Morris Lilienthal practices at the law firm of Martinson and Beason, P.C. in Alabama. Morris also hosts The Mo Show Live, a Facebook Live event that features interviews with prominent community members of Huntsville and Alabama. Morris is also a co-author of The Ultimate Guide to Social Media For Business Owners, Professionals and Entrepreneurs book.
Today we share his presentation, “Small Firm Social Media Successes” from MaxLawCon 2018.
Listen here: https://maximumlawyer.com/podcast/
Watch here: https://youtu.be/9CMzILaw7fE
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Transcript: “Small Firm Social Media Successes” with Morris Lilienthal
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.
Unknown Speaker
In today’s episode, we’re throwing it back to a presentation from Max law con 2018. Our presenter Morris Lilienthal is a personal injury lawyer based out of Huntsville, Indiana. Morris teaches us about small firms social media successes, let’s get to it.
Jim Hacking
Morris Lilienthal, aka MO You may have seen him on tips from mo or on his Facebook Live show Morris is the son of a judicial system for district court judge he grew up around the courthouse and quickly developed a passion for the wall. He’s a 2003 grad of Cumberland School of Law. While there he was president of the Cumberland College Democrats and was on the moot court board. He attended Maryville College in Tennessee, where he played offensive tackle on the football team. Mo is very, very kind and very generous with the information that he gives to his clients. He spends a lot of time working with the March of Dimes, he I think he’s gonna talk a little bit about that. He’s also like Mitch, a Rotarian. And he does a lot of community service. He’s a great role model for all of us. So we’re really glad to have Moe thanks, MO.
Unknown Speaker
One of the things that social media allows you to do is to stay top of mind. And so we’re going to talk about how do you do that? And how do you go along, and I want to give you some of the philosophies first, behind it. So I think one of the things you have to keep in mind is that consumers don’t trust companies, right? And then, not only are we companies, but we’re lawyers. The lawyer jokes are out there for a reason, because there’s a lack of consumer confidence. So the counts already Oh, and two, right? It’s Oh, and two against us. And I’ve got that baseball analogy going on for the game here in a little bit. But what can we do? How do you reverse that trend? How can you come out and get people to connect to your law firm, get people to connect to you? Well, what do consumers trust? They trust people. So a lot of times, you’ll hear people talk, and you’ll talk to lawyers. And you’ll ask them, what’s your most valuable asset. And we just heard Seth talking about reviews, your most valuable asset really is your reputation. And that’s what you’re doing online is building your reputation. And then I was talking, I was talking with Tyson last night and talking with some other lawyers. And and I think you probably would all hear about this. A lot of times, I’ll ask lawyers. Well, where does your business come from? How do you get business? And people tell me? Well, referrals are a really large source of my business, maybe referrals from other former clients, people in the community, or referrals from other lawyers? Why are people referring you business? Why are they doing it? They’re referring you business because they know you, they like you. Maybe you connected with him at the ballpark. And your son’s on the same baseball team. Maybe they’ve seen they’ve worked with you and they know you do good results, maybe they know that you give back to the community, maybe they have experienced that you always return calls within 24 hours. So they you are connecting to that person. That’s why people are connecting with you. And so social media didn’t change that folks, social media can amplify that. Think about if you can build referrals and things in your local community by doing this, imagine what you can do on a grand scale. That’s what Mitch has done. And a lot other people in this group are doing the same thing. And that’s what I’m trying to do. But I’ve got to you know, we got to start somewhere, we got to go from that couch to that 5k. Right. So we’re gonna, we’re gonna get there. And the other thing I would mention that I think was Seth was kind of hinting at with the reviews is that if you’re not building your reputation online, and if you’re not monitoring your reputation online, it’s going to be built for you anyway, you’re gonna get these negative reviews, there’s going to be people chatting online about this. You saw Joey had some great comments for people that were in his tribe talking about, hey, this is my this is my guy, call him he’s a human. He does great work. Second, third, fourth, what’s going to be the response is his people have had experiences or bad experiences or you’re not returning phone calls, you’re not out there and actively engaged. They’re going to be don’t call this guy I had a bad experience I tried to call. So you’ve got to maintain your reputation online, or it’s going to be maintained for you. So how do we do this? Right. So we’ve heard some of this already today. And I think it’s really important. I’m a big believer in this and I bought in on this. And we talked about that. Consumers don’t trust companies, they trust people. So I think you have to humanize yourself. I think you have to humanize your firm. Think about the people in your firm. Got to let your audience on social media and in general, your even your current clients, they need to be able to relate to the people in your firm. What interest does your client have that maybe that your firm has an interest in, or the members of your firm have an interest stem. So what we try to do is to try to humanize yourself what things do you support that your community might want to support or what they already support that you can make a relationship or a connection to them? And so take a look at this, right? So we’ve got the classic, you know, blue collar shirt that you get coming, I guess, out of law school, and the you’ve got some great curtains there. And he’s evidently really successful, because he’s up in a high rise in do people relate to that picture? Right? Do they relate to that picture? Do they relate to the other picture of somebody that says, hey, I’m a parent, too. And boy, I get the low battery all the time, I’m out at the ball field, I’m out doing this, I’m out doing that. I’m running around 24/7, like a chicken with my head cut off. And I can’t get enough done. And my battery’s always on 5%. And a lot of times, it’s on 5%, because your kid has your cell phone. But that is something that that I try to do that I’m a big believer in and that I see a lot of people in this group doing as humanizing yourself, connecting with people, getting people to know you on a personal level. And we’ll talk a little bit more about how that transitions into helping you grow your social media presence. So tell that personal story, talk about what you’re passionate about, I will guarantee you that almost everybody in this room has charities and thanks, if they support it, their firm, that you go out, and you do whether you’re supporting a little league teams, whether you’re supporting a soup kitchen, in your area, whether you’re supporting other nonprofits, maybe a lot of great firms, and you’re doing scholarship programs, maybe you’re doing bikes and helmets, programs, things in your community that you support. But are you spreading that message? Are you telling your audience about your passions and your things? So Mitch talked about this, and this is talking about what your why is, and I think, you know, this is personal to you, this is personal to your firm. But you need to you need to express that why and connect with that audience. Because I think what you’re going to find out is when you do that those people are going to connect with you on that humanistic level. And then they are going to get to know you, they’re going to get to like you and then ultimately, they’re going to trust you. They’re going to trust your firm. They’ve trusted you. Now, you notice when people were tagging Joey, they weren’t tagging in the law. They were tagging Joey personally, that’s because they’ve gotten to know Joey. So let me show you how I’ve done this. That’s my Wah. And, uh, pardon me if I get emotional. But this is my family’s March of Dimes team. And it’s something that we’ve done for our sixth year. And it’s very passionate to me. But it’s been so exciting. And once it one of the things that really allowed it to jump start and really take off like the last two, three years with wildfire was because I shared it on social media, and I’ve taken off of social media, I’ve gone through it personally with social media, and then having my firm amplify it through our channels on our firm’s law firm page. So I want to talk a little bit about how you can do that, and give you some examples of doing that. Because it doesn’t have to be the March of Dimes, again, any of these things that you’re passionate about, find it and connect with that audience and connect not only with that audience, but allow that audience to connect with your audience. So this is my son Wyatt. And so one of the things that we did was, we, you know, try to come up with clever ways to show our why and to spread that message, right. So again, you know, a lot of us in here are wearing different hats. I’m a trial lawyer, marketing director, taking the trash out, if I need to doing whatever it is at the firm that needs to get done, what you’re gonna notice about some of these things that I’m showing you, these are not complex things to do. And I can assure you, they’re not costly things to do, there’s a lot of that you can do. And if you’ve got the resources to do it, that’s phenomenal. But I want to talk to you about doing it from a small, firm perspective. Let me show you this video real quick. And then I’ll talk to you about it. But anyway, so what what you would have seen there that is a 62nd video of nothing but some flip cards that my son that we put together for my son to flip over. That told the story of my martyrdom team in less than 60 seconds. We had some audio added to it. That video was seen well over 4000 times dozens of comments shares at the national, local state, March of Dimes, we’re sharing it out to other organizations sharing it out. But aside from my son doing it in the first shoot, I was fully expecting to do that in like 15 shoots, we did it the very first time, right, which is very rare. But I shot that with my iPhone. I didn’t I didn’t bring fancy equipment or do anything like that. If again, if you got it and you got the resources, that’s phenomenal. But I shot it with my iPhone. And then we just added a little bit of music to it, and it helps amplify our message. So that’s the story behind Team. Well, we’ve had a just an awesome, awesome, awesome time with it and sharing in doing and I’m going to tell you in a minute why it’s so important. So why do I share this and why the hell do I have a picture of Robin leach up here? Right because I think people think a lot of times a lot Have our clients think we’re up in an ivory tower, that we don’t bad things don’t happen to us that everything is champagne wishes and caviar dreams. That’s the robbing, which, but we’re not bad things happen to us. We have Murphy’s Law happened to us every day. And I think when you humanize yourself, or you find that cause that you connect to, and you do that, I think you relate to your clients. And so we’re real people, people with interest, people with hobbies. So we’ve got a lot of people in this room that have really cool hobbies or things that they’re very passionate about, whether it’s running, it’s nutrition, whether it is anything that you have a passion about, there’s going to be a lot of times of community for that, right? So connect with that community, share your story in doing that. humanize yourself, take people in your firm that maybe they have a cause and connect with that community through the other members of your firm. So I think it’s something that if you’ll just take a few minutes, and really spend some time thinking about what your WHY IS, and there may be a couple of things that you know, you can support and do. So what do we do? So there’s just some practical stuff because I want to kind of give you some ideas of what you can do when you start thinking about how you can implement this into your into your at your office. So we we have a website, but it’s not a it’s not a full website. It’s a web page. It’s a page on the Martinson and decent website. And so that’s just a redirect. But when we have the state and other state, March of Dimes team sharing our content, and it’s linking back to the Martin and Bayesian page on on the team will say we have 1000s of views on that website. So people are coming on to read about our story. And then when they get on to my law firms website, Hey, these are this is a lawyer doing this. This is not some you know, just you know, other nonprofit or somebody the March of Dimes website that’s doing this. And so we do fun graphics like this, and this is about two years ago, and I got a couple of nasty messages that I would have there. I put my five year old in a 10 foot basketball goal, but we did not that was Photoshop. So we try to have fun with it. You know, we act we have an active Facebook page where we share information and share stuff out. And then we’ll drive some traffic back to the Martinson and Beason page that the team will page, but have fun with it come up with interesting things that you can do to engage that audience. And again, folks, this is a sixth grader, my wife’s class can do this for you, if you can’t do it. I mean, this, I’m not talking about high end stuff. There’s just ways to engage. So now you’re sitting there thinking yourself, Well, Greg, he’s a nice guy, bad thing happened to him. He’s raising some money. That’s nice. But what the hell’s that doing for his firm? What’s it doing for him? So let’s talk about that for a minute. So in the last several years, I’ve made a tremendous amount of connections to using my why and social media to connect with influencers in various parts of the state and really around the country. I just had a conversation with the National March of Dimes about having one of their people on my show coming up saying, and it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t done this. I’m gonna I’m getting asked to go speak at a lot of things. During the basically the March of Dimes. big fundraiser time is from January to April, when the when the walks up walk is in our area. I was asked I’ve been asked to speak at a lot of a kickoff meeting for a lot of the corporate events. So I was asked to speak to all the partners of all the managers of the Publix and district managers for Publix grocery stores in North Alabama and South Tennessee. And so they bring me on as the face of the March of Dimes to speak and tell about my story. But now these people are following me on social media. In fact, I posted a picture the other week, when I was speaking at the Publix kickoff meeting and a tag national Publix and tag some other people in some of the platforms. I had somebody that that for some reason follows Publix, but reached out to me to want to make a donation. And I said, Well, here’s the national pages you can do. And if you’re willing, you can make a donation to my page. And she made a donation to my page. Now this person is continually following me on social and making routine comments. That all came out from a post there that I was doing. I’ve made a couple of really good radio connections, people who are radio DJs that have a really big following in our market. They support the March of Dimes. I’ve been on their show five or six times. And in fact, I got to know these guys so well that they have been on my Facebook Live show and were hilarious. And one of the guys was the roving reporter for the Jay Leno Show for two years. So pretty cool guy, and I’ve gotten some business out of that through their through their network. And this is another cool thing and this kind of goes back to some of the things that we were talking about with reporters. So I’ve been able to get asked to be on the noon television show in the morning show several times talk about the March of Dimes and our efforts and so what that’s done it’s allowed me to connect with those reporters and do and was in there, made a new connection with a new reporter and had a great interview and I left and I think Joey hit on this with Bom Bom. I sent the reporter a bom bom email. So thank you so much for taking time out of the noon for the new show to have marchador John, I really appreciate you allowing me to come be an advocate for that. Well, she was blown away by the video email, she thought that was pretty cool, she said, But then she came out to her house. And that’s a picture from the interview. And she did like a 10 minute piece on my wife and I in New York Times. But now what I’ve done is now I’ve made a real human to human connection with this reporter. So now, when we had some scandals going on with our governor, we’ve always got scandals going on in Alabama, we had written a blog post kind of trying to news Jack, what would happen with the election? And what if he was removed from office and certain things were going on? And so I sent her an email, and I said, Hey, just wanted to reach out to you, we just did a story on a news blog on this, we thought this was really a lot of people are gonna be asking questions about it. So it was a trusted source for her. She said, um, this is fantastic. I’m going to share this with the newsroom. And we’re going to reach out to you about having comments on it. So that’s how I’m making an interning some of the personal things that I’m doing the right thing to do for the right reasons. But how taking that social media and then growing and growing my influence and growing connections within my community.
Unknown Speaker
Right. But I want to share that there are a lot of other folks in this group that are doing great things and give you some examples with it. So Bernards, a good friend of mine, and Bernard and his brother have a really good heart. And they do a lot of great things in their community. So they work with nonprofit to give back in their area to do food donations. And what they do is they go out, and they’ll, they’ll take videos, and tag that group, and ask people that if they’re willing to be on camera to talk about what they’re doing, and how they’re giving back. So they’re connecting with that audience. And then that audience is now going to share their message. So if people in connected with that need a lawyer, who do you think they’re going to call, they’re going to call up an arts firm. And another idea, another example of a way of showing your wife or your interest or your passions, maybe not necessarily nonprofit related, but a great way of doing it is what guy does, guy has a passion for nutrition and health. And so guy has gone out and he’ll do videos, speaking to certain issues, two to three minute videos addressing health and issues. And in this when he’s talking about the dangers of artificial sweeteners, and he is connecting the people that have a passion for that, and those people are going to follow Him and stay in touch with him. So you know, in short, embrace your wise, you know, share your passions on social media, and you’ll connect with people. And then you take those consumers who don’t trust companies and don’t trust lawyers, and they’re going to trust you, as a person. Have fun with it. They might expect here, you know, if you met Mike in a back alley, he might be pretty intimidating with the bald head and the rockin beard. But he has so much fun with it. And I just met Mike for the first time in person last night, but I knew I was gonna like him and enjoy him because of his post. Right? I mean, how awesome is these flowers in the beard, in anybody that’s rockin Tupac socks is a friend of mine. So those are awesome. And so have fun with it. And this is a cool picture. He’s, I think, a selfie after a trial victory that I thought was really cool. And so I have fun with it. And I do these weekend work shirts. And so give you a little story behind that I have quirky shirts, I’m not a quirky sock guy. I’m a quirky shirt guy. So I just noticed that on Saturday mornings, I get to the office really early to do some work. And I have all these cool shirts on. And I think it may let me share this with with with my social following, right. And so it’s so fun people get involved in it and really take off with it. But I’ll tell you what it has is there’s a real undertone for this. So if you think a little bit deeper about what you’re doing with some of your posts, you can have some really cool undertones. So I’ll give you what the undertone with this one was. So I had somebody reach out to me about eight months ago to ask me to be on a state board. very flattered that they would ask me to be on this nonprofit board. But I’ve kind of gotten to the point where I’m so busy that if it’s not hell yes to tell. So I don’t have time I can’t add anything else. I’ve already committed to doing stuff. And so I was trying to nicely tell this guy hey, look, thank you so much. I’m so appreciative of you doing this and doing it but I’ve got so much going on. He says, Oh man, I see your weekend work shirts at the office at 5am. On Saturdays. I know you’re busy. Right? But that undertone of me being fun, being creative with the shirts call me big papa, that, you know, people are actually resonating with people. And then there’s that legal connection because I’m tagging I’m checking in, in my law office when I’m putting these out. Let’s talk a little bit more maybe even specific about law firms stuff, you know what you can do? You know, what I would say is think about your unique competitive advantages. Your UCaaS, right. What are the things that separate you as either solo practitioner or small law firm that you can highlight on social media? Maybe they always meet with a partner, maybe they maybe they always meet in initial interview with least a lawyer. Maybe they’re not getting signed up by an investigator like some of the large firms do. One of the things that we are very passionate about our firm is getting Google reviews. We have I think about 140 445 reviews right now. And people are telling us that they’re calling us because Have these reviews. And so we’ll share out if we get a nice review. Find a day of the week, if you’re going to do like a content calendar and put out the reviews on that day, share it out. People are really appreciative of understanding that you’re doing a good job. And they want to give you feedback if you’re getting positive reviews and feedback. Some other things that we have done that I’ve found success that I think I mentioned on the podcast episode that I was on, was we’ve had some good traction with some contests on social media. So in Alabama, there’s only one thing and that’s football, and it’s Alabama, Auburn football. And right now Alabama’s King, sorry, John. But it is and so what we decided to do was we were going to do a Facebook contest giveaway, we were going to give away some Alabama football tickets. And we weren’t even given tickets away to the Arabel. Folks, we were given tickets away to like Fresno State. But people are so passionate about this. So what we did is we created a landing page, we did a graphic for social media. And then we did a targeted audience on Facebook to give the tickets away. And it just caught wildfire. And we ended up with the landing page would ask for their name and contact information and said that they were agreeing to be solicited or get follow up email campaign stuff. We got over 1100 email addresses. I mean, it was pretty powerful. And then thanks to John Fisher, I was sharing with them in the legal match group how successful we were doing with the campaign as it was going on. And John made a great suggestion was one, let’s capitalize on that, right? How are you going to give the tickets away, rather than just announcing it. So what we decided to do then was I went on Amazon bought a drawing drum. And we turned this into the church bingo. And we we cut up all these 1100 Plus entries, we promoted that we were gonna go live at a certain time. And then we went live, and we put all the dirt tickets in there, and we’re drawing the drum and all we needed was a gray haired lady to pull them out. And so we drew it out and did it. And it just went over very, very successful. And it was very inexpensive. We had a little bit in the promoted ad on Facebook to target people in Alabama that had an interest in college football. And then the tickets and these weren’t, we weren’t given away high end tickets. And again, they were to to a cheap game. But those are just some things that we’ve done, that I think you could try to implement in your firm to have some success on social media. So the other main thing I want to talk to you about is video. Now, a year and a half ago, this would have scared the hell out of me. And my mug is not one for video, I don’t know that I’ve even got a voice for radio. But you know, I was prompted in product, hey, no, you need to start doing and thinking about doing video. I don’t know about that. I don’t have the technical know how I don’t have the resources and doing. And so finally, I just decided, You know what I’m gonna do it. And let me let me see what I can do with it. And what I think you’ll find out is that it allows you to connect with your audience in a way that maybe just a Facebook post with a steel picture, or a blog post won’t let you do. And so we’ll talk to you about how you can do that. And what’s been successful for me, you know, one of the traditional things that you can do, and that Jim is going to talk about and some other people have talked about already, is you can shoot q&a videos, you can do firm overview videos, but are does a great job of as he’s got questions, videos that he maybe gets from his current clients, and he’ll has a database of them and he will actually forward his client an answer to his question, their question with a video, I think it’s great. So you can do all those kinds of traditional things in it. Even if it may not be for an SEO purpose. It may be for a client experience purpose, then you can take those videos and you can share them out on social media. And a Mitch mentioned this. But I know that when I was on the podcast, I noticed that every 30 days or so I kept getting tagged on Twitter, about the podcast re airing. And I know it was what Jim had done was to set it up on Meet Edgar and share it out. And these are all really easy to do things. You don’t need a marketing guru to do this if you got one. Rock on, but I don’t. So share meaningful content. Share your your why in your videos, you know, I kind of subscribe and people, you know, have their own opinion about this. But in the videos that I do, I kind of do the 8020 rule. And typically, only about 20% of the time am I talking about the law. I just have got a feeling that if I’m on there talking about interact, need to check or legal things constantly, I’m going to tune out almost everybody in my audience. Nobody’s gonna give a rat about what I’m talking about. So about 80% of the time I’m giving a life hack. Maybe I found an app that was cool. That was helpful for me. Maybe I’m giving a motivational tip and do but I have started doing this and it’s been really successful for me. And you can do this things that you’re doing with your kids. You can shoot videos, be you know impromptu about it. I did one yesterday at the airport. They were doing an honor flight yesterday. Never seen that World War Two veteran to Vietnam veterans were being flown into Baltimore. Don’t ask me why we flew to Baltimore to come to St. Louis from Alabama. But we did. And so, but outside, you know, this is a cool experience. I’ve never, you know, experienced this, but I think a lot of people in social media following would really like to see what, what it looks like to see all these people getting off the plane and people waving flags and doing so I just jumped on Facebook Live and did it. But you can also be thoughtful about it. But this one dB, an example. This is one from about a month ago. And what I did was when things come up at the office, and you hear a lot of people tell you about how do you come up with FAQs, just start writing down questions that you get all the time, or thanks or have your staff do it. I think that’s great. That’s how sometimes I come up with my tips. And I had a client, and we were talking about coverages, and she didn’t know what coverage she had or didn’t have. And so that’s where a tip came from. And this is more of a legal related, but it’s almost somewhat consumer related to talking about your deck page, reviewing your declaration page, knowing what coverages you have, and what you don’t have, and knowing it on the front end before it’s too late. Right. And so that was something that I did. And so what I do, I’ll take my phone, and I’ll just turn the sucker around just like this, there’s nothing fancy to it, and I shoot that video. And it’s usually 60 seconds or less, just because I don’t think people have a big attention span for much longer than that. And I’ve done some with a little application called clip ematic. And I think there are a couple others out there, that will actually put the captioning on it. And so it’ll do the captioning. And then you can go in real quick and edit it and do so that way, if somebody’s sitting around, flipping through Facebook or Instagram or somewhere, and they’re in a position like right now, if you’re paying attention on your phone, you couldn’t hear my my tip, if you’re not paying attention to me now, but you might get read my captioning. So just think about it. And I just call it my hashtags tips for Mo. And I’ve done this, I’ve probably got a couple 100 out there so far in the last year or so. But you know what I tried to do you need, I thought it would be if it’ll play, I thought I would show you one. And I thought this one was very appropriate for today’s conference, because it certainly applies to me in today’s conference. Who do you surround yourself with? Think about that for a minute. When you’re working in networking with others, you don’t want to be the smartest person in the room. You want to grow by having other share ideas and foster things that maybe you haven’t thought of, or it’s not in your wheelhouse. So that’s what I’m doing this week. Here. It’s the end of the week here, Thursday and Friday, I’m at a legal conference surrounded by lawyers from all over the country, to help me learn and grow to better serve my clients, and to become a better lawyer, and a better businessman and a better boss. So think about who you surround yourself with. You want to surround yourself with others who can help you grow in a personal and professional setting. That’s your tip promoted a tackle today, everybody that one was I was at a at another marketing conference. And I was talking about, you don’t want to be the smartest person in the room, who do you surround yourself with. And I thought it was very appropriate for the position the conference that I was at. And it was it was applicable to that. So that’s what I did. And that’s, you know, it’s not hard. It’s really not, you know, just get used to it. Take a little bit of time, once you get 10 or 20 into it, I think you’ll find that it’s pretty easy to do. And then basically what I do is and I just natively upload those up to each social media platform. I may change the intro some here and there. But those videos get a lot of traction. And I mean, I’ve really been blown away that I’ve been out in the community and people will talk to me and say, you know, either lightheartedly give me a hard time about it, which means I know they’re watching, or people telling me that they enjoy them. I had someone that I went to college with, I don’t need to be honest, I didn’t even remember her. She was on the soccer team. I was on the football team. So we would pass cross paths in the training room. And then she messaged me and said, I’m loving your tips from my husband and I sat down the other night and watched a whole bunch of who the hell would think they’d want to sit down and do that. But they did. Yeah, well, the other thing I want to encourage you to do is consider starting your own live video show, right? So if 62nd Video scare you, then this is gonna be really scary. But this was something that I was proud to do a few months into my video clips by several people in this room. And I said, I don’t know if I’m quite ready for that. I’m not quite, you know, Walter Cronkite, or I don’t know how I’m gonna be interviewing people, and what am I going to do, but you can do this. And you can do it on a shoestring budget, and I want to talk to you about how you can do it. So, you know, the first thing you need to do is you kind of need to pick a platform, Mitch mentioned V LIVE, I really liked that I’m not using that one yet. But it’s got some cool ways that you can pull in graphics and do this. My show from the other week was this is on blue jeans. And basically so if you don’t if you’re not familiar with it, basically what it is, folks is it’s it’s a conferencing web conferencing platform, just like you used to have a web conference with an expert in another state. But what this allows you to do is to then broadcast it live to Facebook, where then people can interact with you And watch your show, you want to make sure that your guest has a good, fast internet connection, you want to make sure you’ve got pretty good audio, pretty good lighting, I typically wear headphones. And they’re not high end or anything like that, just to prevent any echoing to make sure I can hear what the guest is saying and whatnot. And there’s no feedback or issues with that, you know, one of the things you want to talk about is kind of figure out what you want to do your show on. And that’s about as wide open as you can think about it. So mine is called the most show dot live. And what I’ve done is I’ve decided that I wanted to focus on local and then hopefully, as I’m growing it, larger influencers in my community, people who are making a difference in my community. And so what it’s allowed me to do is it’s allowed me to connect with a lot of great nonprofits in my community, and connect with their audiences, which is now they’re now following me on social, I’m telling you, probably three or four times a week, I’m getting instant messages on Facebook about legal questions, needing legal help. That’s where this is coming from. And so I’ve been able to interview one of the local mayor’s who’s the fastest growing city in Alabama, I was able to interview a really prominent young city councilman for Huntsville recently. And then the gentleman here, this is Mark Maloney. He’s the president nominee of Rotary International. So he’s going to be president of rotary and just over a year, that’s 1.2 million Rotarians in 200 countries. And so that’s a pretty big guest for a little redneck guy from Huntsville, Alabama. So what do you want to do with it? Well, you got to pre promote the show. So you need to get the word out. You don’t want to just go live on Facebook, if you if you can, you know, help that. And so, you know, one of the things that I do, and then I think a lot of people in this room would tell you is you want to pre promote try graphics like Bernards got there looks a lot like my graphic, and, or matches graphic in Joey’s graphic. So I’m just getting wrong. But it’s a way to get it out, you want to put the date the time. Michonne is big about talking about when you do this, and the local match group about making sure you put you know where you’re broadcasting from, and then another timezone, so people understand when it is and where it is, and then put where they can watch it. Right. And, and, you know, what I’ve done is, is done it with the most show that live. And so that is not a separate website or anything, I mean, a platform, that is just a redirect to my Facebook page. So it’s easy, as opposed to telling somebody, hey, when I was announcing it to my rotary club the other week, and we were promoting it around the country and around the world, to watch it, it’s not go to facebook.com backslash more slowly and I’ll nobody will ever find that. But if you just say go to the most show dot live. And it sounds really cool to sound like I’ve got my own show tolerate sounds like I’m bigger than I really am. But then you know, one of the things that I would recommend you do is maybe writing a blog post, this is extra content for your website, tagging the people in hyperlinking to their website or their calls, whoever you’re having online, and then embed that graphic in. And then when you share that out, that’ll help with some, some promotion of it. And then the other big thing is the post promotion of it, which is then going back out if you’re doing it on Facebook Live sharing it on Twitter, sharing it on Instagram, uploading it to your YouTube site. And I have not gotten to this step yet. So I’m not there yet. But maybe taking some of it. And Joey does a good job with this and some others doing and guy and I have done some Facebook lives on some legal topics before going out to rev or some other side and getting the transcript and then taking that and uploading that as a blog on to your your site. So you then you’ve got the actual contact context in the text there but in the video to go with it. And then as we talked about, and you can continue to promote this out through buffer or through things like social jukebox, or things like that, to continue to share it out and to tag these people. So it’s a wrap up, I really want to talk about a few of these things, right? The first thing is, you’ve got to be consistent with it, you cannot start it and stop it, start it and stop it. And I know we’re all bad about that. We’re going to leave this conference with great ideas and great intentions. And you’re not going to do squat because your phone’s list callback list is this long. Your emails are this long when you get back to your home or in your office on Monday and do it. But you need to figure out the couple of things that you’re going to tackle after this conference. And if you’re going to do something on social with you or your firm, you’ve got to be consistent with it. That I think is one of the biggest things that even if some of my tips are tips for crap, if I’m consistently doing it, people are seeing it, people are connecting with it. I have people that all the time that are telling me that they’re watching them or seeing them and I’m just blown away when I walk in somewhere. And I do and I was walking into a cafe on a Sunday for breakfast. And some guy that I know barely says Hey man, what’s the tip from Oh today? And I said, Well, it’s the Main Street Cafe right now. And so, but that’s it and then be unique with it right? You know, we talked about standing out from the noise, right? You know, not interact need to check not call me for this not asking for this Be who you are be genuine. So people like you as a human, right? We’re all different, we have different qualities, you may not be the rockin beard guy with the flowers in your beard or on the Hummer. That may not be who you are. And that’s cool. But you need to stand out and separate yourself, find what your passions are, what that why is, as Mitch was talking about, and show it and share it out. Now, this other one is one we haven’t touched on. But this is huge. And but Jim and Tyson talk about this, and I think with the Bob Berg podcast, and that’s about being a giver. And Nick rish Wayne, who is not here, but it’s a member of this group out in California, is the biggest giver of any of my friends on social media. But what I mean by that is, don’t just share your stuff out, you need to engage with your audience in joy was doing a good job of talking about this, but you need to engage with people that have the similar interest that you have engaged in Facebook groups, and then respond to those messages and not with here’s a great link to my website or YouTube video that answers your question, but engage with them in a meaningful way. And then share that out, provide them valuable information. And when you give, and you give, and you share, they’re going to start following you on social, they’re going to start engaging with you on social, and then when they have a legal need. They’re gonna do what they did on Joey’s page, and they’re gonna say, call him call Alicia, call whoever, because this person is somebody I trust. I know. And I like the other thing I tell you. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. And I don’t like to sprint. So it works out well for me. But it’s taken me a little over a year and a half now just now to get some traction. And so I know in this room, you know, everybody in here is spending money on stuff where you spent your time is money, but you’re not spending a lot of money on it. And what you’re asking yourself Great, this sounds great. All these tips, this video show great. You’re think you’re a local celebrity. But what’s your ROI on it? Right? How do you measure it? It’s hard to measure. But I’m telling you that I’m getting noticed, I’m getting contacts we get, especially in the PR field and I’m in we’ve got all the 800 pound gorillas, Morgan and Morgan, regional gorillas that are that are in my in my space, how am I going to compete with them? It’s hard for them to humanize themselves when they’re on every billboard and every TV commercial. So this is a way that my law firm and I have figured out that we can humanize ourselves and relate to people on various levels for the things that we’re doing in our community, and things that are passionate to us. But just remember, folks, you’re not going to post 10 videos, and all of a sudden, well, that guy from Alabama was crazy. I’m not getting any calls. It’s a marathon, Mitch would tell you that it didn’t happen overnight for him. The last thing is like Nike, just do it. You don’t have to be perfect with it, I know that there is a time and place for quality video production, there’s a time and place for, for polishing and doing everything. But if you wait to do it, I’m here to tell you, you’re not going to do it. Or you’re going to do it and you’re going to be aggravated and pissed off about it. What I would suggest to you is find the one or two things you want to start with, find out what works for you what works for your personality, and what you’re passionate about. And then just flat, do it and do it consistently and be unique about it. So that’s me. If you want to connect with me, please do I’d love to engage with you on social. I know Jen said that they’re going to put all of our presentations, but if you want mine, there’s mine right there. The Bitly link for Max law con you can go right there and it’ll automatically email it out to you just enter your name and information love to put you on my mailing list. And then lastly, but their presentation finished any questions? So anybody got anything I’m getting cases from and I’m starting to see leads in the context and making again, it’s kind of like the referral basis, right? When you’re asking when you’re getting referrals from other people in your community. This is one way that I’m seeing to grow up, grow my referral basis and grow my connections. I got a case a good estate planning case again, my law firm is a little bit different mixed bag. We are not the niche down firm. We each are niched, within my firm. There’s five lawyers, we’ve been around for 81 years. So we’re kind of a mainstay in our in our town. And so we each have our practice area, but I had somebody through social media reach out to me Monday, and said, Hey, my mom passed. I thought everything was in joint names. But we’ve got this big IRA that we need to do. Is that something that you or your friend can handle, but that was a person that I made a connection through social and if I hadn’t been doing what I’m doing, she would never would have contacted me and I’m getting, I’m getting stuff like that eight to 10 times a month in the first month or two of doing these tips from Oh, I thought Who the heck wants to hear from me? Write it once they’re getting dining, you know, directions. I know, I know where to eat. But the you know, I think you just got to be unique. You’ve got to stand out amongst the crowd. And you know, the haters are gonna hate you Good afternoon. So
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very, very rarely, I think people that are going to tune you out are just going to tune you out anyway. And I think that your you know, as long as you’re providing value to your audience in some manner, how are you providing value? Or how are you inspiring them. And so recently, I’ve been, you know, if you’ve been following me a little bit on social in the last month, I’ve really been busting at trying to get in some better shape. And so I’ve had a lot of people recently, give me some feedback about the the few videos that I’ve had my trainer shoot with me and him in the gym, and I, Hey, man, looks like you’re getting after it. That’s great. That’s doing but a lot of people can relate to that. And especially a lot of professionals can relate to that, that if you’re working hard, you’ve got all this going on. And you’ve got the dad with the 5% battery life going on. And then the only time you got to get up at 5am in the morning to be at the gym, and it totally stinks to do it. When someone’s busting your tail at 5am. It’s even worse, but I think you just got to be unique about it. And I think I wouldn’t I wouldn’t worry about that. Thank you so much.
