I received an e-mail today from Jerrold Parker, senior partner at Parker Waichman Allonso, LLP, the well-known New York personal injury law firm more well known for asbestos litigation. Jerry was writing to ask me to evaluate and list his new personal injury case management software called SmartAdvocate. Apparently, Jerry invested a substantial amount of money to develop custom case management software for personal injury and mass tort cases and is now licensing it to other personal injury lawyers.

I responded to Jerry’s e-mail and he called me back a few minutes later. During our telephone conversation, we began discussing my vanity phone number 1-800-HURT-911, vanity phone numbers for lawyers and Parker Waichman Alonso’s new vanity phone number 1-888-BIG-CASE.

Once you decide on on the direction of your brand, never forget it and never deviate from it. I noticed two recent examples of brand deviation or destruction by major corporations.

Recently, Domino’s announced that (after 40 years) they discovered their pizza wasn’t good! Can you imagine that? So they reinvented their pizza and recent advertising has focused on nothing but how proud they are of their new taste.

Domino’s became a $1.4 billion company with bad pizza because they hit on a great niche with a great brand slogan “30 minutes or it’s free”. Apparently, their customers liked bad pizza, never cared and/or just wanted fast delivery. Now, they abandoned their brand and have to compete on taste. But after trying it yesterday, I don’t think that’s going to be successful.

New Year’s Eve was Tavern on the Green’s last night for dinner under its current ownership. Now, after a fight for ownership rights of the brand, a Manhattan federal judge will decide who gets to keep the name Tavern on the Green, valued at $19 million. That makes the brand worth 50% of annual gross receipts of $38 million. ^{1 2}

While a name like Tavern on the Green has tremendous value as a brand that draws people to the restaurant, lawyers are in a different situation with two distinct differences.

First, a lawyer’s name cannot be sold with the law practice because of the prohibition, in most states, of using another lawyer’s name who is not practicing in the law firm. If a lawyer’s name is branded, it becomes a brand with substantial value that cannot be realized upon the sale of the law practice.

Retailers and some lawyers have long known that credit cards create more sales and larger sales. Now, the Salvation Army has reported that their experiment with accepting sidewalk kettle donations by credit card from wireless credit card processing transmitters has been a success.

The Associated Press reported today, “Major George Hood, spokesman for the Arlington, Va.-based charity, said that the donation sizes are similar to online donations, which average about $75. CNN reported that the Salvation Army claimed that sidewalk donations increased from $1-2 paid by cash to $14 paid by credit card.

For almost any field of law, other than personal injury, credit cards can allow you to:

• Retain clients who otherwise could not afford an upfront retainer;
• Allow you to discount your fees less often;
• Reduce situations where clients are not keeping up with billing;
• Reduce the cost of billing and collections; and

Would you like to instantly and simultaneously give your contact information to a group of people? Let’s say that you’re giving a legal seminar about asbestos litigation to a group of lawyers. Now, you can simultaneously give your contact information to every attorney listening to your seminar.

All you have to do is tell someone or a group of people to text your username on their cell phone to 50500 and your contact information will be sent to them. It’s that simple and it’s even free!

Did you ever want to give your business card to someone, but suddenly realized that you are out of cards? Now, you can give out your contact information without business cards in your pocket. In addition to the above method, you can text the recipient’s cell phone number to 50500 from your cell phone and the recipient will receive your contact information.

Brand fraud online is increasing and law firms are not immune.

CMO COUNCIL reported that “A global audit of 306 marketers, sponsored by MarkMonitor, a leading provider of solutions for enterprise brand protection, found that trademark trespassing is moving increasingly online, and fraud is becoming more difficult to identify due to the increased sophistication of brand hijackers.”

For quite a while, e-mails have circulated which purport to come from a law firm or in some illegal way use the name of a law firm to perpetuate a fraudulent scheme. A search on Google came up with a myriad of complaints about schemes involving the name of a law firm.

Winning an election is all about advertising and it’s all in the message. McCain is using the tried and true Republican message which is attack the opponent. This message has worked very well in the past, but is not working now. Attacking the opponent works when the population is happy. When things are not going well, this type of strategy does not work.

When people are unhappy, a political candidate must explain what can be done to make things better. When people are already happy, changing things can only present risk. Thus, attacking your opponent becomes an effective strategy.

When people are unhappy, they naturally want change. The appropriate message is a two-part message. The first part is to tell people what you will change. The second part is to explain how that change will help them. This is the most elemental part of advertising, tell people how you will solve their problem.

If video on TV is so much better for capturing attention than online advertising, it would stand to reason that video is the best method for advertising online. With online video advertising in its infancy, the findings by a leading market research firm The Kelsey Group, while startling, is not surprising.

Smallbiztechnology.com just published an interview on September 9, 2008 by Assistant Editor Laura Leites with Keith Wiley, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications at Spot Runner. Wiley stated that “The Kelsey Group, recently released a study indicating that the local online video market will see an increase in growth from $10.9 million in 2007 to $1.5 billion in 2012, a compound annual growth rate of 167.8 percent. At Spot Runner, we’re seeing particularly strong growth among restaurants, jewelers, law firms and professional services companies.”

I’ve wanted to write another article about the Yellow Pages, but want to get a quick note out about a FREE webinar tomorrow, Thursday, September 11 at 1:00 PM Eastern Time.

The webinar is moderated by Dick Larkin, the Yellow Pages Commando who is a nationally known expert who formerly worked in the Yellow Pages industry and for the last couple of years has been a proponent of online “yellow page” advertising.

I believe he has found that the print version is not yet dead and he promises to provide some very interesting and useful information. The webinar will also include several experts from the Yellow Pages industry.

I have attended several of Dick’s free webinars and they are very informative. In fact, I’m upset that I missed the last one. If you’re lucky enough to read this before tomorrow, you can sign up for the free webinar at http://ypcommando.com/blog/2008/09/06/the-real-future-of-yellow-pages-free-webinar/ at the top of the page just under “Register Here”.

Years ago, people told me that the Internet would be the end of TV advertising. I told them that my fear was that demand for TV advertising time from online companies would substantially increase and push TV advertising costs higher. Today, there are a great many online businesses which spend much of their advertising budget, if not the bulk of it on TV advertising to bring traffic to their websites.

TV viewers are quite familiar with some of the largest online advertisers, Vonage.com, Monster.com, Ameritrade, Netflix, Scotttrade, LendingTree.com and Ditech.com. In fact, your knowledge of these brands probably emanates from TV advertising.

Recently, in an effort to attract more potential clients to their website, Lawyers.com began advertising on TV and joined the list of other website companies to advertise on TV. I’ve been saying for a long time that online directories can work well for lawyers, but they are usually overpriced and cannot produce a large enough stream of clients for the price.

Lawyers have a lot of common sense. It’s probably the single most important trait of a lawyer, but when it comes to issues outside the scope of a client matter, some lawyers get lazy and put away their common sense.

I was at a seminar on May 20, 2008 about attorney advertising on the Web, where FindLaw was the featured speaker/presenter. FindLaw was presenting some useful information about websites and website advertising, but they also were promoting FindLaw websites for attorneys.

A FindLaw employee stated that “4 million people per month are coming to FindLaw to look for an attorney”. That’s quite an impressive figure. That’s not 4 million people per month coming to FindLaw. That’s 4 million people who are coming to FindLaw specifically to look for a lawyer! Surely, if even a very tiny fraction of that traffic should come to my website, it would be worthwhile. A lot of the lawyers at the seminar seemed very impressed and not one lawyer questioned this amazing statement.

On March 3, 2008, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s anti-spam team made several predictions for 2008, one of which was, “A top-level domain (TLD registry) will offer domains for under $4. The result will be another TLD blighted by spammy domain registrations.”

Because of the low cost of .info top-level domain names, they have been used by spammy web masters. What are spammy websites? That’s a topic for another article, but basically they are worthless websites, designed only to make money for the webmaster and which Google has no interest in presenting to their users. You can read about some of the characteristics of spammy websites here.

GoDaddy is now offering.info names for only $.99. Such a low cost allows a webmaster to cheaply set up thousands of spammy websites. Google has been trying to get rid of spammy websites for a long time through a myriad of methods. Google results have substantially improved over the last few years specifically because they have been successful in eliminating many spammy websites from the search results.

Do you know how many potential clients you are losing because their e-mails are returned undelivered? I believe lawyers don’t really need new clients because eliminating spam e-mail seems to be more important.

I do TV advertising for personal injury lawyers and marketing for criminal lawyers. I often send e-mails to lawyers who request information or with attached files, such as an agreement. My e-mails are frequently returned as suspected spam or virus content.

Although I advise lawyers that their spam filters are creating a problem, none of the lawyers have ever turned off their spam filter. Maybe they don’t know how. Apparently, they do not even know how to accept my e-mail address as an accepted address. They usually just give me an alternate e-mail address.

Many lawyers tell me that they would like to try TV advertising or billboards for a month. If it’s working at the end of the month, they will continue. When these lawyers consider if their advertising is going well, they look at the number of calls they received and want to see that enough clients were retained. Many of these lawyers will be disappointed and go away happy that they cut their losses, never realizing that they really cut their profits.

Outside of the legal profession, retailers, long experienced in advertising, plan their advertising campaigns differently and evaluate ROI differently. For instance, stores routinely sell “loss leaders” just to get customers into the store with the hope that they will purchase other items, come back again, and refer their friends. Retail stores look beyond the initial customer that was brought in by advertising.

Many legal practice consultants advise attorneys to cross sell legal services to their existing clients. For example, I, as a personal injury lawyer, could let my clients know that my law firm also represents clients for immigration, divorce and bankruptcy. It sounds like a good way to generate new business. Even if you don’t practice in those fields, you can refer these clients to other lawyers and get paid without doing any work. But it’s actually counterproductive.

First, it’s much easier to get clients to call you when they know that you only practice in one field. They will think of you as a “specialist”. It’s the same as a brand. Brands for one product are always stronger. The more diverse a brand becomes, the weaker it can get.