Solo Contendere

Your message needs to include a call to action

On Martin Luther King Day, my Facebook news feed was filled with posts about America’s greatest social activist, including remembrances and a few scattered reminders that while we have made great strides toward King’s dream, we are not there yet.

This train of thought took me down the tracks of the civil rights movement and the Arab Spring, and eventually deposited me at the station of “What does this mean for small-firm lawyers?”

I know that sounds like it is in the middle of nowhere, but bear with me.

The Internet is the great equalizer for small firms. It has reduced our dependence on office space and print libraries, enabled the outsourcing of receptionists and document management and changed the way we look at finding clients.

While a majority of people with legal issues still turn to friends for referrals to an attorney, the public — especially the younger generations — are increasingly comfortable finding a lawyer online. And why not? We shop for shoes and cars online, find a plumber or even a doctor; why shouldn’t we go online to find a lawyer?

Yet for all the ways the Internet has helped level the playing field between large and small law firms, there is still a fundamental disconnect about what the Internet does and does not do. Social media especially have distorted our views about what constitutes “doing something” about a problem — legal or otherwise. As a result, many small firms are using social media with virtually no effect on their overall client base.

Let’s take an easy example. Anyone who has Facebook or Twitter has seen the posts or pictures that fly around social media. This person thinks everyone should have the right to marry. Cut and paste this as your status to protest Citizens United; retweet this picture; change your status to this to support the fight against breast cancer.

There are certainly ways that expressing your support online is helpful to some causes. But in many ways, online activity has replaced real, meaningful activism. Love them or hate them, the Occupy Wall Street protesters have gotten out from behind their computers and tried to do something about a perceived problem.

If social media had been around in the 1960s, King would have had 30 million Twitter followers and “separate but equal” would still be law. The civil rights movement, like any change that has ever happened in the world, happened because people were moved to action. They sat in at lunch counters and in the front of the bus; they marched and sang and got out in the streets and organized voter registration drives and brought about change the only way change ever happens: by doing something.

Across the world and half a century later, news reports gave much of the credit for coordination of the Arab Spring protests that eventually brought down the governments in many Middle Eastern countries — and especially the government in Egypt — to the influence of social media. Blogs, Facebook and Twitter were not only instruments for informing opinion but for telling democracy’s supporters when and where to meet and to act.

Think of them as a politically engaged flash mob: They coordinated their protests through tweets and posts that brought together thousands of people and brought down some of the region’s most entrenched governments. Unlike the social media “activism” we see in the United States, they used social media as a tool for action, not as a substitute for it.

Which brings me back to where I started. Whether you are trying to correct a huge social injustice or simply trying to get a potential client to pick up the phone and call you, the lesson is the same. Being online is not enough. You need people to act.

Whether you can get people to act today depends somewhat on your practice area, but the call to action is key. If you are in family law, it is not enough to simply write a blog post showing how having a will is important. For debtor’s rights attorneys, tweeting a link about“10 Rights You Didn’t Know You Have” is a good first step. But having the right story is just that: a first step.

The American Research Group’s “10 Rules for More Effective Advertising” points out that when the call to action is not a part of your presentation, all you have is an entertaining story. Unless you tell someone what they are losing by not acting and then give them an easy way to act to correct that problem (by calling you), you have not given them a reason to call.

So when you write a blog post or update on Facebook, make sure you don’t just show off your services, but explain the necessity to act on them. If your firm is on Twitter, use a few of those 140 characters to urge people to call. It’s great to tell people how good your services are, but if you don’t back up those services with an explicit call to action, your online “friends” are likely to support your services or “like” them, but never use them.