A Game-Changing Approach to Content Amplification for Law Offices
Law Firm Growth Podcast Episode 70: Demystifying Social Selling and Amplifying the Power of Employee Networks with John Baldock
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Narrator: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Law Firm Growth podcast, where we share the latest tips, tactics, and strategies for scaling your practice from the top experts in the world of growing law firms. Are you ready to take your practice to the next level? Let's get started.
Jan Roos: Hey everybody. Welcome back to The Law Firm Growth podcast. I'm your host is always Jan Roos, and I'm here with a really interesting topic, which I might actually dig into some stuff that we're going through right now. As I ask our current guest, John Baldock. Who is the head of growth for social horsepower about a lot of stuff related to social selling, different networks, things that we haven't actually gone over too much on the podcast, but have some really interesting applications for a lot of different practices of law.
Jan Roos: So thanks for coming on, John. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Okay. So to get into it it's interesting. Like I'm familiar with the term social selling, but one of the other things I saw in your bio [00:01:00] was this concept of employee advocacy, which is the first time I've seen that. So I guess, can we start off with getting some definitions down and what the difference is between the two?
John Baldock: Sure. And before I do that, how about I back it up just a little bit and I'll give you that, give you my background. There's a reason why I talk about this stuff. And so I worked for LinkedIn for almost 10 years. And I finished up at at the end of June in 2020 and my final four and a half years for LinkedIn was managing their employee advocacy platform.
John Baldock: So they had a platform called Elevate. It was actually one of their fastest growing, most successful products they'd ever launched. And they then sunset, which doesn't make any sense. If it's doing so well, why would you sunset it? But actually they were going to make way more money if they got rid of it.
John Baldock: Than if they kept it. And so what basically the platform and what employee advocacy is that you've got employees at your company. You want them saying good things about you. You want them on social. The downside is that they don't know where to find the [00:02:00] content. They don't know what to say, and they don't know when to say it.
John Baldock: And so this sort of demystifies all that and takes all those worries away. Basically, there are platforms like social HP where you curate in all of the content and that content could be thought leadership, it could be industry news, and it could be company related content and then employees go in and they decide what they want to share.
John Baldock: And they put it out to their networks. Usually people default to sharing on LinkedIn, but we connect to other networks, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. So organizations, especially like law firms, they want to use this type of technology because they want to land new clients. And they want to expand existing relationships.
John Baldock: So they may be dealing, if it's a corporate law firm, they may be dealing with one slice. Let's say they're dealing with IBM and they're providing services to one particular team. There's literally hundreds of possible buyers that you could be selling into corporately. And so it's, how do you expand those relationships?
John Baldock: And so a simple example would be If you were looking to [00:03:00] sell into LinkedIn and when I worked there and you shared something and I like comment or reshare it, which are all publicly facing actions, then everyone in my network is going to see that update. And I'm connected to 300 people at LinkedIn.
John Baldock: And if I'm one of your buyer target buyers. I'm also connected to all the other buyers at the organization. So it's about building that visibility, building the brand. It's all the top of the funnel activity. When you look at the marketing funnel, it'd be all that top of the funnel activity. Who are these people?
John Baldock: What's the brand? What are they about? And if you utilize employee sharing, rather than running a campaign, running campaigns are great and they're going to drive some results. But if you utilize your employee channel, then you can actually tell a story over time. Because it's evergreen. It's always on.
John Baldock: Your employees are always able to share content. So instead of just a campaign where you're putting like, if they click on that ad, then I deliver ad number two. And if they click on that ad, I deliver ad number three. You can literally stage out, how are you going to tell [00:04:00] your story over the course of a year and build those relationships for your attorneys to be able to land new deals and
Jan Roos: bring in new clients.
Jan Roos: Yeah, that's fantastic. And I also say too, as far as like where it's coming from to just, if you even had the same content, but it wasn't coming from something that said sponsored out at the top, I'm sure a lot of people are going to take that differently. So that's twice as trusted. No kidding. And statistically it's twice as trusted.
Jan Roos: Wow. That's fantastic. And I also want to say too, it sounds like there might be some other applications as well, too. I know I'm usually thinking the most about sales stuff just because of what it is that we do, but at the same time, as far as hiring and that kind of thing, and, employee retention, that probably doesn't hurt either, does it?
John Baldock: It ties in really nicely with with hiring and retention. I'll touch on hiring first, which is basically, let's say we need to hire 30 attorneys this year. And it's within a couple of different teams. I can advertise to those audiences all I want, but they don't know our firm. And if you probably, if you survey.
John Baldock: Yeah, all those attorneys and ask them to stack rank, [00:05:00] which is what we used to be able to do with linked in. We used to be able to come to companies and say, this is how you compare to your competitors for your talent acquisition. You're number 10 in this, you're number nine in that, you're number three here and we would have a list of criteria.
John Baldock: And if you want to be competitive and you want to pull those people into your firm, you need to be top of mind. You want to be at the top of that echelon, so that way, when you have openings, you have, referrals coming in versus trying to, hit somebody up cold. And by having your attorney sharing out cultural updates about the company, what the company culture's what the campuses are like, not that's entirely relevant over this last year, but maybe it's, workplace flexibility, whatever that is.
John Baldock: There's the benefits, the reason, the kinds of work that you're doing. This demystifies the brand and it basically, it gives you an impression or feeling about that brand. So then, and it's also being shared by your attorneys who are connected to guess who other attorneys that have the exact same skillset.
John Baldock: Like they've worked with them on other teams [00:06:00] at other places. Et cetera, et cetera. Even if they're coming from schools and their new hires, they're connected to a whole whack of other students that you could potentially be bringing in. So at every possible stage, it can work to be able to drop people into the organization.
John Baldock: And then you can tie it into your applicant tracking system. So that way you can not only see, Hey, we're getting more job views. We're getting more job applications, but also we can actually see. Who of these people are connected to our attorneys, therefore, attribute it back to the attorney that actually shared that
Jan Roos: content.
Jan Roos: Yeah, that's fantastic. And like the other thing too, is just I'm sure there's a tremendous additive effect, like even, beyond the stuff that you guys can track directly from coming in from a referral. If you were to run the ad to that, More or less softened audience. It's a lot more of a warm, reach out.
Jan Roos: Or if somebody is just going for the, the LinkedIn sponsored message or the cold outreach, it's going to be a little bit less cold every time you do that.
John Baldock: Totally. It's about touch, touch points. And when I was helping organizations with their talent acquisition strategies, when I worked for LinkedIn, we would talk about the journey.
John Baldock: You could talk about a [00:07:00] buyer's journey from a sales perspective. What's the same thing when you're talking about a talent acquisition journey. Some people, it only takes a couple of things and Oh yeah, I want to work there. Sometimes it could take you a year and a half of constant touch points, putting little evidential points in front of people.
John Baldock: So that way they get familiar with your organization. They get familiar with the brand. They get familiar with why they would want to work there. They know people that work there. Now all of a sudden you're not just some firm out there. You're actually a firm that they want to work at. So it's the same idea with the marketing funnel.
John Baldock: You're building that awareness and eventually you're getting them through to applying for a job, or they're much more receptive when you reach out to them. It's. Cause you can already see they're connected to your attorneys and they're they're, therefore they've seen this content over the last year and therefore much more likely to respond to a recruiter.
Jan Roos: Yeah. Honestly, I think the stakes get much higher and the more sophisticated of a hire trying to make, this probably isn't something that a lot of people have to like absolutely blow out all the stops to hire a paralegal fresh out of a bachelor's degree, but if you want, people who have specific subject [00:08:00] matter which I know I honestly don't know a lot about how these big white shoe firms grow, but that's a big it's a big way that a lot of people do that from what I do know.
Jan Roos: These guys are probably getting hit up by recruiters all the time, but if you're the person who's had the story going for the last year, that's, it's a huge advantage. Exactly. So I wanted to switch based into kind of some of the application of this stuff. So one of the things, and I'll use ourselves.
Jan Roos: Personally, and, I'll go ahead and say this on the podcast too. We waited an embarrassingly long time to actually get our whole setup going for case you'll on LinkedIn. And it was only literally a couple of weeks ago. We have employees that have been here for two or three years. It's still had the job that they had when we hired.
Jan Roos: So we've been going through the exercise of creating a unified front. It's really made me think about all this stuff, which is why it was a really good time to have you on the podcast, John, but I've always felt that. It was easy for us to ask our marketing and sales people who, had some tangible benefit to putting this stuff out to, to do this kind of thing.
Jan Roos: How are you getting buy in across the organization to do this? Buy in to bring this kind of tool [00:09:00] in
John Baldock: or buy
Jan Roos: in for the
John Baldock: people to share the content? From the people ultimately. Yeah. Okay. So I'll give you an example of a large organization. So obviously this wouldn't be a law firm, but let's say, so 10, 000 employees.
John Baldock: And so my experience was in working, I had clients, my largest client had 450, 000 employees. And then our smallest client, had a few thousand. And but this is applicable. If you have a firm of 50 people, this is still very valuable. If you have an organization of 10, 000, the most you're likely going to get to sign up to raise their hand and say, this sounds like a great idea is about 50%.
John Baldock: So take that into consideration the idea unless it's unless you've got a firm of 50 people. Which then you can just basically say, Hey, everybody do this. But if it's like a big company, big organization, then there's people can put you on ignore pretty, pretty easily, pretty fast. That being said, let's say now you've got a half of your audience signed up.
John Baldock: So you have 10, 000 employees and 5, 000 signed up of those 5, 000. You have [00:10:00] different groups. So raising your hand and saying something's a good idea. And then following through as a different deal altogether. Think about, how many training seminars you've been to where they give you a binder and they're like every week, fill in this page and make your notes on your goals.
John Baldock: And then once you do that, email it and whatever. And what you do is you get back from the training session. You go, this was great. I really enjoyed that. And then you slide the binder up onto your desk and then you never look at it again. Yeah, exactly. It collects dust and it's brilliant. We say yes to all kinds of stuff and then we very rarely follow through.
John Baldock: And then also taking a consideration that most organizations, they have a lot of apps. So if you, for example, like with single sign on, then you can literally just, when you go into Okta, something like one of those tools, you just see like rows and rows of apps. And your goal is to use the least amount of those tools to be able to get your job done.
John Baldock: Why duplicate effort? Why, why would I use that app when I can get all this other stuff in this one? So they're spread thin and they're asked to be doing a lot. And then attorneys are asking them to bill it. Like you want them making money for the firm. You don't want them like spending all [00:11:00] their time, rewriting copy and being an expert on sharing.
John Baldock: And it's a lot to ask an employee to be a social media marketing expert on top of their regular job. So what you end up with is the early adopters and the people that love technology, which is about 20%. Those people will use this tool regularly. So what you find is that on average, 20 percent of the people that actually signed up will use it.
John Baldock: So if you have a company of 10, 000, you get 5, 000 to sign up, 1, 000 will actually log in roughly on a monthly basis and share content. So you have two challenges. One is what content do we deliver those 1, 000, which is not rocket science, thought leadership industry news company content. How do I motivate the other 80 percent to actually use this tool?
John Baldock: And that was our challenge at LinkedIn on an annual basis. When we're up for renewal, a lot of clients would just say, what we signed for 5, 000 last year, we got 5, 000 people to sign up, only 1, 000 are using it, let's just reduce our contract to 1, 000. That's how many people are using it. Why pay for another [00:12:00] 4, 000?
John Baldock: They would also be concerned about missed opportunity. The average person on LinkedIn has 800 connections. So if I have 4, 000 people that raise their hand and aren't using it, that's 4, 000 times eight. So there's 3. 2 million people that we could be reaching whenever we want. If our employees would just get in and share content.
John Baldock: So those are the biggest problems with these kinds of applications. These SAS based. You're not tied to your job. You don't get fired if you don't use them. So what social HP built is a do it for me functionality and people love it, especially within the legal world. And so basically what they do is the attorney sign up and then the social media marketing manager who is the expert on content.
John Baldock: Curates the content like shares, one piece for them this week, two pieces for them next week. There's a thought leadership piece, there's an industry news, and then here's something that they can comment on and they put it on their calendar and they just basically set it to go out for them.
John Baldock: And then there's two ways people can have their calendars. So attorneys can have an open calendar or a locked calendar. [00:13:00] Open calendar basically means you guys have at it plan out the perfect sharing cadence, make me look like a genius for sharing this amazing stuff at the right time and all that kind of stuff and making our firm look great.
John Baldock: And I don't have to do a thing, never have to log in, never have to think about it. And all I get is just comments coming in on LinkedIn going, Oh my God, that was so amazing. Thank you for sharing that. The other one is a locked calendar so they can place things on your social sharing calendar so that it's set to go out to LinkedIn and whatever platforms you want.
John Baldock: The difference is you get a notification the day before saying, Hey, this is ready to go out. Can you just review and approve it? And then people literally, it's like dinner's being like walked in and just sat in front of them here you go, all you need to do is just get ready to click a button in a way it goes, that makes it nice and easy.
John Baldock: So that's the structure that we built. It's the only platform. Social HP is the only platform that has this functionality and it's the absolute game changer. It's basically taking. Employee advocacy from, an infancy stage to a 2. 0 certain next [00:14:00] generation type of
Jan Roos: product. Yeah, that's fantastic.
Jan Roos: And one of the things I always say as far as when we're consulting with clients and their sales process and stuff is basically the less you can count on people to do, the more likely it is that it's going to actually get done the day it's I like to say I'm not cynical, but I have a pretty realistic understanding of The temptations that people have on their attention and the world that we live in.
Jan Roos: So that's absolutely fantastic that you guys had that. And then just to go into the other side of that too. So let's talk a little bit about the content calendar. Do you guys have people that are like, you're repurposing content that they're going to be producing elsewhere on their blog or YouTube or whatever, or do you guys go ahead and have specific, how much do the clients that you're working with are creating content specifically for LinkedIn and the use of this platform?
Jan Roos: Generally,
John Baldock: everybody is creating content. All firms are creating content. Usually they place it on their blog and then they forget about it. Some of them place it on their blog and then they ask employees to share it out through email or on LinkedIn. And then they may update it on the LinkedIn company page.
John Baldock: And then [00:15:00] there's going to be some firms that have thought leaders. So they're industry experts, et cetera, et cetera. And maybe subject matter experts. And they'll ask those people periodically to write an original piece or, a thought leadership piece. And then they'll have people, comment on it, et cetera.
John Baldock: So it's, this tool just grabs all of that and brings it into this one location, including anything else that they would want to be able to share out. But I'd say most firms are creating original content. They just don't realize what they can do with it and the power of it. They seem to, just put it on their corporate blog.
John Baldock: Yeah. And periodically updated on their company page, but just, basic math. If I have a firm of 50 people and we have 600 followers for our firm, that's one employee shares it out and they'll actually beat the firm's reach on LinkedIn. And if you have all 50 people share it out times 800. Then you're talking about a reach of 40, 000 instead of a couple hundred.
John Baldock: It's basically utilizing the power of what you have and amplifying it. And we can dip into a, another topic, which is share a voice. I'm happy to explain it. [00:16:00] Oh, absolutely. So it's an important subject because What LinkedIn would do on their platform specifically, but this, this math could be applied to any platform is they would measure a company share of voice.
John Baldock: Let's say we have a firm and they're specifically dealing with bankruptcies. Okay. So if you then look at LinkedIn, LinkedIn will actually tally all conversations that are happening around bankruptcies. And then they'll, let's say it's, 10, 000 conversations and then they'll look at your firm and say, what percentage of those conversations around bankruptcies are you involved in, which is usually a very small amount.
John Baldock: So then they would come back and then they would say, Hey, FYI, you guys specialize in this area and your share of voices. 5 percent of the total conversation. And then they would go, by the way, here are all these other firms that are destroying you, like here's a firm that has 15 percent of that conversation.
John Baldock: Here's another firm that has 8 percent of that conversation. [00:17:00] And you guys barely even register as a blip. And then they would of course pitch, Hey, why don't you run these evergreen ad campaigns? Spend, oodles of money and they are effective and they will definitely change your share of voice and they'll drive new business, et cetera.
John Baldock: And they're very targeted. It's great, but they're costly. You can do the exact same thing by utilizing your employees. To change that share of voice so you can go from a company, if you have 50 attorneys and you have 600 followers of your company page to a reach of 40, 000 with just your employees sharing out that, the same story now find a firm that has 40, 000 followers, they've probably got 2000 attorneys.
John Baldock: So now you're a firm with 50 attorneys competing with a firm of 2000 attorneys because they're not utilizing their employees voice and you are and their company page has 40, 000 followers and your employees have 40, 000 followers. So you guys are an equal playing field. All of a sudden, you're, [00:18:00] it's the great equalizer.
John Baldock: You're a small firm and you're like playing like
Jan Roos: with the big boys. Yeah. That's fantastic. And it's funny too. Like the thought that crossed my mind when you were saying that, John, I was like, it's people always used to joke Oh yeah, man, they had the guy who invented a car that ran on water, but they killed him.
Jan Roos: Like why LinkedIn made it. Cause you know it's better for them. And again, I don't really think anyone's a good or bad actor as far as the big players in the ad space, but it's yeah, they make more money when people are duking it out on the ads auction. They don't make money when there's a way to do it.
Jan Roos: So it absolutely completely makes sense if that's the thing. And then I was just thinking about applications for this too. It's interesting. We, we deal almost exclusively with the state planning attorneys, but every once in a while we get people who are talking about getting, asking us for help on some pretty niche stuff.
Jan Roos: And like one of the ones that comes to mind is just just emerging fields like cryptocurrency and cannabis law and that kind of stuff. I could imagine that's probably, do you have any, without, But any examples of what would be, I know we threw the 0. 5 percent share of voice sure, how good can it get if you're talking about a niche the best situation for the most niche topic, for the best engagement, like what would be like a absolute, [00:19:00] like golden outcome for one of these campaigns working out super well?
John Baldock: And one thing I would say is that I wouldn't call it a campaign because it's evergreen. And so it's literally an evergreen channel, a campaign would be, I just gave LinkedIn 10 grand. And they ran my campaign. It lasted three weeks and here are my stats. And then I hope this results in something and those are effective.
John Baldock: This would be cheaper than that run for an entire year and generate massive amounts of ROI for your firm. So completely different angle. But that being said, if it's a very niche topic and there's a very limited amount of players in the space. You'll get a sense. First off, if you're not really playing in it, you're just company updates and commenting here and there, you're going to almost barely register, but if it's a niche topic and it's fine night, and there's a very specific audience and your firm has reached into some of those people.
John Baldock: If you deliver content that's engaging and you're consistent with it, you could end up with 50 [00:20:00] percent of
Jan Roos: that share voice. Yeah. And that's amazing to think about too. Yeah. It's if you have the point where literally whenever this thing is mentioned, you're brought up. Every other time that it's brought I can only imagine what the, the return investment for something like that would be.
Jan Roos: So that's amazing. And actually on the topic of content that gets engaged. I know you mentioned that you guys have some analytics are you able to share do you guys have any insights onto what kind of stuff tends to perform the best, or do you guys do any sort of analytics on that?
John Baldock: The best analytics came from LinkedIn when I was there and we had analytics on that. We didn't necessarily stack rank it. So it was a little more anecdotal, but first I'll just say that there's a best practice in sharing content, which is we had a model, which was three, two, one. So that was three pieces of thought leadership.
John Baldock: Two pieces of industry news, one piece about you. So for every six pieces of content you share, only one should be about you bragging about your services, your company, your story, whatever it is. The other five should be providing value to your network in a way that you're not asking for business. [00:21:00] So that's the best practice.
John Baldock: Then kinds of stories that are the most engaging. So once LinkedIn enabled native video is definitely the most engaged. What kinds of videos? I don't have the right answer for that. What goes viral and then for firm specifically, that's a different deal. But I'd say video is always the most engaging, but if you're thinking about like a piece, like you're writing a piece for whatever reason, very consistently.
John Baldock: The top five ways of this, the top 10 of that people love to click on that. It's it's the best click bait in the world. And it's not like facetious or negative way, meaning like you got them to click and they're not going to get what they wanted. But if you deliver for example, like the top five ways to prepare for a state planning, yeah, people are going to click on that.
John Baldock: Like a hundred percent, people are going to click on that. Whereas if you're like, this is the way of state planning, the industry is changing. That's going to be less engaging. For whatever reason, people love numbers, and they want to see Oh Oh, do I know all five? Yeah. Like it's literally like a, like a test or to get,
Jan Roos: it's it just drives [00:22:00] drives people to click.
Jan Roos: Yeah. It's really interesting hearing you say that. We promote like the advertising that we're the most familiar with is just doing social media advertising on Facebook. But from all the tests that we do, yeah, there's numbered lists always. And I don't know. I've got my theories on it too. I think one of the reasons I think it's That's the first time I've heard the completion thing too, because I think that's a really interesting hypothesis.
Jan Roos: I also think on some level, it's like, it's a finite number, right? It's not, you're not opening this Pandora's box of, Oh God, now I have to care about
John Baldock: How long is this article going to be?
Jan Roos: Exactly, right?
John Baldock: Is it 17 pages? I don't have to read
Jan Roos: that. It's stack size.
John Baldock: This is the top three? I could click, I could see, I could read three titles.
Jan Roos: I'm an esteemed busy professional. Of course, certainly I have time for three things to say at the top. Okay. That's really fascinating. Okay. And then I'm trying to think as far as like the most appropriate calls to action do you see people going, just go ahead and dropping calendar?
Jan Roos: I know this is super tactical or like what kind of engagement you find working the best as far as actually that sales conversation and getting that started. So
John Baldock: let's take an example of I share a story and I work for a firm. [00:23:00] I didn't actually click and share it. Somebody did it for me. I'm too busy. But anyway, a share is a story is shared.
John Baldock: So what I'm going to get when I'm in LinkedIn is I'm going to get my notification. So I'm going to see who liked commented and reshared it, which is brilliant because it's right in LinkedIn. That's where I'm spending my time. So in my notifications, I get a little like update. I click and there's six new notifications and it says, 10 people liked or commented on your story.
John Baldock: So I click on that to see who the 10 are. Now I know who those people are. I'm obviously going to be More than likely first degree connections, but some of them could be second degree connections because any of those public facing actions go to their networks as well. So not only are you hitting your network, but anybody that does that, it then amplifies into their network.
John Baldock: So you've got that network effect. So let's say I've got six people that did those actions, then I can literally look and realize Oh, okay. Here are three people that I actually should be booking meetings with. And then you can see how they engaged and very easily and very commonly. It's just, Hey, I noticed you clicked on this or you like that.
John Baldock: We're actually experts in that [00:24:00] area, or we can really provide a lot of value around this topic if you're interested, let's book a call. Let's book a conversation and continue through. So it's a great way to see that publicly facing engagement and then turn that into a reason why you should have a conversation.
Jan Roos: Yeah, that's really intriguing. I was going to say it's funny. This is something that I haven't brought up on the podcast yet. I, back in the day, I've actually had my personal profile banned on LinkedIn over three times. Okay. And that was because back in 2016, 2017, I was the direct outreach cowboy brother.
Jan Roos: I was going straight up hard pitch and we closed business and we did really well for those clients. So I don't feel too bad about doing it. But I think the evolution, at least that I've seen as far as the B2B sales that we've been involved with is that it's harder. And I would say pretty much more expensive in either the amount of money you're putting into it or the amount of time you're putting into it to go directly for that sale.
Jan Roos: Or not necessarily the sale, but selling them on a meeting, selling them on a phone call, but it's just such a simple adaptation. [00:25:00] It's I think even the most. Novice marketers understand the importance of putting content out, but it's just not really capturing that. I think it's just it's one of those things.
Jan Roos: And why I think it's such a fantastic platform that you've built is that people think that the battle's over after you create the content, there's another battle to be fought by promoting that content, which you guys can help with. And still another one being able to do the damn outreach and just,
John Baldock: Convert
Jan Roos: and on some level, it's like any person who's liking your content and sharing it, they're raising their hand.
Jan Roos: They're saying, this is something I'm thinking about. If nothing else, it's an excuse to have a conversation, totally.
John Baldock: And there's a variety of ways. And that's when we head into the conversation on social selling, which is now, so we've got this platform, we're driving out this content. How do we action it?
John Baldock: And so there's a few things from a technology standpoint, we've also built in the functionality to be able to actually see what they did after they came to your social share. So for example, like if you shared something, then went Oh, hang on a second, let me learn about that firm. And then they went to your website.
John Baldock: We can actually action that for you. So we can say like X many people from these different companies visited your website from [00:26:00] your social shares. So we can actually tell you that. And then it's not rocket science to figure out who those people are. Because, if I see in my list, like five people came from apple, then I just go, okay, who shared the story?
John Baldock: And I can see who shared it. And then I just messaged that attorney and go, do you know anybody at apple? And they're like yeah, I know. Like Steven Sarah. And it's okay, cool. They clicked on your stuff and. You're trying to land them as an account. So perhaps you should reach out to them and book a call.
John Baldock: So from an aggregate standpoint, we can deliver that information. Stepping forward and like, how do we action it? So my background, like originally was in headhunting and it was, we were taught to cold call and the way we were taught to cold calls, like purely it was numbers. So for example, like it wasn't like, Hey, and this and that, what do you think?
John Baldock: And this pitch. It was outright. Hey, my name is John Baldock. This is the reason why I'm calling. Are you interested? And then if they went, no, you went, okay, thanks. Hang up. Boom. Hi, my name is John Baldock. There's a reason why I'm calling. Are you interested? Yard. [00:27:00] Okay, great. Let's have a conversation, but you'd have a hundred connections and it will maybe one or two people would be like, Oh, perfect timing.
John Baldock: Yeah. I'll have a conversation. Everybody else were like, no. And you just hang, they would literally tell us just hang up and move on. You're not going to take them from buying from six months from now to buying today and you want to sell stuff now, so nobody does that. Pretty much. Nobody does that these days.
John Baldock: I've last time I've received a cold call was almost never. So how do we then move from people are liking and commenting? to I'm now engaging in a conversation to I'm booking a call or a meeting, et cetera, et cetera. So really, some of it is just, who are they? And, are they the person that we should be engaged with?
John Baldock: If we see somebody and they're at like an organization that we're, we want to do business with, and they're not, we're not sure if they're the buyer, maybe it's, Hey, thanks so much for commenting. Really appreciate you participating in the conversation. Then they like it. And then you just respond back, Hey, you know what?
John Baldock: Your organization's really the kind of company that we should be doing business with. Can you tell me who I should be connecting with at your company? [00:28:00] And then they just, yeah, I'm happy to help. Yeah. Yeah. You should be talking with such and so in this team and such and so in that team. And it's okay, great.
John Baldock: Then you reach out to those people. And when you do, you just say, Hey, I was chatting with your colleague over here and anyway, they suggested that I reach out to you. And it almost feels like that warm intro. It feels like they were like, oh, okay I guess I'm obligated to respond now. It's warming it up.
John Baldock: And the other thing you can do. Is with platform like LinkedIn and others is you can see how you're connected. So if I wanted to reach out to you, Jan, then and I don't know you, and we're not first degree connections, I could just pull you up and see who knows you that I know and then ask them, Hey, how well do you know Jan?
John Baldock: Oh, okay. You know him pretty well. Do you mind making an intro? In a way we go, but you can really widen out. The reach of an organization and the amount of connections with social sharing and employee engagement, employee advocacy, we found that the average person on LinkedIn was getting a half a new connection a month.
John Baldock: So every two months they would get a new connection. When they were sharing [00:29:00] socially, they were getting invites all the time. So you're growing your network way faster because you're visible. You're now recognized as a thought leader in the industry. You're recognized as somebody that really knows their shit and people want to connect with you.
John Baldock: And that opens a lot of doors. I was gonna say too,
Jan Roos: it's like a lot of the stuff that might be legible to some of these like old school blog posts and like email newsletter guys, it's this is a list. This is exactly like your email list. And there's no doubt in people's minds and in the conversation that the more people that you have on your email list, the better it is.
Jan Roos: But I think it's time that people start talking about this, not only for themselves, but also just, this has been a huge eye opener for me about the value on this to a company as a whole. Yeah, I think it's a total, it's a total paradigm shift. I'm having a hard time thinking about cutting questions on behalf of the the listeners because I'm so intrigued on ones for myself.
John Baldock: That's all good. Feel free to ask the ones that are really for you. Something else to take into consideration is that there's engagements and then there's visibility, right? There's reach. And so taking that, that example of an organization has 50 people in it, which is probably going to give you a reach of about [00:30:00] 40, 000 people.
John Baldock: You don't need to have 40, 000 engagements every time your employees share something. That's not going to happen, but it's going to show up in the news feed of 40, 000 people. So just visibility, like I'm going to see things in my news feed. And if you and I are connected, even if I don't click on it, I'm still seeing it.
John Baldock: I'm like, Oh, there's young. Oh, okay. Oh, that's an interesting article. And I don't have time to click on it. Oh, okay. Moving on. And then a week later, Oh, Hey, it's just sharing that really cool thing again. Oh, That's another interesting article. Oh, wow. Yon's really smart. He seems to be on the, the pulse of his industry.
John Baldock: And then, two weeks after that, I see something in my newsfeed and you share it and then I click on it because it's super relevant and it's like actionable for me and I'm like, oh my gosh, thanks, Yon, really appreciate you sharing this. That's the reason you should be reaching out to me and booking a call.
John Baldock: But the first two times it's just building that familiarity. Now, all of a sudden I like feel like I'm getting to. Become more familiar with you, your known commodity, et cetera, et cetera. So building that brand for your employees is also [00:31:00] building the brand for your firm. So there's one piece, which is just getting the content out there.
John Baldock: The other thing I should mention is people often think, Oh, all our employees are connected to only the same people. You can say Oh, our reach is 40, 000, but they're all connected to the exact same people. And the answer is they are internally. We're all connected to each other. So it may, you may think like everybody knows everybody.
John Baldock: Yeah, at your firm meeting, but outside of your firm, statistically on average, on the LinkedIn network, two employees outside of their internal connections overlap, their networks overlap by 3%. Wow. So 97 percent statistically on average, they do not overlap. The only way they overlap more is when everybody worked at the same places through their whole career.
John Baldock: Same friends, like all the way along and same clients. If, if you have two twins and they worked at the same organizations, one Sarah and one's Bob, Great. But that's not where your people are coming from.
John Baldock: They have diversified backgrounds, varied, et cetera, different [00:32:00] connections and, different schools, different places to work, et cetera, et cetera.
Jan Roos: Yeah. That's fascinating too. Cause it was interesting. So one thing I wanted to one kind of last thing too, I know we've had a lot of examples that we've talked about for B2B, but does this change at all, are there people that are using this for like more people who have I guess consumers in the sense that it was just one end user, but again, a lot of these consumers who might be on LinkedIn, say somebody who works with business owners.
John Baldock: So there's five main use cases. And then we can split some of them into pieces. One is marketing, pure play, B2B, B2C, and we can dig into what the C is. Then there's talent acquisition. Hey, we need to hire these people and we want, the people with like skills to be able to share this content.
John Baldock: There's social selling. So we're going to share this content and then we're going to expect our, people that are client facing to action that and book meetings and make calls. Then there's corporate responsibility or corporate communications. So that's about brand reputation. If you need to protect your brand, if you're in the news a lot, and you want to control what that story is, control the narrative, there's [00:33:00] no better place than a platform like LinkedIn, where mostly people just only make positive comments.
John Baldock: It's risky for them to make something not positive because it's going to affect their career. So generally, it's a great place to be able to control your story from top to bottom and have everybody support it. And then the last main use case. Is through resellers or distributors et cetera.
John Baldock: So for example, like I've got a business, I've got my employees, but also I've got these organizations that I've partnered with that sell my service, sell my product, represent me in some way. And they may represent me exclusively, or they may represent like a whole variety of products and services. And so they deliver content and they want those people to distribute the content to their networks and the amplification effect of that is pretty impressive.
John Baldock: So those are the five digging in, like on the marketing side that, who are we targeting and what are we, who are we trying to reach? It depends on, this is where you have to look at who your employees networks are. So if they're connected to your target audience, so for [00:34:00] example, if you have financial advisors sharing your content, yeah, they're connected to their prospects.
John Baldock: They're connected to their clients who their clients are going to have. Their networks are going to be full of prospects. So if your employees are connected to customers, whether they're businesses or individuals, if your employees are connected to those, or attorneys are connected to those, I know I'm.
John Baldock: Jumping back and forth between employee and attorney, but if they have those connections, then there's value in whether it's B2B or B2C.
Jan Roos: Yeah, that clarifies things a lot for me too. And I'm just trying to think too, cause it's like, you also brought something up when you're mentioning the the resellers thing too.
Jan Roos: Cause it's one of the things I've always thought there was a huge application for LinkedIn is every kind of attorney, any practice areas, a lot of these main street guys, especially, there's a lot of really logical things. When you said financial advisors, that triggered me because that works a lot really well for state planning attorneys.
Jan Roos: It works really well for real estate attorneys. And if you're getting in front of those people, you're And you're looking really smart, some of the best situations we've seen with clients that we work with, or [00:35:00] when somebody ends up saying, having a financial advisor says, Hey, look, I like what you guys are saying, why don't you talk to my audience and, being able to have that leverage over time with, seeing the consistent content, it's and I can't think of a much better way to do that.
Jan Roos: So that's fantastic.
John Baldock: And then just to add a couple of notes on that real briefly. So one, you're going to be building up your professional profile. Yeah. So you'll be looked upon as a thought leader in that in the space. And then if you're targeting like a specific audience and then those, and you've got those connections and they're sharing it out, that's going to like really elevate you.
John Baldock: That will also mean that you will get invitations to speak at, to audiences that are going to matter and could be potential clients. And then also it means that. If you have events like live events that you want people to sign up for, and you're considered a thought leader, the odds of you getting people to sign up and getting people to like, want to hear you speak is going to increase.
John Baldock: So when populate like an online seminar or even in person, want to, the not too distant future that'll potentially be all back to normal fingers crossed. [00:36:00] So when that all unwinds and, we're able to do things in person again, you have that opportunity to be able to draw people in and participate.
John Baldock: And so signing up online. And registering for events, et cetera. This is a great way to be able to do that. And we've built some functionality around that as well.
Jan Roos: This rabbit hole keeps getting more interesting the more we talk about this job. ,
John Baldock: I wanna say, yeah, we could dig at this, we could dig at this for a while, couldn't we?
John Baldock: Yeah.
Jan Roos: Yeah. That's fantastic. But yeah, I think this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. If people are liking what you guys are what you're saying right now what's the best place for somebody to take a next step?
John Baldock: Sure. So a couple of ways, one is just visit our website, social HP.
John Baldock: com to you can reach me. So my LinkedIn profiles, Jonathan Baldock, literally just type in Jonathan Baldock on LinkedIn. I'll come up and my actual like email or my URL is. LinkedIn forward slash Jonathan Baldock. So it doesn't get any easier than that. So those would be the two easiest ways.
John Baldock: And if anybody wants to have a chat, I'm happy to have that conversation and certainly appreciate this opportunity to be able to chat with you today.
Jan Roos: My pleasure is all mine, John. This has been a fascinating [00:37:00] conversation. All right, guys, I think I am taking a lot of notes in the course of listening to this and I really hope you have too, but there's some super actionable stuff of you guys.
Jan Roos: I think this is one of my yawn endorsed re listen episodes. Thanks so much, John. And for the rest of you guys, I'll see. See you next Tuesday at 8 a. m. Eastern on Law Firm Growth podcast.
Narrator: Thank you for listening to The Law Firm Growth podcast. For show notes, free resources and more, head on over to casefuel.
Narrator: com slash podcast. Looking forward to catching up on the next episode.
Maximizing Employee Advocacy for Law Firms
A Game-Changing Approach to Content Amplification for Law Offices
Law Firm Growth Podcast Episode 70: Demystifying Social Selling and Amplifying the Power of Employee Networks with John Baldock
Narrator: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Law Firm Growth podcast, where we share the latest tips, tactics, and strategies for scaling your practice from the top experts in the world of growing law firms. Are you ready to take your practice to the next level? Let's get started.
Jan Roos: Hey everybody. Welcome back to The Law Firm Growth podcast. I'm your host is always Jan Roos, and I'm here with a really interesting topic, which I might actually dig into some stuff that we're going through right now. As I ask our current guest, John Baldock. Who is the head of growth for social horsepower about a lot of stuff related to social selling, different networks, things that we haven't actually gone over too much on the podcast, but have some really interesting applications for a lot of different practices of law.
Jan Roos: So thanks for coming on, John. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Okay. So to get into it it's interesting. Like I'm familiar with the term social selling, but one of the other things I saw in your bio [00:01:00] was this concept of employee advocacy, which is the first time I've seen that. So I guess, can we start off with getting some definitions down and what the difference is between the two?
John Baldock: Sure. And before I do that, how about I back it up just a little bit and I'll give you that, give you my background. There's a reason why I talk about this stuff. And so I worked for LinkedIn for almost 10 years. And I finished up at at the end of June in 2020 and my final four and a half years for LinkedIn was managing their employee advocacy platform.
John Baldock: So they had a platform called Elevate. It was actually one of their fastest growing, most successful products they'd ever launched. And they then sunset, which doesn't make any sense. If it's doing so well, why would you sunset it? But actually they were going to make way more money if they got rid of it.
John Baldock: Than if they kept it. And so what basically the platform and what employee advocacy is that you've got employees at your company. You want them saying good things about you. You want them on social. The downside is that they don't know where to find the [00:02:00] content. They don't know what to say, and they don't know when to say it.
John Baldock: And so this sort of demystifies all that and takes all those worries away. Basically, there are platforms like social HP where you curate in all of the content and that content could be thought leadership, it could be industry news, and it could be company related content and then employees go in and they decide what they want to share.
John Baldock: And they put it out to their networks. Usually people default to sharing on LinkedIn, but we connect to other networks, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. So organizations, especially like law firms, they want to use this type of technology because they want to land new clients. And they want to expand existing relationships.
John Baldock: So they may be dealing, if it's a corporate law firm, they may be dealing with one slice. Let's say they're dealing with IBM and they're providing services to one particular team. There's literally hundreds of possible buyers that you could be selling into corporately. And so it's, how do you expand those relationships?
John Baldock: And so a simple example would be If you were looking to [00:03:00] sell into LinkedIn and when I worked there and you shared something and I like comment or reshare it, which are all publicly facing actions, then everyone in my network is going to see that update. And I'm connected to 300 people at LinkedIn.
John Baldock: And if I'm one of your buyer target buyers. I'm also connected to all the other buyers at the organization. So it's about building that visibility, building the brand. It's all the top of the funnel activity. When you look at the marketing funnel, it'd be all that top of the funnel activity. Who are these people?
John Baldock: What's the brand? What are they about? And if you utilize employee sharing, rather than running a campaign, running campaigns are great and they're going to drive some results. But if you utilize your employee channel, then you can actually tell a story over time. Because it's evergreen. It's always on.
John Baldock: Your employees are always able to share content. So instead of just a campaign where you're putting like, if they click on that ad, then I deliver ad number two. And if they click on that ad, I deliver ad number three. You can literally stage out, how are you going to tell [00:04:00] your story over the course of a year and build those relationships for your attorneys to be able to land new deals and
Jan Roos: bring in new clients.
Jan Roos: Yeah, that's fantastic. And I also say too, as far as like where it's coming from to just, if you even had the same content, but it wasn't coming from something that said sponsored out at the top, I'm sure a lot of people are going to take that differently. So that's twice as trusted. No kidding. And statistically it's twice as trusted.
Jan Roos: Wow. That's fantastic. And I also want to say too, it sounds like there might be some other applications as well, too. I know I'm usually thinking the most about sales stuff just because of what it is that we do, but at the same time, as far as hiring and that kind of thing, and, employee retention, that probably doesn't hurt either, does it?
John Baldock: It ties in really nicely with with hiring and retention. I'll touch on hiring first, which is basically, let's say we need to hire 30 attorneys this year. And it's within a couple of different teams. I can advertise to those audiences all I want, but they don't know our firm. And if you probably, if you survey.
John Baldock: Yeah, all those attorneys and ask them to stack rank, [00:05:00] which is what we used to be able to do with linked in. We used to be able to come to companies and say, this is how you compare to your competitors for your talent acquisition. You're number 10 in this, you're number nine in that, you're number three here and we would have a list of criteria.
John Baldock: And if you want to be competitive and you want to pull those people into your firm, you need to be top of mind. You want to be at the top of that echelon, so that way, when you have openings, you have, referrals coming in versus trying to, hit somebody up cold. And by having your attorney sharing out cultural updates about the company, what the company culture's what the campuses are like, not that's entirely relevant over this last year, but maybe it's, workplace flexibility, whatever that is.
John Baldock: There's the benefits, the reason, the kinds of work that you're doing. This demystifies the brand and it basically, it gives you an impression or feeling about that brand. So then, and it's also being shared by your attorneys who are connected to guess who other attorneys that have the exact same skillset.
John Baldock: Like they've worked with them on other teams [00:06:00] at other places. Et cetera, et cetera. Even if they're coming from schools and their new hires, they're connected to a whole whack of other students that you could potentially be bringing in. So at every possible stage, it can work to be able to drop people into the organization.
John Baldock: And then you can tie it into your applicant tracking system. So that way you can not only see, Hey, we're getting more job views. We're getting more job applications, but also we can actually see. Who of these people are connected to our attorneys, therefore, attribute it back to the attorney that actually shared that
Jan Roos: content.
Jan Roos: Yeah, that's fantastic. And like the other thing too, is just I'm sure there's a tremendous additive effect, like even, beyond the stuff that you guys can track directly from coming in from a referral. If you were to run the ad to that, More or less softened audience. It's a lot more of a warm, reach out.
Jan Roos: Or if somebody is just going for the, the LinkedIn sponsored message or the cold outreach, it's going to be a little bit less cold every time you do that.
John Baldock: Totally. It's about touch, touch points. And when I was helping organizations with their talent acquisition strategies, when I worked for LinkedIn, we would talk about the journey.
John Baldock: You could talk about a [00:07:00] buyer's journey from a sales perspective. What's the same thing when you're talking about a talent acquisition journey. Some people, it only takes a couple of things and Oh yeah, I want to work there. Sometimes it could take you a year and a half of constant touch points, putting little evidential points in front of people.
John Baldock: So that way they get familiar with your organization. They get familiar with the brand. They get familiar with why they would want to work there. They know people that work there. Now all of a sudden you're not just some firm out there. You're actually a firm that they want to work at. So it's the same idea with the marketing funnel.
John Baldock: You're building that awareness and eventually you're getting them through to applying for a job, or they're much more receptive when you reach out to them. It's. Cause you can already see they're connected to your attorneys and they're they're, therefore they've seen this content over the last year and therefore much more likely to respond to a recruiter.
Jan Roos: Yeah. Honestly, I think the stakes get much higher and the more sophisticated of a hire trying to make, this probably isn't something that a lot of people have to like absolutely blow out all the stops to hire a paralegal fresh out of a bachelor's degree, but if you want, people who have specific subject [00:08:00] matter which I know I honestly don't know a lot about how these big white shoe firms grow, but that's a big it's a big way that a lot of people do that from what I do know.
Jan Roos: These guys are probably getting hit up by recruiters all the time, but if you're the person who's had the story going for the last year, that's, it's a huge advantage. Exactly. So I wanted to switch based into kind of some of the application of this stuff. So one of the things, and I'll use ourselves.
Jan Roos: Personally, and, I'll go ahead and say this on the podcast too. We waited an embarrassingly long time to actually get our whole setup going for case you'll on LinkedIn. And it was only literally a couple of weeks ago. We have employees that have been here for two or three years. It's still had the job that they had when we hired.
Jan Roos: So we've been going through the exercise of creating a unified front. It's really made me think about all this stuff, which is why it was a really good time to have you on the podcast, John, but I've always felt that. It was easy for us to ask our marketing and sales people who, had some tangible benefit to putting this stuff out to, to do this kind of thing.
Jan Roos: How are you getting buy in across the organization to do this? Buy in to bring this kind of tool [00:09:00] in
John Baldock: or buy
Jan Roos: in for the
John Baldock: people to share the content? From the people ultimately. Yeah. Okay. So I'll give you an example of a large organization. So obviously this wouldn't be a law firm, but let's say, so 10, 000 employees.
John Baldock: And so my experience was in working, I had clients, my largest client had 450, 000 employees. And then our smallest client, had a few thousand. And but this is applicable. If you have a firm of 50 people, this is still very valuable. If you have an organization of 10, 000, the most you're likely going to get to sign up to raise their hand and say, this sounds like a great idea is about 50%.
John Baldock: So take that into consideration the idea unless it's unless you've got a firm of 50 people. Which then you can just basically say, Hey, everybody do this. But if it's like a big company, big organization, then there's people can put you on ignore pretty, pretty easily, pretty fast. That being said, let's say now you've got a half of your audience signed up.
John Baldock: So you have 10, 000 employees and 5, 000 signed up of those 5, 000. You have [00:10:00] different groups. So raising your hand and saying something's a good idea. And then following through as a different deal altogether. Think about, how many training seminars you've been to where they give you a binder and they're like every week, fill in this page and make your notes on your goals.
John Baldock: And then once you do that, email it and whatever. And what you do is you get back from the training session. You go, this was great. I really enjoyed that. And then you slide the binder up onto your desk and then you never look at it again. Yeah, exactly. It collects dust and it's brilliant. We say yes to all kinds of stuff and then we very rarely follow through.
John Baldock: And then also taking a consideration that most organizations, they have a lot of apps. So if you, for example, like with single sign on, then you can literally just, when you go into Okta, something like one of those tools, you just see like rows and rows of apps. And your goal is to use the least amount of those tools to be able to get your job done.
John Baldock: Why duplicate effort? Why, why would I use that app when I can get all this other stuff in this one? So they're spread thin and they're asked to be doing a lot. And then attorneys are asking them to bill it. Like you want them making money for the firm. You don't want them like spending all [00:11:00] their time, rewriting copy and being an expert on sharing.
John Baldock: And it's a lot to ask an employee to be a social media marketing expert on top of their regular job. So what you end up with is the early adopters and the people that love technology, which is about 20%. Those people will use this tool regularly. So what you find is that on average, 20 percent of the people that actually signed up will use it.
John Baldock: So if you have a company of 10, 000, you get 5, 000 to sign up, 1, 000 will actually log in roughly on a monthly basis and share content. So you have two challenges. One is what content do we deliver those 1, 000, which is not rocket science, thought leadership industry news company content. How do I motivate the other 80 percent to actually use this tool?
John Baldock: And that was our challenge at LinkedIn on an annual basis. When we're up for renewal, a lot of clients would just say, what we signed for 5, 000 last year, we got 5, 000 people to sign up, only 1, 000 are using it, let's just reduce our contract to 1, 000. That's how many people are using it. Why pay for another [00:12:00] 4, 000?
John Baldock: They would also be concerned about missed opportunity. The average person on LinkedIn has 800 connections. So if I have 4, 000 people that raise their hand and aren't using it, that's 4, 000 times eight. So there's 3. 2 million people that we could be reaching whenever we want. If our employees would just get in and share content.
John Baldock: So those are the biggest problems with these kinds of applications. These SAS based. You're not tied to your job. You don't get fired if you don't use them. So what social HP built is a do it for me functionality and people love it, especially within the legal world. And so basically what they do is the attorney sign up and then the social media marketing manager who is the expert on content.
John Baldock: Curates the content like shares, one piece for them this week, two pieces for them next week. There's a thought leadership piece, there's an industry news, and then here's something that they can comment on and they put it on their calendar and they just basically set it to go out for them.
John Baldock: And then there's two ways people can have their calendars. So attorneys can have an open calendar or a locked calendar. [00:13:00] Open calendar basically means you guys have at it plan out the perfect sharing cadence, make me look like a genius for sharing this amazing stuff at the right time and all that kind of stuff and making our firm look great.
John Baldock: And I don't have to do a thing, never have to log in, never have to think about it. And all I get is just comments coming in on LinkedIn going, Oh my God, that was so amazing. Thank you for sharing that. The other one is a locked calendar so they can place things on your social sharing calendar so that it's set to go out to LinkedIn and whatever platforms you want.
John Baldock: The difference is you get a notification the day before saying, Hey, this is ready to go out. Can you just review and approve it? And then people literally, it's like dinner's being like walked in and just sat in front of them here you go, all you need to do is just get ready to click a button in a way it goes, that makes it nice and easy.
John Baldock: So that's the structure that we built. It's the only platform. Social HP is the only platform that has this functionality and it's the absolute game changer. It's basically taking. Employee advocacy from, an infancy stage to a 2. 0 certain next [00:14:00] generation type of
Jan Roos: product. Yeah, that's fantastic.
Jan Roos: And one of the things I always say as far as when we're consulting with clients and their sales process and stuff is basically the less you can count on people to do, the more likely it is that it's going to actually get done the day it's I like to say I'm not cynical, but I have a pretty realistic understanding of The temptations that people have on their attention and the world that we live in.
Jan Roos: So that's absolutely fantastic that you guys had that. And then just to go into the other side of that too. So let's talk a little bit about the content calendar. Do you guys have people that are like, you're repurposing content that they're going to be producing elsewhere on their blog or YouTube or whatever, or do you guys go ahead and have specific, how much do the clients that you're working with are creating content specifically for LinkedIn and the use of this platform?
Jan Roos: Generally,
John Baldock: everybody is creating content. All firms are creating content. Usually they place it on their blog and then they forget about it. Some of them place it on their blog and then they ask employees to share it out through email or on LinkedIn. And then they may update it on the LinkedIn company page.
John Baldock: And then [00:15:00] there's going to be some firms that have thought leaders. So they're industry experts, et cetera, et cetera. And maybe subject matter experts. And they'll ask those people periodically to write an original piece or, a thought leadership piece. And then they'll have people, comment on it, et cetera.
John Baldock: So it's, this tool just grabs all of that and brings it into this one location, including anything else that they would want to be able to share out. But I'd say most firms are creating original content. They just don't realize what they can do with it and the power of it. They seem to, just put it on their corporate blog.
John Baldock: Yeah. And periodically updated on their company page, but just, basic math. If I have a firm of 50 people and we have 600 followers for our firm, that's one employee shares it out and they'll actually beat the firm's reach on LinkedIn. And if you have all 50 people share it out times 800. Then you're talking about a reach of 40, 000 instead of a couple hundred.
John Baldock: It's basically utilizing the power of what you have and amplifying it. And we can dip into a, another topic, which is share a voice. I'm happy to explain it. [00:16:00] Oh, absolutely. So it's an important subject because What LinkedIn would do on their platform specifically, but this, this math could be applied to any platform is they would measure a company share of voice.
John Baldock: Let's say we have a firm and they're specifically dealing with bankruptcies. Okay. So if you then look at LinkedIn, LinkedIn will actually tally all conversations that are happening around bankruptcies. And then they'll, let's say it's, 10, 000 conversations and then they'll look at your firm and say, what percentage of those conversations around bankruptcies are you involved in, which is usually a very small amount.
John Baldock: So then they would come back and then they would say, Hey, FYI, you guys specialize in this area and your share of voices. 5 percent of the total conversation. And then they would go, by the way, here are all these other firms that are destroying you, like here's a firm that has 15 percent of that conversation.
John Baldock: Here's another firm that has 8 percent of that conversation. [00:17:00] And you guys barely even register as a blip. And then they would of course pitch, Hey, why don't you run these evergreen ad campaigns? Spend, oodles of money and they are effective and they will definitely change your share of voice and they'll drive new business, et cetera.
John Baldock: And they're very targeted. It's great, but they're costly. You can do the exact same thing by utilizing your employees. To change that share of voice so you can go from a company, if you have 50 attorneys and you have 600 followers of your company page to a reach of 40, 000 with just your employees sharing out that, the same story now find a firm that has 40, 000 followers, they've probably got 2000 attorneys.
John Baldock: So now you're a firm with 50 attorneys competing with a firm of 2000 attorneys because they're not utilizing their employees voice and you are and their company page has 40, 000 followers and your employees have 40, 000 followers. So you guys are an equal playing field. All of a sudden, you're, [00:18:00] it's the great equalizer.
John Baldock: You're a small firm and you're like playing like
Jan Roos: with the big boys. Yeah. That's fantastic. And it's funny too. Like the thought that crossed my mind when you were saying that, John, I was like, it's people always used to joke Oh yeah, man, they had the guy who invented a car that ran on water, but they killed him.
Jan Roos: Like why LinkedIn made it. Cause you know it's better for them. And again, I don't really think anyone's a good or bad actor as far as the big players in the ad space, but it's yeah, they make more money when people are duking it out on the ads auction. They don't make money when there's a way to do it.
Jan Roos: So it absolutely completely makes sense if that's the thing. And then I was just thinking about applications for this too. It's interesting. We, we deal almost exclusively with the state planning attorneys, but every once in a while we get people who are talking about getting, asking us for help on some pretty niche stuff.
Jan Roos: And like one of the ones that comes to mind is just just emerging fields like cryptocurrency and cannabis law and that kind of stuff. I could imagine that's probably, do you have any, without, But any examples of what would be, I know we threw the 0. 5 percent share of voice sure, how good can it get if you're talking about a niche the best situation for the most niche topic, for the best engagement, like what would be like a absolute, [00:19:00] like golden outcome for one of these campaigns working out super well?
John Baldock: And one thing I would say is that I wouldn't call it a campaign because it's evergreen. And so it's literally an evergreen channel, a campaign would be, I just gave LinkedIn 10 grand. And they ran my campaign. It lasted three weeks and here are my stats. And then I hope this results in something and those are effective.
John Baldock: This would be cheaper than that run for an entire year and generate massive amounts of ROI for your firm. So completely different angle. But that being said, if it's a very niche topic and there's a very limited amount of players in the space. You'll get a sense. First off, if you're not really playing in it, you're just company updates and commenting here and there, you're going to almost barely register, but if it's a niche topic and it's fine night, and there's a very specific audience and your firm has reached into some of those people.
John Baldock: If you deliver content that's engaging and you're consistent with it, you could end up with 50 [00:20:00] percent of
Jan Roos: that share voice. Yeah. And that's amazing to think about too. Yeah. It's if you have the point where literally whenever this thing is mentioned, you're brought up. Every other time that it's brought I can only imagine what the, the return investment for something like that would be.
Jan Roos: So that's amazing. And actually on the topic of content that gets engaged. I know you mentioned that you guys have some analytics are you able to share do you guys have any insights onto what kind of stuff tends to perform the best, or do you guys do any sort of analytics on that?
John Baldock: The best analytics came from LinkedIn when I was there and we had analytics on that. We didn't necessarily stack rank it. So it was a little more anecdotal, but first I'll just say that there's a best practice in sharing content, which is we had a model, which was three, two, one. So that was three pieces of thought leadership.
John Baldock: Two pieces of industry news, one piece about you. So for every six pieces of content you share, only one should be about you bragging about your services, your company, your story, whatever it is. The other five should be providing value to your network in a way that you're not asking for business. [00:21:00] So that's the best practice.
John Baldock: Then kinds of stories that are the most engaging. So once LinkedIn enabled native video is definitely the most engaged. What kinds of videos? I don't have the right answer for that. What goes viral and then for firm specifically, that's a different deal. But I'd say video is always the most engaging, but if you're thinking about like a piece, like you're writing a piece for whatever reason, very consistently.
John Baldock: The top five ways of this, the top 10 of that people love to click on that. It's it's the best click bait in the world. And it's not like facetious or negative way, meaning like you got them to click and they're not going to get what they wanted. But if you deliver for example, like the top five ways to prepare for a state planning, yeah, people are going to click on that.
John Baldock: Like a hundred percent, people are going to click on that. Whereas if you're like, this is the way of state planning, the industry is changing. That's going to be less engaging. For whatever reason, people love numbers, and they want to see Oh Oh, do I know all five? Yeah. Like it's literally like a, like a test or to get,
Jan Roos: it's it just drives [00:22:00] drives people to click.
Jan Roos: Yeah. It's really interesting hearing you say that. We promote like the advertising that we're the most familiar with is just doing social media advertising on Facebook. But from all the tests that we do, yeah, there's numbered lists always. And I don't know. I've got my theories on it too. I think one of the reasons I think it's That's the first time I've heard the completion thing too, because I think that's a really interesting hypothesis.
Jan Roos: I also think on some level, it's like, it's a finite number, right? It's not, you're not opening this Pandora's box of, Oh God, now I have to care about
John Baldock: How long is this article going to be?
Jan Roos: Exactly, right?
John Baldock: Is it 17 pages? I don't have to read
Jan Roos: that. It's stack size.
John Baldock: This is the top three? I could click, I could see, I could read three titles.
Jan Roos: I'm an esteemed busy professional. Of course, certainly I have time for three things to say at the top. Okay. That's really fascinating. Okay. And then I'm trying to think as far as like the most appropriate calls to action do you see people going, just go ahead and dropping calendar?
Jan Roos: I know this is super tactical or like what kind of engagement you find working the best as far as actually that sales conversation and getting that started. So
John Baldock: let's take an example of I share a story and I work for a firm. [00:23:00] I didn't actually click and share it. Somebody did it for me. I'm too busy. But anyway, a share is a story is shared.
John Baldock: So what I'm going to get when I'm in LinkedIn is I'm going to get my notification. So I'm going to see who liked commented and reshared it, which is brilliant because it's right in LinkedIn. That's where I'm spending my time. So in my notifications, I get a little like update. I click and there's six new notifications and it says, 10 people liked or commented on your story.
John Baldock: So I click on that to see who the 10 are. Now I know who those people are. I'm obviously going to be More than likely first degree connections, but some of them could be second degree connections because any of those public facing actions go to their networks as well. So not only are you hitting your network, but anybody that does that, it then amplifies into their network.
John Baldock: So you've got that network effect. So let's say I've got six people that did those actions, then I can literally look and realize Oh, okay. Here are three people that I actually should be booking meetings with. And then you can see how they engaged and very easily and very commonly. It's just, Hey, I noticed you clicked on this or you like that.
John Baldock: We're actually experts in that [00:24:00] area, or we can really provide a lot of value around this topic if you're interested, let's book a call. Let's book a conversation and continue through. So it's a great way to see that publicly facing engagement and then turn that into a reason why you should have a conversation.
Jan Roos: Yeah, that's really intriguing. I was going to say it's funny. This is something that I haven't brought up on the podcast yet. I, back in the day, I've actually had my personal profile banned on LinkedIn over three times. Okay. And that was because back in 2016, 2017, I was the direct outreach cowboy brother.
Jan Roos: I was going straight up hard pitch and we closed business and we did really well for those clients. So I don't feel too bad about doing it. But I think the evolution, at least that I've seen as far as the B2B sales that we've been involved with is that it's harder. And I would say pretty much more expensive in either the amount of money you're putting into it or the amount of time you're putting into it to go directly for that sale.
Jan Roos: Or not necessarily the sale, but selling them on a meeting, selling them on a phone call, but it's just such a simple adaptation. [00:25:00] It's I think even the most. Novice marketers understand the importance of putting content out, but it's just not really capturing that. I think it's just it's one of those things.
Jan Roos: And why I think it's such a fantastic platform that you've built is that people think that the battle's over after you create the content, there's another battle to be fought by promoting that content, which you guys can help with. And still another one being able to do the damn outreach and just,
John Baldock: Convert
Jan Roos: and on some level, it's like any person who's liking your content and sharing it, they're raising their hand.
Jan Roos: They're saying, this is something I'm thinking about. If nothing else, it's an excuse to have a conversation, totally.
John Baldock: And there's a variety of ways. And that's when we head into the conversation on social selling, which is now, so we've got this platform, we're driving out this content. How do we action it?
John Baldock: And so there's a few things from a technology standpoint, we've also built in the functionality to be able to actually see what they did after they came to your social share. So for example, like if you shared something, then went Oh, hang on a second, let me learn about that firm. And then they went to your website.
John Baldock: We can actually action that for you. So we can say like X many people from these different companies visited your website from [00:26:00] your social shares. So we can actually tell you that. And then it's not rocket science to figure out who those people are. Because, if I see in my list, like five people came from apple, then I just go, okay, who shared the story?
John Baldock: And I can see who shared it. And then I just messaged that attorney and go, do you know anybody at apple? And they're like yeah, I know. Like Steven Sarah. And it's okay, cool. They clicked on your stuff and. You're trying to land them as an account. So perhaps you should reach out to them and book a call.
John Baldock: So from an aggregate standpoint, we can deliver that information. Stepping forward and like, how do we action it? So my background, like originally was in headhunting and it was, we were taught to cold call and the way we were taught to cold calls, like purely it was numbers. So for example, like it wasn't like, Hey, and this and that, what do you think?
John Baldock: And this pitch. It was outright. Hey, my name is John Baldock. This is the reason why I'm calling. Are you interested? And then if they went, no, you went, okay, thanks. Hang up. Boom. Hi, my name is John Baldock. There's a reason why I'm calling. Are you interested? Yard. [00:27:00] Okay, great. Let's have a conversation, but you'd have a hundred connections and it will maybe one or two people would be like, Oh, perfect timing.
John Baldock: Yeah. I'll have a conversation. Everybody else were like, no. And you just hang, they would literally tell us just hang up and move on. You're not going to take them from buying from six months from now to buying today and you want to sell stuff now, so nobody does that. Pretty much. Nobody does that these days.
John Baldock: I've last time I've received a cold call was almost never. So how do we then move from people are liking and commenting? to I'm now engaging in a conversation to I'm booking a call or a meeting, et cetera, et cetera. So really, some of it is just, who are they? And, are they the person that we should be engaged with?
John Baldock: If we see somebody and they're at like an organization that we're, we want to do business with, and they're not, we're not sure if they're the buyer, maybe it's, Hey, thanks so much for commenting. Really appreciate you participating in the conversation. Then they like it. And then you just respond back, Hey, you know what?
John Baldock: Your organization's really the kind of company that we should be doing business with. Can you tell me who I should be connecting with at your company? [00:28:00] And then they just, yeah, I'm happy to help. Yeah. Yeah. You should be talking with such and so in this team and such and so in that team. And it's okay, great.
John Baldock: Then you reach out to those people. And when you do, you just say, Hey, I was chatting with your colleague over here and anyway, they suggested that I reach out to you. And it almost feels like that warm intro. It feels like they were like, oh, okay I guess I'm obligated to respond now. It's warming it up.
John Baldock: And the other thing you can do. Is with platform like LinkedIn and others is you can see how you're connected. So if I wanted to reach out to you, Jan, then and I don't know you, and we're not first degree connections, I could just pull you up and see who knows you that I know and then ask them, Hey, how well do you know Jan?
John Baldock: Oh, okay. You know him pretty well. Do you mind making an intro? In a way we go, but you can really widen out. The reach of an organization and the amount of connections with social sharing and employee engagement, employee advocacy, we found that the average person on LinkedIn was getting a half a new connection a month.
John Baldock: So every two months they would get a new connection. When they were sharing [00:29:00] socially, they were getting invites all the time. So you're growing your network way faster because you're visible. You're now recognized as a thought leader in the industry. You're recognized as somebody that really knows their shit and people want to connect with you.
John Baldock: And that opens a lot of doors. I was gonna say too,
Jan Roos: it's like a lot of the stuff that might be legible to some of these like old school blog posts and like email newsletter guys, it's this is a list. This is exactly like your email list. And there's no doubt in people's minds and in the conversation that the more people that you have on your email list, the better it is.
Jan Roos: But I think it's time that people start talking about this, not only for themselves, but also just, this has been a huge eye opener for me about the value on this to a company as a whole. Yeah, I think it's a total, it's a total paradigm shift. I'm having a hard time thinking about cutting questions on behalf of the the listeners because I'm so intrigued on ones for myself.
John Baldock: That's all good. Feel free to ask the ones that are really for you. Something else to take into consideration is that there's engagements and then there's visibility, right? There's reach. And so taking that, that example of an organization has 50 people in it, which is probably going to give you a reach of about [00:30:00] 40, 000 people.
John Baldock: You don't need to have 40, 000 engagements every time your employees share something. That's not going to happen, but it's going to show up in the news feed of 40, 000 people. So just visibility, like I'm going to see things in my news feed. And if you and I are connected, even if I don't click on it, I'm still seeing it.
John Baldock: I'm like, Oh, there's young. Oh, okay. Oh, that's an interesting article. And I don't have time to click on it. Oh, okay. Moving on. And then a week later, Oh, Hey, it's just sharing that really cool thing again. Oh, That's another interesting article. Oh, wow. Yon's really smart. He seems to be on the, the pulse of his industry.
John Baldock: And then, two weeks after that, I see something in my newsfeed and you share it and then I click on it because it's super relevant and it's like actionable for me and I'm like, oh my gosh, thanks, Yon, really appreciate you sharing this. That's the reason you should be reaching out to me and booking a call.
John Baldock: But the first two times it's just building that familiarity. Now, all of a sudden I like feel like I'm getting to. Become more familiar with you, your known commodity, et cetera, et cetera. So building that brand for your employees is also [00:31:00] building the brand for your firm. So there's one piece, which is just getting the content out there.
John Baldock: The other thing I should mention is people often think, Oh, all our employees are connected to only the same people. You can say Oh, our reach is 40, 000, but they're all connected to the exact same people. And the answer is they are internally. We're all connected to each other. So it may, you may think like everybody knows everybody.
John Baldock: Yeah, at your firm meeting, but outside of your firm, statistically on average, on the LinkedIn network, two employees outside of their internal connections overlap, their networks overlap by 3%. Wow. So 97 percent statistically on average, they do not overlap. The only way they overlap more is when everybody worked at the same places through their whole career.
John Baldock: Same friends, like all the way along and same clients. If, if you have two twins and they worked at the same organizations, one Sarah and one's Bob, Great. But that's not where your people are coming from.
John Baldock: They have diversified backgrounds, varied, et cetera, different [00:32:00] connections and, different schools, different places to work, et cetera, et cetera.
Jan Roos: Yeah. That's fascinating too. Cause it was interesting. So one thing I wanted to one kind of last thing too, I know we've had a lot of examples that we've talked about for B2B, but does this change at all, are there people that are using this for like more people who have I guess consumers in the sense that it was just one end user, but again, a lot of these consumers who might be on LinkedIn, say somebody who works with business owners.
John Baldock: So there's five main use cases. And then we can split some of them into pieces. One is marketing, pure play, B2B, B2C, and we can dig into what the C is. Then there's talent acquisition. Hey, we need to hire these people and we want, the people with like skills to be able to share this content.
John Baldock: There's social selling. So we're going to share this content and then we're going to expect our, people that are client facing to action that and book meetings and make calls. Then there's corporate responsibility or corporate communications. So that's about brand reputation. If you need to protect your brand, if you're in the news a lot, and you want to control what that story is, control the narrative, there's [00:33:00] no better place than a platform like LinkedIn, where mostly people just only make positive comments.
John Baldock: It's risky for them to make something not positive because it's going to affect their career. So generally, it's a great place to be able to control your story from top to bottom and have everybody support it. And then the last main use case. Is through resellers or distributors et cetera.
John Baldock: So for example, like I've got a business, I've got my employees, but also I've got these organizations that I've partnered with that sell my service, sell my product, represent me in some way. And they may represent me exclusively, or they may represent like a whole variety of products and services. And so they deliver content and they want those people to distribute the content to their networks and the amplification effect of that is pretty impressive.
John Baldock: So those are the five digging in, like on the marketing side that, who are we targeting and what are we, who are we trying to reach? It depends on, this is where you have to look at who your employees networks are. So if they're connected to your target audience, so for [00:34:00] example, if you have financial advisors sharing your content, yeah, they're connected to their prospects.
John Baldock: They're connected to their clients who their clients are going to have. Their networks are going to be full of prospects. So if your employees are connected to customers, whether they're businesses or individuals, if your employees are connected to those, or attorneys are connected to those, I know I'm.
John Baldock: Jumping back and forth between employee and attorney, but if they have those connections, then there's value in whether it's B2B or B2C.
Jan Roos: Yeah, that clarifies things a lot for me too. And I'm just trying to think too, cause it's like, you also brought something up when you're mentioning the the resellers thing too.
Jan Roos: Cause it's one of the things I've always thought there was a huge application for LinkedIn is every kind of attorney, any practice areas, a lot of these main street guys, especially, there's a lot of really logical things. When you said financial advisors, that triggered me because that works a lot really well for state planning attorneys.
Jan Roos: It works really well for real estate attorneys. And if you're getting in front of those people, you're And you're looking really smart, some of the best situations we've seen with clients that we work with, or [00:35:00] when somebody ends up saying, having a financial advisor says, Hey, look, I like what you guys are saying, why don't you talk to my audience and, being able to have that leverage over time with, seeing the consistent content, it's and I can't think of a much better way to do that.
Jan Roos: So that's fantastic.
John Baldock: And then just to add a couple of notes on that real briefly. So one, you're going to be building up your professional profile. Yeah. So you'll be looked upon as a thought leader in that in the space. And then if you're targeting like a specific audience and then those, and you've got those connections and they're sharing it out, that's going to like really elevate you.
John Baldock: That will also mean that you will get invitations to speak at, to audiences that are going to matter and could be potential clients. And then also it means that. If you have events like live events that you want people to sign up for, and you're considered a thought leader, the odds of you getting people to sign up and getting people to like, want to hear you speak is going to increase.
John Baldock: So when populate like an online seminar or even in person, want to, the not too distant future that'll potentially be all back to normal fingers crossed. [00:36:00] So when that all unwinds and, we're able to do things in person again, you have that opportunity to be able to draw people in and participate.
John Baldock: And so signing up online. And registering for events, et cetera. This is a great way to be able to do that. And we've built some functionality around that as well.
Jan Roos: This rabbit hole keeps getting more interesting the more we talk about this job. ,
John Baldock: I wanna say, yeah, we could dig at this, we could dig at this for a while, couldn't we?
John Baldock: Yeah.
Jan Roos: Yeah. That's fantastic. But yeah, I think this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. If people are liking what you guys are what you're saying right now what's the best place for somebody to take a next step?
John Baldock: Sure. So a couple of ways, one is just visit our website, social HP.
John Baldock: com to you can reach me. So my LinkedIn profiles, Jonathan Baldock, literally just type in Jonathan Baldock on LinkedIn. I'll come up and my actual like email or my URL is. LinkedIn forward slash Jonathan Baldock. So it doesn't get any easier than that. So those would be the two easiest ways.
John Baldock: And if anybody wants to have a chat, I'm happy to have that conversation and certainly appreciate this opportunity to be able to chat with you today.
Jan Roos: My pleasure is all mine, John. This has been a fascinating [00:37:00] conversation. All right, guys, I think I am taking a lot of notes in the course of listening to this and I really hope you have too, but there's some super actionable stuff of you guys.
Jan Roos: I think this is one of my yawn endorsed re listen episodes. Thanks so much, John. And for the rest of you guys, I'll see. See you next Tuesday at 8 a. m. Eastern on Law Firm Growth podcast.
Narrator: Thank you for listening to The Law Firm Growth podcast. For show notes, free resources and more, head on over to casefuel.
Narrator: com slash podcast. Looking forward to catching up on the next episode.
Brian Murphy
Brian Murphy is the CTO of CaseFuel. He's managed millions of dollars in ad spend and has built the digital infrastructure that has aided hundreds of attorneys turning leads into cases