March 10, 2010
It doesn’t always feel that way – being the little guy often doesn’t feel like the power position. But take another look.
The current recession has buyers re-thinking how they use their resources. Those of us who want to remain high-value trading partners are called upon to respond – sensitively – to new sets of concerns. Our prospects and customers are operating in new worlds. They are re-interpreting what’s most important, where they will focus, what they need, and with whom they will place their trust.
It reminds me of the moment, many millions of years ago, when the cooling of the earth offered our warm-blooded small mammal forebears advantage over the dinosaurs.
Large businesses cannot move quickly. 
It’s very difficult for them to notice a new nuance in Customers’ thinking, listen in a way that people experience as being heard, and respond in a way that generates new value for both parties. This most basic human interaction is not scalable. The big guys don’t have a chance competing with us in personal customer connection.
Like the dinosaurs requiring a certain amount of heat – reptiles cannot regulate their body temperatures - our large competitors thrive on scalability. That puts them at a huge disadvantage in a changing environment. They’re desperately trying to figure out how to appear responsive. But web 2.0 makes the job harder and harder.* Of course customers can tell when no one’s really listening - the human brain is very hard to fool on that score.
Little guy/gals, on the other hand, thrive on being close to our Customers. We can know every one of them personally, we can respond to each one uniquely, and naturally they can feel it.
The way to leverage this advantage is to focus on a simple question that will juice your brain and stoke the fire in your belly:
Who do you want to serve, and what do you want to make happen for them?
Use the question to focus and refocus. If you’re feeling worried about the recession (which is likely to reduce your intelligence by interfering with Pre Frontal Cortex function), the question will spark your ingenuity.
Take it one step farther, as we do in Worksheet 1, “Who would you LOVE to be working with?” That question will enable you to work with recession, not against it, by taking the little guy’s advantage: getting closer to the people you care about when they need it most.
The only reason a business exists is to help certain someone solve a certain problem they can’t easily solve for themselves. That’s why people are willing to pay their time and money, because they get help.
- Worksheet 1,">Heart of Business
* Prahalad’s brilliant book shows large businesses how to operate from n=1, but the discipline to do so is very demanding, and predictably rare.
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But, take heed, there is a
But, take heed, there is a way to survive today and position your firm for the future. In today’s volatile economic environment there is a need for experts of all stripes to help explain, predict virtual private server hosting, navigate and connect people to one another to help them solve their problems. Thought leaders can come from anywhere, from a lawyer in solo practice just hanging out her shingle to a practice head at a mid-sized firm to an associate in a major law firm domain name.
If approached in the right way, the current recession provides an opportunity to stake a claim as a thought leader that will serve you well today and for years to come. The size of your firm doesn’t matter, nor does the size of your marketing budget. Because while money is certainly tight web site design, smart lawyers and other professionals are finding that it doesn’t take a lot of money to get attention on the Web as an expert. Web 2.0 marketing tools, such as blogs, podcasts, tweets, social networks and interactive websites are most cost-efficient and, when used properly, can help do the marketing work for you. This is called social media and it’s going to change the way people make buying decisions for everything from their new car to their legal services. And, make no mistake, the change is already well underway.
You may have been reading a lot about lawyers who are blogging. The truth is, for all the attention they’ve been getting, lawyers who blog are few and far between. An ABA Legal Technology Survey Report, released in September 2008, found that only two percent of all lawyers in this country maintain professional blogs and eight percent of law firms maintain firm blogs search engine marketing.
The survey also found that the vast majority of lawyers aren’t using the Internet to market themselves either. Only 15 percent of lawyers have joined social networks, like Facebook and LinkedIn; four percent of firms are using social networks to its best advantage.
The dearth of penetration in social media by members of the legal profession indicates that there is a huge opportunity for lawyers today and at almost no additional investment in technology business opportunity.
The web is particularly useful for small firms and individual lawyers because, for the first time ever, anyone can be an authority and garner influence because of their expertise and not because of where they work or whom they know. The web allows you to become as big as you want to “look” and be.
Consider the case of Jaffe itself operating in this new 2.0 environment. As a firm, we’re our best case study. Recently, we wrote guidelines for social media policies that can be used within law firms. We were using a very similar document here at our firm already. One of our associates saw a query on the Legal Marketing Association’s listserv regarding social media policies. We quickly posted a notice on the listserv that our policy was available to anyone who wanted it and, within three hours, we had 30 requests for the document from members of our targeted audience. Our experience demonstrates that when you have something to offer, the Web is a very efficient means to get it to those who can benefit immediately from that information.
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