Professionals are on LinkedIn to do business and to connect. This makes LinkedIn the platform of choice for increasing your firm's influence and authority, by publishing and distributing thought leadership content to the right audience from your internal experts.

Join us as we explore the ways in which LinkedIn has made it easier for top thought leaders to shine in their particular area of expertise. Josh from Influence & Co. and Jaron from RubensteinTech will share new content marketing strategies, the metrics worth tracking and practical tips to empower thought leaders within your organization.

FEATURING:

Josh Johnson
Vice President
Influence & Co.

Jaron Rubenstein
President and Founder
Rubenstein Technology Group

MODERATED BY:

George Sanchez
Director of Business Development
Rubenstein Technology Group

Influence & Co. believes in the positive impact that quality content can have on growing leaders’ and experts’ brands and to change entire industries. Thought leadership content not only helps individuals and companies convey their expertise, but also helps their audience gain knowledge to fulfill their needs. Our goal is to help bridge that gap and make the process easy and seamless for everyone involved.

Video Transcript

George: Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. My name is George Sanchez, your moderator for today. I'm very excited to bring you the eighth installment of the RubyLaw Thought Leadership Series LinkedIn 2015, Leverage Thought Leadership Content. For those not familiar with RubyLaw, RubyLaw is an enterprise-level web content management platform designed to meet the web, global marketing, and proposal-generating needs of leading law firms. RubyLaw is a tailored alternative, one that empowers the user experience for both internal content managers and external audiences alike. It currently powers the digital presence of leading firms, like Winston & Strawn, Akin Gump, and Perkins Coie. The RubyLaw Thought Leadership Series is RubensteinTech's effort to support the big opportunity firms have to create a competitive advantage given the changing expectations of how law firm stakeholders consume content. One of the ways legal marketers can create a competitive advantage is to leverage their number one asset, their intellectual capital. Today Josh Johnson and Jaron Rubenstein provide insight on how to best leverage thought leadership content on LinkedIn in 2015. As part of this discussion, we also want to make sure the webinar's interactive, so please send questions and comments via Twitter using the handle @RubensteinTech or #RubyLaw or feel free to send them directly to Jaron Rubenstein via WebEx chat. Right now I'd like to introduce our friend and guest panelist Josh Johnson of Influence & Co. Josh Johnson is a content marketing and thought leadership fanatic and vice president of Influence & Co. He was part of the team responsible for building the foundation for Influence & Co.'s content and thought leadership strategy, and now helps clients and brands identify how they can be leveraging thought leadership to grow their brand and grow their firms. Josh's own thought leadership articles have been published by Forbes, the Content Marketing Institute, B2B Marketing, Business 2 Community, and more. Influence & Co. itself specializes in extracting knowledge from companies and individuals to create and publish authentic content to their audience online. Their strategies have helped position 200 plus clients as authorities in the space, resulting in key relationships and opportunities, such as new leads, new investors, new talent, strategic partnerships, and further press coverage for their company. Hey, Josh, it's really great to have you here today.

Josh: Hey, thanks for having me, George.

George: This is a really important topic, I think, in legal marketing, where basically, the firm's basic, the biggest assets are walking in and out of the building on a daily basis. These are top legal minds in the world, and pretty much every attorney you find at Am Law 100, 200 firm is a bona fide thought leader. It's also a nice follow-up to our last webinar, where we basically covered the bigger picture of developing a content strategy. And this basically a webinar to discuss how that content strategy can be leveraged on a platform like LinkedIn. So, with that I'd be happy to just hand over the floor to Josh so he can take you through his great presentation. All yours, Josh.

Josh: Well, thank you very much, thanks again, George. Thanks to Jaron and RubensteinTech for having me here today and for that great introduction on Influence & Co. and myself. I'm really excited to be here to share some of the best tactics and tricks that we've found over the last year to year and a half on leveraging the LinkedIn platform to position key people within your companies and your key attorneys as thought leaders, as George mentioned, in the Am 100, in the Am 200. Really, your key assets and your key differentiators are your attorneys and are your individual thought leaders that you have at your company that service your clients on a daily basis. So I'm excited to share some of best tips and tricks on how they can be leveraging LinkedIn to make sure that thought leadership that you have internally is being communicated effectively online. So, before we get started I wanted to run through a quick agenda of the different things that we were gonna discuss exactly.

What is "thought leadership"?

So first, we're actually gonna go ahead and define what thought leadership is. A lot of the time is can be a very ambiguous term, a lot of people have different understandings of what the meaning of thought leadership actually is, so I'm gonna go ahead and define that from our perspective and how we're gonna refer to it today. From there we're gonna discuss why it's actually important. A lot of times there's a lot of marketing jargon and things like thought leadership thrown around without a lot of substantiated claims behind it on why it actually matters for your organization. So I'm gonna discuss a little bit of that and that I'm gonna discuss, go on to where to actually start on the LinkedIn platform. So what are the key things that you have to be doing on the platform to actually accomplish this goal of thought leadership and then the things that thought leadership can bring to your company. Next, how to measure it. How do you make sure that you are being effective with the resources you're spending on this initiative and how do you make sure you're moving up and to the right, you're being more effective over time because really that's a key element of it. You don't want to be spending a bunch of resources if you're not having success. Finally, the next two things are really about what are the key secrets. So what in the end are the really big takeaways to know going into this initiative for your firms. And then, how do you scale that success long term across the organization to make sure you're actually gonna accomplish everything that you set out to.

So like I said, first I wanted to go ahead and define thought leadership for the use of this presentation. So thought leadership is the practice of sharing opinions, perspectives, and experiences around a specific expertise with the primary goal of educating, inspiring, and driving innovation within an industry. So what that really means is it's the process that your attorneys and your individual thought leaderships at your firm, thought leaders at your firm are going to be going through, to basically better the understanding of their networks around their specific expertise in the industry. And the sole goal is making sure you're adding value to the group of people you're presenting that information to and doing it in a way that's adding more understanding to their perception of the industry and of the topic at hand. But why does that matter? It's obvious, I think, I think we can all agree that's an important element and we can see that happen, especially in daily person-to-person interactions. We see that happen in consultations and in ongoing services, but on a grand scale, why does that actually matter and why is thought leadership and thought leadership content an actual good way to accomplish that?

The 5 key benefits of thought leadership

So to run through the benefits of thought leadership itself really quickly, there are other things besides just these five key benefits that you get from thought leadership, but here are the key metrics that we see our clients accomplishing most frequently by doing content the right way on LinkedIn. So brand awareness, just making sure people are more aware of the individual's brand, as well as the firm's brand in this space. New client opportunities, so actually reaching new people who could be a potential sale, a potential client for the firm, and driving them to the point that they would reach out and inquire. Next is staying top of mind with all the existing relationships, especially on a platform like LinkedIn, by consistently publishing content that you're actually getting the firm's name and the individual's name in front of their existing network more consistently, which creates referral opportunities, it creates renewable business, and it creates more loyalty long term. Next is educating audience on important issues. I think we can all relate to going into a conversation where someone just really has a misunderstanding or misconception in the industry, and that's really putting a halt to the conversation because they don't really know where you're coming from as you're attacking a certain problem or addressing a certain issue. So making sure that the people in your network are educated on specific key topics that you can service them on is an important element of thought leadership and an important benefit of it. And then finally, like I said, customer retention and customer loyalty.

Why do your clients buy?

And that really leads into my next slide here of why do your clients actually buy and what creates that long-term loyalty. Well, a recent study done by the Corporate Executive Board analyzed four BDB companies, how do they choose venues, how do they choose the companies that they partner with to help accomplish key elements of their business that they can't do internally, like any legal needs that they have. And what was interesting is that price didn't even end up in the top four. What you see here are the real reasons why people end up buying from the companies and from the firms that they go with. First you see unique and valuable perspectives. Next is ongoing advice and consultation. Then assistance in avoiding land mines. And then finally education on new issues. As we discussed in the last slide, those are the big things that thought leadership helps to accomplish. So what you're doing by creating and publishing thought leadership content is actually essentially networking and bringing your advice and expertise to your audience at scale. So you're helping more people, more consistently, and you're doing it in a way that is really positioning you to be the long-term beneficiary of that client's business and of that person's network.

So to move on from really why your clients buy, I wanted to also show why LinkedIn is actually one of the best platforms to do this on. And here's just some insights into how many people are actually on LinkedIn on a daily basis and how frequently they're there and why they're there. As you can see, there's 332 million users worldwide. These are stats pulled three quarters of the way through 2014, so it's a higher number even by now. There's 107 million in the U.S. and 40% of users check their LinkedIn daily. So really what it comes down to is people use LinkedIn to conduct business. That's why they're there so they're in the mindset to be consuming content or consuming ideas that are going to help them in a business sense, which is what makes the merge of thought leadership content and LinkedIn an important platform to build into your strategy. So now that we know what thought leadership is and why it's important, I want to go through some of the key elements of where you're actually gonna have to start to build an effective strategy. For that, there's really four key elements that you have to have included within your strategy and that you actually have to do on LinkedIn to make sure you're gonna attack the goal from all the different angles that are really important.

So as you can see, it's a combination of having a good profile, the personal updates, publishing content, which I think is the key element. Consider the former two kind of the table stakes to accomplishing what you're trying to do from a thought leadership perspective and consider the next two the key differentiators in the way you're gonnna separate yourself long term, and that's what we're having to clarify here in a moment. So like I said, the first element to accomplishing thought leadership is actually having a profile that's ready to give off that brand perception of each individual and the firm as a whole, as a thought leader. So as you can see, we pulled in Jaron Rubenstein's LinkedIn profile here. Everybody knows what Jaron looks like. So just in case you didn't know what he looks like, we did have a picture earlier, though.

Jaron: It's not a 10-year-old photo like most profiles.

Key elements of a LinkedIn profile

Josh: So here are the key elements of a profile and why the profile's actually important to the overall strategy. What it is, is it's initial credibility for if someone meets you offline, if someone finds you online through a piece of content or a conversation you're having in a group, what your profile is a representation of who you are from the get-go. Like I said earlier, it's kind of table stakes for your actual thought leadership strategy. If you're doing all the other things right, it's gonna look relatively fishy and interesting if they get to your profile and it's not giving off the same message and brand perception that your content and the rest of the things that you're doing actually is. The next part is it's actually just giving them the opportunity to do more background research on you as an individual or you as a firm. So it's giving them, here's this person's actual credibility points and what makes them a reliable source for me, not just worrying about was this article they wrote really valuable. So it's just more of, again, that resume-type approach to knowing who this person is. And finally, this is actually the point in which most people, we'll talk about conversion metrics later on, but this is actually the point in which most people will actually convert, based on one of those metrics. For example, if they connect to you or they send a message, or if you have a call to action within your summary statement to ask them to reach out if they have specific needs. So you have to have this profile up to date because a considerable percentage of your conversions off of thought leadership are going to come through this final asset.

So just to recap really quickly, the key elements that I think are important to have up to date. A quality profile photo, really what we mean by that is just one where they can see your face, it's not including your whole body, it's more of a shoulders-and-up photo. You have 500 plus connections, that's a key element of a thought leader 'cause a thought leader is generally someone that's gonna be networked and connected in their space and just knowing that you're at that 500 person mark is a small but important point of credibility. The next ones are really just making sure you're doing a thorough representation of your background and who you currently are. So that's really reflected in your summary. Your current and prior job descriptions of what you've accomplished. And then the recommendations from the people, whether that's past clients, past employees, past peers that you've worked with as an individual and as an attorney. One of the things that we know especially as a firm in the Am 100 or 200s that you end up with, you have lot of different attorneys across the board and scaling that profile across every attorney is not always the easiest fashion.

So one of the things that you also want to do is make sure your firm profile's up to date as well. There are less variables involved in the firm profile, but really it starts with similar attributes of having a quality summary and history on the organization, what are their key focuses, where are they located, that sort of stuff. A good image or visual. A lot of times companies forget to include a visual and it's not very emphasized on LinkedIn as a whole for their companies right now, but the quality images do stand out. The next component is just consistent updates, so consistently sharing a new article and not always just sharing a press release or an announcement from the company, but similar to what we'll talk about later on an individual level, sharing relevant updates in an industry that you address as a firm. And finally, having a follower count of 5,000 plus. Not a hard rule here, 'cause getting to 5,000 plus followers is definitely an undertaking, especially early on, especially if you're just starting this process, but getting there is kind of the inflection point for someone from a credibility standpoint, as well. So after kind of getting the bare bones of your profile in place and all the details that you need there, the next thing is, again, what we just talked about with the firm updates, also having those personal updates, as well. And really what that means is are you sharing relevant content within your industry, are you sharing your opinions and perspectives of things going on in kind of more of a short-form fashion. What we'll talk about in a second is really the full publishing platform and the full contributor profile. But early on, from a consistency standpoint, you want to be updating at least once a day some sort of new article that you've read or something new happening in this space, and a quick comment from your perspective for your own interpretation of that article or of that news bite.

So finally, like I said, the big component of thought leadership in general on LinkedIn and really leveraging content to make that happen is actually publishing original content from the individual and from the company. What you'll see here, this is actually an article from our company that we published just over a year ago now announcing that LinkedIn was opening up its publishing platform. Initially when LinkedIn first had publishing ability, it was limited to a group of about 150 influentials they had self-selected that ranged from Barack Obama to Richard Branson and a few other really influential, successful business owners, in a variety of industries. And then over the course of the next six months we actually worked with LinkedIn prior to opening up its platform to where our clients were the first 150 next people to actually publish to the platform and test out building out that further, that bigger contributor platform for more of their users to help share more content more frequently and let people leverage the LinkedIn platform, and really leverage their networks, to make sure they're getting themselves out there as a thought leader in what they're doing.

So the key elements of actually leveraging that content platform in the right way. First of all, and I'll run through each of these bullet points in more detail in a moment, but step one is repurposing content published elsewhere. We'll talk about this in a few different ways. One, it's a process of showing that you actually are publishing content elsewhere, as well. So anyone can publish content on a LinkedIn profile, which is an important element of being a thought leader, but also if you've contributed content to an external publication or if you've been writing for the firm's blog or another outlet, wherever that may be, you can reuse that content, so people know that you're writing elsewhere and this is more of a repository for all of your existing content. Second, again, which we'll talk about later, with repurposing content, you're helping yourself scale that initiative faster. Instead of having to recreate a new article every single time you publish something, you're able to get more bang for your buck and actually produce more with less initiative in terms of content creation. Next is investing time in a quality headline and the appropriate topics to make sure they're gonna be on point. Next is including a relevant call to action at the end of each post and sometimes within the posts themselves. Next is supplementing your content with an addition to a quality a quality visual at the top. Are there visuals or are there other content assets you can bring in to each article and to each contributed piece to actually engage you to further and add more value and add more perspective and depth to that conversation. And then finally is tagging through correct channels. We'll go over channels later on in the presentation as well, but channels are essentially the different vertical that LinkdIn has identified as bigger niches of audiences on the platform. So basically the way to leverage those channels to them and distribute to a much larger and a much more targeted group of people.

George: Josh, I have a question.

Josh: Yes?

George: This is within the new publishing platform that you guys announced over a year ago. So what's the difference between, I think, I'd love a clarification of, if I post something on my personal page--

Josh: Yep.

George: Versus posting as a influencer or contributor on a publishing platform, what are the benefits, I think, was one of things that I was thinking about.

Josh: Definitely, that's a great question, so--

George: And anybody can get on the--

Josh: Exactly, yeah, initially, throughout the first half 2015, they gradually opened up the publishing platform so that more of those long form posts to the rest of the network. By now everyone has that ability to go on and publish a post whenever they'd like. So the difference between just publishing an update and publishing a post. When you're on your actual profile page or you're on kinda the feed page of your LinkedIn, after you log in to LinkedIn, you'll see at the top is where you can actually share an article you've found on a publication, share just a quick thought on a specific thing going on in the space. But then, to the right of that, you'll see, to the right of that, on that home, kind of digital feed page, and also if you're on any other piece of content page, that's a longer form like we see on the right of this slide here. You'll see there's an actual published article button that's typical yellow on each page that you can click and actually create a full-length piece of content like this. And by full-length, full-length all you do is, full-length long-term article, kind of interchangeably here, but what we mean is an actual full-length blog post or something that's diving into a concept further than just a thought or two. Typically I would recommend somewhere in the area of no greater than 140 characters for a short update, and then for your bigger LinkedIn updates, you're talking in the area of 600 to 1200 words, just depending on the topic and what you're trying to convey.

George: That's great, thanks, Josh.

Josh: Awesome. So, moving on, what I want to do then is talk more about, kind of like I said all those key elements that go into leveraging a platform in a really effective manner. So the first one, like I said, is actually just repurposing content that you've already published externally. Again, really what we're talking about here is just making this a more scalable approach to accomplishing your goal of thought leadership and then so not only does it make that content creation and distribution process easier to publish new content to LinkedIn, but it also helps to show people that not only are you publishing there, but you have that credibility and prestige of publishing on other platforms, as well.

For instance, here's a client of ours, Yuriy Boykiv, who as you can see, this article was originally published on Inc, which is a column that we helped to achieve for him. But the important part is what Yuriy found was the article did pretty well on Inc and he found that he got a good, engaged audience there and he knew it would be beneficial for him, then, to share that article even further with his existing network. And what happened, actually, was this particular article got put into a couple different channels, which is how you see this distribution of almost 110,000 views, a significant amount of comments and likes and social interactions that really spawned off a lot of distribution. So the next component, moving on from there is, like we said, investing in a quality headline and actually putting thought into that. I've seen a bunch of different times where people who've created really quality articles or quality blog posts invest a lot of time in the content itself, which is very important, but then they forget to invest in an actual headline that's clickable and engaging. And I say this with the asterisk mark of you don't want to mislead people with the headline but you do need to invest to make sure that what you're saying in the headline is gonna be clickable and is gonna be engaging enough to want people to look further into the topic that you're doing. So here's just a few of the tactics to actually make that happen more consistently. Including numbers in the headline. So listicles, which are what most people call any sort of article now that's just a quick list of items, are pretty common now. A big point in including numbers in the headline is that is doesn't necessarily have to be a listicle. All it means is you could have five key points. In this example, for instance, from Robin, you could have five key points that you're gonna illustrate, but you don't actually have to do it in a list form. Because I think one of the main things that people care about is using listicle, which in the end, oftentimes means it's not, like, qualitycontent, it's more of just a way to get something out. So there's still value to using a number in your actual title, even if it's not a normal list-type post as you would expect. Scare tactics and negatives actually work really well. So for example, the five trends that your company is missing out on because you're not doing X, or the big thing that your company missed out on from 2014 because you didn't do this at the beginning, or something like that, when you're giving people the feeling that they're missing out on something or that they're going to miss out on something, they tend to click more often because there's a reason for them to click it, its information that they're not going to get elsewhere and they're going to miss out on some sort of result that they're hoping for. Next is referencing current trends and news. That's also why I like this example from Robin here. As you can see, it was published awhile ago, but wearable technology in general has been a very big piece in the news and a relevant topic for a lot of different people. So she leveraged not only the news or the current trend component, but she also leveraged the number component here, which as you can see again led to a really well-viewed and well-circulated article. And then finally, is using one or two uncommon words in each article. For example, this could be something as simple as using the word beautiful, for instance. Beautiful is not a common word that you see in an article title or something like that. So it's going to stand out when people actually start looking and diving deeper into, or when people are looking at headline after headline after headline, when they see words that haven't come up three or four times, it's gonna stand out and have a better chance of garnering that initial click.

The next big component of making sure your action maximizes platform from a thought leadership perspective is actually, and this goes then to the end of the conversation in the presentation we'll talk about more later, is actually measuring how successful you're being in converting these views and converting this engagement into really opportunities for the firm. A big piece of that is having calls to actions. Typically I recommend having them at the end of content linked in, but when appropriate you can actually include them within the content itself. As you can see here, this was just a, the 8 Steps of Thought Leadership Through Content Marketing is a white paper that we actually created as a company and we create relevant articles to that and publish that to LinkedIn. So we follow up that quality piece of content with a call to action for them to further engage with us and for them to further have another piece of content that's gonna help solve their problems for their company. The next good piece to look at is actually what other visual assets can you be bringing into piece of content. We all know that every article at the beginning should have a quality image, preferably not a Shutterstock-type image, but something more custom to your organization. But throughout the content, you can actually be bringing in other visuals, as well, whether that's a relevant picture, or in this instance, this is actually a SlideShare that someone brought into an article that they wrote on LinkedIn because the article itself was about company culture and leveraging that to grow a company, so they wanted to share HubSpot's culture code slideshow that they actually put together to add another really high quality visual asset to the article they were sharing and circulating among the viewers and readers of their content.

And finally, so as you can see at the bottom of this image here, you see the tags of marketing and award permissions. This is just an article that I had published on my platform awhile ago, but this goes back to what we talked a little bit about leveraging the LinkedIn channels effectively, and making sure that you're having as much of an opportunity to make sure your content is getting circulated effectively among your network. By tagging each article that you're publishing, what you're doing is you're telling LinkedIn this article is relevant to this specific topic and what ends up happening, then, it helps to tie that article to the right channels and then eventually to the right audience on LinkedIn, which helps to further distribution. By single-handedly just doing this, you're not guaranteeing yourself a piece of content will put into a specific channel or distributed to a certain volume of audience, but it helps to give clarity to LinkedIn and most importantly, Pulse. The Pulse network, which is actually a technology that LinkedIn bought a few years ago that actually helps to circulate and bring quality content to the surface of the conversation. So one thing I wanted to go into next, then, was what actually makes for good thought leadership content? So we just went over a couple different, a few different ways to make sure you're maximizing this content that you're publishing.

But an important element is, again, making content that actually accomplishes its goals and is actually gonna be thought leadership in nature, as we've talked about from the beginning. So here's just six quick tips to run through and always have in mind when you're developing content with the purpose of really helping an audience and educating them. You need to start by making sure it's gonna add value to the conversation. You don't want to be too overly-promotional, and actually I'll go into what makes for not good thought leadership content in a moment. But you want to make sure your number one priority is making sure you're sharing knowledge and adding value to the reader in the end. And the most important thing that they can take away is a lesson or some sort of anecdote that you shared with them that they can then take and take action off of, or at the very least, were entertained by, and sometimes even an important element of a piece of content. So yeah, like I said, the adding value and sharing knowledge is an important element. Backing up your claims with data is an important element, whether that's researching, primary research that you or the organization has done, or doing secondary research to find supporting statistics that support your ideas and your thoughts. Telling stories.

Telling stories is actually the most effective way of getting a piece content, to people to actually read and engage a piece of content. So we talked earlier about having an effective headline, but what's important, actually, on the flip side of that, is actually having quality content, especially from the beginning, that gets them in the process of reading that article. Really frequently I see people who try to dive too deep into bigger statistics or are too generalized early on, that they might get someone to the article but then the article itself doesn't captivate them early on and stories is one good way, and proven way, of actually getting people to engage with content and read it all the way through. And again, the last couple pieces we've already talked about. But keeping the reader as a primary focus about why you're writing this article and why you're sharing this piece of information that you have, and making sure it's thoughtful and a new analysis that's being added to the conversation. There's always gonna be available content that's very general and kind of the same thing over and over, but really to stick out, and to really outshine other people who are trying to be positioned as thought leaders, like each of your attorneys, you're gonna have to add something new and new perspective and new ideas that get people thinking in a different way. So those are things that make for good thought leadership content.

Poor quality thought leadership articles

What makes for bad or ineffective thought leadership articles? There's really a few different things that you can do poorly. Really, in the end what they do is they all focus around the same idea. The most frequent one I see that people mess up on is they're way too promotional, and it's clear that their goal for writing and contributing a piece of content is not to add value, it's not further a conversation, it's to try to convert a reader to contact them or to try to convert a reader to become a client or customer of theirs. That's seen through really quickly by the readers themselves and what tends to happen is, especially on a platform like LinkedIn, you might get your initial batch of distribution that happens when you get published, but then you don't actually get anyone to share it or anyone consistently engaged because they can tell it's more of an advertisement and not really a piece of thought leadership content. A couple other things that are really important and red flags that I see pretty frequently from people who are doing it ineffectively, having a lot of facts that aren't backed up or sourced. Frequently you'll see someone who mentions some sort of statistic that seems a little far-fetched and they don't really have any evidence to back it up with. So making sure that if you do have some sort of fact, you actually make sure you have it sourced in some way. And then finally, we talked a little bit about this already with good headlines and how you can make good headlines that end up not being productive in the end because those headlines still have to get the reader to the point where they're reading an article that is really relevant to them. So, now that we know what goes into a good piece of content and what doesn't go into a good piece of content, what are the other elements of making sure you're maximizing your--

George: We actually have a question.

Josh: We have a question? Okay.

Jaron: We've got a couple of questions, we'll just pause quickly in between sections here and ask. So, just specific to long-form posts, the question was who can view the long-form posts, and are they public, and if so, are they, you know, picked up by the search engines?

Josh: That is a great question. and that's actually one of the differentiation I should have mentioned along with the short verse long-form post. Long-form posts are these blog articles that really contributed content that we're talking about, is Googled by everybody. It's a public version of your profile that is accessible to anyone on LinkedIn, even if they're not connected to you. So your personal updates are only viewable by people that you've personally connected to. With your actual content, you can have people that opt in to follow your content but not connect to you as an individual. So it's a really important distinction. Yeah, a very important thing to mention is that public assets, the kind that you are putting out there, you should know that it is accessible to everybody. And to your second point, it is indexed by the search engines. So you will have LinkedIn content that shows up. I've seen over the last year that organic reach of LinkedIn content to decrease over time, so I don't think it's gonna be a huge component of the reach your LinkedIn articles will get initially, but that's also why we talked about publishing something elsewhere, that will rank better in Google, and then also just rehashing that in your LinkedIn profile for your network there to view as well.

Jaron: Sure, sure. And for the long-form content itself for these posts, do you recommend repurposing content that's already published elsewhere, or is the recommendation for this to be exclusively LinkedIn publication?

Josh: I always recommend, just from a, this more of a economic standpoint, but publishing something elsewhere first and then reposting to LinkedIn and giving credit with a link back to the original piece of content. Part of that is because early on, especially as you're building this brand as a thought leader and trying to build this following to have a really effective strategy, you might not have posts that get picked up by a channel, so you might end up with only a few hundred views, which isn't a bad thing, it's actually, can be, a few hundred views of the right 300 people can be really, really impactful, but in the end, what you can do is you can publish that to your own personal blog on your website, or if you have a column somewhere else, you can publish that content there and then repost it. And as long as you give due credit for the original publication, there's not any issues typically with the publication on your own media outlet.

Jaron: Excellent, excellent. All right, thanks, Josh. And those were audience questions, so just a quick meta note, if you do have any questions, please feel free to post them to the Q and A or chat them directly to me at Jaron Rubenstein on the WebEx. Back to you, Josh.

Engaging people

Josh: Great, so that brings me into the next part of the presentation and kind of the fourth and final piece of what you have to be doing to be effective and is really icing on the cake in terms of making sure you're polishing off your strategy as a whole. It's actually engaging people. I think it's funny that sometimes people really forget that part of thought leadership is the fact that it's not a set it and forget it medium, it's not something that you can say, okay, I did this, I'm done with it until I publish another piece of content. What's gonna happen to this content after you publish it, is you're gonna get people that like it, you're gonna get people that share it, both on LinkedIn as well as other social networks, and you're gonna get commenters. So these are really important things to note throughout the process, not only because you want to be engaging these people, but also because that engagement actually helps to spur on further distribution of it.

And I'll over exactly how content permeates the LinkedIn network in a moment, because they connect, again, it actually sheds light on why this process is so important from an engagement perspective. So, like you said, there's a big piece of, after you publish a piece of content is using that new piece of content as a platform to engage different people. So like we said also, you're gonna have people initially that will comment or that will start engaging with that piece of content via a comment or via a social share, whatever that is. What you actually want to actually do is spur on more and more conversation and actually from the beginning your goal should be to get as many people to interact with content in that capacity as possible. One of the things that we've seen over the course of the last year working with LinkedIn, an early goal of yours after you publish each piece of content, should be to get to the point where at least 10% of the visitors to the article of the viewers are actually taking some sort of social or engagement action, like we said, like a share or a comment. What happens, then, and how content permeates the LinkedIn network from those initial interactions, is anyone who likes, or shares, or comments, instantly their networks, then, get shared that new piece of content.

The LinkedIn Pulse engagement algorithm

So actually let me rewind a moment there. Whenever you first hit publish on a piece of content, your network of connections and followers get a push notification and if they have their email notifications on, they get that initial notification that you just published something. So those are the only people that will initially view your content. So what you want is then that network to add at least a 10% rate engage in some way, because what happens is, first of all, as they engage, instantly their connections get distributed that content as well. So the more people engaged, the more new networks you're tapping into with each and every interaction. So that's an important element, so you've basically gone from your initial number to a really almost immediately a much, much larger network just by accomplishing that 10%.

But not only is it important to reach into those networks, what happens on the LinkedIn internal side is like we mentioned earlier, we mentioned the Pulse algorithm that LinkedIn bought awhile ago that's main purpose is finding quality content and bringing that to the top of the conversation. What Pulse actually recognizes is when you're able to get to that certain percentage of viewers, engaged viewers, it brings it up into a queue for the editors at LinkedIn to view. And the editors who actually run those different verticals and different channels of content within the network. So, this editor then gets fed your piece of content and then it's up to them to decide if they want to drop it in and distribute it through a specific channel on the network. So what can happen, then, not only then are you tapping into your initial network and your secondary network, you're having an editor actually send out your piece of content to everyone on the LinkedIn platform who has opted in to learning more about that specific medium. That could be ranging anything from law-specific verticals to maybe you wrote a topic on big data and data security and there are verticals with millions of viewers and millions of subscribers to these specific topics that read this content on a daily basis and that's what we're talking about, is kind of a big secret element of making sure you're really successful is trying to essentially engineer the opportunity to put into these channels, because what happens, again, not only then does this new post that you've updated consists in a much larger circulation among a targeted and engaged audience around a specific topic, you also then have the opportunity then to convert them to more followers. And oftentimes you actually covert these editors to followers, as well, so any future content you publish is not yet immediately put into a channel, but those editors that kinda are those gatekeepers and decision makers to actually publishing it through a bigger audience are automatically notified as soon as you get published. So it's one of the things that we see pretty frequently. Not only is there a certain correlation between an initial piece of content gaining traction early on and then getting a lot of views itself, there's also correlations to once you're able to get one or two of those pieces of content that really shine through, the new followers and new connections that you've garnered through that process, in addition to the influential editors that you've garnered as followers, tend to make your future content more effective earlier on in the process and therefore you have a bigger opportunity to influence a much bigger market.

George: That's really powerful, Josh. Thanks.

Jaron: Excellent.

George: Really, really great piece of insight.

Josh: Definitely.

George: Basically, there's different triggers within the algorithm that will expand your distribution. And it's like the 10% then, from there, if it gets enough traction, it can make it to an editor, editor shares it within a channel, and then, sort of, the next time you're posting, he may or may not have followed you, but if he did, then you're on a good track.

Josh: Exactly, yeah. It's kinda like it's an escalation that builds on top of each other. Content doesn't general in a lot of different mediums but really on the LinkedIn network, and that was actually one of the most interesting things when LinkedIn bought Pulse was how they were going to leverage that. It was kind of a question mark at first about how LinkedIn was going to leverage the algorithm to maximize its impact, because this is actually before they had any content on the actual--

George: Publishing platform.

Josh: Publishing platform itself. So it was a big question mark initially and now it's proven to be one of the biggest assets for them and then also for users to be aware of to then take advantage of.

George: All right. So, I think that to the folks we're speaking to today, is to educate the firm that this has happened to LinkedIn, and it's just one more channel to take advantage of.

Josh: Exactly, yeah. And like we said, the cool part is you can engineer these results because you know what the general triggers are. Is it gonna happen every time? No, but what you know is if you do this consistently enough, and part of it is, like I said, what I was going to say here is early on maybe you don't get those comments the first time you publish something, so maybe the second time around, it could be actually just saying to five people in your network, hey, I would really appreciate it if you could go to this post, like it, and give me a comment on it. Even if it's a brief comment, it's something that triggers the algorithm to start picking it up as a desired piece of content, which really gets that flow going. And this going to be activated later on, even after initial publication. So you don't have to do it within the first 10 minutes something's published. You could do it maybe the next morning and see, okay, if I get 10 people to comment on this within a 20-minute period, what does that do for the algorithm? And those are all different things that can factor into it getting picked up and circulated more effectively.

Jaron: Excellent.

The proper way to use LinkedIn Groups

Josh: So, just to go on again, it's talking about using these comments and using content as an engine to create engagement and then to create, eventually, a lot of the ROI that you're looking for in terms of exposure and really relationships with the audience. The next that I wanted to talk about really quickly was just leveraging groups to actually distribute this content. What you'll find is there are a lot of groups on LinkedIn, and actually, probably, I think too many groups to be entirely honest. What's really important is that you go out and find one or two groups for each piece content that is really relevant to that content. If you share with more than a couple groups at a time, what you'll find is that LinkedIn could mark your initiatives as spam and you could get shut off from continually distributing that content. So that's not something that you want to be doing. Being selective is much more important than just trying to hit up 15 different groups and hope one of them takes off. And then here is just some of my other best tips on how to do that the right way. Observe the normal daily conversations that are happening in these groups, so you know what's the normal process for somebody who introduces an article of theirs. Some groups, really, it's almost a no policy to do that, so for you in this instance it's less important for you to actually share the content there because it's more of a red flag than even if you're just trying to add value and start quality conversation. So the biggest thing is do your homework on that group first before you actually share your article.

Key metrics for evaluating your thought leadership

So the next two areas, evaluating success and then actually replicating and scaling sucess are two important elements for us to do. So here are the key metrics that really you can look at as you're being more and more effective with your thought leadership strategy and as you're trying to grow an individual's and the firm's influence as a whole. These are the things that you need to be looking at. Everything from views, engagement, like we said, these are derivatives that allow the algorithm to pick up and be more effective, but they're also things that you can look at as I'm being more successful here versus another article that didn't accomplish these same goals. Like we know that for instance follower growth, profile views, and new connections, requests to talk, are kind of the high-dollar, high-premium types of conversion opportunities, 'cause those are the ones that actually convert into clients and into paying customers long term. So those are some important ones that I always like to look at for clients. The important thing is there's really no god metric, though. Depending on your specific initiatives and your organization, at any given time, some of these may become more or less important for certain initiatives. Like, if you know, for instance, you're trying to get people to download a white paper, click-throughs and website traffic are gonna be more important at that moment than the new connections that that author gets. So just knowing what you're actually trying to accomplish with each piece of content and then as a whole for your whole strategy is important up front. So here are kind of the key secrets of success. A lot of this is more so summing up what we talked about. Knowing the initials goals is important. Knowing where you're wanting to get long term, whether that's positioning an individual, positioning the firm, or accomplishing more of a specific metric, like a white paper download. Repurposing content, again, that goes to not only leveraging your other credibility that you've already garnered elsewhere. So if someone views your LinkedIn content, they know you're already a contributor, but also from a scalability standpoint, just making sure that it's a sustainable effort to consistently be publishing content. Tagging content within appropriate channels allows LinkedIn and the algorithm to pick up faster, to spur on that distribution earlier on. Leveraging your existing network of connections and followers. Reaching out to some important people and asking the to share, asking them to comment, is a good way to early on start some of that stimulated engagement that you're looking for. Like we said, getting that 10% view rate through a like, share, follow is important early on, especially with your early pieces of content to make sure you're maximizing the conversion of views that you're eventually going after. Sharing and distributing through other outlets. So that could mean everything from like tweeitng and sharing on Facebook, as well as other social platforms, to also putting it in a personal or company newsletter or some other distribution assets that you have to make sure you're driving attraction to each piece of content. Using calls to actions for white paper downloads. Calls to actions can also be in the actual content, asking someone to comment or asking a specific question at the end of an article for them to answer in the comments. So those are other ways you can ask at scale to try to get some of those engagement metrics early on. Responding, interacting, engaging people like we said. Distributing through other social channels. Sharing in one, two hyper-relevant groups for each specific piece of content. That doesn't mean it's the same group every time. Each topic you write is going to have a different nuance, so choosing the right one can be important. And then finally, like we said, a lot of these things lead into activating the Pulse and LinkedIn channels to really spark big distribution across the board.

Finally, we have scaling success. So we know content creation itself can be a very time-consuming effort. To do it consistently over time, or to have success over time, you have to be doing it consistently. It's not something that you can pick up one month and let go for a few months and then hope to pick up and have the same level of momentum from the beginning. So here are a few strategies that I have in place that we use for ourselves, as well as a lot of our clients, and I always recommend to people who are trying to do this. Like we said, repurposing content's a big piece of the puzzle. Leveraging calls to actions to generate email lists and further long-term distribution. So the easier you make your second, third, and fourth efforts of distributing new content, the more success each post can have because you're instantly gonna be reaching a bigger network from the beginning. So having the right calls to action that get followers and get people engaged right from the get-go is gonna be more effective in making sure you're long-term successful. Next we have knowledge management. It's a theme I hadn't talked about yet, and I won't go into too much detail here 'cause it's a total own topic, really, but what it is, is actually your attorneys, your whole firm is constantly creating content, whether that's answering a client question in an email, whether that's writing something for their own personal blog, or whether that's just having internal conversations and doing webinars or presentations internally. Managing and organizing all of that into a database that you can call on specific themes or article topics or concepts from individuals, can make the process of creating content over and over again more easy and makes it take less time to do it effectively. So that's something I really recommend. There's a few technologies out there that do this element. We, for a lot of our clients, we've actually just recently polished off our own technology that does this for ourselves and our own clients, but before that we honestly just used Google Docs to start tagging and linking things and organizing them in different ways to make sure it's easy for us to start from scratch. And then finally is equal focus on distribution as content creation. What you should be doing with every piece of content is really spending as much time as you do on creating that article as you do at trying to leverage and distribute it to the right people. That can range from engaging and talking to commenters and sending to groups, to also making sure you're linking to that article and other pieces of content you're publishing later on. That can mean reaching out to a friend who runs a newsletter that's similar to your audience that you know would find value in it as well. But investing in making sure your content's read is a really, really important element of accomplishing the goals you're setting out to. And that's for the most part all the slides that I have, so I know we took a couple questions already, but I'm sure there are more, so I'd love to open the floor to any questions that are coming in.

Jaron: Excellent, thank you so much, Josh. So, we've got a few questions already, but as I said before, feel free to chat Jaron Rubenstein or enter the QA in the WebEx if you'd like to ask an additional one. The first one was, in terms of engagement and comments, so you're getting engagement and people are commenting. How do you manage negative comments?

How do you manage negative comments?

Josh: That's a great question and it's actually something that every once in awhile you'll have someone that just, maybe they just disagree with a point that you're making, 'cause really there's almost always two sides to an argument. So if you're coming in strong on one side of an argument, which I think is almost a necessity oftentimes in content. You don't want to be controversial but you want to be strong-spoken, so you're gonna have people that disagree with you. I think the biggest thing is just embracing the conversation and it really depends on how negative the comment is and what the If it's extremely negative and it's clearly they're just out to make a point and not have a real conversation about it, honestly, I typically ignore it. If there's something that you think you can address that would better the situation, go ahead and say it, but I would typically ignore it if it's too negative. If it's really just in disagreeance of your point, I just spur on the conversation from there, 'cause that's actually, again, that's actually what's gonna get three, four, five people commenting on the same thread, which actually, like we said, can trigger a lot those distribution elements that we're looking for. So, really just spurring on the conversation and if it's a friendly debate over a disagreeance on a specific point, embrace it, 'cause I think that happens in real life and it's gonna happen in the content you publish. Actually probably more often in the content you publish 'cause people have a little bit more courage behind the veil of the internet.

Jaron: And that's engagement. I mean, in a sense that's what you're looking for. And I think I've also heard that, you know, when you get those sort of strongly negative comments that are obviously sort of picking a fight, if you will, I think usually the other readers of those comment threads are smart enough to know what's going on.

Josh: So I've actually seen situations where someone's said a really negative comment, and before one of us, or I think the specific one I'm talking about was on our CEO's article. Before he could even comment to it, there was, like, five or six people that responded and just tore the guy apart. Took care of itself.

George: Took care of itself.

Josh: You spark that debate and you spark that conversation. So it's really interesting, especially on a network like LinkedIn, where it's a professional medium, you typically won't have people gong way overboard, like you would in a platform that you're using a pseudonym, rather than your actual name, and you're anonymous.

Jaron: Right.

Josh: So on LinkedIn, typically it's a little bit more professional and people are more ready and willing to step into those conversations.

Jaron: Yeah, yeah. No, sure, that makes sense. Okay, so I'm gonna go into a legal question here, which is, so if you have, you're a legal marketer at a firm, small, big, doesn't really matter, depends on, you know, they generally have the same issues in terms of attorneys that are maybe new to LinkedIn, or maybe they don't have a profile, maybe they have a profile, they haven't really paid any attention to it. You know, what would you recommend to the marketer to, you know, to get that attorney up to speed with an effective strategy as quickly as possible?

Josh: That's a great question and really important, especially for any firm that's really growing in any capacity and bringing new people on. I think square one, like we said at the beginning of the presentation, is having their profile up to snuff and really reflecting the firm's brand as a whole, and so you're not hurting the firm's brand by having someone who's not up to par with everything else. But then also just giving them that personal profile that makes them look credible enough and is really sharing their expertise and highlights why they're differentiated as individuals in their specific space. I think one thing that firms can do is document what you prefer to be an actual profile for your firm. You could find that's differentiated from the best practices of a competitor or someone else, depending on specific verticals that you talk to or your unique target audience compared to somebody else, or even having attorneys who have different target audiences because they specialize in much different areas. So might have a standard description that you're wanting all of your attorneys to bring in every single LinkedIn profile that you use. So make the process of standardization really easy but just documenting here's an ideal online profile, and then even going through your best tips to get to that 500 plus connections that we know is important. Connect with everyone in the company. Really go back through your other social profiles and are you connected to everyone that's relevant there. And then getting them to start publishing and participating in discussions across other LinkedIn groups, as well, is another great way for them to start that brand presence and thought leadership presence they're looking for.

Jaron: Right, right. I mean, is there any reason that an attorney at a firm shouldn't be connected to every other attorney at that firm?

Josh: Yeah, you'd be surprised. You'd be surprised, it definitely happens, but there is no reason that they should not be connected to their own internal network at that firm.

Jaron: Right, that's a strong referral source offline that may as well be online as well.

Josh: Exactly, yeah.

Jaron: Okay, so we have a question about if there are any ethical concerns that lawyers specifically need to consider. Is that something that you can speak to?

Josh: I can speak to it a little bit, probably not as thoroughly as some of the lawyers--

Jaron: Big difference!

Ethical concerns for proffesionals 

Josh: The biggest thing I think you have to point out is that I've seen lawyers who do content really well and they actually, some of them even will put a disclaimer at the end of it that this is their own views, opinions, and this is just an opinion, this is not legal advice formally. So that's something to consult internally with what your firm wants as the best practices there. Again, I also see lawyers frequently contribute to online publications all the time and they don't have that included as well, so I think it's a lot of personal, personal level of how much risk you want to take on in having a message out there. But that's the only one whenever I've talked to lawyers and legal firms in the past around that topic, is it's really a personal choice about how much they want to, like, give those disclaimers to control their message.

Josh: Yeah. So it sounds like the marketing team should really consult with the firm's attorneys who would govern that sort of, have that kind of expertise to just decide, like, is there a standard disclaimer that everyone should be including. And I know just from the projects we've worked on that, you know, different firms have different interpretations of those kinds of rules.

Jaron: Exactly.

Josh: So that's a great point. There's a question that just has do with driving people to the blogs and the firm website. Is there a negative to putting blog content on LinkedIn, because then it could potentially take people away from the blog?

Jaron: Yeah, so quick answer is no, and actually if you do it the right way, what you're hoping to do is actually drive traffic to the blog via the LinkedIn platform. So even if you're reposting content from the blog, right at the top of it, as I've showed in a couple of the pictures I had throughout the presentation, right at the top of it you're gonna put this originally appeared on the company blog, and you're gonna link to that blog post actually. And actually we've seen a lot times, a high percentage of people will opt to view it in its original medium, rather than read it at the LinkedIn profile, which is really, really interesting to me. It was something that I didn't expect early on, 'cause I figured you already have the content here, why would you not read it over there? But why would you take another step to read the same thing? But it's something that people do really frequently, so it one way to distribute content from your blog really, really well. Additionally, when you're talking about publishing content to LinkedIn, you can rework the articles that you're publishing to LinkedIn to actually, then, include links directly to blog posts that you have on your blog. So if it's around the same article topic or the same theme of content, you could say here's one idea of this theme and here's a secondary one that we published on our blog that you should definitely go check out. Or if you have someone who asks a specific question in the comments, and you have a blog post that's more relevant to their specific question, you can then share that blog post. So it's about thinking things through, about how could I make sure we're taking advantage of the opportunity to migrate some of these audiences to, again, it goes back to what are your initial priorities. If blog traffic and converting people into subscribers on your blog is of utmost importance to you as an organization, think about the way that you can leverage this content medium of LinkedIn and this thought leadership initiative to drive that result.

Jaron: Yeah, that's excellent. So it's not just the posts to your profile, but it's also the long-form content that can be driving readership almost to your firm's site and to your blog.

Josh: Correct, yeah. And we talked a little bit about calls to actions. I think that's an example of a call to action within content. Again, and then there's a lot of different ways you can do it. We even do it, for example, for instance we do webinars relatively frequently and we'll include links to our webinar-linking page, to our past recordings of webinars within that contributed content. Because we want people to continue reading because we spend a lot time investing in those really high-quality assets, we want to make it as available and as accessible as possible. So, again, it's just thinking things though about what you're trying to really, really accomplish and then engineering the results that you're hoping for.

Jaron: Yeah, yeah that makes sense. I mean just like your prior slide, you talked about how important it is to put equal effort into--

Josh: Into distribution.

Jaron: Distribution, as to creation. And that's a good point. It's usually, I think, most teams are weighing one much more than the other.

Josh: Yeah, and typically it's always on content creation. Most people think you just have to create as much content as possible, when in reality, I think a lot of the most successful content marketers I talk to, regardless of industry, they probably create 20% of the content of what some of the other people in their industry do, they just make sure they invest in testing different and scalable distribution mediums to make that happen.

Jaron: Distributing it and repurposing it. That's true, that's great. So I've got one last question for you, unless anything new comes in on the WebEx, and that is, so you are a law firm. How do you the attorneys engaged in doing this at your firm? So, you know, obviously attorneys will give different weighting to the value of LinkedIn. Some of them might not even have profile or may have just the beginnings of a profile. So how do you get them engaged? How do you get them to create a profile, to publish, etcetera?

Josh: Yeah, that's a great question, and I think there are two key elements to it. One is showing them that it's worth it, so setting the vision to show here's what this initiative can help accomplish you and here's also why it's important to you, as well as our organization as a whole. So whether that's certain sales initiatives, certain lead initiatives, certain types of client initiatives that you're trying to get to, showing them how content and how their activity on LinkedIn plays a role in that overall brand image and reach that you're trying to accomplish as an organization. So one, showing them it's worth it, kind of painting the picture. I think that's almost a leadership-type thing is just showing them why it's actually important and worth their time, especially with attorneys and lawyers. It's a very busy industry so it's understandably important to make sure they know that it's actually worth it. And then the second component of that is making it easy for them to do it. So we talked about earlier making a documented LinkedIn profile so they can say okay, here's what I need, I can copy and paste this description, I can do this, these are like literally the 10 things I need to do, and they can go straight down a checklist. That's a lot easier than you just telling them, go make a LinkedIn profile and they don't really know what to do. So that's one component of it. From a content creation perspective, I think what it comes down to is that knowledge management component I mentioned at the end of the webinar, where it's talking about taking all the different pieces of content that your attorneys are already creating. And you don't even have to have them write a post start to finish. You can just say our goal is to make sure we're taking your core ideas and your core thoughts that you're already publishing or that you're already getting out there in some way or another, whether that's a webinar or whether that was a conversation that you had, and then creating the content from there and then making it an easy approval process for them to read a final version of an article and then publish it, rather than trying to look at a blank sheet of paper and say, here's what I want to write on, or something like that. So laying the foundation, making it easy for them to get content created, and then also, a little bit also is part of the strategy of upfront saying, here's what we're trying to accomplish, which could be long traffic webinar downloads, increased influence for you, here's an editorial calendar we have in place to go and make that happen, and here's all the templates and exercises that you need, and that's a combination of making it easy and painting the picture of success. So I think those are the two key elements I would focus on to get someone on board with making it happen.

Jaron: Okay, excellent. And just one more, I just want to share from some conversations I've had. I was in a seminar, it wasn't a direct conversation, but a CMO of an AM law 100 firm was talking about how she got her firm's attorneys engaged, and you know, they went from something like five or 10% of their attorneys having active LinkedIn profiles, or your know, complete LinkedIn profiles, to I don't remember the exact figure, but I'm gonna say it was, like, 80% or 90% or it was something extraordinarily high for any firm, any business. And one of the tricks that she shared was for them it came down to getting the practice leaders and even up to the managing partner, you know, leading by example on that sense and creating the profile, updating it, you know, creating regular posts for their profiles, and then of course demonstrating the value like you said earlier, showing them the value of it. But by doing that and then having those key business leaders in the firm kind of socialize that downward, active, you know, expectations.

Jaron: You especially don't want to be the person sitting there where, I don't have time for it, which is, like, 95% of the time there, and then their direct supports or like the managing partners are finding time for it. Obviously if they can find time for it, typically most people in the organization are gonna be able to find time for it. So that's a really, really great point.

Jaron: Awesome, excellent. All right.

George: I think that it wraps it up. I want to thank Josh again. That was unbelievable, really good insight and really appropriate for the legal marketing community. The recording's going to be up probably within 24 hours, and if anybody has any additional questions or wants to follow up, feel free to email me or Josh or Jaron.