No longer is the corporate bio acceptable. Business is personal. Since the rise of social media, marketing has shifted from capturing the attention of as many people as possible to engaging customers and having meaningful conversations with them. Take a look at 90% of accounting or law firms, and you’ll see that they have not embraced this concept.
They acknowledge that these platforms exist, that their clients use it and may even have these web 2.0 profiles setup for themselves but fail to actively use social media as a tool to make connections, obtain relevant information, get more clients and improve on personal and firm branding. The most common excuse for these professionals is they simply do not have the time managing the profiles. They should consider this time as PR/marketing time . The great thing about social media for lawyers/accountants is that social media gives them the opportunity to create more connections faster than has ever been possible before. Any lawyer/accountant will tell you that the clients that they make are based on the number of personal connections they have. So if the number of clients is equal to a fraction times the number of connections made, why are these professionals so hesitant to start making connections?
A big concern has to do with the firms being afraid of the idea of their lawyers/accountants getting a bad reputation when some of their clients say negative comments on these profiles. If they are providing a good service, then the positive will outweigh the negative everytime. The transparency aspect of a firm using social media will be recognized by the potential client and will be appreciated. Conversations about a company are always been talked about, here is your chance to engage people talking about your company. If these firms don’t do this, these customers or potential customers will be left unengaged, so less feedback, less networking, less marketing and less branding.
Businesses that are afraid of social media marketing, will begin to lose market share to companies establishing themselves at the forefront. Hundreds of millions of people are actively contributing to social media websites and the companies that are recognizing the potential of this, will be the ones most relevant as they will be the ones with the best products/services because they are conversating with the customer and are able to have a product/service with the customer in mind. The pros of social media as a marketing tool outweigh the cons heavily, so lawyers and accountants should wake up and stop looking at social media as threat but rather as an opportunity for low cost marketing, higher visibility and a chance to become transparent.
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