Case Study: Foley Hoag's Social Media Marketing Distinguishes a Hot Practice

Old-media marketing, such as sending out long client alerts, would no longer work. Trillos-Decarie and Business Development Manager Nikki Stevens knew that these clients receive information by monitoring Social Media as part of their own reputation management. It was time for the firm, which has locations in Boston, Washington, DC, and Paris, to leverage 21st-century marketing for this practice.

It succeeded. Not only did the firm's integrated social media marketing campaign distinguish the Corporate Responsibility Practice, it also led to invitations to pitch for legal work from two Fortune 100 companies that familiarized themselves with the practice through the firm's CSR blog.

Social Media Marketing Gets Results

Social media has come a long way to enter the mainstream from its frothy days in the beginning.
LinkedIn launched in 2003, Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006. Today, Facebook reaches 845 million users ' almost triple the population of the USA. LinkedIn has profiles of 150 million business people, and Twitter has 100 million users.

In the new world order, modern marketers like Trillos-Decarie know that legal sales come through relationships, and that social media helps lawyers create and accelerate relationships. “Firms have generated revenue from integrated social media strategies ' most commonly through blogs that are integrated with other social media,” she said.

A new survey by LexisNexis and media agency Vizibility reports that 81% of law firms surveyed used social media in their marketing. See http://bit.ly/x1gmc0 on the Martindale Blog for details. Firms of all sizes said that social media was “extremely” or “somewhat” important in their marketing strategies. Of all the choices online, marketing with blogging, Twitter and LinkedIn are the most widely used, according to the survey report. Like the Colt 45 was the “great equalizer” in 1875, social media has leveled the playing field in legal marketing in 2012.

Building Out a Campaign

Trillos-Decarie turned to senior associate Sara A. Altschuller, lead author of the firm's new blog, Corporate Social Responsibility and the Law, at www.csrandthelaw.com, one of the firm's six blogs. “Sara gets social media and understands corporate social responsibility. She's our voice in social media for CSR,” Trillos-Decarie said. Altschuller wrote entries about the UN's water access resolution, human medical experimentation in Nigeria, and a journalist detained in Iran. She and Partner Gare A. Smith were joined by associate Amy K. Lehr and senior adviser John G. Ruggie to form a team that regularly updates the blog. Most other blogs on the topic are published by media outlets such as Forbes, non-governmental organizations and universities.

The readership grew to an impressive 3,000 unique visitors per month plus more than 1,400 downloads of PDF documents. “The blog helps us define our practice in the marketplace and lets those searching for specific issues to find us,” Stevens says. “The nature of this practice is that it has to stay ahead of new-to-world problems.”

Meanwhile, before the blog launched, Foley Hoag had its Twitter, advertising and public relations strategy combined together to get as big a splash as possible.

• When Altschuller writes a post, she tweets about it with the handle @Saltschuller, which has 910 followers. Trillos-Decarie follows up with tweets with the firm handle @FoleyHoag, which has 545 followers.
• The blog entries were distributed further via the JDSupra.com website and its connected social media accounts.
• These entries automatically feed into the firm's LinkedIn and Facebook profiles.
• Foley Hoag also posts on the new social network, Google+. “The Google+ technology may be the wave of the future for regulated professional services businesses, like law firms, using social media,” Trillos-Decarie said. “It allows companies and individuals to group contacts separately and easily so they can better control who sees which content.”

The firm worked with Ty Francis, publisher of Corporate Secretary magazine, to prepare an integrated advertising strategy through both print and online versions of IR [Investor Relations] Magazine and Corporate Secretary. The advertising campaign was also supplemented with a targeted speaking engagement at an Investor Relations conference, and multiple articles. The blog was also promoted on the Foley Hoag website.

The combined effect was to reach tens of thousands of people across multiple channels. A check of the blog's traffic showed that visitors were finding it from the firm website, Google, online advertising,
Facebook and Twitter.

“For this particular practice group, it's been a success. We received significant business opportunities that would have been much harder to get, if we would have gotten them at all,” Trillos-Decarie said. “Getting opportunities to pitch is the whole purpose of being a business developer. We use social media because it's a relationship accelerator.” As social media consultant Peter Shankman, who works with Foley Hoag, states, “No managing partner will approve time and money on social media because it's 'cool.' They will approve it because it generates revenue.”

Larry Bodine, a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors, is Editor in Chief of Lawyers.com. E-mail: [email protected].

Foley Hoag's Corporate Responsibility Practice helps international companies manage their risk, enhance their reputation and develop policies to respect human rights in remote reaches of the world. However, innovative marketing was needed to make the practice stand out from consulting firms with similar practices. They needed to educate the clients as to why a law firm is best suited to handle this type of work.

Attracting clients was not a problem. The 250-lawyer firm advised BP on human rights, security practices, and rule of law issues regarding its BTC oil pipeline project, which cuts through 1,100 miles in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. Foley Hoag also advised fashion house Polo Ralph Lauren on its global human-rights compliance program, making sure it complied with international norms. In addition, the law firm analyzed the corporate responsibility codes of 100 multi-national companies on behalf of the World Bank Group.

“We needed to raise the practice group's profile,” said the firm's hyperkinetic Director of Marketing and Business Development, Jasmine Trillos-Decarie (pronounced TREE-ohs DECK-aree). “We are competing against many major consulting firms ' some of [which] can do portions of this work cheaper, but do not bring the high-level experience that Foley can provide. There are many advantages to having a law firm provide holistic advice, protect some issues under privilege, and write airtight policies. We had to get the message across that it's important to have a law firm handle this.”

Old-media marketing, such as sending out long client alerts, would no longer work. Trillos-Decarie and Business Development Manager Nikki Stevens knew that these clients receive information by monitoring Social Media as part of their own reputation management. It was time for the firm, which has locations in Boston, Washington, DC, and Paris, to leverage 21st-century marketing for this practice.

It succeeded. Not only did the firm's integrated social media marketing campaign distinguish the Corporate Responsibility Practice, it also led to invitations to pitch for legal work from two Fortune 100 companies that familiarized themselves with the practice through the firm's CSR blog.

Social Media Marketing Gets Results

Social media has come a long way to enter the mainstream from its frothy days in the beginning.
LinkedIn launched in 2003, Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006. Today, Facebook reaches 845 million users ' almost triple the population of the USA. LinkedIn has profiles of 150 million business people, and Twitter has 100 million users.

In the new world order, modern marketers like Trillos-Decarie know that legal sales come through relationships, and that social media helps lawyers create and accelerate relationships. “Firms have generated revenue from integrated social media strategies ' most commonly through blogs that are integrated with other social media,” she said.

A new survey by LexisNexis and media agency Vizibility reports that 81% of law firms surveyed used social media in their marketing. See http://bit.ly/x1gmc0 on the Martindale Blog for details. Firms of all sizes said that social media was “extremely” or “somewhat” important in their marketing strategies. Of all the choices online, marketing with blogging, Twitter and LinkedIn are the most widely used, according to the survey report. Like the Colt 45 was the “great equalizer” in 1875, social media has leveled the playing field in legal marketing in 2012.

Building Out a Campaign

Trillos-Decarie turned to senior associate Sara A. Altschuller, lead author of the firm's new blog, Corporate Social Responsibility and the Law, at www.csrandthelaw.com, one of the firm's six blogs. “Sara gets social media and understands corporate social responsibility. She's our voice in social media for CSR,” Trillos-Decarie said. Altschuller wrote entries about the UN's water access resolution, human medical experimentation in Nigeria, and a journalist detained in Iran. She and Partner Gare A. Smith were joined by associate Amy K. Lehr and senior adviser John G. Ruggie to form a team that regularly updates the blog. Most other blogs on the topic are published by media outlets such as Forbes, non-governmental organizations and universities.

The readership grew to an impressive 3,000 unique visitors per month plus more than 1,400 downloads of PDF documents. “The blog helps us define our practice in the marketplace and lets those searching for specific issues to find us,” Stevens says. “The nature of this practice is that it has to stay ahead of new-to-world problems.”

Meanwhile, before the blog launched, Foley Hoag had its Twitter, advertising and public relations strategy combined together to get as big a splash as possible.

• When Altschuller writes a post, she tweets about it with the handle @Saltschuller, which has 910 followers. Trillos-Decarie follows up with tweets with the firm handle @FoleyHoag, which has 545 followers.
• The blog entries were distributed further via the JDSupra.com website and its connected social media accounts.
• These entries automatically feed into the firm's LinkedIn and Facebook profiles.
• Foley Hoag also posts on the new social network, Google+. “The Google+ technology may be the wave of the future for regulated professional services businesses, like law firms, using social media,” Trillos-Decarie said. “It allows companies and individuals to group contacts separately and easily so they can better control who sees which content.”

The firm worked with Ty Francis, publisher of Corporate Secretary magazine, to prepare an integrated advertising strategy through both print and online versions of IR [Investor Relations] Magazine and Corporate Secretary. The advertising campaign was also supplemented with a targeted speaking engagement at an Investor Relations conference, and multiple articles. The blog was also promoted on the Foley Hoag website.

The combined effect was to reach tens of thousands of people across multiple channels. A check of the blog's traffic showed that visitors were finding it from the firm website, Google, online advertising,
Facebook and Twitter.

“For this particular practice group, it's been a success. We received significant business opportunities that would have been much harder to get, if we would have gotten them at all,” Trillos-Decarie said. “Getting opportunities to pitch is the whole purpose of being a business developer. We use social media because it's a relationship accelerator.” As social media consultant Peter Shankman, who works with Foley Hoag, states, “No managing partner will approve time and money on social media because it's 'cool.' They will approve it because it generates revenue.”

Larry Bodine, a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors, is Editor in Chief of Lawyers.com. E-mail: [email protected].