintiffs’ attorneys for clients: if you’re involved in a mass tort marketing campaign, check your metrics at least once a day so you can make adjustments to your campaign as necessary.

Synergy: Social Media Marketing + Traditional Internet Marketing.

Incorporating social media marketing with more traditional Internet media (in my case, a WordPress blog) has two benefits. It allows interaction with people through Twitter and Facebook who would not have visited the blog. And it has increased traffic to the blog. Google Analytics allows me to see how many visitors to the blog originated at Twitter or Facebook (Analytics discloses only the number of visitors; not their identities). While many visitors to the blog arrive there due to Search Engine Optimization, a significant number come from the BPOilNews Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Attorneys, Social Media and Ethics.

Of course, in any type of attorney marketing you must follow ethics rules. When using social media, there are legitimate concerns about violating rules involving solicitation. But the experience I’ve had the past seven weeks makes it clear that there are many conversations that an attorney can have with people which do not involve solicitation.

An attorney can ethically engage in conversations with an online community, shares news and information, without violating any ethics rules. Avoid giving legal advice or suggesting that people retain you. If you have a form on your website that allows people to contact you for legal representation, let the form do its work. If you have been genuinely helpful to the community, you can expect that those people will be more favorably disposed to hire you than some lawyer with a 30-second television ad.

Michael J. Evans is a mass tort attorney, social media consultant, legal marketing strategist, and a producer of online video/web content. Connect with Mike on LinkedIn, follow Mike on Twitter @evansmichaelj, or connect on Facebook. You can also use the Contact Form at the top of this page.