“Whether you like it or not, everybody’s searching for us online. And everybody is looking at your LinkedIn profile, whether you’re on LinkedIn every day, or once a year, so you might as well make it work for you.” – Stefanie Marrone
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Greg Lambert 0:08
Welcome to The Geek in Review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry I’m Greg Lambert. Marlene is out sick this week. So everyone’s just stuck with me. However, I have a very special guest here with me who is absolutely amazing. And I’m so happy to have her on the show. So Stefanie Marrone, outsource marketer to law firms and legal service providers. Thank you very much for coming on The Geek in Review.
Stefanie Marrone 0:35
Thank you so much, Greg. And I hope Marlene feels better. It’s great to be here.
Greg Lambert 0:40
All right. Well, you have just a very large presence on social media platforms. And I know, I see great content from you on platforms like LinkedIn. So I want to know, how did you go from being on the marketing teams at law firms like MoFo and Proskauer to the consulting work that you’ve done for the past few years?
Stefanie Marrone 1:04
Yeah. So it’s funny, actually, I had a social media presence back then, as well. And I always tell people, when you’re in house, you know, it’s a little difficult in terms of how to manage your personal brand, while working full time and managing the expectations of your employers and what to post and, you know, are you going to alert them that maybe you’re looking for a job, or you’re building your own brand at the expense of the firm, and it’s a fine line. So I know that I’m definitely more visible now than I was before. But I had been building my brand for a very long time, Greg, so much so that when I started my own business, I could because I had been present on social and doing things like promoting speaking engagements I was doing and promoting articles I had written so a lot of the JD Supra articles I’d written and I have a blog, the social media butterfly blog.com through Lexis blog, that I was also promoting that content. So there are ways I feel like an in house marketer could do a lot of these things. But I was using LinkedIn long before I think most people were when I worked at a firm that rhymes with Paulaven and Romwell, I said we should get on LinkedIn. And they said, What? No, we don’t need LinkedIn. And now they have like four or five people who manage their LinkedIn presence, which, which always makes me get it all right, like I was way ahead of my time, but I got pretty active on social, especially during the pandemic, I think, like a lot of people did to feel connected to other people. I also accidentally started my own business, this was not exactly what I set out to do. I was the CMO of a mid sized law firm, and I lost my job and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. So I started this business as an interim step. And it took off. So much. So in part because I already had a built in audience, that I could work with people who knew me because I’d been on social. And also, by the way, speaking engagements for me were huge. People had seen me speak and they knew that I knew what I was talking about. So that I would tell people, if you’re not comfortable with social media, you can always also consider speaking engagements as well, and writing and all of those things. So I just ramped up my presence. But the business was really born from the things I love to do. And I work with mostly small and midsize firms and a lot, I do a lot of outsourced cmo work. So fractional cmo work, marketing work, and then some social media work, of course, LinkedIn training and all that good stuff.
Greg Lambert 3:45
Yeah. So I know that you tend to focus on what the legal professionals are doing when it comes to social media. What were some of the some of the catalysts that made you want to focus on helping the industry improve in this area of content and marketing?
Stefanie Marrone 4:02
Okay, so I feel like law firms lagged behind in so many ways, and in so many areas saw, you know, the bar is so low
Greg Lambert 4:13
It wasn’t very high, right?
Stefanie Marrone 4:14
No, it wasn’t high. But there was a huge opportunity, right? All law firms could do better. There are so many law firms that have 1000s, if not 10s of 1000s of followers and they’re not engaging with their audience in an effective way. They’re making a lot of mistakes like they’re they’re not utilizing that audience. They’re doing a lot of what I call me center content. You know, I’m home we’re humbled and honored to announce that we recently had 100 million Super Lawyers or we recently closed this blank deal. It’s we we we and instead of like having client centric content, so what I tried to do was also by the way, look outside the industry and seek inspiration from other industries and bring voices in. I know we work in a b2b world, but I think B or I talk about b2b Ah, and so, business to human is a little bit more about what I think sells today. You know, we don’t like to use that word selling. But I do think that we are selling to people who want to buy legal services, and they want to do business with people who they know. And they like, and they trust. And they care, I think less about the name on the door than the lawyer doing the work for them. So this is why also I feel like lawyers do need to focus on building their personal brands. And I also think there’s just such opportunity, you know, for example, LinkedIn is free. I mean, most of these channels are free, and people just do not take advantage of them. And out of the 800 million people, Greg, who use LinkedIn, 1% of those people post content on LinkedIn and have that 1%, I would say 90% of that content is not good. It’s very self promotional, and boastful and not helpful. And so I try to be a fresh voice, I try to add stories and helpful vantage points, but also do that for my clients in a way that still is substantive, and also reflects, you know, the firm culture and that sort of thing. But you can do that it’s not an oxymoron, actually, the two can exist.
Greg Lambert 6:31
Is there a particular industry that you think is, is doing a much better job than than the legal I know, all industries are probably doing a better job? But is there any, you know, one or two industries that you think are really solid on how they do their marketing via social media?
Stefanie Marrone 6:49
Yeah, I mean, it depends. I think that there are some financial service companies that do a great job, like I’ll say, like, and the some of the big four, like PWC, I think it has so much interesting content. And I’ll tell you why. It’s because they don’t just have dry, boring business content. They actually inject their people into their content. They feature the good works of the firm, and the company, they feature studies, and so many law firms are not doing that sort of thing. They’re not doing thought leadership in a way that’s effective. This is also why so I don’t just work with law firms, I work with some legal service providers. And that’s been among the most fun things I’ve done over the last few years is, you know, helping to bring to market some of their thought leadership and their surveys, because, what we do contend to be dry. But even when you have dry content, the way you portray it visually can really make it much more interesting. So I would say like, sometimes I’ll look at Goldman Sachs, sometimes I’ll look at PWC. And then sometimes I will look totally out of the industry, like, what’s the Food Network doing? I’ve learned a ton about short form videos, from those kinds of organizations, Bloomberg does a terrific job. It has different sectors, and each of them has a different field. But there, that’s also been really helpful. And then there are a lot of I would say, clothing retailers, and beauty companies that also do a really good job of injecting some creativity in their posts. Now, not necessarily on LinkedIn, that’s more on Instagram, but there are ways to channel some of those ideas for business content. And that’s always what I’ve tried to do is just kind of, you know, disrupt a little bit but encouraged lawyers to think a little differently. Now, I don’t know that every big law firm, or the top 25 would want to do that with me. But I that’s also why I think it’s been easier to work with some smaller and midsize firms because they’re willing to take more risks. And it’s less red tape
Greg Lambert 8:23
On LinkedIn specifically. And that’s where I kind of see you the most I’m not a big Instagram kind of person. But I love LinkedIn. I know you were talking about being able to tell a story on platforms like LinkedIn, what are what are some of the other things that were kind of missing out on is, especially when it comes to LinkedIn, which is a real professional market, these, you know, this is an area where you’re going to see your peers and potential customers. So what’s some things that we could be doing better?
Stefanie Marrone 9:27
Okay, so here are some things you could be doing better. And I would see the same tips that I’m giving you here would be tips that I would say an individual could do or a company page, I will also put one caveat. It’s very difficult for a company page to go viral. In fact, I would say it’s almost impossible. So you don’t necessarily need to follow all of the same rules. The only way to get really good engagement with a LinkedIn company page is to get your employees to share your content, then that’s what most firms don’t do. Do so your employees can either be your strongest brand ambassadors or your weakest, and you need to tap into their valuable networks. Because let’s say your firm has 5000 connections. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that those there’s overlap, or all 5000 of those people follow your lawyers, or that they’re gonna see it because the algorithm is so tricky, it makes you not see this content. So I just want to say that so some of the things that I’ve seen work really well short form video number one. So it’s really hard for people to put themselves on video. And I feel like it’s an underutilized tool. I also think that most law firms have video that they don’t even realize they have. And let me give you a few examples. Number one, every webinar you’ve done has a video component, if you recorded it on Zoom or something else, a lot of people don’t strip out. So Okay, number one, nobody wants to watch that 50 minute video unless they’re getting CLE credit, okay, and if you post that 15 minute video on LinkedIn, nobody’s gonna watch anything but the first three minutes. So if it’s just introductions, you’ve lost people. But what you can do is splice it up into 1015 segments. And usually webinars are evergreen, so they’re a little bit less timely, sometimes they are timely, but there are elements of it that are more that are evergreen that you can reuse and repurpose that are timeless. So find those segments and what I always do, Greg, as I get the transcript, you know, there’s a lot of services I’ve used otter before, there’s rev, there’s a lot of them. And so download that transcript. Number one, you’ve got a blog post, or several you’ve got social media copy for days, quotes, all of those things. And then you’ve got the short form video segments. And you don’t have to be an expert in video editing either. I’m not what I do with my videos is a trick that my friend Alexis Robertson, who works at Foley and Lardner, she taught me that I really had to make those short videos, she does it with the screen recording button feature on the iPhone. So in videos like uploaded to YouTube, she’ll just get in and screen grab the section that she wants, and then cut it down like right from there. I literally do it on my couch while I’m watching House of dragons or white lotus. And it’s so easy. So okay, short form video, the video should be no more than three and a half minutes. Okay. The second thing, list posts, they do so well. So 10 reasons why you should have a LinkedIn strategy 10 reasons why you should listen to this podcast that we’re on right now. That’s great. And I’ll tell you, I’m so scared of chat GPT. And we could talk about that if you want. But if you asked it to write a post about this, it literally would, but don’t just take it at face value to like add your own spin to it. But it’ll at least give you like a starting point. But tips, those pieces, too. So well an infographic, bringing to life your content with an image that actually has substance. That’s great. Please don’t use any images that are stuck images, particularly like in the DEI space. And just if you’re trying to show your lawyers like don’t make them, like don’t use anything, that’s not your people. And so I would say those kinds of things do really well. And again, with video, if you could bring to life a client alert, bring to life a client alert, get your lawyers to talk about, you know, the key distill down the key points of the client alert. One more tip carousel images. Nobody is doing this. For the most part. carousels are so easy to create, you can actually do it natively now on LinkedIn, or you can do it through Canva, which is the graphic design program I use. And you would essentially like so let’s say it was like five changes in California pay transparency, which was actually something I worked on recently. It’s an alert, I’m gonna break it up into a capsule post, which would have one page graphically with each of those tips or five changes, whatever it is, and then people scroll through it. So you upload it as a PDF. Why do I like these, Greg is because there’s more dwell time, people spend more time scrolling through, and they usually save this content, which is really good for your engagement. Because remember, social media success isn’t just about the number of likes, it’s about the number of comments you have, the more importantly the engagement you get on your posts. So that’s also why videos do well and also why these carousel posts do well and they help you bring to life your content in a way that the written word just doesn’t. So those are just some ideas. And those are all things that individuals and lawyers law firms could do.
Greg Lambert 15:11
I want to go back to one of the things you you started off this, this answer with, and that was leveraging all of the professionals that you have at your firm to repost or to post the content as well. And we do that here. And I think one of the kind of the common things that I hear from attorneys is that, I don’t want to look like I’m, you know, I’m just reposting content. I, you know, so what what do you say to that argument? And I guess the main way to say it was, I don’t want to be, you know, a shill for my, for my firm doing that. And so how do you get over that uncomfortableness with the attorneys?
Stefanie Marrone 15:56
Okay, so a number of things on this number one, I would say that it’s I do not like that insert, repost feature, I think it’s it, LinkedIn, launched it, I think last year. And what it does is make it a little too easy to post things. Because it doesn’t allow you to put your own spin on it and give your own vantage point your own insights. So it’s essentially a waste of a post, I don’t if you, Greg share something about an m&a deal that your firm just did. I don’t understand the context. I assume it’s because you’re saying, Oh, look at this deal, my firm closed, but I don’t know the role you had on it. Especially if I’m the lawyer who worked on it, I should say that I was really proud to work on please don’t say proud, but we’ll construct it in a way that is more effective. You know, I had the opportunity to work on this deal and help, blah, blah, blah, with blah, blah, blah, right? Context is important. Maybe you’re the marketing person who supports that group, and you say, I worked on the RFP that helped to get this new client, and I’m so proud to see my firm do that. So context is everything, you’re not building your brand, you’re confusing. People, I think the other thing is, it’s not enough to just send an email to the firm and say, we just posted this, please share, you need to do more. And this is also why don’t love like those instant sharing programs that they have. Because again, it doesn’t give you the opportunity to put your own take on things or develop your own brand. What I would recommend doing is picking and choosing the things that makes sense for you. And some of these things will fall in your wheelhouse. And that’s okay. Like, like, it would be okay, if like, let’s say I’m a litigator, and the labor and employment group just put out an alert on trait pay transparency. Well, they I may have contacts that would find that interesting. So I should give an intro about why I’m sharing it. So California recently came out with some new regulations for employers and pay transparency, all employers should really pay attention to this reach out to my partner, so and so who wrote this alert to find out more, you’re doing an intro, maybe there’s even an origination there for you or, you know, you’re definitely gonna make better friends with your, with your colleagues for doing that. So, so there’s that I don’t think everyone should post the same thing either. Nor do I think that the firm should be providing language for people to pose I’ll give you an example. When I worked at MoPhO, for example, we had a huge deal. And we also had, we acquired a German firm. And so we opened up a Germany office. Well, we wrote something. And we asked the lawyers to share it. And guess what happened, like 200 lawyers shared the same thing within like, two hour period. And it showed up on a lot of people’s speeds. So that I think, defeated the purpose of building around and showcasing things because it just seemed like it was company speak, it seemed like they were all brainwashed employees. So you have to add context. And it has to be relevant. You confuse people when you share things from your firm. Without saying why it’s just better than to give a like to the post because if you like a post, there is an opportunity that that post could show up in somebody’s newsfeed. So I hope that answers the question.
Greg Lambert 19:41
Yeah, no, that was good. I think one of the things that a lot of marketing teams want to do is make it easy, and sometimes making it easy can have other other repercussions.
Stefanie Marrone 19:58
Oh, yeah. I mean, I think listen not the intention is always from a good place. It’s just that then it could open up a Pandora’s Box, especially if the lawyer or whoever sharing it is not well versed Greg in social media. So that’s where you get into the tricky thing where they hit that instant repost button, or they share it without the contacts or with something that doesn’t quite make sense. So that’s why training to me is the most important thing that you can do for your lawyers, periodic training, best practices, how to use LinkedIn and actually sit with them and show them how to use the platform. How do you actually share something people are scared? How do you use the featured section? Greg, do you have your podcast on the featured section of your page?
Greg Lambert 20:46
I’m trying to think of I do. So. Well, speaking of podcast, let’s talk about this platform that we’re on now. Do you think that podcasts are worth creating for legal professionals?
Stefanie Marrone 21:00
Okay, do I think podcasts are worth creating for legal professionals? I think it depends. I think it’s a saturated market. And I think that you really have to have a unique vantage point, I think you have to bring something to the market. And you just like with blogging, you have to commit to it. Because if you don’t, you will not have success, you also have to market it. And I think that that, again, brings us back to what we just spoke about, if you don’t know how to market things, and you don’t utilize LinkedIn and social media, you’re not going to be effective. When it comes to this. I do think podcasts are incredibly powerful. There’s no better medium to reach people today. Like people, I’m busy. You’re busy. Sometimes while I’m cleaning my house, Greg, I listen to podcasts when I work out when I’m driving. You can’t do that with video, or at least please don’t, because you will get into an accident. And Greg and I don’t want to be responsible for that. So I would say don’t do you know, don’t don’t do that. But I do think Podcasts can be effective, you just have to have really good content, have a good angle, and market. And so your podcast, again can be turned into video segments into blog posts, and you should be promoting it on social several times. One of the biggest mistakes law firms make. And most professionals, Greg is they do what I call one and done, which is posting something on social ones, and it never sees the light of day again. And most of them a podcast content is evergreen, again, it can be reused and repurpose. Many people never need to create another new piece of content. But like for example, so let’s say it’s a year from now. And this is your highest rated podcast because it should be right. And you want to do another you want to rerelease it there’s not much that’s going to change here. Unless Chad GPT and robots. txt and AI take over the world in the next year, but hopefully not. But like do you have like content and you could repost like teacup. And another idea, Greg, for you and for all the other people out there who have a podcast would be periodically do a roundup of your top podcasts. And maybe even like the end of the year, like these are our top 10 podcast of the year and you tag the person who was in it. And it’s extra visibility for them too. So what’s better than that? Right? Right. So it’s just about being smart about promoting it committing to doing it, and having a really interesting vantage point. But if you don’t know what your take is going to be and what you’re going to bring to the table. There’s a lot of litigation podcasts out there. Believe it or not, there’s a lot of lawyers, you know, and also I think you have to have the personality for it. You have to know the right questions to ask and you know, all that right. You’ve been doing this for a while. So what do you
Greg Lambert 23:56
say I actually heard a, we did a podcast here at the firm, where it was interesting, because we actually brought in a doctor to talk about some some legal issues. And the doctor who has his own podcast said something that I thought was really interesting. And that was I’m not the expert at this. So when I ask questions, it’s really genuine questions about a topic that I want to know more about. I’m not trying to just frame a question. And I think sometimes with podcasts, especially people who are, you know, true experts in the field. They can kind of leave their audience behind by not asking kind of more of the the simple questions and allowing the the guests to, you know, if they if that’s the type of platform they had, allowing the guest to kind of fill in the blanks of legitimate question. So I agree.
Stefanie Marrone 24:56
Also, by the way, podcasting is a little less I guess scary than the being on video video scary showing up on video, especially live video, podcasting, it doesn’t matter if you’re in your pajamas like you can still do it. Unless there’s a video component. I just want everyone to know that Greg and I are not wearing pajamas today. Now, but you know, you should know he and he’s wearing his firm button.
Greg Lambert 25:21
I guess. I am branded.
Stefanie Marrone 25:23
So yeah, you are branded. So you know, it’s a little less scary for those people who are nervous about being on camera.
Greg Lambert 25:31
Yeah, I found that to be true. As a lot of people. When we set up interviews, when I tell them that we’re only going to use the audio content. It’s like the pressure, you can just see the pressure release from them. And, and a lot of times, once they do one the first time, then they get the bug and they’re like, oh, you know, this was very easy to do. I want to you know, I want to do another one later on. So yeah, I think I think people get really comfortable with with with podcast. And yeah, I know it’s a saturated market. But I think when it comes to really good content, it’s not all that saturated. Exactly.
Stefanie Marrone 26:08
And it’s also remember, just like I said, with LinkedIn, it’s not about how many people view it it’s who views that. Yeah, but also if you hurt barking in my background that was not me and I have two French bulldogs and they are barking at the front door.
Greg Lambert 26:21
So all right, and introduce both dogs to us. What are their names so
Stefanie Marrone 26:26
I have a two and a half year old French bulldog named Lucy and then I got Lucia dog five months after I got Lucy because she was very high maintenance and needed a constant attention particularly at when I was working from home. And her name is Scarlett. So there are two of them and they’re on Instagram at Lucy Scarlett Frenchies.
Greg Lambert 26:46
Oh my goodness, there we go. So not hard to become famous
Stefanie Marrone 26:49
when you’re a Frenchie. Let’s just say that Instagram grad so hard if you’re a lawyer or a law firm, I’ve even struggled on Instagram massively like I have over 20,000 followers on LinkedIn, and a very sad 1500 on Instagram.
Greg Lambert 27:08
I’m not an Instagram pig. So well, that reminds me, then what are some of I know LinkedIn is kind of a go to that network for professionals? What if What about others? And and I laugh because you know, Twitter, I think the consensus with most people on Twitter right now is they’re going to write it out until it either continues or explodes. So you know, what, what are some of the other platforms that you think lawyers have a, you know, a reasonable expectation to, you know, put content out there or build their brand on?
Stefanie Marrone 27:44
Okay, so I think lawyer should really just focus on LinkedIn, for the most part, you when you think about which channels on which you should be really what you should think about is where are your clients and your referrals and your prospects, and maybe you’re looking for recruits. And that is where you should focus. And so I think each channel also can serve a unique purpose. One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to the content that you post. So like, for example, you’re not going to post the same thing on Instagram, as you would post on Twitter than you would post on LinkedIn. It’s all very different content. So I would personally suggest that you pick one or two platforms and only focus on them, when you do all of them, you tend to do all of them lackluster, you know, I think it could be much better to be focused on one or two, I would tell you to not ignore YouTube, because I do think if you have video content and podcasts, you need to post those things on YouTube. YouTube is owned by Google, YouTube has incredible high search domain authority, just like by the way LinkedIn does for my lawyer friends, your bio will be your number your your website bio will be your number two Google Search number one Google search result your LinkedIn profile number two and YouTube. Three, but the firm’s LinkedIn profile right up there, okay, so I you’re missing an opportunity if you don’t repost. But when you post a YouTube video, to social media, I would personally either you post it directly from like you save it your computer and post it natively in LinkedIn. So you’re not taking people off. You don’t have to follow that rule on the company page, because the rules really don’t apply there. Because you can’t go viral. You want to direct them to your website where the video lives. And then they can it’s an embedded on your page, but plays through YouTube, if that makes sense. So YouTube, mixto, LinkedIn, I think Jury’s out on Twitter, but I’ve never seen a law firm using Twitter effectively, and I’m just gonna go out on a limb and say that, and the only lawyers who really use Twitter effectively are the lawyers. I think to work Communicating with reporters, and building relationships with reporters. Instagram is so tricky. For individual lawyers, it’s almost impossible to build a brand there. For law firms, dry boring business content will never go anywhere. They’re the only content that will do. Okay, is the content that peeks behind the curtains. So this content that’s about firm life from culture, your people. So q&a is maybe with a lateral q&a is with your alumni. Your good works. By the way, Greg, the number one top rate is social media posts, in terms of like a group would be the ones that focus on CSR, and community service and pro bono. So those are the posts that do the best, they are not the post that involve lawyer awards, much to the chagrin of most lawyers of AI,
Greg Lambert 30:52
especially after the money that they paid for those awards.
Stefanie Marrone 30:55
Exactly. I would say most law firms do not need to be on tick tock In fact, I will ask you to please not go on tick tock. I just don’t think it’s necessary. Right now. And I think so. Facebook can be tricky. Again, law firms can be on Facebook, for recruiting and softer side news. But for lawyers, it really depends on where you get your business from, and how you use Facebook. Like if, if you’re using Facebook to share content about your family, you don’t necessarily, you know, meet you want to make it a public thing, you know, and I think people have to understand also, your private life is your private life and your public life is your public life. I have two Instagram accounts grabbed one is my personal Instagram that has pictures of my dogs and my niece and nephew for the most part. And that is private. And there are 186 people on there. And then I have my work, one that has, you know, sad 1500 that I’ve been trying to grow for years. And that’s where I post my work content. And those two are very separate. And my dogs account, which like dogs have more followers than me. So that’s also funny. So I would just say make sure that you audit your presence, and that you’re also keeping track of who is in your network and don’t feel obliged to accept every request when it comes to your personal life as well. Maybe give them the option of following you as a public accountant, as well. But I think like you my long winded way of saying focus on where your clients are is the most important thing.
Greg Lambert 32:34
Yeah. How do you measure success when it comes to social media? What I know we said earlier that it’s not about the number of likes. So if it’s not about the number of likes, how do you kind of measure whether what you’re doing is succeeding or not?
Stefanie Marrone 32:49
Yeah, I would love to tell you that I could track the ROI of my clients getting new clients directly from a social media post. But alas, I cannot. What I can tell you is that social media success is an amalgamation of a lot of different things. When you hear somebody say, Wow, you guys are everywhere. Wow, your social media looks amazing. Wow, you guys are doing this and that I didn’t realize it. And the person saying it is a GSA, or the person saying it is an alum who’s referred work to it’s building brand awareness, to a point where it is impacting decision making. So it’s just another way to influence buyer decisions. But it’s also another way to disseminate information. And another way to reinforce what you want to reinforce when it comes to your brand at your firm. And that’s something to keep in mind. And I think that’s also why law firms need a social media strategy and why lawyers, and any marketing professional or any business professional, who is serious about being on social media needs to create a social media strategy. Otherwise, you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall, Greg, and I’m Italian, I love spaghetti. But what I don’t like is spaghetti thrown at the wall. And that’s what I feel like a lot of firms and people do you need a strategy to make sure that what you’re doing is actually effective. Now, of course, you should look at your analytics. There are tons of Analytics, you can see like which posted better than others, instead of tracking the number of likes, look at engagement, because that will tell you much more than the number of likes. But you should also look at if you have and I see this a lot with the big, big big firms. They have hundreds of 1000s of followers and 10 likes, well, they’re doing something wrong there and the people liking the posts aren’t even relevant to the industry. They’re random people, they’re not even their employees. So you need to look Get that because then you know you have a problem, you have an internal communications problem, and you have an audience problem. So I would say it’s a lot of different things there. But you don’t want to throw the spaghetti at the wall. And you definitely want to make sure what you’re posting. resonates you, you, you won’t know. Okay, another thing, let me mention that most people look at social media in invisible only mode, silent mode. You know how it is, like, you’ll look at actually, Greg, I don’t know that you’ve ever liked one of my posts. But maybe you’ve seen them and you like my content, because most people don’t feel the need to hit that like button. In fact, they’re uncomfortable doing it. But they like it, they keep it in their back pocket. So everybody needs to remember that for those days, where they feel like, Oh, darn, I only got 10 likes or whatever it is. But keep that in your back pocket for a rainy day. You’re posting for all of the people who are engaging, but more for the people who aren’t who are very likely to hire you regardless. So think about that silent audience.
Greg Lambert 36:10
Oh, that makes sense. Now, now you making me wonder whether or not cuz I’ve watched, because I know you do a lot of videos. And I’ve watched the Washington number of the videos. And now I’m trying to think of oh,
Stefanie Marrone 36:21
I don’t actually know you like? I don’t know, if you don’t like it. That’s fine. We can talk about that later. But I guess I wouldn’t be on the podcast if you didn’t like it. So.
Greg Lambert 36:31
Exactly, exactly. I do like it. So in you talked about the social media strategy, especially an individual lawyer or another legal professional that’s looking to have a strategy to to build their brand to create content? Is that something they should do themselves? Or should they reach out to either a professional in their marketing department? If they have one? Or should they reach out to a consultant like yourself? What, what’s your advice?
Stefanie Marrone 37:04
So I think it depends, I think that you should go into your resources first. First and foremost, because you have those internal resources, I know that it can sometimes be a little difficult to tap into those resources, because there isn’t enough of those to go around to everybody. I think it’s going to also depend on how serious you are about making a commitment. Now, these are things also you can do yourself, setting up your own social media calendar. And strategy doesn’t have to be hard. What I would recommend people do is actually think about the content pillars, and then develop those. So content pillars, Greg are the three to five areas in your wheelhouse that support your brand and your business. And those are the areas you’re going to only write about. So for somebody like me, it would be, let’s say, probably speaking, legal marketing, then another one would be LinkedIn, maybe another area would be more generally speaking social media. And then maybe a fourth one, I have a women who Wow Initiative, where I feature women in the legal industry and beyond. And they’re interesting backgrounds. So I’m not going to deviate on those actually, one more professional development. That’s like a casual and personal draining, I don’t deviate from those topics, you’re not going to see me write about the trucking industry. First of all, I knew nothing about the trucking industry. And second of all, it wouldn’t make sense for my brand. So lawyers could think about those five areas of for themselves. And then under there, there are sub areas. So maybe it’s then an Industry Focus. And then the tactic would be how to convey that information, whether you’re going to repurpose a webinar, or do a podcast, promote an event which he spoke, all those sorts of things. I think also the cadence of posting needs to be something you think about, you cannot expect to be successful on social media, if you show up every few months. You also do not need to post though every day. In fact, if you think your content might be lackluster, you want to post fewer days. So I would recommend that you post really good content like two to three days a week, and then maybe skip the other days. You don’t have to show up every day. In fact, you can be overexposed, but sometimes I actually worry about so sometimes I pull back. Also think about the time of day when you when you’re you know when you should pose that’s also really important, but it’s always good to get the feedback from a professional. There are a lot of resources out there. I don’t know that you have to hire somebody. You also should just make sure that if you work for an organization, you work for a law firm that you have the blessing of that law firm to host that content. Hate to be Debbie downer, but there are social media guidelines for every firm and And, of course, never talk about a deal or a matter before it’s public. And even then I would still exercise caution when it comes to that. So it’s a fine line. But you certainly could engage with a professional to do these things. But don’t ask the professionals who write your own posts, like people ask me to do that. And I don’t do that. I can’t write in your voice. You can only do that I can give you ideas. But the secret sauce each of us have is our experiences, our stories, our viewpoints, and you can give someone like an outline, but you can’t capture their spirit and essence. So yeah, some people might do it. I just don’t do that.
Greg Lambert 40:46
Yeah, well, your your comment on being careful to make sure that you’re following social media guidelines reminds me. And I think this may have been in the 90s, when we’re able to just start posting anything on the internet, it wasn’t necessarily social media. We joked back then that the number one rule for online content was don’t post anything stupid. So
Stefanie Marrone 41:12
I don’t know if you remember that example. But there was a remember when above the laws, message boards were super hot. And there were people would be posting things like there was someone on an A Sella, talking about like a law firm potential merger, a lawyer and somebody overheard in the seat behind them. And that was not good. And it was also an example of a lawyer who posted that she was in a hotel room, where the it was essentially Walmart’s headquarters. There are no other companies in that area. And it was pretty clear on what she was working. And she got in big trouble for doing that. So yeah, you know, I, even if you think your network is private, it’s not people can screenshot anything they want.
Greg Lambert 41:56
That’s for sure. So well, that gets us to the part of the show where we ask our guests the crystal ball question, and I’m super excited to ask you and hear what you have to say on this. So what do you see as a challenge, or a change for the legal market and social media, or just marketing altogether over the next three to five years?
Stefanie Marrone 42:22
Okay, three to five years is tricky. There are so many things I’m concerned about the rise of AI, I brought it up a little bit before I’m concerned about tools like chat GPT, and there are others. I think they can be incredibly useful when used the right way. But I also worry about these tools and taking away the heart of some of the posts. And I also worry about the ramifications of using some of these. Because if you type in something and I type in something, we could get very similar results, which will also be problematic if we’re turning it into a social media post or a blog post. So I don’t know that we fully understood the scope of this, and the ramifications. And I think lawyers are gonna have a lot of fun with this topic. I also think that we still need to shift to a more in person. mentality. I think that people have gotten a little bit lazy about going back to networking events, going back in person. And I don’t necessarily think we can do everything online. Like I love webinars, Greg, I love social media. But I don’t think there’s any substitution for in person networking. And I myself have to force myself to go to conferences, again, I’ve gotten so used to this new normal, I think webinars are here to stay and they should be, and they help us bring content to so many people we wouldn’t normally do guests to do otherwise. But I think we also need to make sure that we are going to conferences, we’re seeing our clients in person, like go on that site visit, go visit them at their offices, all of those things. Take them to that Yankees game or wherever, whatever sports scene you like, it’s really important to maintain. It’d be the rodeo here, the road, yeah, take them to the rodeo. All of those things are really important to manage and maintain relationships. And then I would say that any lawyer that doesn’t think or law firm that doesn’t think they need to be on social media is behind the times, like you may be in the enviable position of having tons of clients and that’s great for you. But you need to be top of mind and today’s generation of decision makers grew up with an iPhone in the bassinet, and they know how to my niece is four she knows how to Google everything. So you better believe that your client in their 20s and 30s. And by the way, also I’ll go as far to say baby boomers, who now know how to use everything with technology because their kids and their grandkids are so they’ve adapted as well. So you really need to adapt to technology and have a strong online presence. Because whether you like it or not everybody’s searching for us online. And everybody is looking at your LinkedIn profile, whether you’re on LinkedIn every day, or once a year, so you might as well make it work for you.
Greg Lambert 45:25
Well, Stefanie Marrone, thank you very much for coming in. Because this was just as enjoyable as I thought it was going to be. So thanks for coming in.
Stefanie Marrone 45:33
I’m so glad. Thank you so much, Greg. This was fun. And maybe when I come to Texas, you’ll take me to the rodeo.
Greg Lambert 45:39
Absolutely, absolutely. You get to come in March, though. Okay. So and of course, thanks to all of you for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review. If you enjoy the show, and I hope you do share it with a colleague posted on social media. We’d love that too. And we’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on and Marlene can be found on twitter at gay Bauer M And I can be reached @glambert on Twitter Stefanie, what about you? What’s the best place to for folks to seek find? You
Stefanie Marrone 46:07
know, I’m on LinkedIn just Stefanie Marrone and also Twitter. very creatively, @StefanieMarrone and Instagram @StefanieMarroneLegalMarketing, and then oh, my blog, Greg, the SocialMediaButterflyBlog.com.
Greg Lambert 46:22
All right, and you can reach out to us there or if you want to go old, old school, you can leave us a voicemail on our Deacon review Hotline at 713-487-7821 and as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you Jerry. And thanks once again Stefanie.
