You Can’t Control Your Firm’s Online Reputation (But You Can Manage It)
These days, it seems as though your hard-earned reputation is in the hands of strangers. What used to be a private discussion between two or three people has become a public forum where just about anyone can jump in and comment. They don’t even need to be former clients.
In fact, reality isn’t nearly so hopeless. Quite the contrary: The fast pace and far reach of the internet actually offers new opportunities to build your business. The quality of your work is still crucial to your reputation, and so are positive recommendations from past clients. These days, you need to get more active in maintaining that good reputation across a much broader group of people. And by actively engaging past and potential clients via review sites and review platforms, you can actually build your firm’s brand and its business. In any case, reviews and ratings are here to stay, and their existence is a fact that you can’t afford to ignore.
A new whitepaper from FindLaw explains how to respond to both positive and negative reviews, and how your firm can benefit. Download your free PDF copy of You Can’t Control Your Firm’s Reputation (But You Can Manage It).
WHY ARE ONLINE RATINGS AND REVIEWS SO POPULAR?
Digital technology has allowed consumers to become better informed about all types of products and services. Indeed, you’ve probably found online sources of information helpful when shopping for, say, a car or a computer. More and more, consumers of all kinds rely on the opinions and experiences of people whom they’ve never met to provide trusted insights.
To be sure, legal practices are not consumer products. But they get the same kind of scrutiny from legal consumers. These consumers are looking at more than law firm websites. Most contain information about an attorney’s experience, alma mater, successful cases and community involvement. The same information is often replicated on a firm’s social media profiles and directory listings.
This information plays a critical part of a firm’s overall digital marketing strategy. But in this day and age, the most important content about lawyers on the internet often wasn’t written by them. Past clients’ perspectives are having an equal or greater impact on law firm’s reputations. They can confirm an attorney’s abilities, validate his or her character and describe what being a client was like.
In other words, online marketing in the age of five-star reviews isn’t a one-way message – it’s a conversation that’s occurring whether you participate or not.
The solution? Get active in managing your reputation. Start by downloading the new white paper from FindLaw, You Can’t Control Your Firm’s Reputation (But You Can Manage It).
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