After my wedding, someone said to me, “no one remembers the food at a wedding, I hope they don’t remember yours.” The food was horrible, the service appalling, and the caterer showed up so late that my wedding party had to set up the tables for the reception.

Being a Web 2.0 kind of guy, I left a review on Yelp to inform others about my experience.

Yesterday, I received an email through Yelp:

Hi Conrad, I accidentally stumbled onto your review that you wrote about your experience with XXXX XXXXX, my company, last summer and I wanted to find out if anything was ever done to satisfy your complaints and disappoinments. I don’t recall talking with you directly after the event and if I did I truly apologize for not remembering.  If you would be so kind as to call me when you have a minute. I would love to resolve this and somehow earn your respect again.  What name was the order placed under and what was the date?
Thank you very much,
John”

I’m a true believer you can build raving fans by proactively responding to negative feedback.  Granted it’s a little harder for a wedding caterer – I can’t really make up for the fact that they were understaffed, took over 30 minutes just to serve the main course and forgot the chocolate in the chocolate strawberry dessert.  So I appreciated John’s approach, but he’s falling a little short.

Best Practices when Dealing with Negative Client Reviews

1. Proactively Monitor Your Online Profiles – don’t “accidentally stumble” onto feedback about your company.  Use Google Alerts to proactively monitor your online reputation.  Avvo makes this really easy with email notifications when something is added to a lawyer’s profile.
2. Reach Out – responding to unhappy clients is a hallmark of good business.  While you can’t please everyone all of the time, you shouldn’t dismiss all disgruntled former clients as nutjobs.  Most online review forums that protect the identity of the reviewer (like Avvo), also offer facilitate confidential conversations – for example, John sent the email through Yelp and he never saw my email address.  Avvo has a similar process where our Customer Care team will reach out directly to the reviewer.
3. Offer to Make It Right – John offers to work with me to resolve this issue.  This is the foundation of great customer service.
4. Make it Easy to Contact You.  You’ll notice in John’s email that while he asks me to call, he fails to provide a phone number or email address. Because the review came through Yelp, I can’t even find his email address.
5. Follow up Quickly – My wedding was in 2003.  I left the review on Yelp more than a year ago.  At this point, the likelihood that I’m going to invest time with John is close to zero.   The likelihood that during the past 7 years I’ve warned numerous engaged couples about my experience with the caterer is exactly 100%.
6. Manage Your Overall Review Profile – one negative review isn’t the end of the world.  People reading reviews know that you can’t please all of the people all of the time.  However, if the balance of your reviews are negative, you may want to look very critically at your business.  John’s business has two negative and one positive review.  With innumerable options available, would they make your wedding caterer shortlist?

Many people are uncomfortable providing negative feedback in person.  Online reviews may be the only indication that you have a grumpy ex-client.  How (and when) you respond can make all the difference.

This is not a humble post. It is not full of business acumen, legal insight or bleeding edge technology advances. This is a cheerleading post about Avvo’s growth in appeal to both consumers and lawyers.  I write not out of arrogance, but to answer the question we get asked by lawyers every day, “why should I spend time on Avvo instead of all of the other websites out there?”

When it comes to legal directories bigger is better – be it having the most lawyers, the most information or the most consumers using that information to chose a lawyer. Two Novembers ago, I wrote a post called “Avvo – World’s Largest Legal Directory” using some data to compare Avvo to the establishment. It’s time to update those stats:

Avvo – more lawyers, more ratings, more reviews and more people finding lawyers than anywhere else in the world.  Lawyers, there are literally hundreds of websites in which you can invest your time and dollars. Prioritize Avvo, the one that delivers the biggest impact to your business.  (Oh and we’re free.)

Data Sources

• Lawyers – Avvo (internal numbers), Lawyers.com search, Superlawyers – 5% of roughly 800,000 practicing lawyers.
• Rated Lawyers – Avvo (internal numbers), Lawyers.com search, Superlawyers – 5% of roughly 800,000 practicing lawyers.
• Lawyers w/Client Ratings – Avvo (internal numbers), Lawyers.com search
• Traffic Growth – Compete comparison of annual growth rate for Visits (Findlaw directory data on lawyers.findlaw.com requires a free log in to Compete to see subdomain data).

I recently sat in on yet another lawyer marketing seminar that regurgitated the same message delivered by legal marketers: “lawyers, if you just understood social media as well as I did, you could be as popular on [insert Twitter and/or Facebook] as I am.” The talk goes something like this:

“See all my twitter followers! When I tweet, people listen, they open up their offices to me, they meet me at airports for coffee, they bake me brownies. When I link to my latest blog post on my Facebook fan page, my vast network of friends pass on my witticisms to their vast network of people, all of whom are prospective clients. I’m even more popular than I was in 8th grade and my (ahem) marketing business is thriving!”

I watch the audience with mouths slightly agape, enraptured, scribbling furiously on hotel note pads trying to unlock the mystery of mastering this professional popularity contest. Twitter accounts are opened in real time, facebook fan pages are set up on iPhones. I can almost see the thoughts among the audience: if only I had 10,000 Twitter followers, I could buy that Porsche 911 C4 convertible in Arctic Silver Metallic.

Invariably during the Q/A session someone (usually a recently minted solo practitioner) asks, “how am I supposed to do all of this social media stuff and still bill clients?” The experts pause uncomfortably, say something to the extent of, “well, it’s really easy and it doesn’t take that much time” and then quickly move on to highlighting their number of twitter followers. There are two major mistakes with this line of thinking.

The first falsehood that marketers (or self-proclaimed social media experts, ninjas, gurus and mavens) would have you believe is that the social media popularity contest doesn’t entail a significant investment of time.

How do I know this? I’m a legal marketer and if I’ve learned anything in the past four years its this: social media doesn’t circumvent the fact that building relationships with people takes time. To wit. . . we have a team of people who have full time jobs marketing the largest and most popular legal website in the world. Avvo’s charismatic CEO and a wise General Counsel are both social media savvy and we have no fewer than 10 individual twitter accounts, LinkedIn Groups, Facebook Fan Pages and even two Foursquare accounts. Through our investment in social media we’ve built relationships with numerous key influencers (Ambrogi, Elefant), consultants (Merenda), surly curmudgeons (Greenfield), and industry innovators (Port). Social Media has been good to us and we use it effectively, but lets not pretend that we’ve been successful by simply tweeting 5 minutes a day between bites of cereal and at halftime during the Seattle Sounders game.

The second falsehood that marketers would have lawyers believe is that building a legal business is just like building a marketing business. It’s simply not true. Prospective legal clients behave very differently than most marketers, especially when it comes to social media. How many people want to fan their DUI lawyer on Facebook? How many people retweet the 140 character quips from their Divorce attorney? I’m not suggesting that social media can’t work for lawyers, in fact I’ve spoken with many practicing lawyers who are successful with it – but keep in mind the golden rule of marketing that seems to have been forgotten by the marketing experts themselves – know your customer.

If you want to learn how to use social media to build your client list stop listening to self-proclaimed marketing experts who suggest you need to be more like them with legions of twitter followers and jealousy-inspiring Facebook fan pages. Instead, learn from those practicing lawyers (who bill legal clients not lawyers) to see how they connect with their prospects.

Update: Nancy Myrland (social media marketing consultant) responds with a good balance here: Yes, this Takes Time.

Update 2: Still thinking about hiring a social media company? Check out 52 Questions to ask when Hiring a Social Media Company from Outspoken Media.

Happy Memorial Day. For those in the legal profession, take time to remember two of your own who were lost in Iraq in 2003 when their Blackhawk went down: Warrant Officer of the Corps, Sharon Swartworth and Sergeant Major of the Corps Cornell Gilmore.

Those of you who were lucky enough to join us for the Avvocating conference in January will remember the Search Engine Optimization talk delivered by ex-Googler Vanessa Fox. Her book, Marketing in the Age of Google was released a month ago and is already a Top 10 Bestseller on Amazon. Join Avvo tomorrow at 10:00 (PST) for a one hour free webinar with Vanessa for an overview of her book along with an opportunity to lob questions at one of the leading minds in search engine optimization. See you there.

Interested in raising a little JD?  Selecting an appropriately lawyerly name for your kiddo may be important.  We just published an exhaustive analysis of lawyer first names going back to 1808 across all 50 states on Nameberry, the best baby name website.  Nameberry is the online accompaniment to the books (try Beyond Ava and Aiden) from naming trend experts Linda Rosenkrantz and Pamela Satran whose insightful commentary has been guiding the names in nurseries for years. 

Last month Avvo launched our first major design overhaul of the site.  Looks like we were so successful, Google has followed our example.

Google launched a new UI today aimed at bringing much of their latest search functionality to the masses. The layout of the search results pages has been refined and (gasp!) the Google logo received a polishing.  But the major update is providing one-click filtering functionality based on a user’s intent.  In plain English?  Let’s say I search for “iPhone” – the previous (and new default) result is a mix of all sorts of information around the iPhone.  Search engines have trouble understanding the user’s intent – do I want late breaking news about the iPhone, do I want to buy an iPhone, do I want to see a video of an iPhone, do I want to read blog reviews about the iPhone? So Google has added simple one-click filtering icons to help users further refine their results:  Shopping, News, Blogs, etc.  There is also additional functionality to limit results by date and even geography.

These changes are a result of traffic pattern analysis that suggests people are constantly refining their searches through the search box – essentially running 2, 3 or even 5 searches to find the content they want.  This pattern is obviously a poor user experience – by providing one click filtering based on the user’s intent, Google can funnel people to the content they want more efficiently. Interestingly, reviews (as in client reviews on Avvo, for example) didn’t make the cut (although has Google tested this extensively in the past.)

For an in-depth review (and screenshots) check out Meet The New Google at Search Engine Land.

Last night, I had the privilege of attending QLaw’s Annual Banquet as the guest of Richard Wood and Summit Law Group.  QLaw (aka the GLBT Bar Association of Washington) celebrated it’s 5th year anniversary with over 400 lawyers in attendance, including Governor Chris Gregoire.  The keynote was given by Darren Manzella, a former US Army Sergeant dismissed under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell after two decorated tours of duty in Iraq.  He recounted his very personal experience along with the support of the pro bono organization Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.  Whatever your perspective may be consider this:  in an era where the armed forces are struggling to recruit, 14,000 active and trained service members have been dismissed under DADT.

Hartford Magazine partnered with Avvo to power their Top Lawyers Listings. The magazine is on the shelf now, you can also read the list of the top 88 lawyers featured across twelve different practices areas in their online edition.

Over the past 3 years, website and blog platforms have come a long way in terms of conforming to Search Engine Optimization best practices. In simple terms, the technology to support SEO is becoming more ubiquitious. However, every now and then I run across sites that still run afoul of SEO fundamentals. Take this visually georgous site for the Atlas Law Group. Unfortunately, the site is built entirely in Flash and the search engines have trouble (although getting better) parsing Flash content. What does this mean in real terms? Well, because the engines can’t navigate in Flash, they can’t even find any of the additional pages on the site (in fact, technically there aren’t any additional pages, the entire site is one single shell built in Flash). So all of the content on the site is invisible. A search for the pages indexed by Google returns only one single page – the homepage. (You can do this search for your own site by doing this search on Google: site:www.atlaslawgroup.com). This search should return all of the pages on your site, if it doesn’t, you may have a technical problem.) To demonstrate why this is such a significant problem, the site doesn’t even rank for the attorney’s name: Megan K. Pionkowski.

Now lets look at what we get when we search for “atlas law group“, the homepage does come up, but unfortunately the snippet reads: “Non-Flash Site Under Construction – Click here for access to the Atlas Law Group Twitter page. loading…” This is hardly a welcoming advertisement for someone looking to hire the Atlas Law Group.

SEO technical problems used to be rampant. Technology has improved so much in the past three years that problems like this should never happen. Be careful who you hire.