Social Media: Where Everybody Knows Your Name

If one of the goals in your Marketing and Business Development Plan is to grow your practice, then it follows that you would then identify the strategies to accomplish that.

Typically, it’s broken down like this:

• Goal: What I want or need to accomplish.
• Strategy: How I intend to accomplish it.

Find And Be Found

Two strategies to accomplish that growth that are present in just about every Business Development Plan I am a part of are:

• To find people
• To be found

Obviously, we have to connect with our prospects, the people we want to do business with, whether they are:

• New clients
• Former clients
• Current clients
• Media
• Referral Sources
• Influencers
• Connectors
• Etc.

When we dissect this further, we ask:

“Where can we find these people, these prospects, while also setting ourselves up to be found?”

One of the many places we can accomplish this is Social Media. We have tools at our disposal that we’ve never had before that allow us to ramp up our efforts in a powerful way. Social Media allow us to:

• Find our prospects
• Be found by our prospects

Sound familiar?

So, off we go. We dive into the tool or tools of choice, gathering friends, followers and connections. Along the way, we think:

“Hey, this is kind of fun. It’s amazing how we can easily connect with people at a moment’s notice.”

At some point, we also begin to think:

“This is a good feeling. I prefer Facebook (or Twitter, or LinkedIn, or Google+) because my friends are there. I know them. They know me. I can relax here, and know that my buddies are close-by. It’s easy.”

Where Everybody Knows Our Name

Here’s what often happens: We keep going to that familiar place that we love, the one where everybody knows our name, because it feels good and it’s easy to be there. It soothes us when we have issues, and allows us to sooth our friends when they have issues. They’re always glad we came.

• If it’s Facebook, we have our family and our buddies.
• If it’s Twitter, we have our favorites put into a list or two that we can easily scan to catch up.
• If it’s LinkedIn, we have a group that we like to visit.
• If it’s Google+, we have our Circles and Communities that welcome us.
• If it’s Instagram, we are happy because we know we can catch up with the lives of our friends via their pictures.

Then one day we take a look at that Business Development Plan we wrote, and the Target Audiences, or Prospects, we identified, and realize we still haven’t connected with them because we’ve become comfortable where we are, and we’re not looking for them any longer.

We relaxed. We found our stride in Social Media. We coasted a little.

The Danger of Complacency

Merriem-Webster.com tells us that Complacency is “a feeling of being satisfied with how things are and not wanting to make them better : a complacent feeling or condition.

What do we need to do?

We need to take the time to connect with new people. We need to venture out where everybody doesn’t know our name.

• We need to research and join a group on LinkedIn.
• We need to comment on an update in our LinkedIn newsfeed.
• We need to share that update we commented on in our LinkedIn newsfeed.
• We need to visit those people we once decided to follow on Twitter to reacquaint ourselves with them.
• We need to create a List of prospects and their companies on Twitter, then talk to them.
• We need to comment on a few Facebook updates shared by people we don’t normally interact with.
• We need to go deeper than clicking Like on a Facebook status update, and talk to the person who posted.
• We need to comment on a blog post, actually engaging in conversation.
• We need to share blog posts in our communities.
• We need to read a few updates from others on Google+.
• We need to Circle other commenters on our prospects’ updates on Google+.
• We need to join Communities in our areas of expertise on Google+.

Make This A Habit

If it helps, schedule 5 minutes a day in your calendar to visit one of the sites where everybody doesn’t know your name, and try some of the suggestions I made above.

Connect with new people on a regular basis. Remember that, just like making connections face-to-face, one contact in Social Media often leads to another, who leads to another, and so on.

Before you know it, new people will also know your name….and they might just be glad you came.

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Photo Credit to Wikipedia under a Creative Commons License

Nancy Myrland is a Marketing and Business Development Planning Consultant, and a Content, Social & Digital Media Speaker, Trainer & Advisor, helping lawyers and legal marketers grow by integrating all marketing disciplines. She is a frequent LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook for Business trainer, as well as a content marketing specialist. She helps lawyers, law firms, and legal marketers grow their practices by making their marketing and business development efforts more relevant to their current and potential clients. She also helps lead law firms through their online digital strategy when dealing with high-stakes, visible cases. As an early and constant adopter of social and digital media and technology, she also helps firms with blogging, podcasts, video marketing, voice marketing, flash briefings, and livestreaming. If you would like to reserve an hour of Nancy’s time to begin talking strategy or think through an issue you are having, you can do that here. She can also be reached via email here.