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. :-)
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.
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
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!
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.
Registration is now open for Avvocating 2012! The 3rd annual online legal marketing conference is being held on Thursday, May 3 and Friday, May 4, 2012 at the Bell Harbor Conference Center in Seattle, Washington.
Rich Barton, the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Zillow and Founder of Expedia, will give the keynote presentation, followed by an impressive lineup of technology and legal industry leaders:
Michael Blumenthal: Small Business Consultant, Google Maps and Local Search Industry Expert and Blogger at Blumenthals.com/blog
Tyson Snow: Founding partner at Mumford West & Snow LLC in Salt Lake City, Utah. His practice areas include employment law and intellectual property litigation.Tyson is also the founder of Social Media, Esq.,a blog about social media for attorneys.
Josh King: General Counsel and Vice President Business Development, Avvo
Duane Forrester:Senior Product Manager for Microsoft Bing Webmaster Outreach Program,Author and Columnist at Searchengineland.com.
Mark Kelly: President, Chair 10 Marketing a Seattle-based Internet marketing consulting firm.
Matt Homann: Innovational Speaker, Creative Facilitator, Lawyer and Founder of LexThinkand the author of the legal blog “the [non]billable hour”.
To register for Avvocating 2012, please visit online: www.avvocating.com. For information about sponsorship, please contact Megan Olendorf at megan@avvo.com.
We’ll cover a range of topics including blogging, reputation management, online ethics, social media, website analytics, public relations and search engine optimization. Everything you need to know about how to market the good work you’re doing for clients, to drive more business to your firm. We’ll also have guests from time to time, including Mark Merenda, Founder of SmartMarketing, David Ackert, President of The Ackert Advisory and Stephen Fairly, CEO of The Rainmaker Institute.
Hope you can take time to join us each week, on Thursdays at 1PM ET/10AM PT.
Thanks as always for supporting Avvo and have a Happy Thanksgiving!
Last week Seattle Personal Injury Attorney Jason Epstein spoke with us about the various free and low cost online marketing tools and tactics he uses to market his firm. Here’s a replay for all those who may have missed it:
