I write this on my flight back home to rainy Seattle after a week in tropical Florida. Man, was it hot . . . and muggy. Whenever, I pointed this out to a Floridian, he or she would say “This is nice – you should see summer.” I don’t think I should see summer. I’m not sure my Northwest cooling system is built for it. I left D.C. for a reason.
That being said, our week in Florida was immensely enjoyable. We had the pleasure of presenting in Miami, Palm Beach, Tampa and Orlando; and, as always, I was humbled by the turn-out combined with the intense interest in and/or appreciation for Avvo and social media in general.
I also learned a number of things on this tour. Here are 11 of them (“This one goes to 11 . . .”):
1. In Miami, restaurants do not stay open past 10:00 p.m. on Monday nights. Huh? Isn’t Miami supposed to be wild and crazy? This is a real problem if your flight arrives at midnight. We found ourselves standing at the window (no inside seating) of the local Checkers ordering enough calories to put down a horse.
2. It can REALLY rain in Florida. Even being from Seattle, we were impressed. Sadly, we were impressed while standing at the aforementioned Checkers window.
3. Mark Merenda of Smart Marketing is one funny guy. He had the crowd laughing multiple times in Miami, including offering the term “meat space” for the offline world (apparently cribbed from his 17-year-old son) and analogizing social media to atomic power (“it can be used to power cities; it can be used to blow up cities”). Thank you Mark for your entertaining and insightful thoughts.
4. Brian Tannebaum looks and is much younger than his social media pictures or his bulldog personality. While I won’t disclose his age, I will tell you that I am 42 and he is two years younger than me. I sincerely expected Brian to be in his late 40’s, early 50’s. Maybe it’s because he hangs around with Scott Greenfield so much. Here is Brian’s blog post on speaking at the Avvo seminar.
5. Rocket Matter is cool. In Miami and West Palm Beach, we had the luxury of watching Larry Port talk about Rocket Matter and how Rocket Matter is taking a lot of traditional software development best practices and applying them to law firm management. I hadn’t appreciated many of the parallels until seeing Larry’s speech. I am confident that Larry and Rocket Matter are going to go far – check them out at www.rocketmatter.com. Even if you don’t immediately buy his software, go see Larry the next time Rocket Matter comes to a speaking venue near you – Larry is a great public speaker. Here is Rocket Matter’s press release on the Avvo Tour.
6. Twitter is not hard. Some of the most-appreciated advice from the trip was Brian Tannebaum’s tutorial on using Twitter. I don’t even need to paraphrase – he said, “Get a twitter account and start using it, that’s all you need to know.” I loved this because more people need to be spreading the word that social media is not hard, scary or expensive. Lawyers simply need to be better at getting involved, and Brian hit this involvement point on the head.
7. Lawyers are not measuring ROI. One thing that we constantly preach is measuring ROI. Thanks in large part to the fat fees lawyers are used to shelling out for, say, the Yellow Pages, they will buy expensive marketing products without thinking through the ROI. Lawyers will spend thousands of dollars on a website, blog, PPC or other marketing tool without having any idea how much business it brings them. The sooner we can get lawyers making these calculations, the sooner the marketing cream will rise to the top. It is one of the reasons we are launching Avvo Pro, which the illustrious Bob Ambrogi so eloquently summed up in this blog post.
8. Central Florida is beautiful. We had to drive overland from West Palm Beach to Tampa. In between is some of the most beautiful farmland and ranchland I have set eyes on. It was a little bit Montana and a little bit Havana. Conrad and I agreed that it was a real treat getting to see a part of Florida that neither of us had ever seen before.
9. Dennis Chen doesn’t like to be called an “expert” in social media. Dennis Chen presented with us in Tampa and Orlando and, during the Tampa presentation, I referred to him as an expert more than once. Dennis is clearly a person of high integrity, and he said to me after the presentation that I probably shouldn’t refer to him as an expert regarding social media. Now, Dennis has four websites, participates on multiple social media sites, participates in listserves, runs his own PPC campaigns, answers questions in Avvo Answers and has a solid handle on SEO. He may not see himself as an expert; but he probably has more practical experience than many of the self-proclaimed social media “experts,” “mavens,” or (Conrad’s favorite) “ninjas” that are out there today.
10. There is a lot of artistic flair in the lawyers in Florida. One was a painter, another was working on a novel, etc. But the one who really surprised me was Terry Verduin from West Palm Beach. She has written two children’s books The Goopy Ghost of Halloween and The Amazing Flight of Little Ray, and she even brought them to the Avvo seminar. You can buy both of these books on Amazon – just follow the links above.
11. Many were watching us from afar. I received a number of DM’s from lawyers asking when we are coming to their area. Our mid-Atlantic tour kicks off the week of November 9th (one week from today) and we will be announcing new tours for 2010 before the end of the year. Also, we love to work into our tours speaking gigs for other organizations (like our ABA and NYCLA speeches next week). So, even if you are far away, if you would like us to come speak to your group, please let us know. We will always do our best to accommodate. You can also come see us at the sure-to-be-very-cool Avvocating conference, January 21st and 22nd in Seattle.
Thank you to everyone who participated in the Avvo Tour. We had such a great time. We call the seminars our “depth charges” because they help people better understand who we are and what we are about, and consistently the attendees go back to their communities and spread the word. We also get to see first-hand the struggles that lawyers have in marketing under the demands of practicing law. This helps us build better products, Avvo Tours, webinars, etc. Finally, we find these tours to be so energizing because we are able to meet face to face those lawyers that rely on Avvo for client development. Every time a lawyer says to me, “I get a lot of business through you guys,” I want to weep. But as I said to the crowd in Orlando in response to one of these testimonials, that would be embarrassing for you and me.
Mark
Results Map: We have a new map on our lawyer search results pages. This map will show all of the lawyers on the page that have claimed their Avvo Profiles. The really neat part is that, when a user hovers over each pinpoint on the map, a summary of the corresponding lawyer’s Avvo profile pops-up, effectively giving the lawyer a free billboard on some of our most valuable real estate. We think of this as a gift to all of the lawyers who help make Avvo a hearty marketplace.
Neighborhood Filters: Do you need a lawyer close by? Beginning today, you can search for lawyers based on neighborhoods within a city. Not only can you type a specific neighborhood into the Avvo search box at the top of the page, but you can also start with a city search and then, from that search results page, filter to your favorite neighborhood.
Avvo Profile Filters: When selecting a lawyer, different elements of competing lawyers’ profiles are important to different people. Some focus on client ratings, others the Avvo Rating or languages the lawyers speak. Because of this, from the lawyer search results pages, we now allow users to filter Avvo profiles by client reviews, attorney endorsements, misconduct, Avvo Pro subscribers, Avvo Ratings and whether the lawyer offers a free consultation or speaks a specific language. 
I am happy to announce that 
ability to include a running feed of their twitter and blog posts. Adding more color, visitors to your profile will receive a better sense of who you are and the expertise you bring to the table.
