Trial Magazine

Building meaningful professional relationships is fundamental to the practice of law. Real-world networking remains essential, but the internet now provides a different set of tools attorneys can use to make and strengthen connections.

Email

Newsletters are the most common email marketing tactic. If you’re having success and regularly receiving positive ­feedback, by all means, carry on. But most ­newsletters aren’t useful for connecting with colleagues.

Instead, try personalized emails to nurture professional relationships. You’re probably already doing this: Each time you send an email to check in with a trusted colleague, you’re using email for networking. As your number of professional relationships grows, however, it becomes difficult to scale this networking. Using email automation tools can help.

These tools can automatically send emails to wish someone happy birthday, celebrate an anniversary, send a holiday greeting, and share practice tips. There are a variety of programs available to do this—such as Infusionsoft, HubSpot, and Active Campaign—but in my experience, they can be overkill for most lawyers and also can be expensive.

Instead, you can do almost everything you’ll want to do with MailChimp:

• track performance of email ­campaigns (open, click, and conversion rates)
• automate emails based on site visits and ad clicks
• integrate email marketing into paid social campaigns.

The MailChimp Subscribe iPad app is a highly customizable, free signup form builder. It basically turns your iPad into a mobile subscribe form. The next time you’re speaking at an event, you can make it easy for attendees to join your email lists by passing around your iPad.

Permission-based email lists also can be used to create custom audience lists in Facebook and Google AdWords so you can stay top-of-mind with colleagues across platforms. For example, you can specifically promote content to connections on Facebook who have opted in to receive messages from you.

Chat Apps

With the rise of smartphones, chat apps such as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, and Slack have become popular. You should become familiar with how these tools work. Many lawyers are already using these tools to engage in various online communities.

One of the most popular is Lawyer Smack (www.lawyersmack.com). These communities provide networking access specifically for lawyers, who tend to feel more comfortable sharing information there than they would on a public social network.

Social Media

You likely have professional profiles or pages on social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn—but are you using them strategically?

Keep in mind that while Facebook is more social in nature, people on LinkedIn are there to talk business. This difference is important because it shapes the nature of the conversations that happen on each platform. While Facebook is useful for staying in touch with a larger, more general audience, LinkedIn is better for connecting with other lawyers who are looking to develop and maintain professional relationships.

Facebook. First, connect with people you know. Like and follow local businesses, organizations, and news pages in your community that are relevant to your practice. Often, the professional networking you do in real life is shared online—for example, through a post or photo tag—so it’s important to be connected with colleagues virtually.

Second, consider creating a local business page for your firm. No matter how people first hear about your firm, they’re likely to search for information about you online. Because of Facebook’s popularity, Google is likely to show your firm’s Facebook page prominently in searches of your name, as well as ­snippets of any Facebook reviews of your firm.

LinkedIn. One of LinkedIn’s most powerful features is the ability to see mutual connections and groups, which is particularly useful for seeking out new professional relationships.

Beyond creating a personal profile, a firm page, and connecting with people you know, you should find relevant groups. Groups serve the role that list servers historically have played. The key is finding the right groups with the right people. Don’t opt for groups solely based on their membership numbers. Instead, look at who is in the group and the conversations that are taking place.

If you’re struggling to find a valuable group, create your own. Finally, encourage people who know, like, and trust you to provide a recommendation on LinkedIn.

Twitter. Twitter’s main strengths are speed and access. It’s particularly useful for content distribution and discovery. From a networking perspective, it provides access to journalists in a way unlike any other. But don’t try to drink straight from the unfiltered Twitter ­firehose. Instead, curate lists of contacts by subject. For example, you might have a Twitter list for:

• lawyers who are members of the same professional organizations
• people in your local community
• people you met at a particular social function
• people who tend to discuss subject matter you’re interested in.

Even in the digital age, developing strong relationships with our fellow lawyers and other professionals remains integral to law practice. What has changed are the ways in which we create, nurture, and solidify those relationships.

Gyi Tsakalakis is the cofounder of AttorneySync in Chicago. He can be reached at gyi.tsakalakis@gmail.com. The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not constitute an endorsement of any product by Trial or AAJ.