LinkedInGPT || Red Flags for Firing Your Agency

Episode Notes

Transcript

Conrad Saam: Before we get started, we’d like to give a huge thank you to our sponsors, Lawmatics and CallRail.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Conrad, what are you thankful for this season of Thanksgiving?

Conrad Saam: Wow. I was just about to talk about how great I am, and you want to move me straight towards humility and gratitude. I like it. I am thankful that Michigan is still 10 and 0, how’s that for a segue into banter that I’d rather talk about.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, you know I want to talk about that. Although I’m sure we’re going to get a lot of Michigan “Haterade” on the hashtag. We’ve been doing this — I don’t know if I’ve said this on the show before, but our family has been doing a gratitude practice with our kids at dinner. So we talk about what we’re grateful for. And it’s been awesome. I mean, you know, six-year-old and a four-year-old the gratitude is what it is. But I think it’s a good habit. And I think from a business standpoint, look, we serve clients. Gratitude that comes through both for your clients, but also through your marketing. Gratitude and empathy wins the day for businesses, right?

Conrad Saam: And for parents. This is corny, but I’ve learned I now have teenagers, that the reason you teach your kids to say please and thank you is not to make them look nice and polite when they’re out, but it instills in them a sense of gratitude every single time someone does something nice for them or someone does anything for them, right? And so, I believe gratitude is one of the most important characteristics for being happy.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Gratitude is the secret. Aside from gratitude, what are we talking about today?

Conrad Saam: As always, we are starting with the news. We’re moving on to a segment on AI and spam. And then what is one of my favorite things to talk about? Red flags to fire your horrible, dastardly, lying digital marketing agency.

Gyi Tsakalakis: In addition to my wonderful co-host Conrad, I am grateful for our wonderful theme song and producer, Mr. Lockwood.

[Music]

Intro: Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, teaching you how to promote, market, and make fat stacks for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

[Music]

Conrad Saam: All right. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I appreciate you taking the time. We actually went back and looked at the data from last Thanksgiving episode, and it was well listened to. Our suspicion is correct. You are tired of hanging out with creepy Uncle Frank who’s had one too many drinks and this year has one less teeth and you are upstairs hiding, listening to Gyi and I wax poetic about legal marketing. So we, as usual, going to start with the news.

[Music]

Conrad Saam: All right, sir. We’ve known this for a while. This is news about Google, not from Google. There was a great article out by AJ Kohn, which we will put in the show notes, and he was talking about how Google is using click data. This is one of those kinds of dirty little secrets that I haven’t really heard hit the kind of legal SEO world, but has certainly been talked about outside of the legal SEO world. Clicks as a ranking factor. Very, very real. And Gyi, your contention is that it has generated a bunch of trash content that is ranking. Tell me why.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, trash is in the eye of the beholder, right? Google is giving users what they want. Articles and pages that are getting clicked on are getting surfaced more regularly. And I think we’ll talk about this in the context of helpful content update and a couple other recent updates. But I would highly encourage everybody, if you’re into search, you should be subscribed to ‘Blind Five Year Old’ that’s AJ’s blog. He is one of the, in my opinion, smartest people in the SEO game. In fact, he’s a consultant for Reddit, which I thought was funny because Reddit is flooding SERPs. And he’s probably part of the reason why that’s happening. But from a legal marketing standpoint, this is why it’s so important that your titles and your meta descriptions and your content is actually earning engagement. When talk about engagement in social, you got to be thinking the same thing for search.

Conrad Saam: Super tactical coming to you from Gyi. And this is why we’re calling this episode Red Flags for Firing Your Agency because we know it’s going to get engagement. All right, that was a non-Google announcement. Gyi, there’s also two announcements coming out of Google. What are they?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah. So I’ll give another shout to another really smart SEO Lily Ray. She brought to my attention that Google just announced these some of them are newish the perspective stuff, but notes is new.

(00:05:05)

And so, again, the idea is and we’ll drop a link in the show notes, but Google providing more tailored search experiences so users can provide feedback on results. There’s no question this will get abused. It’ll be interesting to see how Google addresses this. But the trend is this has been going on and I think we’re going to continue to see more of this. The buzzwords personalization.

So if you want to get more content, whether it’s from a brand or a person or whatever, you’re going to be able to tailor your results to get more of that. And Google wants to surface more of this helpful user content because again, as you’ll see from AJ’s post, that’s the stuff that people are demanding and it also feels very much like this is the response to TikTok for search, right? Because TikTok, you can completely tailor it by who you follow. And those are the people are going to show up in your feed. And yes, TikTok’s going to surface stuff. That’s the part that Google seems to be missing. And so, Google’s trying to close that gap with these updates, in my opinion.

Conrad Saam: And finally, OpenAI, enabling anyone to create their own version of ChatGPT. Talk about open source. This is a no code approach to creating your own version of ChatGPT. When ChatGPT came out, there were a lot of people who started spinning out these ChatGPT legal spinoffs, and that was difficult to do. No longer, right? If you invested a bunch of venture capital money in that opportunity, the playing field has just been leveled inside of 10 months so have fun with that.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah? Our friend Kevin O’Keefe, he posted this on LinkedIn. He was at a legal marketing conference and the panelists were very almost poking fun at AI and Generative AI in general.  And wow, folks are missing the boat. I mean, I’ve been playing around with it, creating new GPTs, and again, this is the tip of the iceberg with this stuff. But when you see what you can create and how you can tailor it to do specific tasks, I don’t see how you can walk away from this and be like, this is seismic so we’ll drop a link. They haven’t rolled it out for everybody. But if you can get access to the custom GPTs, it is. You thought Generative AI was a game changer just typing stuff into Chat GPT, wait until you can see what you can do when you’re creating your own.

Conrad Saam: What you can create for yourself, right? I mean, think through what that means. You can customize this exactly for you. Question for you Gyi, and this is a tangent, but I’m going to take it. Do you think law firms should not be using ChatGPT or AI generative content to generate content for their website? I was called to ask for that at a recent conference and I’m wondering what your perspective is on this.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, again, we talked about this in a prior episode, so maybe we’ll force Lockwood to dig it up. But the answer is, if you’re copying and pasting, then no, don’t use it. You’re an idiot, right?

Conrad Saam: Thank you, Gyi, for insulting — if anyone had seven minutes before we insulted the audience as you’re over under, there you go.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But if you’re using it for all the things that we’ve talked about, inspiration, ideation, ad copy, permutations, reviewing it, it’s a game changer. I mean, I can’t tell you how big of a difference this is. And so, folks that are — this fear stuff, we’ve seen it before, and guess what? You know where a lot of the fear is the people who are getting paid to do the stuff that ChatGPT can do more efficiently.

Conrad Saam: Yeah. My take is I would rather have my clients paying us to analyze a whole bunch of content instead of writing a piece of content, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, it’s so funny because we say this all the time to lawyers. You better find ways to get paid for the value that you drive for your clients.

Conrad Saam: That’s right.

Gyi Tsakalakis: In the context of law practice. Well, the same thing is true for content publishing. If you’re a content person, you better find ways to get paid for something that the GPT can’t do. And so, whether it’s analysis, whether it’s editing, whether it’s research, whether it’s interviewing I think we talked about this last time and it was kind of poking fun at The Verge article that was saying SEO destroyed the internet. But the thing that that journalist did was they interviewed a bunch of people. Well, Chat GPT is not interviewing anybody. You’re not getting actual quotes and all that kind of stuff from real humans. And so anyway, ranty but cut me off.

Conrad Saam: When we come back. If you have not heard enough about AI generative content, you’re going to get some more of it. So Gyi has talked about LinkedIn GPT. We’re going to talk about ghost writing when we come back.

(00:10:02)

[Music]

Gyi Tsakalakis: If you’re like a lot of lawyers that we talk to, you’re trying to grow your firm but you’re having trouble doing more in a day than just managing your systems.

Conrad Saam: So what you really need is a simple system that can easily identify where your profitable leads are coming from, analyze practice performance and easily sync up matters.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Now I’ve got to admit, I’m both an investor and advisor to Lawmatics and the reason is I’m super excited what Matt’s building over there.

Conrad Saam: So you don’t have to change your entire system, Lawmatics easily integrates with MyCase, Clio, Smokeball, Rocket Matter and lots of others.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So take a test drive today with Lawmatics to make client intake easier, lawmatics.com.

[Music]

Christopher T. Anderson: If you’re a lawyer running a solo or small firm, and you’re looking for other lawyers to talk through issues you’re currently facing in your practice, join the Unbillable Hours Community Roundtable, a free virtual event on the third Thursday of every month. Lawyers from all over the country come together and meet with me, Lawyer and Law Firm Management Consultant, Christopher T. Anderson to discuss best practices on topics such as marketing, client acquisition, hiring and firing, and time management. The conversation is free to join but requires a simple reservation. The link to RSVP can be found on the Unbillable Hour page at legaltalknetwork.com. We’ll see you there.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And we’re back. Conrad, you use LinkedIn at all?

Conrad Saam: I use LinkedIn quite a bit, my friend. It’s funny, we’re looking at data on LinkedIn versus Facebook. I have been an avid early adopter of Facebook and I’ve been really, really active on Facebook. I’ve only in the last 18 months gotten really deep on LinkedIn. It’s amazing. You can see the difference in engagement based on that lack of longevity. But I am on LinkedIn, I post almost every day.

Gyi Tsakalakis: That’s smart. And I will tell you this, I am a big LinkedIn user too, for many of the same reasons you mentioned. But I’ve noticed an unfortunate trend happening which has happened to everything. And the post that I wrote was I was calling it LinkedIn GPT because it’s become very clear to me that, as we just talked about, in the context of content publishing, people are typing into ChatGPT, give me a great LinkedIn post and then they’re copying and pasting that into their LinkedIn post. And it’s also become clear to me that they’re doing it for even comments on my own post. And I know that there’s this emerging industry of LinkedIn ghost writing and all this stuff and here’s my thing about it, and I want to get your opinion on this too.

I don’t really care whether or not you use ChatGPT, but I better not be able to tell and that’s the issue. And it’s really not any different than we talked about with ghostwriting and blogging, right? So people used to hire people to ghostwrite blog posts. And if I can’t tell, if it sounds like you and I can’t tell, maybe I don’t care, it’s because I can’t tell the difference. But once I can tell, I’m not engaging with you. I’ve got people I know that I actually know in real life that are doing this. And it’s not that I’m, like, holding some self-righteous viewpoint of them doing this. I just know that it’s not them. And so, I’m like, I’m not going to engage it because it’s not you.

Conrad Saam: You want to name anyone Gyi?

Gyi Tsakalakis: I do not.

Conrad Saam: During our Christmas session, Gyi and I will be pounding eggnogs until I get him to name who is no longer his friend on LinkedIn.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I love eggnog, by the way. If I’ve never said that before. My family makes fun of me I’m the only one. I make my own eggnog. And my family is like, this is so bad for you, and none of us like it but it’s my tradition.

Conrad Saam: I love that you make your own eggnog. By the way, we’ve broken the rule of no Christmas before Thanksgiving.

Gyi Tsakalakis: You brought it up.

Conrad Saam: I know, but I keep trying to get you to name people. But, I mean, it’s an interesting thing here, and it’ll be fascinating to see how this evolves. We have been talking content, and I’m really not being Socratic here, I don’t know, but we’ve been talking about content and authentic content and why it’s okay to not have overly produced video and all this kind of stuff. This is about to become very inauthentic. I mean, deeply inauthentic. And the technology is here right now for all of this, even video, right? And so, I really wonder how consumer behavior changes once all of the marketers ruin content? Like we talk about, have SEOs ruin the internet, our marketers are going to ruin content, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis: But this is the thing. This is my thing. This is why I’d love for you to share your story, but I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but you indicated that maybe you had been at a conference and people were saying, do not use AI for anything content.

(00:15:04)

And again, to me, it’s missing the point. I mean, the former president, who I shall not name, had people writing tweets on his behalf.

Conrad Saam: Sure.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Guess what? No one cared. They were retweeting and sharing and engaging and blah, blah.

Conrad Saam: But that’s because everyone knew, because the grammar was correct when he had someone else writing it.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Fine. Well, that would actually be an indication that people, they thought that it wasn’t authentic. But my point is, I don’t care. I don’t care if it’s a human ghostwriter. I don’t care if it’s an AI ghostwriter. The issue is, if the consumer of the content can tell, that’s the thing that ruins it. It ruins your authenticity, right? And we talked about this in the preshow, and I’d love to hear some of your thoughts about this. But as you mentioned, the technology is already here for this to exist in video. If you and I create a script or maybe chat, we create our own Lunch Hour Legal Marketing GPT, and it gets so good that we’re, like, create this episode and it can do it. And it’s Conrad and Gyi talking, and maybe it needs some editing, but people, the subscribers can’t tell the difference. Does it matter? It reminds me of Matrix, right? It’s like, if you can’t tell the stake is real, does it really matter?

Conrad Saam: So I agree on that, but I’m looking forward further when people are like, everything is —

Gyi Tsakalakis: Surrogates.

Conrad Saam: Like Conrad and Gyi, they’re not involved at all. They’ve just done a really good job of writing some prompts, and I can see them on YouTube and it actually looks like them, but it’s not really them.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But if you can’t tell if you can’t tell that’s the whole point.

Conrad Saam: But what I’m saying is, just imagine this. We’ve talked about, these are very common thing. We’ve talked about Happy Veterans Day and Thanksgiving content. What if at the beginning of the year, you have a script, right? You say, all right, I’m going to create a prompt. I would like to generate video content for the top 30 holidays in the United States. And it should have this type of theme in it, and it should slightly reference my legal work. And I want it to be 60 to 90 seconds each of these videos. You set that up and press go, right? This is doable right now. This is absolutely doable right now. And the cost of generating that content has become so low. Like, and we talked about the cost of generating AI content, like, what it has done is leveled the playing field on the content stool of the SEO game.

So now the only remaining major factor is links, right? So now everyone can create whatever content they want. They all post it, they flood the web, and consumers are like, this is garbage. My whole experience is garbage because everyone’s doing it and it may be unique and it may be from an individual lawyer’s perspective, but it’s just so ubiquitous that no one cares anymore. What happens when no one cares about content? Because it’s just computers talking to each other. And then the comments that are on that content are auto generated by people spamming LinkedIn with comments on that. It’s bomb.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I might be missing your point, but implicit in everything you said is that people can tell the difference, right? If they think it’s garbage, they can tell that it’s garbage. Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if it was AI or a ghostwriter or it was the real — let me tell you something. Lawyers are great at cranking out their own garbage content. The real lawyers, real live lawyers.

Conrad Saam: Oh, I had that conversation, too. No, but I think implicit in my comment is the oversaturation. Like right now with content, with video content, for example, you do this and I do this. It actually takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of time to put that together. We’re going to take the recording of this. There are some people who are going to do some amazing work in post-production so all the gaffes that I had when we did the intro, no one will know about those things, right?

And you cut these up, we put an intro on it, we put some music to it. There’s work to that. There’s real work to that. And the work that is entailed in that can become virtual. And so, in the same way that everyone can write content to fill their SEO content gaps, everyone can create video now. Everyone creates social comments now. And yeah, those proxies might be as good and indistinguishable from the human. Do people stop caring about what’s on the web from a content perspective because it becomes so ubiquitous?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, I think that’s a good point. And my response to that is people will, and we’ve already seen this happening, right? It’s the great filtering. People will start to gravitate to the people who they trust, right?

(00:20:00)

So if they trust that Conrad is putting his pants on and putting the mic up and talking about what he had for breakfast, because everybody’s super interested in that. But we know it’s you, right? We know that it’s you and we’re engaging with you. We’re engaging with your expertise versus if Lunch Hour Legal Marketing turns into auto generated content or Conrad, I mean, they’re going to filter out that other stuff. That was kind of my point at the outset of this LinkedIn GPT thing, right? Because maybe some of these posts, I can’t tell, right? Maybe some of them like, it’s a ChatGPT thing.

Conrad Saam: Like all of mine? All of yours.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I can’t tell. But once I know somebody’s doing it, right, once I know they’re doing it and this is to your point that seed is planted in my head and I’m not going to engage with it. And so, trying to give a constructive takeaway for this again, if you’re going to do this stuff, it better be invisible. And the stuff that people are going to want to gravitate to is the stuff that ChatGPT can’t do. ChatGPT can’t do Conrad’s book review of this book that just came out yesterday, right? ChatGPT can’t do what your firm’s local charity drive was. They can’t do content around how you supported your local charity. They can’t do content about how you were active in, I don’t know, youth sports or something. I’m pulling things out of nowhere here, but hopefully people get the point. Just like we tell you to do in law practice, you got to spend time creating the content that the robots can’t create.

Conrad Saam: Let’s take a break.

[Music]

Dave Scriven-Young: You like legal podcasts because you’re curious and want to be the best attorney you can be. I’m Dave Scriven-Young, host of Litigation Radio produced by ABA’s Litigation Section with Legal Talk Network. Search in your favorite podcast player for Litigation Radio to join me and my guests as we examine hot topics in litigation and topics that will help you to develop your litigation skills and build your practice. I hope you’ll check out Litigation Radio and join the ABA Litigation Section for access to all of the resources, relationships and referrals you need to thrive as a litigator.

[Music]

Gyi Tsakalakis:  And we’re back and as are ravenous fans know, we have been asking folks at conferences and online to submit questions and so if you record yourself asking a question, we’ll send you an awesome Lunch Hour Legal Marketing hat or potentially additional swag in the future.  Tell your friends.  Leave a review.  You won’t get a hat if you leave a review but we do appreciate hearing the nice and horrible things you have to say about us and with that said, we have a question from Stephen Skinner on local celebrities.

Conrad Saam:  Stephen Skinner.  Great attorney out of West Virginia.

Stephen Skinner:  I’m Stephen Skinner.  I’m a partner at Skinner Law Firm in Charleston, West Virginia and the question is about endorsements and using local celebrities to endorse your firm in various ways.  I think there are a lot of folks in the name, image, likeness, business, college athletes are now available.  Is there any value in that?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Love this question.  Conrad, any value in local celebrities?

Conrad Saam:  Great question.  This is a fun one.  This might be the most funniest question that we’ve received because there’s so many ways to go with this.  I have two initial thoughts.  The first is we’ve talked often about how it is easier to create a brand affinity around a person instead of a company, right? and I’ll use we can use Nike as the most obvious example of that.  Michael Jordan versus Nike.  There’s an equivalency between those two things and it is easier.  Thought number two is my confidence in hiring a local college football star who’s not going to do something epically stupid like you were putting some risk in your brand there and I don’t mean to besmirch college students at all but as someone who was once a college student, I would want to be very careful that your brand isn’t represented by a keg stand.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  So you’re saying choose your influencer carefully.

Conrad Saam:  Choose your influencer very carefully and we’ve seen this even within the I’m going to bungle my NFL references but there’s a plumbing company in the Seattle market that I believe it was Marshawn Lynch.  Marshawn Lynch, call me out if I’m wrong on this Gyi because my NFL knowledge is close to zero.  Marshawn Lynch no longer plays for the Seahawks.  Is that correct?

(00:25:02)

Gyi Tsakalakis:  That’s correct.

Conrad Saam:  Okay, so they have built this brand.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  He’s retired.

Conrad Saam:  Oh, he’s retired and does he still hang out in Seattle?  I don’t know these things.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Maybe he does.  Yeah, but he’s still famous.  He’s still the celebrity in Seattle, right?

Conrad Saam:  No, but okay, let me give a different example.  Let’s say you are the Tom Brady Plumbing Company in Boston and now he’s in Tampa.  See, now there’s two football pieces of data that I can give —

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Okay, that might be a better one.  But I promise you, Tom Brady doesn’t buy his own drinks even up in New England.

Conrad Saam:  So my point being, when you tie yourself to a local celebrity whether you’re a law firm or Nike.  I mean this has happened over and over with.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Here’s the example you should have given that you didn’t.  Kanye.

Conrad Saam:  Kanye.  I’m talking–

Gyi Tsakalakis:  They made the shoes.  They made his shoes.  They got all these shoes sitting around.  They can’t sell.

Conrad Saam:  Yeah, so great example.  Don’t tie your law firm to Kanye.  But those are very real things and it’s two sides of the sword.  I do think you need to — I think it works and I think it is fraught with peril especially when it comes to college students.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  It is fraught with peril.  I think it’s a great idea.  I think Conrad’s right.  You got to choose wisely.  I will also encourage folks, if this is brand new for you, go check out the FTC rules on this and make sure you’ve got the proper disclaimers.  But here’s my thing, because it’s phrased in the way of like a celebrity endorsement.  Forget about the the endorsement.  The Bernstein firm here they do a bunch of local Detroit sports people.  So it’s Barry Sanders, I think Darren McCarty and maybe Kirk Gibson and it’s like they’re tying in like how awesome the Bernstein firm is or whatever.  Don’t do that part, right? You don’t need to do the I endorse this law firm part.  Just have a conversation with the people because again, people are going to want to see the person talk regardless and you’re just going to be along for the ride.  It’s almost like barnacle celebrity SEO kind of, right?  You’re attached. You’re getting the awareness and the affinity.  So I’d sit down and the other thing I would say is to try to have a conversation that might be topically relevant.  People are going to be like, that’s nuts — I’ve seen lawyers do this where they’ll have an interview with somebody about maybe they were in a car accident, right?  So a celebrity has a real story about them being in a car accident and how their lawyer helped them through it.  Now hopefully that’s the lawyer that was you.  Because otherwise they’re going to be like, oh, who did Barry Sanders choose?  Maybe not a great example but I think some relevant story is great but I would even say forget that.  Do the same thing but go hyper local.  So not even the college athlete go interview or connect with the principal of your local high school or something.

To answer the question directly, the value of the celebrity.  It’s the same thing we talk about when we’re talking about this idea of borrowing audience, right?  You’re connected to this audience of these people that want to see what this person has to say but it doesn’t have to be an endorsement.  It can just be a conversation.  Tell me about your playing days.  Tell me about what it was like to be in the NFL.  Tell me what it was like to play at the major university.  That’s the stuff people actually want to hear.  It’s a real authentic story and now you’re attached with it because you’re the interviewer.  I mean, it’s the same thing.  It’s the reason why people interview other people on their podcast, right?

Conrad Saam:  So that’s what I was going to say.  I would flip the script on this.  I would flip the script on this.  Can you help make someone in your town a celebrity?  Can you become the path to their celebrity by giving them exposure, right?  We’ve talked about dark social a little bit but that is the other side of this.  What can you do to help people and give them a bigger voice that becomes also powerful.  Okay, we’re going to move on.  Thank you for the question, Stephen and by the way, if you want a hat from LHLM, hit us on the socials with a question.  Trucker hats inbound.

Now, Gyi, the next thing is red flags for firing your agency.  All of you are sitting at home having turkey wishing that you had had a better financial year and you’re blaming the leads that your agency didn’t generate for you.  So, Gyi, I want to ask you, what are some of the red flags on when it is time to pull the plug on your terrible digital marketing agency?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Well, and I’ve got to give a shout to the law firm marketing subreddit on reddit.  If you’re not on there, go check it out.  There were a bunch of recent threads on issues.  It’s the end of the year like Conrad said people are like, should I fire my SEO company that was one of the threads.

(00:30:04)

Wondering if I still need an SEO marketing company and I’m not going to read all these. I think the subreddit law firm also has some but I’m just going to do a couple of call outs.  So the first one is it takes me five months to implement CallRail and they’re paying $2,000 a month.  Now, again, I don’t know what the heck’s going on here but it goes back to this.  If it’s taking your agency five months to set up infrastructure, it’s probably time to look for a new agency.  Well, at least with CallRail.  I know Conrad’s dancing around there because some of the infrastructure gets pretty complicated and as I said that I thought maybe five months though that still seems like a long time but I hear what you’re — tell me why I’m wrong.

Conrad Saam:  No, I think it depends on the infrastructure.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  But for CallRail?

Conrad Saam:  For CallRail, that should be done on day one and I can just hear my people being like, shut up, Conrad.  That is one of the earliest things you want to do because if you don’t have CallRail, you’re now running with five months of no data.  So you are running headlong with your eyes closed towards a cliff so that’s just dumb.  I mean, that’s just dumb.  There are other things.  We’re going to do a migration from an intake management system to a HubSpot and we have a big firm and we have seven different offices and we want to do reporting across differently across some of this infrastructure does get very complicated and it’s custom to your firm but like CallRail five months.  You’re crazy out.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  All right, here’s another one.

Conrad Saam:  Okay, hit me.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Two weeks ago, my consultant told me that my Google business profile was fine.  Didn’t have much many reviews but didn’t really matter and then all of a sudden, they totally flipped the script and they’re like, oh, my gosh, Google’s putting a huge priority on reviews and you’re in trouble now.  So I’ll tell you what my problem with it is with it.

Conrad Saam:  Go.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Number one is reviews impacting locals.  Not a new thing but that’s a little bit more maybe nuanced.  I’m critical.

Conrad Saam:  It shouldn’t be nuanced for our audience.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  This is when it’s time to fire.  When you’re like, I sold you this local SEO thing and I never gave you any context about where you stand from a competitive review standpoint.  Just even if they’re successful in getting you to rank, if there are no reviews there it’s not going to matter.

Conrad Saam:  Yeah.  So it’s an interesting perspective and I fully agree.  An agency that doesn’t operate within the context of your reality where they have things that they do regardless and this typically happens with agencies that do one marketing channel.  Right?  I’m an SEO company.  You need more SEO.  I’m a pay per click company.  You need more pay per click.  I find that there is I believe that if you do not see the full board you can’t be playing chess and most of the time, agencies believe you need more of what they do and I think that is one of the red flags that I would look at if the answer is always, you need more of the hammer because you sell hammers.  That is concerning.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Here’s another one.  My account manager has not really responded to several emails over a few months.

Conrad Saam:  Okay?  I was going to ask the time frame on that.  You know, my bias is I wait and I can’t wait for clients to tell me that we call them too much.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Right.  We have the opposite problem.  I’m like, get the client, get a hold of the client.  Clients like, I mean, I’m busy, I’m in trial, and blah, blah.  If you can’t get a hold of your agency people, I mean, I’m trying to be judicious and think about examples of where you would be trying but in the very least, they should be acknowledging that you’re trying to contact them and like, “hey, let’s talk about this as part of our next quarterly strategy session or something.”  No response like that should be a no brainer.

Conrad Saam:  Yeah, we have a report.  I don’t know if you do this too but we have a report.  It’s one of the metrics.  One of the eight metrics that I look at on a weekly basis.  How many clients haven’t been touched?  It’s all through our CRM system but I know and the answer is one or fewer that’s our target is how many clients haven’t been touched and that all comes out of making phone calls through a CRM system, email through a CRM system.  All of that gets.  It’s super easy to track and again, I can hear my people being like, back down, Conrad.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Good, good.

Conrad Saam:  But you want your agency to be annoying.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Hold your people accountable.

Conrad Saam:  I hear from you guys way too much.  Okay, great.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yes.  Here’s one.

Conrad Saam:  Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  I hired my agency because I saw they were hanging out with other people I respect on Facebook at a conference.

Conrad Saam:  Well, this is not on Reddit and I know this is something that annoys you.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  I’m putting that on Reddit.

(00:35:00)

Conrad Saam:  He just lied to all of you.  This is not on Reddit but he and I have been talking about this.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  I didn’t say it was on Reddit.  I said it was another thing.  There’s another red flag.

Conrad Saam:  You implied it is lying through a mission, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  You don’t know it’s not on Reddit.

Conrad Saam:  It is now.  Okay.  You talked about barnacle, right?  There is the barnacle effect of people going around taking pictures at conferences of all these well-known lawyers and implying that they’re the agency.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Ask them.  Ask them if they work with them and go ask the person that they’re sending all the conference pictures with if they work with them or if they used to work with them maybe.  Why they fired them?

Conrad Saam:  You said it was fantastic.  Well, I had a slight corollary to what you’re suggesting but mine is that are they dating other people.  Are they taking another person to the prom when you thought you were their exclusive client, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Right.

Conrad Saam:  You’ve heard this from me, Gyi, over and over but I really believe that it does not make any sense in the world to have an agency gathering your data and bring it across the road to your competitor.  That’s just bonkers and so that’s a red flag for me.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Ask them if they sponsored the conference.  Speaking of —

Conrad Saam:  Knives, knives out, Gyi.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  It’s another one that drives me insane.  Here’s one for you, Conrad.

Conrad Saam:  Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  So let’s talk about timing.

Conrad Saam:  Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  I guarantee SEO ROI in one month.  Is that a red flag or a green flag?

Conrad Saam:  Let me give the counterpoint and this will answer your question accurately.  I have definitely, in the past, looked at a site or a GMB profile where I could guarantee that they would have improvements the next day.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  That’s not what I said.

Conrad Saam:  I get it.  I get it.  This is the only way in which this should actually work.  I look at a GMB profile and I see that they’re listed as lawyer in Cincinnati when instead they do something and they’ve got a good review.  All they have to do is change that category, and all of a sudden thing will change.  If you can find something that is that basic and that simple.  A, you should tell the lawyer to do it on their own and not charge them for it, because it’s a simple piece of information, and B, if you do engage them, you can make that guarantee.  Having said that —

Gyi Tsakalakis:  No, you can.  No, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.  You’re changing the question.

Conrad Saam:  Okay, well, we’ll see.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Of course, you can make improvements.  That’s not what I said.  I’m talking about guaranteeing ROI.

Conrad Saam:  Oh, guaranteeing, so return.  So we’re actually talking about money?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Well, this is and here’s the issue, right?  You did your answer is totally right.  There’s all sort of things you can do but let’s talk about and we can go back to your awesome takes on ROI from our previous episode.

Conrad Saam:  All right.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  What does ROI stand for, Conrad?

Conrad Saam:  Oh, my gosh. I believe it is expressed as a percentage.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  A percentage of what?

Conrad Saam:  It is the return over the investment and if you are able, you are not able.  In fact, Gyi and I would love to talk to you.  If you have been engaged in an SEO company that in the first three months has done something that has had an impact that has then generated a client that you have signed and resolved their case and been paid for that.  In three months, we want to talk to you.  I mean, we’re saying —

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Be careful.  If you submit yourself, be careful.  You better be able to demonstrate all the things that Conrad just said.  You got paid, you’re a PI firm.  You got a return on investment in SEO in the first three months.

Conrad Saam:  Okay.  Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  I want to say well —

Conrad Saam:  Implicit in this is the notion that you have a great tracking mechanism set up and that you’re going all the way from marketing channel to your matter management and billing system depending on what you’re using and that you know the formula for ROI and I think this is the previous episode so I don’t want to hit this too hard but you guys don’t know what ROI is and yet you listen to people say ROI, agencies say ROI, lawyers say ROI all the time and you don’t know what the fuck it is.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  It’s even harder than this.  It’s even worse than that because and you said this the first time but you didn’t include it in this last round.  Not only do all the things that you just said are true.  You’ve got to show that the agency did the thing that caused that lead to come in, convert, and pay you in that time frame because, again, even if you’ve got a lead that converted and paid for you in those first three months was it from some blog post that was on your site from some two years ago or was it from activities that you had done in the past.  You got to show I paid this agency this amount of money within three months of paying that money because of the things that they did I got paid.  Now, outside of PI, maybe, I’m still skeptical.

(00:40:02)

Conrad Saam:  Okay, so that goes back to our ROI thing.  We’re trying to make some red flags on this.  If your agency talks about ROI and doesn’t know the math to calculate ROI, that to me is a bit of a red flag.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Well, my problem is not even knowing the math.  I think I’m more concerned about the integrity.

Conrad Saam:  Wow.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  People that are promising that are guaranteeing SEO ROI in the first month.  In my opinion, and again, you got the examples, I would love to be proven wrong but you better bring the evidence.  There’s a lack of integrity there.

Conrad Saam:  I’m not going with integrity.  I just think they like the buzzword.  Everyone likes to say ROI and no one knows what it is.  You are being too generous.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  They don’t think these marketing people, you don’t think marketing people that are promising ROI and SEO don’t know what ROI is?

Conrad Saam:  I 100% believe that’s the case.

(Voice Overlap)

Conrad Saam:  Because it’s such a trigger word for people to be like, “oh, well, that seems like a good business term and I’m going to do that because I want some positive ROI” but that is a problem, okay?  So I’m going to move on from the ROI thing because we hit it before. I want to give two more things that are red flags to me and this goes back to the integrity thing.  This is a real integrity problem that you and I both know for a long time lying about the number of leads overcounting the leads that you generate, right?  And for me, we’ve talked about CallRail already but if your agency is double counting people when they’ve called multiple times to your law firm as leads.  They are deliberately and this is deliberate.  This is not, I don’t know, basic business math.  This is deliberate.  I am double counting those leads and that, I think, is garbage and there are lots of agencies who like to make themselves look like they are generating a ton of leads so there is a little radio button in CallRail again where you can only count the first time they’ve seen that phone call, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  You don’t think there’s an accident.  They’re not just doing that by accident.

Conrad Saam:  This is where I question integrity.  This is absolutely where I question integrity and then, speaking of integrity, if you don’t provide access and this is a pay per click thing and I do not for the life of me understand why any law firm is okay with this.  If you do not have access to your pay per click campaigns, you have no idea what they’re bidding on which means you have no idea what they’re actually spending money to generate calls to your firm.  Which means that you might think you’re buying a whole bunch of divorce lawyer Cincinnati pay per click terms when you’re actually buying the name of your law firm and you have no way of actually seeing that you have no way of knowing and so if you don’t have access to those things, you’re renting your efforts and eventually, I can’t say that agencies are going out of their way to screw you but I certainly can tell you that you don’t know.  You don’t know.  You don’t know and a lot of these agencies do not have your best interests at heart.  I’ll leave it at that.  Sorry, that’s the end of my flags.

Gyi Tsakalakis:   And with that, we don’t have any time for any more flags.  We’ve got more flags.  We don’t have any time for any more flags.  Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate.  Conrad, I’m grateful that we get to do this show together.  Happy Thanksgiving to you.  Grateful for all of our listeners and subscribers.  If you haven’t subscribed, we’d be so grateful if you would subscribe.  For those who are already subscribed, we’d be super grateful if you’d leave us a review.  Until next time, Conrad and Gyi.  Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.

[Music]

Outro:  Thank you for listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.  If you would like more information about what you heard today, please visit legaltalknetwork.com.  Subscribe via Apple Podcasts and RSS.  Follow Legal Talk Network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

[Music]

Continue Reading