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Marketing Tech: Business Intelligence Tools Get Personal
It's no secret that the legal profession is a bit slower than corporate America to adopt new technology offerings. This has been true of extranets, CRMs and most recently, listening platforms (sometimes called “listening tools” or “business intelligence tools”). As defined in a Forrester white paper from 2010, listening platforms are “technology and analytics infrastructures that mine and analyze social media (and other informational sources) to deliver insights essential to making informed marketing and business decisions.”
Stated in less white paper-like terms: Listening platforms allow users to monitor “buzz” about clients, competitors, and market/industry trends. The first listening platforms appeared in the corporate market as early as 2006.
The Challenge: Too Much Information
Listening platforms emerged in response to an obvious challenge ' too much information. Between online journals, corporate websites and the proliferation of new media sources (think blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), the task of monitoring the competitive landscape seemed insurmountable.
Savvy business development and marketing folks understood that sticking their collective heads in the sand did not comprise a business intelligence strategy. Those who could uncover and understand meaningful information would be in a better position to serve their clients, find new opportunities with prospective and existing customers, and help anticipate problems, trends, and opportunities in real time, or even before they actually materialize. Meaningful is the key word here.
Basic media aggregators ' think of a tool like Google Alerts ' scour the Internet for terms that are of interest to the user. These applications are very good at isolating those terms ' so good, in fact, that they might churn out scores of search results per day, each classified under different criteria (industry, client, etc.). As one competitive intelligence manager at a major firm told me recently, you can't expect an executive to wade through 500 pages of research each week. So some poor analyst (or several) is left to plod through the list of search results, hoping to find the information he really needs from the ocean of amorphous results the aggregator generated.
Solving the Problem
When law firm marketers and business development managers began exploring the listening platform concept ' circa 2010 ' there were some better options available for businesses with consumer-facing brands. These tools ' Nielsen Net Ratings and Radian6, for example ' were not well-suited for the very specific needs of the legal profession.
Several tools for law firms have emerged in the last few years. With these platforms, users can set up very detailed parameters about what clients, industries, and practice areas they want to follow. The applications automatically search tens of thousands of sources, ranging from legal and industry-specific news sources, mainstream media, trade journals, blogs, Twitter feeds and other new media.
The platforms then analyze and classify the results for relevance and deliver users a very personalized form of business intelligence ' the information they need, according to their role in the firm. I liken this trend toward more personalized information like what you see on consumer sites like Amazon or Netflix. When I visit these sites, they know who I am, and have identified areas of interest to me (legal technology, skiing, the Disney films my kids enjoy) based on my past activities; a form of profiling, of course. This is attractive to me as a user, as it reduces an increasingly unwieldy amount of information ' most of which I have no interest in ' to a much more targeted information set.
How Does It Work?
When listening platforms first emerged in the legal market, my job (as a purveyor of an entry in this category) was largely to explain the basic concept of this new product category. Most of the usage examples I had to share were drawn from the corporate world; my associates and I had an idea of how listening platforms would be applied in the law firm environment, but only very limited experiences from which to draw. Two years (and over 10,000 users) later, I have a well-documented sense of how listening platforms are being deployed by different stakeholders in the firm. For business development and marketing personnel, the tool has many applications:
1. Gain an understanding of your clients' business
. A constant refrain among corporate counsel is, “We're not sure how well our outside counsel understands the minutiae of our business.” Making the effort to understand the client's business strikes an emotional chord; it's about caring, and ultimately, about gaining trust. The listening platform's client monitoring capabilities are among its most powerful applications. The better platforms perform an excellent job of eliminating less salient data points; one analyst found that a legal-specific listening platform had a 50% higher “relevance” rate than a general news aggregator.
Listening platforms also compile information in one place. Users don't have to conduct a number of searches and then patch the information together. Information is sorted according to client or industry group ' or however you want it sorted. And, it includes new/social media as well as more conventional information sites. One finance practice group at a large Washington, DC, firm learned through its listening platform that a leading investment bank was looking to buy out smaller competitors, and they immediately alerted their client, a mid-sized investment bank, about the potential to be acquired. The smaller bank didn't end up being bought, but the lawyers impressed their client by knowing the latest developments in the market.
2. Uncover new business opportunities
. Listening platforms can identify online “whispers” that can generate new engagements, both with existing clients and prospects. Several clients have shared stories of engagements that their listening platform has helped them land. In one, the platform revealed a mention of one of the firm's client's product lines on a plaintiff firm's website. It was pretty obvious that the plaintiffs were preparing for a class action involving the client. The client firm was engaged to defend against the suit. In another instance, a firm found a rumor of one of its clients pursuing an acquisition of another company. One of the firm's partners shared the intelligence with the client, and the client was so impressed that it accepted the firm's offer to advise it on the transaction.
3. Find fodder for blogs and other marketing communiqu's
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