Attorney Marketing News

Archive for the ‘Complaints|Rip Offs|Scams’ Category

Facebook closing.  Not.

Rumors about that Facebook is closing its doors come March 2011. Truth:  Facebook is not going down (in fact, it is growing with scary leaps and bounds) and no such announcement was ever made by Facebook reps.

Rumors have a way of quickly spreading across the Internet like the child’s game of telephone.  Although the source of the rumor is not officially known, but The Weekly World News ran with the story (along with “CBS Buys Brothel for Charlie Sheen.”)

Some folks will believe anything they read on the Internet – no matter how fictitious and ridiculous the information.

The moral here is to be sure to occassionally check the Internet to see what people are saying about you in forums, directories, and so on.  You cannot do damage control if you are not aware of bad press (and you cannot take advantage of good press if you are not paying attention.)

Internet Reputation Defense Tips

Here are a few ways you can see what people are saying about you:

• Subscribe to Google Alerts.  Ask Google to send you free email alerts anytime someone mentions your name or website on the Internet.  If Google picks it up, they will tell you.

• Use SocialMention.com. This is a search engine that scours social networks (that are often ignored by other search engines) for keywords you enter.

• Check your directory listings from time to time.  If you created a directory listing for your business somewhere, monitor it from time to time to see if you are getting any customer feedback.  Many open source directories create listings for you – whether you want them to or not.  Take some time (just Google your business name or website) to track down all your directory listings – claims ones you want and ask the site owners to delete the ones you do not want to be associated with.y

What Not to Do:

• Do not use ReputationDefender.com.  Google “Reputation Defender Scams” if you want to know why.

• Do not pretend to be someone else in forums and blogs to try and get people to say nice things about you.  It could back fire, it is dishonest, and you will not get a realistic view of how well (or poorly) you are doing with your social networking campaigns.

I ran across a press release recently for a law firm in New York and thought it would serve as a good example of what not to do on a variety of scores.

The so-called “press release” is a waste of Internet space (no offense to the law firm, who, undoubtedly did not even publish the release, but some attorney “marketing” firm most likely did on their behalf.)

Here is the lead in:

NEW YORK, NY, July 20, 2010 /thinkAlchemy/ — Antin, Ehrlich and Epstein offers a free, no obligation consultation and they accept personal injury cases on a contingency fee basis. This enables clients to get the representation they need without having to contemplate the financial burdens of obtaining legal counsel.

We are committed to our clients. Visit us on the web for more information (hyperlink omitted).

Our own news flash:  This is not a press release.

Do not get me wrong, I am not frowning at the law firm, but at yet another way some company is taking advantage of attorneys.

When a Press Release Site is Not a Press Release Site

ThinkAlchemy.com, whose tag line is “the agency for growing business” may mean well (but I personally think a more honest tag line would be  “post any silly thing you want to grow our business for us.”)

Perhaps Think Alchemy just assumes people posting press releases are educated enough to know what goes into a good press release.  But law firms, take heed:  talking about your services is not a press release – it is a marketing pitch and this site is full of nothing but poorly written ads trying to pass themselves off as press releases so that media sources, like Google Alerts (how I received notice of this “press release”) will pick them.

Think beyond Alchemy:  Do you think a serious print publication would ever pick up a press release that has nothing to say and only services to sell?

If you want to know what should go into a press release (and the proper format to use) visit Bill Stoller’s website, PublicityInsider.com and read, “How to Write a Press Release.”

Tips a Press Release Service May Cheapen Your Law Firm’s Image

The release is cheapened even more than the venue itself because of what follows (and was added by Alchemy – not the law firm) and serves as a clear warning this site is not promoting information quite on the up-and-up.  At the bottom of the release the following appears:

Press Release Keywords:

• personal injury lawyer new york, pi attorneys ny, construction accident lawyer ny, accident lawyers new york, wrongful death lawyer new york, injury attorney new york, wrongful death attorney ny, medical malpractice lawyer ny, car accident lawyer ny, work related injuries new york

The above example is known as “keyword stuffing” and is a black hat technique.   A black hat technique is anything Google (or any other search engine) decides you should not do at any give time or they will slap your website wrist.   Google hates black hat techniques, and you should, too — not because Google does, but because they make you look bad.

The “keywords” are not even keywords, and are not serving as tags for site visitors to find other related information – they are deceptive hyperlinks to law firm websites.

Trickery is Not the Way to Get or Impress Clients

Any media outlet that has to resort to forcing keywords on a page is one to steer clear of.  And, any media outlet that tricks site visitors into clicking through to an attorney’s website is also one I strongly recommend you do not associate yourself with.

Think of it this way:  you want your clients to trust you with resolving some serious legal matter.  What image does your law firm present on your website?  Do you skillfully trick people to pages with misleading information and falsely directed hyperlinks?  No, or course not.

But if people are driven to your website because they accidentally land on your home page due to the trickery and deceptive link building by a marketing outlet, you may be found guilty by association of being untrustworthy yourself.

While doing some research on a new client who complained his website was not showing up in search engines, I started where I often start: I looked at his SEO and his content.

What I discovered in a casual comparison of this attorney’s site to other similar sites stunned me.  And, I am hard to stun because over the years I have seen some pretty blatant scams.

Attorney Marketing Firm Sells Attorneys Identical Content (worse, some is undeniable acts of plagiarism)

Open the following websites side-by-side.

• Zalman & Schnurman
• Johnson & Vorhees
• McCutcheon & Hammer

Now, read and compare content for spinal cord injuries, dog bites, and personal injury overviews.  All these websites were created by (and run by) the same attorney marketing firm (and not one that is small potatoes you never heard of, either.)

Let’s visit one more just for emphasis:

• Hoffman, Moore & Perez (check out their spinal cord injury page – it will look familiar if you visited any of the above listed websites)

From a search engine standpoint, aside from the firm name and address, these sites are the same.

But wait, it gets better.

The “original” content that appears for spinal cord injuries on all these attorney websites (and who knows how many others) was material taken word-for-word from the National Spinal Cord Injury Association (NSCIA). Please, do note, no credit is given to the nonprofit organization that actually wrote it on any of these websites.

If you Google “what is a spinal cord injury?”  or “spinal cord injury research,” both of which are likely searches for someone suffering an SCI, the NSCIA appears in Google’s page one results.

Let’s assume a consumer clicks on a link to the NSCIA website looking for information and reads their FAQs about SCI.  Maybe the consumer then searches for an attorney.  How does it make an attorney look if their website repeats the same information without even offering a source credit to the noble nonprofit?

Will this misuse of duplicate content get your website penalized?  It is possible because all these websites have one website (the attorney marketing firm) in common.  If they all stood alone it might not be as bad.  But Google is smart enough to tell fake from real when it comes to content management warehouses that generate content from data bases to toss up websites

The real issue is that if you paid good money for content writing services and got the same site that was already sold to other attorneys (and maybe even to attorneys in your own geographic location) you got ripped off.

Visit any of the websites above and look at their footer if you want to see the attorney marketing firm engaging in this practice.

Many reputable companies outsource work, and there are certainly reputable outsourcing service companies to send work to.

I want to be clear:  there is nothing wrong with the business practice of outsourcing work.

Where I do have a problem with outsourcing work is when the client paying full retail prices is duped by marketing tactics into thinking they are paying for work being done in-house.

One reason many companies do not advertise (or offer during the course of working with them) that they outsource work is because more clients would want to price haggle.  And, for what it is worth, consumers do not see outsourcing in the same positive light that some business owners do.

It can be reasonably argued that when you walk into your local department store you pay a mark up on items you purchase so why not expect the same commercial model for  outsourced work?  First, there is transparency in retail – you know the store bought their stock at wholesale prices and will mark up prices.  There is another difference in retail vs. outsourcing: you can wait for a sale or buy a store brand to save a buck.  Stores know this and compete to keep markups reasonable but profitable.  And, stores have massive overhead they need to cover that small web development companies often do not have.

The lack of transparency is the only real problem I have with companies that outsource work.  If a company wants to outsource to tap into a bigger or better talent pool – and the client benefits from the arrangement – then outsourcing can be beneficial to all parties concerned.  However, if your web development company outsources a lot of work you should try and negotiate their prices down at least 10%.

The Outsourcing Sales Pitch – Money, Money, Money

I want to share with you an email typical of many received by LA Wolfe Web Marketing.  The email is a solicitation to entice our company to outsource our work:

Hi There

Hope you are well. I am Shivani from Innomax Solutions. We are an online marketing company with specialization in Search Engine optimization and web design and development. We follow a B2B model where in a lot of digital firms from US, UK, Canada, UAE etc outsource their campaigns for us to execute. We customize these services as per the requirement of the end user.

Please find attached a list of our services and packages and how it will benefit you if you outsource your SEO and Web Design campaigns to us.

We offer specialist services in Search Engine Optimization-Both on Page and off page, Social media Optimization,Dynamic SEO.

Web Development- We have an extensive in house team of experts in php/MYSQL, Drupal, Joomla, OS Commerce, table less HTML.

Content writing – We write SEO friendly content for live website as well as articles and blogs for submission,

PPC – We have a team of Google Certified Adwords Executives to run your ppc to the best results.

We work with 100% quality and 50% of your in house cost!

If you have any queries or concerns or want to know how you can expand your business through outsourcing please revert back and I will be more than happy to assist you.Please let us know your views on outsourcing your SEO Services to us.

I Look forward to your reply.

The company that sent me the above email is offering to do our client’s work for us at 50% of our rates.  Great for us (sort of, outsourcing to the wrong places can ruin a company’s reputation) but bad for clients (why pay double when you can just hire a company from India yourself?) Their pitch is all about money:  We collect our full fee from clients, pay them half and pocket the other half – for doing absolutely nothing.  Not once does the company mention how our clients would benefit from such an arrangement.

Hello?

We do not outsource and here’s why:  Aside from the obvious language barrier in the company’s marketing material (something likely to also convey in their content, SEO, and SEM work) outsourcing overseas can result in delays in exchanging information and miscommunication.  Who are we supposed to hold accountable when deadlines are not met, work is not done properly, or the outsourcing company cannot be reached? If we want instant direct access to team members without time barriers, the ability to handpick the best person for the job, we have to keep client services in house.

We are control freaks when it comes to our work. Our company has its own approach, philosophy, methodology, mission, vision, and well, you get the point. If we want things done the way we want things done, we have to do them ourselves.

Think about this for a moment:  If outsourcing work is so great for the client why are web development companies not advertising they do it for you?

I do not know of a single web development company — not one — that boasts on their website “we outsource our work and charge you double!”  If you know of one, please email us, and we will publicly thank them for their honesty.  But I can tell you the top 4 attorney marketing companies all outsource work – press them for an answer and you often get song and dance answers like “our department is not outsourced” (but the work the department does is outsourced.)

Many web development companies do outsource work.  Done properly, this can help businesses’ grow faster, but there are really only two reasons why web development companies outsource work:   it is cheaper than hiring their own people (a lot cheaper) and because they want take take on a large number of clients but do not have their own staff to handle the volume of work they take on.  (Think puppy mills and sweat shops.)

But isn’t outsourcing equivalent to hiring a general contractor?

No.

If you were building a home or undergoing a major renovation it would make sense to use a general contractor to hire and oversee the worker bees for you.  You would pay the general contractor for their services even though other people would actually be doing most of the work.  This makes sense for a lot of reasons.  But web development is not building a house and web development companies are not in the general contractor business.

You’d probably not hire a general contractor who collected the total costs from plumbers, electricians, dry wallers, etc. and then charged you double.  And, there is complete transparency: if you hire a general contractor it is with the understanding other people will be doing the work and the contractor will charge you something additional on top of those costs.

My objection is not in companies who choose to outsource.  My objection is with companies that do not disclose this upfront to their clients.

Before you sign with a web development company ask them if they outsource any work whatsoever.  If so, ask who and where they outsource to.  If they are buying wholesale work and selling it at full retail prices back to you, ask for a discount of 50% what their markup price.

The Bottom Line

When a company outsources work, they also outsource their reputation and integrity.  Frankly, we are just not comfortable doing that.

If we chose to work with an outsourcing company, our clients would not be their clients. An outsourcing company would want to make us happy but they would not care about making our clients happy.

The bottom line is that a company 5,000 miles away who has never even spoken to our clients or spent long hours analyzing a clients’ website and industry,  will not care about our clients they way we do because they will not take them time to get to know them like we do.