Legal Firms – Don’t Allow Outside Parties Using Social Media To Control Your Reputation
There’s a shadowy figure making Holland & Knight’s online footprints. What’s worse, whoever this is, is controlling the direction the conversation is going and it’s not pretty.
approximately 20 per day. The tweets contain links that lead readers back to Investigator – Law Firm, whose profile lists six other sites, each describing it’s contents as “Information, Articles and Complaints involving Holland & Knight Attorneys.”
HK Law Investigations currently has 7 SEO online platforms publishing negative content
Investigator – Law Firm
http://posterous.com/people/KDDLNOIwdb
HK Law blog on Blogger
http://hklawinvestigations.blogspot.com/
HKLaw Investigation
http://hklaw.tumblr.com/
HK LAW on Twitter
http://twitter.com/hklaw
HK Law Investigation
http://hklaw.livejournal.com/
Holland & Knight Investigation
http://hklaw.wordpress.com/
What’s so?
Holland & Knight’s official website www.hklaw.com, is beautifully designed with an abundance of viable information reflecting it’s commitments. Their corporate communications area has been diligently producing newsletters covering the span of the firm’s practices. They also send out press releases at the rate of approximately 2 per month.
Journalists are picking up on HKLaw Investigation’s information too, and every article that gets published on the internet containing anything negative about Holland and Knight is being republished on these sites. This is a vicious circle.
What’s not happening?
The newsletters and articles they are publish are not internet friendly, interactive, or detectable by search engines. Therefore, the communication coming from Holland & Knight is doing nothing to combat the negative coverage that HKLaw Investigations is distributing.
What can legal marketers do?
Ford’s head of social media, Scott Monty, was able to avoid a public relations crisis by doing exactly that.
Related Posts:
Online Reputation Crisis – An Update of Holland and Knight’s Annonymous Naysayer: HK Law
Tags: Kara Smith, Karasma Media, Legal Marketing Tactics, Legal Marketing Trends, Social Media
January 16th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Kara -
This is great detective work and cogent content about the risks of internet reputation ambushes. I learned about your blog from one of our attorneys and now I’m putting it on my Favorites. Thanks.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Thank you Russell. Considering that law firms are always going to be on one side of an issue, it’s inevitable that someone is going to be discontent with what they’re doing. All the more reason for the legal industry to incorporate social media into their marketing strategies, sooner rather than later.
January 22nd, 2009 at 10:22 am
Thank you, Kara, for this great reporting. You are dead on that it is the responsibility of all law firm marketing teams to get a handle on social computing and follow their firm’s online footprint vigilantly.
While presenting introductory material on social computing to lawyers and legal administrators over the past 12 months I have been emphasizing the importance of reserving the law firm’s name on Twitter (NOW) even if they do not yet participate, and certainly reserve all URL configurations of the name with .net and .mobi at the very least. Any firm that does not own the url of their full name spelled out e.g. jonesjonesandjones.com instead of jjjlaw.com or jjj.com should try to secure it NOW!
Your story is an incredible example of unethical business practices that are only getting more rampant as Web use for fighting personal battles against organizations and making political views even more contentious than those at the cocktail party. As communications and marketing becomes more ubiquitous on the Web, law firms MUST protect their good name and reputation to the best of their knowledge.
January 23rd, 2009 at 9:00 am
Jane – Thank you for your comments. You’re making extremely good points about law firms owning their URLs across domains, and the immediacy necessary for them to take action. It’s always better to deal with emergencies prior to their coming to fruition, so indeed NOW is a good time. Hopefully, more people who need to read this kind of information are, and are taking the actions we’re directing them toward.
January 30th, 2009 at 2:08 am
So many lawyers are working in law firms and offices to solve the legal problems of people. They have vast experience to understand the legal issues of family members. Experienced family lawyers in law firms provide proper guidance and supervision to fulfill the demands of clients.
http://www.lawyersindemand.com/
February 24th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Did anyone at the law firm think about trademarking their name?
the damages from somethinbg like this when the appropriate steps have been taken to trademark a business entity would go far is making this go away in a day or two.
February 24th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
Kara,
Thanks for advancing an extremely worth discussion and for sharing this specific incident. I’d like to cross-post a past comment shared on a timely post on Online Marketing Blog which highlights some of the important points raised here.
As your post clearly demonstrates, the idea of monitoring online brands and reputations needs to go beyond a collection of feeds and searches for online mentions, and needs to be comprehensive enough to cover intentionally mispelt domain names, free-blogging platforms (i.e. brandXYZ.blogspot.com), Twitter, MySpace urls, YouTube, gmail, spoofed IP’s, text/banner ads, and piggyback spammers that could be potentially broadcasting their dodgy messages using unguarded domain names, harvested email addresses or even unused online profiles.
This can be a daunting and time-consuming task, and our firm has assisted many companies by helping them stay on top of such incidents and helping avert the risks associated to online brand assault. IMHO, your final point about getting caught with your guard cannot be overstated, and in our shared interest to help raise awareness, we can only hope your message inspires those who have been reluctant to recognize the importance of being proactive about online brand and reputation management.
Joseph
@RepuMetrix
February 24th, 2009 at 11:24 pm
Joseph –Thank you for your comments and cross-link.
My hope is that name-holders will take heed of this incident and treat it as a precautionary warning. Unfortunately, I’m afraid more people are going to have to learn the hard way, than not.
February 24th, 2009 at 11:32 pm
Regarding the issue of copyright…
I strongly doubt Holland & Knight had hklaw copywritten.
It appears that whomever is behind the commentary is too savvy to not have done their homework — thoroughly. They set up several domains with the HK law to have gone to the trouble of setting up these fairly intricate domains.
April 20th, 2009 at 4:32 am
Very nice, I agree with you there Russel Lawton with “great detective work”. Great blog.
LLC
July 6th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
[...] & Knight’s negative, online conversation several months ago, when I wrote my original post: Legal firms dont allow outside parties Shed some light on disgruntled players within the construct of any large law firm and you’re [...]
July 6th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
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January 23rd, 2010 at 9:18 pm
[...] Karasma Media by Kara Smith » Blog Archive » Legal Firms – Don’t … [...]
February 2nd, 2010 at 10:02 pm
Thanks for bringing this issue to the light. Its not something I’m familiar with but I plan on investigating it further. Could cause a lot of problems if the wrong people keep doing this.
Anyway, thanks for sharing.
Bob M
February 3rd, 2010 at 11:33 am
Hi Bob -
Keeping on top of what’s happening in the social media world, how it effects legal marketers and keeping track of pertinent information for my clients is what I do.
Thank you for checking in and taking the time to respond!
Kara
June 22nd, 2010 at 11:47 am
As a Houston Personal Injury Lawyer you really hit a topic I worry about as the competition is fierce and it is not beyond my competitors to attempt to manipulate reputation online. Thanks for the heads-up and I’ll keep reading for tips!
June 22nd, 2010 at 10:26 pm
Thanks so much for commenting Don. Nothing to worry about — ongoing action is the key!