Whats That Shiny New Marketing Toy Youve Got There? || Googles Out Of Home Ads – Legal Talk Network

First Gyi and Conrad dig through the giant heap of legal marketing news that somebody left here since the last episode. Then, the guys help you avoid over-investing in every cool new thing right before they encourage you to invest in Googles cool new thing.

Second Life! Pokemon Go! Clubhouse! (gasp) Whatever other nonsense you think might work to market your firm. Yes, theres always cool new tech to play with, and maybe you feel like you can be early to this new thing, but sometimes its important to step back and make sure youre not over-investing in the next nothingburger. DO: keep up with the latest trends and tech. DONT: be a sucker for the next shiny thing.

And, weve all seen it in the movies; a delightful future of humanity where everywhere you walk there is a personalized hologram trying to sell you the latest, hottest new thing or turkey dinner in a cup. Well, good news! Google is taking the first steps to that utopia with their new offerings with Out of Home ads. The gents share their takes on our bright future, brought to you by Google, and how (and why) youd use Out of Home to promote your law firm.

A Giant Pile of News:

Special thanks to oursponsors , , , and .

Gyi Tsakalakis: Wed love to hear from you so we can make our show better.

Conrad Saam: Please share five minutes with us at legaltalknetwork.com/survey.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Be sure to tell them you love LHLM most of all.

Conrad Saam: Well choose five respondents wholl get selected among three great prizes: air pods, Beats and the solo stove firepot. That would be awesome. From our survey sponsor Nota by M&T Bank.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Before we get started, we want to thank our sponsors: Clio, Lawyaw, Posh Virtual Receptionist and Nota. Conrad, I made some ribs this last weekend and I understand maybe you also made ribs.

Conrad Saam: I made ribs. I think you have to end out the summer season with ribs. Right? Or some barbecue just to pretend the kids are back in school but youre just elongating the summer just a little bit better. You know the other cool thing I did is my favorite, not that this is a parenting show, but I also bought which is shockingly inexpensive a blow-up projector screen to do movies outside. So as the days have gotten shorter, were now showing movies outside for the neighborhood kids and so we have a bunch of kids coming over every Saturday night to watch movies with ribs.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Are you charging admission?

Conrad Saam: As far as you know, the admission is just a love and adoration of their parents for me taking kids off your hand on a Saturday night.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Very nice.

Conrad Saam: No. But its a really fun way to so I wanted something COVID safe that we could do outside with a bunch of friends back to school and so, its been a good little community gathering that weve been able to create.

Gyi Tsakalakis: What movie did you play?

Conrad Saam: We are going to play Napoleon Dynamite next weekend which might none of my kids know about so Im excited about that. But we watch Spider-Man into the spider-verse which bluntly I was never a comics guy and Im guessing I didnt get 90% of the movie. I was also cooking ribs.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Not a raving review from Conrad.

Conrad Saam: No, no. Everyone loved it except I. Everyone loved it but I was busy cooking ribs.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So what else were going to talk about today besides Spiderman and ribs?

Conrad Saam: Oh boy. This is actually going to be pretty jam-packed. We typically try and jump through the news quickly. Theres a lot of news coming out of the holiday weekend so theres a lot to catch up and then were going to dig a little bit deeper into some of those news items. And the next thing for our first segment, Im really excited to talk about this. This is the dangers of chasing the shiny new toys for your marketing, right? And the importance of actually experimenting with a shiny new toys. And then speaking of shiny new things, were going to end up talking about Googles poorly named out-of-home advertising product that they just talked about this week. Before that, were going to listen to some tunes.

[Music]

Male: Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing teaching you how to promote market and make fat stacks for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Welcome everyone to another episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. We hope you all had a wonderful Labor Day weekend as were recording just after Labor Day. Its great to be back here with you. Conrad, lets dive in to this giant pile of news.

Conrad Saam: I wasnt trying to end that sentence, giant pile of news. So the big thing that we were talking about last time that I still think is interesting is the Google helpful content algorithm. My experience with our clients, I suspect you are seeing the same, is a bit of a yawner in terms of any changes. Is that accurate for you?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yes. Its a big to-do about nothing, you know. I dont want to turn this into a negative rant but this is what the no SEO industry does. This is what the SEO industry does. By the way, Googles doing this too. They know exactly what theyre doing as well.

So, Google has this fancy algorithm, all this stuff going on to try to sort through the mess that the web is. And Google, you know, the actual search engineers, they make updates to the algorithm to make the results better you know. What better is, well let the search engineers decide or now the AI decide. But I digress Google announces, Hey, we made an update. If you have unhelpful content on your site, this classifier might make it not rank as well.

And of course, the SEO industry, because this is how they make their money. It goes out and says, Oh, new update from Google. You better hire us to fix it. Your contents, everythings broken, everythings bad. Your sites going to disappear from search results. You better hire us. And then with some exceptions, with some notable exceptions. And guess what? The stuff that when it does happen, it happens on ginormous websites, not small law firm websites, not the local pack, it might be like your old blog post or your keyword stuff, this or the million plurals like thats unhelpful. Maybe some of that gets filtered.

(00:05:10)

But to your point Conrad, we havent seen a ton. Most major people who spend their days staring at search console and Google Analytics havent seen a ton. They did some I think Barry Schwartz at Roundtable did a survey and said about 20% of people saw something happen and its still rolling out so you know, its still too early to even talking about this. But what is the helpful content update Conrad?

Conrad Saam: Well so, very quickly it is a site-wide adjustment based on how much, what Google considers helpful content. Theyre calling it helpful content to make it sound innocuous and theyre not calling it a penalty specifically to make it sound innocuous. The interesting thing for me is that they talked about this so much, they named it ahead of time and Im going to give a counterpoint to the nothing happening, a counterpoint perspective on this because I actually all of the signals suggest that this will be a big deal.

The last time when Panda rolled out, it hits something like 22% of the web if you have a massive site. And because its site-wide, this is important. If you have a very large volume of pages on your website and a lot of them are garbage, it will actually have a negative impact on your good content, right? And thats what it means by site-wide algo update.

There is a great post. Joy Hawkins brought this to my attention this morning. Its a great post by Marie Haynes and what she writes about is her expectation that this, even though nothing really big is going on right now, she says the last time there was a major rollout, the changes happened at the end of the rollout. So the variability in search results didnt happen until the very end of the rollout and her hypothesis is that its going to happen again. I think that is highly possible but well see, right? Like she could be wrong. This is just a kind of her theoretical perspective. I tend to agree with her because Google has made such a big deal of it which is out of the ordinary for how they typically operate.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So lets say you and Dr. Haynes are right, then what would you do? What do you do? What do you tell a small law firm website clients to do to their websites to prepare to have a great helpful content update?

Conrad Saam: Dont do anything. Henny Penny. The sky is not falling and we dont know if its falling until youve got at least two weeks of data posts update. So you need to sit tight and strap in and watch the data, right? So none of this meant like Gyi and Conrad prognosticating and disagreeing over this. Who cares? None of it matters. What really matters is how your traffic changes, how you are converting traffic changes if your traffic changes and so you need to sit and wait until youve got enough data to actually make that assessments.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And by the way, even with that data, there are hundreds of other updates going out of Google that they dont even talk about and so try to distinguish between helpful content update and the hundreds of other algorithm updates that might be causing the same problem.

Conrad Saam: And finally, we will move on from global content. The smaller your website traffic is, the less scientific this is just basic statistics but the smaller your website traffic is, the less scientific any study is going to be because you simply lack the sample size to ascertain whether or not your site is getting hit or if its just natural variability in behavior.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Statistical significance, such a pain.

Conrad Saam: You know, my .

Gyi Tsakalakis: Data scarcity.

Conrad Saam: I try not to talk about my kids too much but my oldest kid is taking AP stats in high school and that makes me very happy. Its one of I think the best classes you could take in high school to prepare you for real life. Okay, moving on.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Best tip.

Conrad Saam: My case, document automation and accounting. Whats going on with my case Gyi?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, the race to be the platform operating system universe, whatever metaverse, who want to go there, whatever you want to call it, for legal is on and my case is definitely in that fight. And so, theyve integrated their document automation and accounting similar to what Clio is doing and some of these other major platforms but you know they want to be one stop shop, right? Like run your firm so its your whole firm. Payments accounting intake, whole consumer journey right there in that app.

Conrad Saam: And not a surprise, right? Like people look at the complexity of all these different systems its difficult.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Who wants to open two different systems?

Conrad Saam: Yeah, zero, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Not me.

Conrad Saam: Speaking of the my cases of the world, Clio conference is coming up in October. Weve got the Crisp Summit November 2 and 3. I also noted like theres some crazy people showing up at conferences. Obama is going to HubSpot inbound. Hes the keynote at HubSpot. I will confess, I did actually apply to speak at HubSpots in town conference, probably 90% for the slight opportunity to actually meet Barack. That would be super cool.

(00:10:05)

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, they got to bring Obama and because no one wants to go to conferences anymore and so .

Conrad Saam: Well thats an interesting thing. Were seeing a really interesting shift in the conferences. Its those in-person conferences, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah.

Conrad Saam: Also Gyi, you are the kiss of death for Amazon medicine. It was canceled before our episode. We talked about it last session, Amazon medicine. We talked about whether or not that is a hint that Amazon might be prognosticating or thinking about or toying with the legal industry. Before the episode went live, they had canceled it. So theres an article in the Washington post about Amazon. A kiss of death Gyi for Amazon medicine.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, you know, Bezos is a big LHLM guy and so, when hes sitting there, hes just cant help himself. But interestingly, the Washington Post article that I will cite is actually talking about how they are still very keen on doing health. Anyway, take a look, decide for yourself. I still think and we know this. I mean you worked at the company that I was thinking like this many years ago.

Conrad Saam: Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But a site where you go for lawyers, right? And Amazons the site where you go for everything so, look, theyre not there yet, theres a lot to do. But even if its not Amazon, someones going to be that.

Conrad Saam: Someones there. Its already happening, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah.

Conrad Saam: The different models. And thats why we bring it up because I think its really important to think well outside our typical construct of what practicing law means in order to think about what the future looks like. Speaking of what the future looks like, youll be able to delete your racist tweets in Twitter now by editing them. Twitters opened up an editing feature so you can erase your stupidity from the past. Good or bad Gyi.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Do you have the other functionality on your app? Do you even have Twitter? Are you on Twitter?

Conrad Saam: I used to be such a heavy Twitter operator. Twitter. And I have found honestly that the you will find me nowhere on TikTok yet although and were going to talk about the importance of this. The lurking on these things is really, really important, right? Because there are so much to learn just by lurking. You dont have to engage but lurking and were going to get into the shiny object thing but lurking on these different platforms is important. Yeah, I do not have the Twitter edit functionality on my Twitter account.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I dont either and I dont know if maybe .

Conrad Saam: I think they may be rolling it out to people who say stupid things all the time.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, they dont care. I cant get a blue check so they dont care about me.

Conrad Saam: All right. You said TikTok.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I did.

Conrad Saam: TikTok is really changing the way Google is thinking about how the next generation is finding information. There is a great TechCrunch article on this. Well put this in the show notes but Gyi, can you talk about how the success of TikTok and Instagram is shaping and Googles response to the successive TikTok and Instagram but shaping the way younger generation is actually looking for information?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah. The short version is that people are actually going to TikTok and Amazon to find like places to eat. I think thats like the big example. But the point is, is that the users are now using social platforms more in the context of search, right and discovery.

And you know its funny. I dont know if you and I talked about it. I remember this conversation long ago and Facebook was originally pushing like their search functionality. It never really was a thing because no one went there to do that. But now, these users are. So theyre going and they want to see, theyd much rather see like somebody, one of their influencers or a friend or somebody talking about with a video about the place, the food, all that kind of stuff, the ambience. And so, Googles like while were losing searchers to social platforms, we need to start thinking about how we can learn from TikTok and Instagram to make search results more visual and image-driven, video-driven. I think thats the gist.

Conrad Saam: And Im going to come back to this lurking concept. You will not get this unless you start lurking and playing in some of these different platforms because you will see. Its so real when youre there and its reading it on TechCrunch is nice but actually experiencing it is really important. Theyre going to talk about the new thing and how to approach that.

Gyi Tsakalakis: You know I got to this is a show about bashing the legal profession. Usually, we say about lawyers, theyre so slow to adopt this stuff. Somethings changed. I dont know. Something lawyers need to dance or something but there are lawyers all over TikTok and all over Instagram like its going out of style. And Ill tell you, its not just agency idiots like us that are pushing them there because a lot .

Conrad Saam: Its not agencies like us. The agencies will get it.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah. Theyre taking this on themselves. I dont know. Maybe its the performance aspect of it but someone has convinced the legal profession to be on (00:14:53) and Instagram.

(00:15:05)

Conrad Saam: And theyre all over. This is to me, this is a pure supply and demand thing. Dean Blachford of Ottawa, hes a tax lawyer out of Ottawa. I did a great session with him the other day and he said he was talking about the amount of time that he puts into his charity event and how that is kind of leveraging online to make that really, really successful. And he literally said, I dont spend money on Google ads. I do this instead and its so much more effective. And whats happened is, pure supply and demand, Google ads so expensive, everyones playing in that game. Youve got to find blue ocean strategies for that. SEO, god help you if you are starting out, right?

And so people are looking for different resources that are going to drive business and you and I both started as SEOs but theres so much out there that is not SEO and Google ads. And so, people are finding that. Its just economics. All right, lets take a break. Were going to pay some bills and when we come back, weve got the Legal Trends Report minute as well as talking more and more about the new, new thing. This is thematically coming across quite well in the session.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Its almost like we planned it.

Conrad Saam: Its almost like its in the show notes.

[Music]

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Gyi Tsakalakis: And now for the Legal Trends Report minute brought to you by Clio.

So many legal professionals see practice management software is a key area for investment. And in fact, according to the Legal Trends Report, it accounted for a moderate or large expense and 67% of survey respondents, more than any other category. You all cant see this because youre just listening to me and Im not hearing the scream. But in the Legal Trends Report, there is a chart that talks about expenses among lawyers who are very involved in finances.

And the reason that I wanted to really zero on this is that if you look at the number one category, practice management software, its viewed as a large expense. It doesnt mean it actually is, its just the perception of. And then you come down and you see marketing website and domain which is an odd way of saying it but it is what it is. And thats a much lower perceived expense and I dont know what to make of it. I was kind of thinking about this and in preparation, it just strikes me. I think about practice management software and you know may be excused for different sized firms but like thats the significant expense? Thats the major expenses practice management software, not marketing? In fairness staff was up there. Associate lawyers were up there.

Conrad Saam: No but I mean, not in fairness. Im looking at the graph that youre talking through right now just so I can describe it for everyone. Practice management software is considered a large or moderate expense by more people, the non-lawyer staff and associate lawyer staff, right? So youre spending, and this is again perception.

Gyi Tsakalakis: You think? You think. Yeah. You think youre setting more on practice management.

Conrad Saam: So youre pretty annoyed about your practice management. So I would much rather spend money. I would rather see, this is inverted, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Right. I mean, staff and staff, I get that one but I dont know. I dont know. A part of me thinks that maybe it just skews for this particular service runs. But draw your own conclusions. Go download the Clio Trends Report to learn more about these opportunities and much more for free. Download Clios Legal Trends Report at clio.com/trends. Thats Clio spelled C-L-I-O.

Conrad Saam: Now Gyi, we started this session off talking about the new new thing and chasing the new, new thing and you and I are both technology people.

(00:20:00)

Theres always a new, new thing coming out, right? So we were talking about TikTok and Instagram and the effectiveness of that which seems surprising. Theres lots of other new, new things that kind of crash and burn, right? And so, I know how I handle this for the agency, its probably very similar to how you handle it for your agency. But how do you think lawyers should be thinking about the new, new thing and how do you balance staying abreast of changes with technology with not going bananas on things that are never really going to take off?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well thats part of our job, right? Its our job as the agency experts to stay on top of this. I think thats part of the value we bring to the table thats self-fulfilling. When we started planning for this segment, it was funny because it was really bash chasing shiny objects. Like thats really how we started. But as we started talking, I think you made the point of how important it is as to balance the shiny object syndrome with keeping informed about what is new.

Conrad Saam: Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Anyway, I think that its a much more of I think balanced construct than just like, its so easy to be like oh, youre silly for chasing shiny objects?

Conrad Saam: I think the problem that we get to is that some of the shiny objects actually hang around, right, not most of them, right? Not most of them. Those of you who are really big on meerkat a long time ago, those of you who were just all over Clubhouse and the mindset

Gyi Tsakalakis: Oh, no. Now I know youve made somebody angry thats listening. Youre about to bash Clubhouse. Oh, boy.

Conrad Saam: Well, by the way, and I genuinely mean this because I would love to have the conversation if you have found Clubhouse, if you still find Clubhouse effective for you from a business perspective, we would love to talk to you. In preparation for this pod today, Gyi and I looked up lawyers on Clubhouse and I sat in on a Lawyer Clubhouse session last night. That was all of the reasons why shiny objects that why we were making fun of shiny objects like A, I couldnt believe it that seven people were actually spending half an hour a week with the same group of inane conversations. B, maybe its just a really bad data point that I had here, but if Clubhouse is still working for you, we would love to know about it and where Im going with this is I played with Clubhouse heavily when it came out. My gut was it was going nowhere because of the way it was set up and I think I was right. Im happy to be wrong. Im happy to have someone walk in and tell me how it is driving their immigration law firm practice and I just dont understand that would be amazing. Wed love to have that conversation.

But my point is not that like hey I called Clubhouse for being that flash in the pan, it was Im happy to be wrong about that and you have to play in the game to understand whether or not this works, right? And you have to play in the TikTok game to understand whether or not it works. You have to play in the Instagram game to understand whether or not it worked. It doesnt mean you have to pick the right tech and I think thats often the case. Oh, you know youre a great tech person because you saw Clubhouse coming and you thought it was amazing and you got everyone on involved. Its knowing whats going to work or whats not going to work. I think thats the deal.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, I guess my thing about all this stuff is what works for some people doesnt work for everybody and what doesnt work for a lot of people does work for a few because I think about this and Im sure there are people that are using Clubhouse to have conversations and build connections and maybe theres look bottom line is this, forget about the example, you are in, if seven of my closest business advisors, referral sources, professional contacts. We are getting together on Clubhouse once a week and we were referred business to each other and talking shop. I would find that tremendously valuable now. Does it have to be our own Clubhouse? I think thats part of the question too is, its like its not about the technology, right? Its about like where the people are that you want to connect with. Ill tell you, Im on Facebook for that very reason. I dont want to be on Facebook, and I, we all have our personal preferences of like the different social media that we like, but a lot of people I know both personally and professionally are there. Theyre not on Twitter which I guess I tend to prefer despite all these problems. I dont know, so.

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Whats That Shiny New Marketing Toy Youve Got There? || Googles Out Of Home Ads - Legal Talk Network