As we close the books on 2011, it’s worth taking a look back at this amazing year.

For starters, Avvo underwent some cool changes this year.  Our medical offerings really gained prominence, with tens of thousands of doctors signing up and dozens of large hospitals and clinics partnering with us.  We were asked to speak at multiple medical conferences and inked many deals to power “Top Doctor” lists based on the Avvo Rating.  Pretty cool.

We also focused our product much more on Q&A this year.  Even though Q&A is all the social media rage right now, we have been at it since 2007 and this year our Q&A forums reached 800-pound gorilla status by answering hundreds of thousands of questions for people navigating their legal and health issues.

We also launched two new blogs, Lawyernomics and Mamanomics, both intended to give some of our biggest power-users even more tools to help in their businesses and at home.

The beauty of all of this “new” stuff is that it builds upon and enhances those things that have historically made Avvo great.  The Avvo Rating; our industry-leading professional directories; Avvocating; our legal marketing webinar series; our thoughtful contributors and supporters LIKE YOU. All boats rise as Avvo learns from helping more consumers and professionals meet, communicate and work together.

So thank you everyone for helping make 2011 a great year.  Whether you advertise, answer questions, post guides, vote and comment on content, or simply have a robust Avvo profile, thank you for everything you do.  We are honored to help power your practice.  We are honored to partner with you.

May our partnership continue to prosper in 2012 and beyond.

Happy Holidays!

Mark

I usually write this time of year to remind everyone to update their Avvo Profiles because our annual Avvo Rating update goes into effect at the end of each calendar year.  Well, we’re changing this up a bit because we have heard that December is the worst time to be updating an Avvo Profile due to all of the year-end tasks that so many professionals must deal with.

Because we are here to make your lives easier, not harder (at least for those that are well-behaved), going forward we will do our annual Avvo Rating update at midnight on June 30th each year.  This will hopefully be a saner timer for everyone to focus on their Avvo Profiles and making sure they are up to date.  It will also give you more time to call and yell at us if your rating goes down. :-)

Thanks,

Mark

After partnering with Seattle Met this year to power its Top Doctors list, we teamed up with our friends “down the road” at Portland Monthly magazine to compile its list of Top Doctors for 2012. More than 300 of Portland’s best physicians, across 50 specialties, are featured in the January issue and online now.

Congratulations to all the winners!

SEO Best Practices for Lawyers

This webinar will be held on Thursday, December 15th at 10:00 am PT and will be hosted by Nick Perone, Online Marketing Manager at Avvo. This webinar will last approximately 60 minutes and will include plenty of time for Q&A.

In response to repeated emails and calls about Search Engine Optimization, we’ll offer insight on best practices and address many frequently asked questions. This webinar is an introduction to SEO for the solo practitioner and small law firm delivered in (mostly) non-technical jargon.

Lawyers who attend this webinar will learn about:

• SEO fundamentals
• SEO challenges and opportunities unique to the small law firm
• Highlight common mistakes
• Reveal “black hat” practices that could get your site penalized
• Cover free and easy to use tools vital to SEO success
• End with 10 things you can do in under 10 minutes to improve your site’s SEO performance

Sign up for the webinar here.

Avvo is excited to announce that we have made some changes to the Avvo Leaderboard and Contributor levels for doctors and lawyers answering questions and contributing content across the site.

What this means:  If you already participate on Avvo, your level went up and there are now even more ways to earn points and demonstrate your expertise to potential patients and clients, and your peers.

So why did we change?

We heard from professionals like you that quality and visibility matter, and that Avvo can help raise the bar by rewarding quality work.  We agree.

We added a Leaderboard to our health community and enhanced it in legal. (For those of you not familiar, the Leaderboard shows the ranking of all professionals participating on the site, and by specialty or practice area.  The Leaderboard also reflects the current week as well as all-time activity.) The Contributor levels have also expanded to incorporate more of the actions on Avvo that reflect quality and expertise.

There are now three main ways to earn points on Avvo:

1) Contribute to the Avvo community.

You still get points for answering questions in our Q&A forum and writing helpful guides to assist other Avvo users.  Now you also get points for highlighting other professionals’ quality contributions.

2) Get recognized for quality contributions.

You now receive points when consumers or other professionals mark your answers and guides as ‘good’. (This means you can earn points while you sleep!) You are also awarded additional points when guides are selected as an Avvo Staff Pick or you participate as an Avvo guest blogger or speaker.

3) Showcase  your expertise to the community outside of Avvo.

You also receive points for sharing your Avvo content with a broader community on social networks, such as Facebook or Twitter.

We’ve also added a few pages.

• You can view your Points History by clicking your total points on your dashboard.
  
• Your Contributor level is now visible at the top of your profile with a link to all of your contributions.
  

 As always, please let us know what you think. Thank you for all you do on Avvo!

Reasons this email made my day:

1.  This is a retiree-aged lawyer who gets social media.  That is truly the exception.

2.  He sees value in helping people.

3.  He takes the time to say "thanks."

Emails like this make us all at Avvo feel so fortunate to do what we do.

Mark

I’ve written before about the appalling practices of Medical Justice, an outfit that sells a perverse form of “reputation management” to physicians and dentists. Core to this “service” is a form agreement, apparently used by several thousand practitioners, that attempts to prevent patients from leaving online reviews. The agreements have taken several forms over the years, from a blunt contractual prohibition on commenting to a more nuanced attempt to transfer copyright in any future reviews automatically to the doctor. In the latter case, the doctor can then use a DMCA takedown notice to attempt to have any online reviews removed.

Not that Avvo or any reputable review site would honor such a takedown notice, but points for creativity, right?

It’s an understatement to call such agreements unconscionable. They’re also wrong on the law and revealing of both a deplorable thin-skinnedness and distrust of one’s patients amongst those practitioners who use them.

However, Medical Justice appears to have finally taken its lumps. In addition to Avvo’s numerous call-outs over the years, 2011 has seen the launch of the excellent DoctoredReviews site, a petition to the FTC by Center for Democracy and Technology to investigate MJ (the petition [pdf] is well worth a read for a detailed review of the MJ contracts) and a Public Citizen suit brought to get a declaratory ruling that the MJ agreements are unenforceable. According to MSNBC, Medical Justice has now decided to “retire” the agreements and urge its doctor members to stop using them.

That’s a great development, but patients must remain wary. There’s no telling how many of MJ’s clients will continue using these agreements. And there is no guarantee that Medical Justice won’t come out with a new twist or technique for doctors to use to try and control online commentary.

For doctors, here’s another approach to consider: Provide excellent service, listen to your patients, and don’t be afraid of what they’ve got to say about you online. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not. And for the vast majority of practitioners, the benefits of enhanced engagement with patients far outweighs the risks posed by online commentary.

Have you heard the news?  Avvo has launched a new blog, Lawyernomics, focused on legal marketing and practice management.  My welcoming blog post really explains it all, so please check out Lawyernomics and let us know what you think.

What does this mean for the Avvo Blog?  Well, increasingly, we have struggled with the identity of the Avvo Blog because it has been one part law marketing/management, one part health marketing/management, one part corporate mouthpiece and and one part public policy.  That’s a lot of parts, and we had many lawyers tell us they wanted more of the law marketing/management part.

To oblige, we built Lawyernomics and all of the lawyer parts will go over there.  The medical parts will get their own home soon enough as well.  The Avvo Blog will then focus on the Avvo corporate and public policy discussions that don’t fit squarely into legal or medical.  Sound like a plan?

One thing:  When you visit Lawyernomics, please check out our “Search Engine Marketing & Social Media Cheat Sheet for Lawyers.”  It’s free, and the purpose of the guide is to provide lawyers and legal marketers with a complete overview of online marketing best practices and tactics.  Highlights include how to:

• Leverage SEO to attract new clients
• Profitability use paid advertising
• Tap into the power of social media

Our Cheat Sheet is the only time I will encourage you to cheat — it won’t even affect your Avvo Rating. Seriously though, it’s a great guide from a team that knows a thing or two about SEO and Social Media . . . and you can’t beat the price.

Regards,
Mark