He was practicing corporate law for a mid-sized firm in Western New York when the firm downsized in 2009. Despite the loss of his job, Dayton says he was relieved. “I had been going into work for a few weeks without having anything to do. Having been poor before and having been bored, I’ll take poor every time,” he says.
That job loss wasn’t the first time Dayton suddenly found himself unemployed. Prior to practicing law, he had been let go from four different positions. Each time, he felt a sense of relief because he realized he had been unhappy and unfulfilled. However, it was also those experiences that jarred him to discern he was born to be an entrepreneur, and that changed Dayton’s life forever.
“I got to work immediately writing my second book--the first one to be published,'Social Media for Lawyers: Twitter Edition.' ... I woke up every morning at 6 a.m. to write, and finished it in about four months. At the same time, I was blogging, hosting a weekly conference call where I interviewed industry marketing leaders and was getting hired by my first few law firms to help with their social media efforts,” he says.
According to Dayton, “it’s not a closely guarded secret” that lawyers need help marketing themselves because they tend to have below average sales and marketing abilities. The intelligence level of the average lawyer is actually another reason attorneys benefit from assistance with their marketing efforts, he says.
“Because they are so smart, I mean seriously intelligent, they aren’t bothered with marketing,” Dayton says. However, being book-smart doesn’t necessarily translate into business savviness. “The type of analytical smarts a lawyer has isn’t really the same type required for marketing. Both call for degrees of intelligence, although they are different breeds of smarts,” Dayton says.
He has a message for lawyers who say they are so busy, they barely have enough time to return client phone calls, let alone maintain a blog promoting their law practice. Dayton suggests those attorneys should either charge more for their legal services or change the area of law in which they practice. Why? “If you have too much business, then obviously you don’t need to blog. But if you are so busy that you can’t even call existing clients back, you have a much deeper problem with strategic time management,” he says.
According to Dayton, several weaknesses exist in how lawyers market themselves. Among them are:
- Lack of strategic focus
- Lack of investment in marketing
- No appreciation of and patience for the time required to see marketing efforts pay off
Most attorneys don’t realize that just as it takes time for a case to wind itself through the legal system, effective marketing takes time to reach its intended audience. “For most lawyers, no short term ROI means the same thing as no ROI. Obviously, that is shortsighted,” Dayton says.
He also laments how the average law firm spends less than 2% of gross revenue on marketing. Compare that figure with growing companies that regularly invest upwards of 10% of their gross revenue on marketing and it’s clear the legal profession lags well behind.
Fortunately, with a change in attitude about the importance of marketing, an attorney’s bottom line can improve with patience, an effective marketing strategy and some financial investment. “Lawyers need to surround themselves with team members who are experts at marketing, and then they need to trust those people to make those decisions,” Dayton says.
Another step a lawyer can take, especially if they aren’t especially adept at marketing, is to blog on their web site. “Blogging is probably one of the easiest ways to build your reputation and bring in business.”
If an attorney is going to have a blog on his or her website in the hopes of bolstering visibility and attracting new business, Dayton says it’s best if the lawyer either writes the posts themselves or hires professionals to blog “with them.” In other words, he suggests hiring a ghostwriter familiar with the attorney’s area of practice to write posts the lawyer then tweaks by adding insights gained from his or her practical experiences.
“The more a lawyer’s DNA rubs off on the blog posts, the better,” he says. Dayton himself has done and continues to do his share of writing. In addition to his social media book mentioned above, another work he wrote entitled 'LinkedIn & Blogs for Lawyers' (co-written with Amy Knapp), was published in 2011.
Coupling Dayton’s strengths in Twitter and other social media platforms and Knapp’s in LinkedIn, the pair was able to produce a work so respected that British author, speaker and independent advisor to international professional firms and national governments Richard Susskind wrote the forward. Thomson Reuters then published it.
Today, Dayton crisscrosses the globe to speak with lawyers and other professionals about how to capitalize on social media to attract new business. He is also building a software company capable of serving any size legal entity from solo to Big Law. The software, called ClearView Social, assists lawyers to share on social media with the click of a button.
In the three years since its inception, ClearView Social has gained a steady following. Over 100 firms globally are users, including 25 of the 100 largest law firms in the United States.
While Dayton has a firm grasp on the powers of social media for lawyers, his lifelong goals don’t hinge on dominating the market. Instead, he would far prefer living in a foreign country for a month each year with his family. “When I set that goal, I was unemployed and had almost no money. But, eight months later, Lexis Nexis was sponsoring a social media boot camp I was putting on in Australia. The sponsorship paid all the expenses from the event, and the event did well enough to pay for me to take my wife and son to Australia for a month. Setting that goal and accomplishing it is always something I’ll be very proud of,” he says.
Tami Kamin Meyer is an Ohio attorney and writer. She is the Chair of the Marketing Committee of the American Society of Journalists and Authors.