Back by popular demand, Vanessa Fox – author and SEO expert – will take the Avvocating Conference stage once again to discuss Marketing in the Age of Google:

Search Engine Optimization is often clouded in technical terminology and confusing buzzwords. In this session, Vanessa Fox, author of the book ‘Marketing in the Age of Google’, strips away the mystery to lay out a clear business structure for approaching SEO. This framework includes keyword research, evaluating competitiveness, understanding a site’s authority, building content and tracking results of your efforts. Participants in the session will learn to either do it themselves or more proactively manage a SEO partner.

Vanessa Fox, called a “cyberspace visionary” by Seattle Business Monthly, is an expert in understanding customer acquisition from organic search. She shares her perspective on how this impacts marketing and user experience and how all business silos (including developers and marketers) can work together towards greater search visibility at ninebyblue.com. She’s also an entrepreneur-in-residence with Ignition Partners, Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land, and host of the weekly podcast Office Hours. She previously created Google’s Webmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to help website owners improve their sites to gain more customers from search and was instrumental in the sitemaps.org alliance of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search. She was named one of Seattle’s 2008 top 25 innovators and entrepreneurs. Her book, Marketing in the Age of Google, provides a blueprint for incorporating search strategy into organizations of all levels.

Join us for Avvocating in Orlando, Florida May 19-20!

You can’t swing a dead cat in these depressed economic days without hitting a reporter prophesying the End of Days for some group of professionals.  Here are three recent articles painting a very bleak picture for lawyers, doctors and nurses as we know them.  

http://www.economist.com/node/18651114?story_id=18651114&fsrc=rss

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/23/health/23doctor.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=doctor%20practice%20sell&st=cse

http://www.npr.org/2011/05/09/136138374/sick-economy-means-nursing-jobs-harder-to-find

The cliff notes for these stories are often the same:  The profession was once prestigious, largely because the professionals made a lot of money.  The market has changed and now no one is making money.  Current participating professionals are now doomed, or at least destined to be really poor — possibly destitute.  

These articles then get republished in professional trade publications, everyone gets depressed, and those with the least hope in succeeding drop out of the profession.

Don’t fall for the hype.

Here’s the reality:  Empires, economies, industries, businesses and businesspeople (and even doctors and lawyers who don’t think they are businesspeople) all go through cycles.  No matter how much prognosticators like to think we have this figured out during good times, we see crash after crash.  And, no matter how much they like to tell a group of people they are screwed during rough times, we see recovery after recovery.  You only need to look at Apple, Donald Trump or something as boring as the metals industry to know that, in business, no one is ever down for the count. 

So, if you are feeling face down on the mat, here are a few quick thoughts on how to get back up again:

Use the downturn to your advantage:  If business is slow, how about investing in customers for the future.  Offer free consultations.  Author free guides and think of ways to get them in front of potential customers (maybe Avvo’s Q&A and/or our Legal and Health Guides? <wink><nudge>).  If you have the cash, think about buying assets at a discount – maybe a scanner, maybe a whole practice – from someone that did not plan so well.  Reinvest in networking – i.e., meeting people who will help you drive your business in the future.  Revisit your strategic planning, budgets and operational infrastructure.  The list really goes on and on.  While a lot of this may cut into your margins in the short term, think of it as taking the time the economy has given you to invest in larger future margins.   

Refocus on differentiation:  A recurring theme in the End of Days articles referenced above is that the struggling profession has become a commodity and, therefore, all participating professionals will fail as one.  But this could not be further from the truth.  In downturns, usually it is the bottom third of the professional class that is in trouble.  If you love what you do and are good at it, then identify “why” you are good at it (i.e., why you are not a commodity) and invest there — both in time and in marketing.

Do whatever it takes to hang in there:  In a downturn, a war of attrition emerges.  So much of surviving this war is simply getting up from the mat and committing to make it to the final round.    As I mentioned above, a large part of your profession will indeed surrender  – heading off to some faraway place like art school or retirement.  As those people leave the profession, they reduce the available supply which will serve as the first step up into the positive arc of your business cycle.   Of course, those that planned the best during good times have the best chance of surviving tough times, so when you are standing on top of the professional rock in a couple of years take the time to think through how you can best position your business for the next inevitable crash (e.g., savings, variable costs, alternate revenue sources, etc.).

Who knew that Gloria Gaynor was such a sage . . .

Mark

p.s.  For those of you who are not as familiar with the End of Days concept, here’s an explanatory MSNBC article.  As you will note, some think the end of the world is only nine days away, so maybe we are all doomed. :-)

On day two of the Avvocating Conference, Miami criminal defense lawyer Brian Tannebaum will kick things off with a 1hr CLE presentation on the Ethics of Online Marketing:

Social media and online marketing have brought a variety of ethics concerns into question for lawyers. This Ethics of Online Marketing session is designed to help lawyers and legal marketers understand the professional ethics rules and state bar regulations governing online advertising, websites and social media.

Brian served a successful term of academic probation in both college and law school and now serves as President of both the Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and Florida Association of Bar Defense Lawyers. He practices state and federal criminal defense and represents lawyers and law students in Florida Bar admission and grievance matters. Brian is also a former vice-chair of a Florida Bar Grievance Committee, serves as a member of both the Florida Bar’s Criminal Law Section Executive Council and Criminal Procedure Rules Committee. He’s won a bunch of awards, been told by some magazines  that he’s “Super” and “Elite,” and pretty, and his professional ethics blog was honored as one of the top 100 legal blogs by the American Bar Association (an association he routinely criticizes and of which he is not a member) in 2011.

Oh, and he loves talking about how much he hates the sewer that is online lawyer marketing.

Join us for Avvocating in Orlando, Florida May 19-20!

Remember at school when you couldn’t wait for show and tell?  Well now on Avvo, doctors can share their talents with the world. With Avvo’s new procedure features, doctors can highlight the procedures and surgeries they perform in writing and through photos.

Procedures on your Avvo profile:

On your Avvo profile there is now a procedure section.  It looks something like this:

You can also customize this list.

Once customized, the default text is replaced by the list of procedures you perform.

Now in pictures:

Avvo allows doctors to showcase medical pictures (before and after, examples of diseases, anatomical drawings, etc.) on their Avvo profiles, as well as Avvo’s health-related topic pages.  Just upload a picture to your profile and tell us what it is.  It will appear on your profile and on any relevant topic pages with your name and a link to your profile. Here’s another example:

Profile section:

Let us know what you think and if you have ideas for additional product features! We love your feedback.

Local search is a hot online marketing topic and one that we’ll dive into Thursday afternoon at the Avvocating Conference. [Wait, what?! You don't have a ticket yet?? There's still time!]

Mike Blumenthal, an online search consultant with strong small business experience, will talk for 60 minutes all about local search and Google Places.

Mike has been involved with offering web services since 1995. Prior to specializing in web design and search consulting in 2001, Mike was a principal in a family owned & operated retail business for over 30 years. Like all small business owners attempting to market to a fragmented clientele, he was continually frustrated by the barriers & costs imposed by the advertising options available. Shortly after Google Maps was released in 2004 he threw out his nine Yellow Page books and started focusing on Local Search. Mike presents nationally at search conferences & contributes columns to Search Engine Land. During the week, you can find him at his blog, Understanding Google Maps and Local Search, where he writes about local search and its impact on the business community.

Here is what you can expect from Mike at Avvocating:

Ranking and Reviews: Making Google Places Work for You – Michael Blumenthal, Online Search Consultant
An overview of strategic and tactical issues related to succeeding with Google Places. How do customer reviews impact Google Local results? Learn best practices for managing and maximizing reviews in this area as well as other factors that impact search engine results.

Join us for Avvocating in Orlando, Florida May 19-20!

Last October, I visited Chicago to fill the ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 in on what Avvo is, and how we go about rating attorneys. One of the charges of the Commission was to examine ratings of lawyers and law firms, and they wanted to hear how Avvo’s groundbreaking ratings of attorneys work.

While the ABA and state attorney regulators obviously have no jurisdiction over Avvo or how we calculate and publicize our ratings, the states do have the ability to regulate attorney advertising. And we have often been concerned about the disregard many states show for the constitutional limits on their regulatory authority.

So I was pleased to learn that the Commission’s draft report concludes that no action is necessary; that attorneys needn’t be further constrained when advertising ratings they’ve received from organizations like Avvo. What’s more, the Commission’s report is notable for two things typically lacking when states adopt lawyer advertising regulations: A thoughtful analysis of the constitutional issues, and a data-driven approach to the question of whether the dissemination of ratings is harmful.

The result? After surveying bar associations, lawyer disciplinary counsel and leading national consumer rights organizations, the Commission found no indication of consumer harm stemming from lawyer ratings. Zip, zilch, nada. Now we’re not at all surprised by this finding, but we’re glad the ABA recognized the importance of empirical research. Here’s hoping those states seeking to further regulate attorney speech take notice as well.
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On Thursday afternoon at the Avvocating Conference, Gerry Oginski with The Lawyers’ Video Studio will discuss best practices for using video to market your law practice:

The use of video as an online marketing tool has exploded over the past several years. You want to be a videographer, a video editor, a video distributor and practice law at the same time. No problem. Gerry is the only seasoned medical malpractice lawyer who is also an experienced video producer who will show you the equipment he uses and how he has created almost 500 videos to market his solo practice in New York. You can do it too. Learn how to create educational video to market your law firm, convert online viewers into callers and set yourself apart from your competitors.

Gerry is a medical malpractice and personal injury trial lawyer in practice for 22 years in the New York Metropolitan area. He has created, produced, edited, optimized and uploaded over 350 educational videos online about New York medical malpractice, wrongful death and personal injury law to help online viewers understand how lawsuits in the State of New York work. With over 300,000 video views, he is a noted author with six books and hundreds of blog posts and articles to his credit; he has become the country’s leading expert on the effective use of online video for attorneys. Gerry’s popular website oginski-law.com consistently comes up #1 in Google organic search results for “New York Medical Malpractice Lawyer.” He has been quoted by the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal, the American Bar Association, and Law.com. He lectures to attorneys across the country about how to effectively use video to market their law firms. He is a faculty member of Solo Practice University and has lectured to the NYC Bar Association and given CLE lectures at LawLine.com.

He created the Lawyers’ Video Studio blog to help Legal Professionals use the power of online video to establish a bond with online viewers. The Lawyers’ Video Studio has become the leading online resource for knowledge and practical solutions for the successful use of this incredibly effective new tool to market legal services.

Gerry will also have a booth set up throughout the two days for people to work directly with the equipment and practice on camera!

Join us for Avvocating in Orlando, Florida May 19-20!

Last Thursday morning, Seattle’s business leaders filled the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, brought together by Business Journal Live and the vision of Dr. Larry Corey, President and Director of Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Institute.  One of the top names in biomedical research, Corey brought his internationally renowned virology and immunology research experience to Fred Hutch just a few months ago, and on day 105 of his position at the helm of the world renowned cancer research center, he shared his goal for the future.  In an appointment that has been called “impeccable,” Dr. Corey came to Fred Hutch to drive its 2,800 employees to the next level in attaining the institute’s audacious mission to eliminate cancer and related diseases as causes of human suffering and death.

Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Institute, along with the University of Washington Medical Center and Seattle Children’s Hospital, formed the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance ten years ago, with the purpose of leading the world in the prevention and treatment of cancer.  Fred Hutch blazed toward this goal with its invention of bone marrow transfer plantation.  Doctors at Fred Hutch train every single person who performs this procedure, which has now been done over 1 million times across the world, turning cancer patients into cancer survivors.  This invention, along with the mission of Fred Hutch, as Dr. Corey proudly announced last week, has “revolutionized” cancer care.

For the past 40 years, Fred Hutch has aggressively researched and battled cancer and related diseases.  Because 20% of cancers are infectious-disease-related, Hutch has also thrown itself into researching the HIV and other infectious disease vaccines and treatments.  With a focus on immunotherapy—which improves life quality of cancer sufferers and is less toxic than chemo—Fred Hutch is also a pioneer in improving the human condition, or, as Dr. Corey so simply and powerfully put it, “being good citizens for the community.”

Cancer is the leading cause of death worldwide, and almost every individual’s form of cancer is unique.  60% of cancer diagnoses occur in low resource countries, and 70% of cancer deaths occur in those low resource countries.  Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Institute is undoubtedly one of the greatest impacts on biomedical research worldwide, but it is also a Seattle landmark, defining South Lake Union with its 0.4 million square feet of facilities.  As Corey remarked with a smile, likening the growth of Fred Hutch to the diseases it fights, “If you’re not growing, you’re not alive.”

10% of the morning’s costs were donated to the University of Washington, and special thanks went out to local sponsors and notable Avvo attorneys at Peterson Russell Kelly.