Independence day is a serious holiday for the small towns surrounding the little law office on the prairie. It’s a time of community celebration – the Lions hold their annual grilled chicken dinner (posh city folk generally call this lunch), there’s a parade down main street with VFW parading the colors leading the way, the high school marking band filling the air with as much enthusiasm as music and the Sheriff’s mounted patrol bringing up the rear (a position necessitated by the desire to avoid having the band march through any unfortunate incidents), the afternoon tractor pulls will eventually give way to the odd speech or two by the hometown politicians – a verbal counterpoint to the rockets’ red (and blue, and white, and yellow) glare. There is a sense of coming home in a small town 4th, a sense that this is something more than just another 3 day break squeezed into an otherwise hectic work week – even though that new cell tower up on the hill reminds us of what is lurking just around the weekend.
It was weekend of celebration not that far removed from a weekend out of the 50’s (17, 18, or 19 – take your pick) where the world slowed down and reflected for a moment. Quite a contrast to on-demand world that has us – the technophile generation – checking our smartphones 110 times a day (on average) and devoting the 13 hours per week to our e-mail, or general immediacy demanded as our connectivity bleeds our practices into our days. No wonder we become devotes of efficiency and getting stuff done for without our various systems our single-threaded wetware would soon run off the rails.
This 24/7 connectivity gives us unprecedented access, opportunity, and leverage – at no other time can we reach so many, so quickly, and at so little cost. Websites and social media make our first impressions for us, CRM software automates our follow-up, and cloud-based practice management systems and client portals let us reach our work and our clients from anywhere and any when. As we embrace that idea that we get our bits for nothing and our eyeballs for free (my apologies to Dire Straits), our marketing moves from dead trees to dynamic, targeted content served on-demand to a multitude of screens dynamically, responsively reformatting itself to the client’s device. The digital world is the great equalizer; it is where the solo and big law compete on equal footing – a place where content is the new currency and the content creator is king.
Which brings us to the sad fact that this massive power comes with a downside. We have passed the tipping point; the question is no longer “should we?” – that question has been settled – but rather “how much and how often?” for if we are not out there producing content we cease to exist for large portions of the market. It is not just that we will suffer from the outbreak of poor SEO (something that, I’m sure, can be remedied by the simple application of this week’s $300 sure-fire snake-oil), it’s that we’ll lose the ability to attract or even be recognized by the “never-lift-their-eyes-from-the-phone” demographic.
Even at the little law office on the prairie, mobile is fast becoming a necessity Five years ago, mobile meant simply having a laptop and a willingness to make a house-call and the only marketing essential was to allow time for a cup of coffee and a brief chat at each stop. Now, that phone towers are appearing on the hilltops, smartphones are sprouting up like toadstools after a rainstorm and with them, comes a whole new type of mobile – less coffee and pie, more content-based marketing and responsive website design. While my inner tech-curmudgeon would like nothing better than turn back this sea-change (my inner tech-curmudgeon really likes pie), the days of ignoring mobile are fading away like the after-image of last week’s fireworks.
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