What Every Lawyer Needs to Know About Online Reputation and Referral Growth with Gert Mellak

Episode Notes

Transcript

Karin Conroy:

This is Counsel Cast part of the Legal Talk Network and I’m your host, Karin Conroy. When you face a complex case outside your expertise, you bring in a co-counsel for next level results. When you want to engage, expand and elevate your firm, you bring in a marketing co-counsel. In this podcast, I bring in marketing experts who each answer one big question to help your firm achieve more. Here’s today’s guest,

Gert Mellak:

Gert Mellak here from SEO leverage.com. Thank you so much for inviting me again, Karen.

Karin Conroy:

Gert, that is probably the most succinct intro I’ve ever heard. Maybe because you’ve been here so many times, I think this is your third. I think you’re the first person who I’ve had on three times. I’ve had a handful of double guests, but this is the first one because this is going to be a good one. This is such the core of what so many law firms think their entire marketing strategy is, and so the title for today’s show, I want to get this out of the way so we can just get into it, is what every lawyer needs to know about online reputation and referral growth. So the first place I want to start is if I had a dollar for every time a firm started the very first conversation with me by saying, we don’t really think we need marketing. We really depend on just word of mouth and referrals, and they think those are two separate things. And so they start there and not only are they two separate things, but somehow this idea of the word of mouth referrals is not marketing is also part of this conversation. So usually I step back and we start by explaining how your reputation is marketing. So let’s start there. Let’s talk about your book, which is all about your online reputation and what that has to do with marketing.

Gert Mellak:

Okay, absolutely, definitely. Just a follow

Karin Conroy:

Question.

Gert Mellak:

Definitely. First of all, honored to be the first speaker being here three times. It’s always amazing to just exchange and brainstorm with you here about the marketing, the book Fix Your online reputation came really from a lot of clients that have issues, some even don’t even know about them, so they come to us for SEO help, we type in their brand name and they say, whoa, whoa, let’s start in a different corner because they may be want some certain rankings for some particular specialty they have and they want to bring those clients in, which is understandable, but very often they have actually a reputational issue they’re not aware about

Karin Conroy:

Or maybe they are. I know you probably see this all the time too, but what’s super common I feel like with lawyers and law firms is some bad reviews. So sometimes they’re not even necessarily people you worked with, they are just angry because they were on the opposing side and so it’s common but everyone freaks out about it.

Gert Mellak:

Absolutely. You have those people. We also have those people who ignore them completely and now we like you say, we work, we base our business on word of mouth anyway, so we don’t meet those review stars. Nobody thinks that word of mouth usually leads to Google search. So I look this person up and see what I can find out about them because they got referred, even if it’s just to find their phone number. And then you see one out of five stars and you say, Hey, why is this actually happening? There are 10 reviews and it’s just one or two out of five stars. There is at least a little bit of a moment of consideration. So I think what we just really need to see is very often these days it’s not SEO and it’s Google search that brings people or makes people aware of you.

They might discover you elsewhere and word of mouth is the perfect example or referrals, but it very often it’s going to lead to a Google search about you, about your brand, about people who have had a specific issue about it. I was just on a call with someone who is doing, selling a course has been for 10 years, high quality course, but there are a few comments out there where people don’t like his way of explaining this or don’t think he’s professional enough and this actually costs him sales and if you multiply it and say this one client or two clients each year that don’t buy from you because of your reviews, it’s definitely already worth doing something about it. Make this 10 and you have a positive return on investment. Definitely.

Karin Conroy:

Well, let’s just start with the basic idea that these reviews and the testimonials, they have a true value or places like Amazon wouldn’t care so much and they wouldn’t sort by the rankings and reviews and you wouldn’t see that everywhere you go. It is critical and it is a major part of any kind of business. Your reviews, your reputation, what people are saying and the testimonials or all of the things that fall under that same umbrella, they are so critical, but they also have a true value.

Gert Mellak:

Absolutely. I very often compare it to being at a party and there is for example, a lawyer and you ask around who has worked with this person and you just listening to what they say, what the experience was, he was not too professional, didn’t really win my case, and this other person also lost their case with this lawyer, the other one, they took them time to get back to me, et cetera. What are you going to do? It’s exactly the same thing online. You want to know what experience other people had and unfortunately, and this is really the issue of those reviews, somebody having a good experience does not care enough to actually state it unless there is a process in place. And this is one of the major points in my book where I say, Hey, it’s one thing to fix a problem, but it’s another thing to actually prevent this from happening in the first place.

Karin Conroy:

So let’s start first with the overall idea is especially from your book is fixing it. So let’s start with the idea that you’re a firm who’s got some negative reviews there, whether they’re true or not, and whether it’s just somebody on the other side, you never even worked with them or maybe there’s some truth to it. What’s the first thing a firm should do about those?

Gert Mellak:

I think the first thing is recognize that this is just something you are not going to just remove and that’s it. So I think very often you see reputation management firms without actually even showing who is there doing this work because they want to come across as the hackers that can hack into Google and remove this and somehow make this magically disappear. So let’s start there. This is not possible, right?

Karin Conroy:

No, and it’s possibly damaging. So this idea that there’s these people out here that can take those negative reviews off, no, don’t do that bad

Gert Mellak:

Idea. There’s even one case, I talk about it in the book as well where somebody actually took down the negative issue but published the lawyer’s letter, he got to take it down, which was even worse. So they were like, this brand sues everybody who talks negatively about them. Here is the lawyer’s letter, I’m taking this down now and it still ranked on page one, it was even worse. So I think the strategies here are essentially twofold. First of all, you want to minimize the visibility and the impact.

Karin Conroy:

Okay, so how do you do that?

Gert Mellak:

You do that on one hand by getting positive reviews as soon as possible from real people. You don’t want to fake this because Google knows about the location. They can technically with the machine learning, figure out if you ever, we are near them if you had communication with them, they have enough data points about us these days that it’s really hard to long-term fake this review and then you just get an overall better rating. This is one of the strategies just to quickly try to minimize the impact. Another way is to run ads and put them on top. Somebody looking for your brand name could actually see an ad from you where you directly try to pick people up from the different areas. You just want to take attention away from this negative review as soon as possible. And this is something we had a client coming in today, tomorrow they’re going to have less visibility on the negative review just because they’re going to start running ads on their brand name with all kinds of versions and this just reduces the impact a little bit.

Karin Conroy:

So I read this great book and I’m blanking on the title, but it wasn’t necessarily about businesses, it was about people who had gone and made just a misstep personally on Twitter and this was a similar strategy. So there was this woman who made a really kind of just dumb comment on Twitter about, I think it was about something about Covid. She got on a long flight. She was flying from I think the US to South Africa the time and she only had something like a hundred followers at the time. By the time she got to South Africa, she had hundreds of thousands of followers, she had lost her job, her life was sort of ruined and it’s a good book, I’ll find the name of it while we’re talking, but the strategy in the end was basically to put better stuff out and sort of suffocate the negative stuff.

Gert Mellak:

Exactly. Google likes fresh content for a start. So if there is something fresh and better, and we don’t probably need to start differentiating two types of reputational impact. One is the reviews and those are the review stars and GUI reviews first and foremost, but also what people might talk about you on sites like Trustpilot for example, or Glassdoor or other platforms, those are review kind of things, but there are also other negative contents out there like from forums or from Google, from guest posts on blog or blog posts or articles, comments, et cetera. So each type of negative communication, negative marketing out there so to speak needs its own approach. Ultimately, you definitely want to make sure that you control the conversation as much as possible, meaning like you say, putting out enough positive content that people are interested in and Google might want to rank in order to ideally push everything to page two or farther behind. And this is definitely one of the strategies but takes a little bit longer. It’s very quickly to switch on an ad. It’s not as quick to actually set up a process to get more positive reviews or actually create this content and place it.

Karin Conroy:

So kind of a combination approach. I can’t find the name of that book. I’ll find it and we’ll link to it on the show pages, but sort of a combination approach. So do both add positive things, but that’s the slower that kind of ties into SEO too, right? I mean typically when we’re talking to people about SEO, we’re saying do a multi-layered approach where you’ve got the long-term vision and some organic SEO going on the site combined with possibly ads, if that makes sense for your firm so that you’ve got things happening in different speeds and in different directions and all of that stuff.

Gert Mellak:

Absolutely, and there’s also one thing that comes to this is that Google, when you type in your brand name, you’re going to see there are different types of contents showing. There might be social profiles showing, there might be a Reddit thread showing there might be your personal page, your company’s page, so you have different slots and it’s not easy to tell Google to ignore the Reddit thread and put a personal blog for example in this place Google has an idea that on number three or in the top three they want to raise thread. So you really need to adapt the strategy based on what’s ranking and how you think you can actually substitute this with something better.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, you don’t get to tell Google that you disagree with item number three. Google’s just like, I don’t care. This is what I’ve decided. So actually that goes into something else that we wanted to talk about which is the knowledge panel. I feel like that ties in sort of with this visual that people are imagining right now with your search for your brand. And can you explain first of all the Google knowledge panel, this is not your Google business profile. These are two totally different things and so can you explain what that is and how it works and why that kind of helps with all of this?

Gert Mellak:

Okay, so first of all, Google Business Profile is like a business directory. Everybody can sign up there. It takes about 24 hours I think tops until you are listed there. I recommend everybody signs up there as long as you overall get positive reviews because this is where people can actually leave a review about your company. This is where you can upload content, photos, edit your stuff and really control what is actually shown there and if you have any issues you can also turn it off. Everybody should be doing this. Most people companies have this already. Probably the IT person at some point set it up and you just need to monitor it for negative reviews. The knowledge panel sits at the same place on the right hand side of the search on the desktop, but it’s not something that you can just sign up for or switch on.

It’s essentially a result, result of a very consistent process where Google has learned based on the consistent information about a brand, what this brand is about, who this is that they have written a couple of books, what their social media profiles are, et cetera. And this is really, the way I explain this to clients is that Google wants to connect the dots like a child wants and you need to give them consistent information and they’re going to slowly say, Hey, if I do this then this happens. If everybody, every day I tell my child that picks can fly, the child is going to take this for granted because it was consistent information and then my wife comes and says, yep, yes, picks can fly and then they see a pig fly and then on the TV they just connect the dots and picks can now fly. Technically Guru would do the same thing. If they find enough consistent information they trust they’re going to state yes picks can fly. And this is also when it comes down to the brand also is going to be, if it’s consistent, Google is going to learn about the brand,

Karin Conroy:

Can a knowledge panel be both a company and a person? Because the version I’ve always seen is usually under a person’s name, but can it also be a company?

Gert Mellak:

Technically yes, but it’s harder because there’s a lot that ties back to the person social media activities, et cetera, where Google get more consistent information. It’s not as easy to trigger it for a brand unless you have a publicly traded company. For example, you type in Apple or Microsoft, you automatically get the panel on the side because there is enough trusted information. With a company it’s not that easy

Karin Conroy:

And I feel like that it gets confusing if the knowledge panel is a company and you also have a Google business profile. But so for myself, I have a knowledge panel but it is under my name, it is not my company name. And so it really commands anytime you search for me or my name, it really takes over and it looks very different from the Google business profile. It has a photo of me, I owned it, I went in and claimed it and said this is me. And then I could make a few edits. It used to be you could make more, but I could just add a few different things and then Google will say yes or no. I could say, could you please do this? And they’ll look at it and half of the ones I sent over they said no. But some of them they did approve and it really helps with SEO,

Gert Mellak:

It helps with SEO because Google ultimately it’s based on Google’s brain. Google is what we call a knowledge graph. This is where they try to make sense of the world. So the bigger your knowledge panel size really matters, the bigger your knowledge panel, the more facts they have learned and trust about you. So they try to use this then also to determine the authority of your website, the credibility of your content. It all ties together. So this definitely, it’s like this long-term goal everybody should pursue in SEO. It’s not something that’s going to happen overnight. It’s going to take quite a while and quite some consistent effort and you also need to defend it and you need to be very consistent. If you suddenly want to switch your specialty as a lawyer for example, you are going to want to go back to those places where you say you specialized in accidents and now you specialize in mergers. You need to educate Google that not change happen and they can relearn, but it’s an effort so it won make you the better

Karin Conroy:

Sense. But that makes it so much more valuable because it takes a lot of time so that when you see one you realize this is not just something someone paid for, it wasn’t just something you couldn’t do overnight. I had to confirm with a number of different ways. It wasn’t just like, hey, click on this, we’ll send you an email and a code. There was a whole confirmation process that took a number of days or weeks, I dunno what it was, but it was really involved. But then because of that it has so much more validity. It’s not just like, and it would be really hard for someone to pretend to be me also. So you know that this is really the real person. It’s more than even truly just even the blue check mark you see on Twitter or social media. It’s a lot more involved than that. So how can you use both SEO and your knowledge panel and all of these different pieces in order to improve your online reputation or if you have an issue like bad reviews or maybe you just haven’t done anything and for whatever reason you need to fix it or make it better.

Gert Mellak:

I think the main idea is somebody is going to type in your brand name and they’re going to make a purchase decision or in favor or against you based on what they see. So you have Google’s page one and Google’s page one is the real estate we are fighting about. So we want to make sure that we control as much of page one as possible both in the main search results on top, on the ads, the aspace, but also on the side with knowledge panel and Google business profile. I wouldn’t exclude one if I have the other one presented well. So this is where we say, Hey, what is actually the situation? We usually score the reputation in this case and say what’s the reputation score? We would elaborate and what is the game plan from here? So there’s always some consistent work pursuing a knowledge panel because it’s a long-term goal.

You think about right now it’s Google, but it’s also the other AI engines, TPT, Gemini, copilot, whatever somebody might be using, where do they get their information from? They search for consistent information on the internet. So even though it might not be something you see today, you want to make sure that you bake your brand into the AI algorithms and make sure that’s so good. This is actually setting you up for success. Maybe next year you’re going to see who has actually started early enough and who just waited because they thought three or four stars out of five stars is enough, I don’t need to do anything else. Now is the second best time to actually start with this. The best was before TPD launched.

Karin Conroy:

That is so fascinating and I really feel like people might not have really captured what you were just saying. So this idea that all of the information that these AI driven platforms are using, it’s not just they have the one resource, they’re going to use what they’re finding on a consistent basis throughout the internet. So where you have that consistent presence throughout different websites, platforms, Yelp, Google this, that the more consistent it is, the more likely that you’ll be found on those AI platforms as well.

Gert Mellak:

Exactly. Because they are going to answer conversational questions. They’re going to say, who should I work with when it comes to a merger, what people’s experience with in this lawyer for example, who is the best lawyer in Sydney? It all comes back to the training materials. So the way language models work is that they go through a lot of content in order to identify patterns and then come up with a probability based answer. They do some fact checking more and more with the knowledge graph for example, but ultimately it comes down to the training material they got. And if you think about the party example, there’s one lawyer, everybody else gives me information what the experience was, et cetera. Just one person that comes to this party that shares a negative experience is going to skew the image I have about this lawyer. Now imagine there are three or four people not really speaking in favor of this lawyer, there’s no chance I’m going to give them even a chance to convince me. So we want to make sure that we control as many people as possible that come to this part in the first place because this is going to impact how we come across as a brand and on the internet is we want to control as much of the conversation about our brand, our personal brand and the business brand as we possibly can and early enough because this is not a fast process.

Karin Conroy:

So earlier you mentioned a reputation score, so how does that happen? And then you said no matter what your score, it sounds like, is it like a percentage or just an overall score? But it sounds like there’s no perfect score because there’s always work to be done.

Gert Mellak:

There’s definitely always work to be done, but what we definitely score is the potential impact and the level of control. I give you an example, I have full control over my website. I have partial control over my Facebook page because there might be a comment below or tons of comments every single day on my Facebook posts that are negative. So I only have partial control over this particular platform and I have sometimes no control because this is a Reddit thread that’s out there and that comes from eight years ago. But Google now really likes to rank Reddit as we know in marketing. So it’s just there and I have no control and it might be really hard to solve this problem. And then we establish this core and also factor in the probability of being able to fix it in a certain period of time and this is our internal formula where we then establish the scores. Okay, that

Karin Conroy:

Was my next question,

Gert Mellak:

Number one, number two, number three, these are the scores. This is our roadmap based on the situation.

Karin Conroy:

So this is kind of like an internal audit. This isn’t something that you use that like a tool that anyone could find online. So what platforms, if someone was trying to take a very broad look at their own reputation, what are the directions and platforms and where should they start?

Gert Mellak:

They should just start opening up and incognito window or logging out from their Google session and performing a few Google searches your name plus reviews your firm’s name, experience your name, experience your brand name, these kinds of queries, and just check what comes up on page one from top to bottom. The further up the more attention it’s going to get. And then just think in your head, how much money is this costing me that I’m seeing this in this position? Because I have a client who actually was able to figure this out, they were losing a hundred thousand dollars a month.

Karin Conroy:

Oh my gosh. So how did they calculate that?

Gert Mellak:

This was interesting. The way they figured this out was they made impulse sales on a webinar and then people would google them afterwards and ask for a refund because they saw their reputation. And reputation was largely based on one unhappy client. And this is the incredible thing here, one unhappy client who created the Trustpilot site page and actually, and there was no way even legally to get this taken down so they could kind of claim it and kind of rename it a little bit and indicate this is not the official one. There was a better one and they actually had pretty decent reviews. But with reputation very often it’s not about how much more money you can make, it’s how much less you can lose.

Karin Conroy:

Oh, I like that. Okay, so I’m going to restate that. So it’s more about not losing so much and it’s not about how much, it’s not even really about that number that your client came up with, which was a hundred grand, what was it? A hundred grand a month? Yeah, so it’s not even about that a hundred grand. It’s like reducing that a hundred grand. How much of that a hundred grand can we shrink down so that it’s just not as big of a number?

Gert Mellak:

Exactly. And very often it’s like quick fixes where it’s okay, let’s probably get from the a hundred to 90 rather quickly and there are a couple of quick fixes. We told this company in an audit specifically and said, if you don’t do anything else, do these couple of things and this is going to save you about 10 grand probably. And then you can say, okay, what is the longer term strategy? We definitely want to bake ourselves into the algorithm. We want to make sure that we come across as a legit brand in the future, so now is the time to actually start this consistent work. But it’s really just we need to be aware of the fact that if I don’t own page one completely, there is always a chance that something pops up and what I see on page one is not what I’m going to see next month. Take a look at page two. Maybe on page two there’s something really negative. You really don’t want this to come up to page one. Yeah.

Karin Conroy:

Oh that’s good. Okay, so let’s take a step back from the negative reviews and all of that and talk just broadly about other types of mistakes that people are making in terms of not addressing this or not thinking this through or just not making this as part of their marketing strategy.

Gert Mellak:

Definitely the first mistake is not seeing this as an important thing, not seeing the importance of maintaining a clean brand profile. And this just requires monitoring everybody with us that is on a reputation plan with us. We do a brand monitoring, we send them a weekly update and say, look this week, these are the dimensions of your brand. These are the dimensions of the founder of your brand. This is our evaluation with a negative, neutral or positive. And this

Karin Conroy:

Is, yeah, you can do that just with a tip. Google search and monitoring that Google search a very basic, I mean you should definitely have that if you have nothing.

Gert Mellak:

Exactly. This is the first one and then there are some advanced, more advanced tools that give you a little bit of a broader spectrum, but at least the first step is to really notice what is out there about you. Sometimes we are the ones telling people that there is an ex employee talking badly about them and then there’s really something going wrong in their marketing, right, because trying to get new leads, nobody cares about the brand image. Something is going wrong there.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah. I oftentimes will have people say they’re so worried about these negative reviews or just showing up on all these different places, especially places like Yelp, which for some reason I feel like that’s an outlier. It’s a whole different thing that they decide to sort of bury their head in the sand and not do it. So what’s your recommendation or your advice for people who are thinking maybe I just don’t go, maybe I don’t have a Google business profile and I sort of pretend like I don’t know, I go incognito or whatever. I don’t know why that strategy, it doesn’t make any sense to me I guess is what I’m trying to say, but I’m sure you get the same questions. Maybe we should just not be anywhere. So what do you typically say to the people who have that thought?

Gert Mellak:

I think the process is flawed. I’m very big at SEO leverage. We are very big on processes and it’s okay. One of the processes and need for search marketing is to proactively generate positive content and positive reviews because you will, it’s never going to be just one thing and you just switch it off and nobody talks badly about you. There are new platforms coming out literally every day, new AI tools coming out literally every day that people are using. We have people who have no idea about tech, suddenly have a WhatsApp group with AI chat in there. I had no idea there was a client telling me about it. That’s very much not tech savvy. You have no idea. You’re never going to control enough platforms that you can switch off to pretend you don’t have this issue. You might not feel you’re affected. You might have enough work, but you’re also not really knowing what you’re actually losing right now who is not even reaching out to you because they found something on Glassdoor or wherever about your brand that they didn’t like. So the issue is there. You can’t switch it off. You can ignore it at your own risk, but you can’t switch it off.

Karin Conroy:

It sounds to me like the overall approach and thought about all of it is not to hide, not to be scared by the negative stuff. It happens to everybody instead you talked about a proactive approach and to just really try to bombard and overwhelm with the positive. So be proactive but also overwhelmingly positive because even for myself, when I see if I’m looking at a hotel review and there’s a few negatives, I will for sure read them, but I’m also looking to see how crazy these people sound. Are they just being unreasonable? And oftentimes this is the case on law firm reviews where you can tell the person is unhinged and so it’s fine because as long as you have a professional and succinct response, people understand that these things happen and that there are just crazy people out there. But if you leave it alone and you have no presence and you just let the world be the world, it just seems kind of ignorant. But what are the kind of systems you have in place or the recommendations you have for making those reviews happen to get that consistent positive flow of reviews to whatever platform you choose?

Gert Mellak:

I just talked about this process to a client literally two hours ago. This is what I think every company that works with somebody and usually does a decent job and makes their clients happy, which is obviously the service needs to be okay, at least knows when a client has this peak of excitement about your service. Yes. So I have a car repair shop and it’s exactly when they hand over the keys, the car is recently, everything is fixed, the tires are shiny. This is when they show them the QR code to scan and say, could you please leave us a review for a lawyer? This might be after the first conversation maybe where there is a lot of clarity coming in where there’s finally a perspective, there’s a strategy developed or it might be when the case was won or when there was a major progress or something like this in our case. But it’s

Karin Conroy:

Not when you send the bill. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And it’s not like three months later, oh remember me?

Gert Mellak:

Exactly. There you go, there you go. But this is what people do very often say we would need a few reviews, let’s poke all the old clients with a stick here to leave us a review three months, six months down the road. Somebody might not even remember this case anymore. If they have a lot of those, it’s definitely you need to pick the moment. One thing we very often recommend is to, if you have some sort of evaluation where you send clients like an evaluation about your services or something, depending on what the answer you might be triggering a request for a review. Nice. So imagine they give you a nine out of 10 or a 10 out of 10. This automatically would be a big on process automation here. Automatically this triggers a request for a review and we can tend then define where this review should go.

Karin Conroy:

And I feel like with everything else in business, you just need a system around it and if it has to be one of your assistants or an office manager or whoever it is that’s going to get it done, there just needs to be a system around it because what I’ve found is it’s a numbers game for every 10 you ask, you’re going to maybe get one and depending on your practice area it might be even less than that. So you just have to be more consistent with asking over and over. So I know this is going to be a good one, it’s time for the thought leaders library. We have a website with curated collection of all the top book picks from our guests. What’s the one book you believe every lawyer should have on their bookshelf?

Gert Mellak:

I’m very big on the good process and the good list. Yes. Mine is the checklist manifesto from Atul.

Karin Conroy:

It is so good. And across industries too. So tell me why you liked that and then I will tell you what I love about this book.

Gert Mellak:

Like I said, I’m very big on a, for me, everything is a process and you can break it down, but if you don’t break it down into the steps that really matter for the person actually going through this process, it goes sideways because they’re either going to start inventing stuff, they’re getting stuck, they don’t have the information they need. They might be overwhelmed because the checklist is 10 pages long and they might really only need five steps and we all have our opinions about it, we have our experience. But in this book there is research and not in any field but actually medical statistics on how many lives were saved with a better checklist. And this is where you say, okay, let’s talk about credibility about the offer. There is as much credibility as you want about how put this together and what the impact of a good checklist can be. And if you say we probably have 50 standard operating procedures here around SEO and reputation management, we constantly go through them and start crossing things out or redefine something. And I think it’s just really important that we dive into this concept and say, Hey, a checklist isn’t as easy and simple as it sounds. There needs to be some attention going to this, some focus going to it. And then it actually can have a huge impact on the business, on people’s performance, people’s happiness, frustration and the processes and actually obviously also the outcome for clients.

Karin Conroy:

I also feel like employees feel more autonomous because they know what the process is. There’s a list in place, but this also just works for the way my brain works. I love lists and I feel like when I’m thinking through whatever it is what we’re going to eat next week and making a plan for our dinners, I’ll have thoughts and they kind of are swimming around, but putting them into a checklist and organizing that, first of all, it takes all of that thought and the process and the thinking and the effort out of my brain. And so then my brain is relieved to do other things and same with anything in kind of a work environment or whatever. But also when you have that system in place, then the likelihood of being closer to perfection is much higher. So you’re going to perform better, your clients are going to be happier. There’s clarity and transparency in what’s happening and it just feels better on both sides. So the checklist manifesto, that’s the book that we will link on the show page also with the links to Amazon and all that good stuff. But also I wanted you to have a moment to mention your own book because this is a new thing and it’s basically the entire subject of the show. So tell us about that.

Gert Mellak:

Yeah, thank you. The book is called Fix Your Online Reputation. It’s available on Amazon. We really start with the book on fixing the typical issues we see with clients every single day, but then also work a lot about what the process could look like, what could a process look like that takes reputation or prevents actually reputation, reputational issues from affecting you can’t prevent them from happening, but they might not affect you so much and really also gives guidance on how to prepare for an artificial intelligence based world where everything that’s out there about your brand actually will affect you.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah. I wanted to spend one more minute talking about social media and how you recommend managing your reputation and thinking about that in terms of how people can present or just social media in general and how people make mistakes on social media with the reputation. But then also earlier you were mentioning the levels of control and so when it comes to social media, you’ll never have complete control because it’s not your platform. So what’s your recommendation in terms of things to think about, concerns to have in terms of social media and possible things to be aware of in terms of managing your reputation?

Gert Mellak:

I have a couple of thoughts here. One is, first of all, not relying on any social media platform to be the most important platform about your brand. So we see sometimes people say, I don’t need a blog, I’m on medium. And Medium might just switch everything to a subscription model and your content is behind the paywall and you’re not showing up on Google with your medium articles anymore.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, I could totally see that happening

Gert Mellak:

With the people not having a Facebook profile anymore because Facebook is kind of old fashioned that don’t need this. But then suddenly one of those positions that actually pushes down a negative one that’s from Facebook isn’t there anymore. I see people who want to be so authentic because this is now really important that you’re very authentic, that it’s like they have some embarrassing videos about them and you see a professional lawyer suddenly with an embarrassing video on their Instagram. It’s not a good ad, let’s put it this way. So whatever is out there, if you’re a professional, your face is obviously in front of people and they make decisions based on what they find out about you. If you’re in this position, you really want to be careful. I think everybody ultimately is in this position. Somebody looking for a job is going to be judged based on what’s out there online about them if they want or not even subconsciously when people want to hire them.

So I think nobody should leave things that are not going to be in favor of them online in general. So you can be authentic without being embarrassing. You can be close to people explaining your subject matter, your topic of expertise in a very simple way, very down to earth way, very relatable way. I believe it’s important for people these days to find some videos where you talk about your subject. I would just consider people might discover you first on socials and make up their mind before they even Google you. I’m not a social media expert here, but I understand how people work very often and they might just use YouTube first and try to find a lawyer in a particular city and see who comes up there. Do they have three followers or 300? There is a big difference in terms of credibility out there.

So not working a particular channel like what you said before, Karen, when you said they just ignore and pretend this doesn’t exist. We can of course pretend nobody’s on YouTube, but we can also understand it is one of the top search engines and people use it all the time of all ages. And then we can say, okay, can we impact those people when they are searching for something we are selling and how can we do this in a decent way? It doesn’t have to be high quality produced media content, but you can be out there.

Karin Conroy:

I see a lot of people struggling with the balance between their personal life and their professional life too. And I feel like we could probably do a whole other show about that, but I really do think this varies too. I don’t think there is a standard answer that’s the right answer depending on what your industry is and what kind of practice areas you work in. I think for most lawyers, you probably want to keep your family and your personal life out of it. And for some subsections of law, you for sure want to, there’s potentially security problems and you don’t want to put anybody at risk. And it just seems kind of foolish. But I still see people posting all these personal things, stuff about their families that kids just graduated from high school and a picture with them and it’s like, I just feel like that is not how you build trust. I think that’s what they think they’re doing is building trust and getting friendly with people. But I don’t think that’s the right answer.

Gert Mellak:

I would agree. The argument definitely is if they can relate to something I’m doing, they’re probably going to hire me some. But at the same time, I don’t think anybody’s going to hire SEO leverage because they’re into woodworking like I am. We might have this in common, but we probably don’t want to spend the consulting hour talking about the latest woodworking tools and different brands. So let’s keep it simple. I can mention woodworking in my profile, but I don’t have to have the profile I believe clients or potential clients are going to find about my topic, my kids, my pets, my morning works

Karin Conroy:

Well and I have intentionally kept my professional and my personal life very separated and it has never once come up. No one has ever as personal as people will possibly get with me in a conversation is where are you? Where’s your office, where are you located? And sometimes I’ll mention that I grew up in the Midwest if they are in that same area and we may talk about it, but that’s about it. It never comes up and it doesn’t need to. I don’t feel like it’s a necessary part of doing business and showing that I am good at what I do. So I feel like it’s safer and cleaner to just kind of keep ’em separated.

Gert Mellak:

I would agree. You can always have some different profile with a different name, not your real name, ideally where you post whatever you want and you’re friends with whoever you want to be friends. But yeah, I think there are a few things that might help somebody having kids. I very often get asked if I have kids, which is interesting.

Karin Conroy:

Oh, interesting. Never do

Gert Mellak:

I found this interesting. I ask a lot. So do you have kids? Do you have kids? This comes up a lot. So I tend to tell people about my kids when it comes up across naturally right now, but I get asked about it very often, but really I think can keep it to a minimum and definitely avoid potential risks.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, I’m not going to give you their social security numbers and tell you where they go to school and stuff like that.

Gert Mellak:

Absolutely, and I think the way I think about it’s somebody types in my name, they are going to see my Facebook, my Instagram, my LinkedIn. Those are three ads that are out there about me. So I can use the real estate again, it’s real estate. They can use the real estate on my Instagram profile for woodworking videos or I can use it to bring across interviews like this one with Karen where we talked about reputation management and somebody might get value out of it.

Karin Conroy:

Exactly. Alright, so Gert, what is one big takeaway you would like people to get from this episode overall,

Gert Mellak:

Their online reputation right now is costing them money.

Karin Conroy:

Oh yeah. I think most likely that is the most likely scenario that it’s, unless you’re really putting a lot of effort into it, it’s probably damaging.

Gert Mellak:

It’s absolutely damaging and it’s damaging now and the longer you leave it unoptimized, the more difficult it’s going to be to convince all the new algorithms out there about what you really want to bring across. So there is a little bit of urgency for people to take this seriously. I believe it’s like somebody, the other day I read it, I forgot the name that said, it’s like if they told you today a tornado is coming in five years, so there are two chances we can all be wrong. And then we have been preparing for five years for nothing, or there is a slight chance everybody right now that talks about this is actually right. And then you have been preparing for this for five years

Karin Conroy:

And you can start running now.

Gert Mellak:

You can

Karin Conroy:

Start running now, get away from the tornado

Gert Mellak:

Feeling an underground shed or something like that.

Karin Conroy:

Exactly. Some cement bunker or whatever it is. Even if you do one little bucket of cement a day and by five years from now you’re ready for that tornado.

Gert Mellak:

Absolutely. There you go. There you go. I think this is the way hard to think about it.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah. Oh, that’s so good. Gert Mellak is the founder of SEO Leverage, but also writer, the author of Fix Your Online Reputation. We will put links to all that stuff as well as the checklist manifesto, and links to all of your social media and all that good stuff on the third version of a show notes page that we’ve had. So thank you so much for being

Gert Mellak:

Here. Thank you so much, Karin. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

Karin Conroy:

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Counsel Cast podcast. Be sure to visit our website at Counsel Cast dot com for the resources mentioned on the episode and to give us your feedback. If you enjoyed this episode, I would appreciate if you could rate and review the podcast on Apple and subscribe to your favorite podcast platform. See you on the next one.

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