#141: How Lawyers Can (and Should) Use Pinterest for Marketing, with Christina Scalera

Episode Notes

Transcript

SOURCE

Speaker 1: Welcome to The Lawyerist Podcast with Sam Glover and Aaron Street. Each week, Lawyerist bring you advice and interviews to help you build a more successful law practice in today’s challenging and constantly changing legal market. Now, here are Sam and Aaron.

Sam Glover: Hi, I’m Sam Glover.

Aaron Street: And I’m Aaron Street. This is episode 141 of The Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today we’re talking with Christina Scalera about why layers should be actively using Pinterest.

Sam Glover: Today’s podcast is sponsored by Ruby Receptionists and its smart, charming receptionists who are perfect for small firms. Visit callruby.com/lawyerist to get a risk-free trial with Ruby.

Aaron Street: Today’s podcast is also sponsored by Clio Legal Practice Management Software. Clio makes running your law firm easier. Try it for free today at clio.com.

So Sam, for the last nine years, I think, since the beginning of Lawyerist, we’ve been talking about how lawyers can or should or should not use social media to promote their practices. I remember lots and lots of breathless posts in 2009 about lawyers on Facebook and lawyers on LinkedIn and lawyers on Twitter. But I’m pretty sure in the last eight years we have literally never mentioned the word Pinterest.

Sam Glover: Not without joking and chuckling in a way.

Aaron Street: Yeah, exactly, and I think our instinct for this whole time, not that Pinterest was around in 2009 but, was to scoff a Pinterest as kind of a vacuous, silly, arts and crafts place that literally would have nothing to do with the sophisticated practice of law.

Sam Glover: And Christina has basically looked at me like I was an idiot for that attitude.

Aaron Street: Yeah, and so I’m really excited for this episode to at least attempt to change I think all of our collective minds about how Pinterest potentially actually can be really useful in promoting your practice and connecting with potential clients, and I hope that Christina is able to do a really good job of dispelling the myth that causes all of us to scoff at the concept.

Sam Glover: Yeah, I think, I don’t want to give stuff away because we’re about to dive into it, but I think what this episode should do is remind all of us that everything can work. It’s just a matter of figuring out how and making sure that it’s the right audience.

Aaron Street: Yeah, and so I’m really excited to hear Christina’s pitch, and having talked with you about it, it sounds like you have changed your mind.

Sam Glover: I have, and let’s just dive into it because she does not need me explaining for her. Let’s hear that conversation with Christina.

Christina S.: Hey. I’m Christina Scalera. I’m the founder of scaleralaw.com, which is my intellectual property practice, and we finally have a website after two years in business, as of last week. I’m also the founder of ruckuslegal.com, which is just a platform that I’m using to teach attorneys about how I’ve used social media to grow my legal practice.

Sam Glover: Well, thank you for being with us today, Christina. I think that’s so funny that you haven’t had a website until now. What has been your strategy for getting people in the door, then?

Christina S.: Yeah, I haven’t had a website because, well, one, I kind of had a website but it was just my name and it was basically an email to me. What I was doing is I was leveraging third-party platforms. I was getting out there and I was educating the audience that I wanted to be in front of and that I wanted to work with. For example, I really enjoy working with creative entrepreneurs and wedding professionals and online course creators. Those are my clients, so what I was doing is getting in front of them in different ways. Finding people that had those people as an audience and using their platform to maybe write a guest post on their blog and link it back to something as simple as my email address, or doing joint venture webinars and creating presentations.

It was great because I could spend all the time that I would have spent creating and developing a website on working with these individuals or creating presentations that I could then leverage and put on their platform. It was great because they had an audience and they needed fresh and interesting new content, but I was the one who had the time and the ability to create that content for them. It was a really nice match, and that was how I got away with not having a website for my law firm for a long time.

Sam Glover: Let’s back up because you have a really interesting niche practice, right? You sort of slipped right by it, but you represent wedding professionals, which, does that mean planners, photographers, both?

Christina S.: Planners, photographers, calligraphers.

Sam Glover: That was what I was getting at, is the calligraphers. You represent calligraphers and you say it’s a growing practice area.

Christina S.: It is. I mean, I don’t know how niche I can go with that. I have to be really careful because of conflicts of interest, but yeah, it’s definitely a growing area. Etsy sellers, we have a lot of moms that have popped up, either new moms or moms that have been moms for a while and their kids are older and they’re looking to sell things on Etsy. Etsy was kind of the Wild West of online sales, but recently people have gotten very sophisticated. They’ve invested in their branding. They’ve invested in treating Etsy as what it should be treated as, which is a search engine. It’s been really interesting because there’s this whole economy around hand lettering and calligraphy that’s popped up. It’s becoming a growing section in Barnes & Noble, and just even in direct to consumer, a lot of these artists and calligraphers are having great success selling direct to consumers right from their website, or actually less from their website and more from Instagram, just building up a base of followers on Instagram and then surprise, I have a book, and it sells like crazy. It’s definitely a growing audience of creatives.

Sam Glover: I mean, anybody who know Aaron and I knows that we love pens and paper and notebooks and things like that. Obviously I’m just sort of automatically fascinated by this, but is that because, as writing becomes something that we don’t have to do all the time as a utilitarian thing, it becomes more interesting and valuable, do you think?

Christina S.: I don’t know.

Sam Glover: Or is it really more down to Etsy and the fact that there’s just an easier marketplace to access this stuff?

Christina S.: I think it’s just people have always been craving this choice, and they finally have it. 10 years ago, if I wanted … Because I’m right there with you. If I wanted a really pretty notebook or a notepad or something, I had to go to Target and just kind of sit on the options. Now, I can go on Etsy and two days later have something drop shipped to me that has my name in this beautiful font, and it’s personalized and it’s interesting and unique and a conversation piece. Even at TBD, where we met, I had this notebook and immediately it looked like this old 1950s notebook, and I bought it at the Denver airport and you were like, “Where did that come from?”

Sam Glover: And then when I went and looked it up, and if anybody’s interested, designworksink.com. Standard issue supplies, they are beautiful notebooks.

Christina S.: And they’re great. They’re fun to write in. They don’t bleed through the pages, which any of you stationary nerds out there know that’s a big deal. Yeah, I think it’s just that people finally have this choice, and there’s a market for it, so where there’s demand there’s supply.

Sam Glover: Now my pen geekery is dragging us off track, but. You did a lot of kind of bringing in referrals and getting clients by taking advantage of third-party platforms, other websites, that kind of thing. Tell me about like social media in general. Did you have a strategy around it, and what were the kinds of things that you used?

Christina S.: Oh my gosh. Sam, I wish I had a strategy around it when I first started. I would be so much further along than I am right now. I didn’t have a strategy. It was just, get on everything and get the most followers, get the most pins, just get everybody looking at my stuff. I guess that’s a strategy of sorts, but that was a really poor strategy because it meant that I was exhausted and that I really wasn’t seeing any traction from any single platform, so I had to narrow that down and say, “Okay, I have to perfect one of these platforms before I move onto the next one.” I really looked at it and I said, what is going to give me the most return on my investment for time, or money if I were to hire a contractor to help me do some of this while I obviously did the legal work, since I don’t need to be on Instagram all day, every day.

When I looked at it, it was very apparent that the platforms that I could use like a search engine were going to give me the most ROI. What I mean by that is platforms like Pinterest that are searchable, that are showing my blog articles and pulling all this work that I’d done to pour into these joint venture webinars or just the content that I was creating in general, it meant that I could put that into an easily indexed and easily searchable database that could then be searched over and over and over, and pinned and shared and-

Sam Glover: It makes a lot of sense because Facebook is not … I mean, you can search on Facebook, there’s very powerful search features, but most people just go to Facebook and see what’s up on their feed, but Pinterest is somewhere you might go to find pictures of things.

Christina S.: Exactly. Instagram’s similar in that you can search hashtags, but someone has to know what they’re searching, so there’s a little bit of a different strategy. I think Pinterest is a lot more akin to what we’re used to on something like Google or Amazon. Amazon’s a search engine too. I think reframing that and really perfecting the one platform before I moved onto the next was the strategy that I would, if I were starting all over again, which actually I am kind of in this way with new Pinterest handles and Instagram names and things like that, doing experiments and seeing what’s going to work in 2018 and beyond, instead of just looking at what has worked. That’s the kind of stuff that I’m looking at, and making sure that I get a really nice foundation on one platform before I move onto the next.

Sam Glover: So your focus really is Pinterest.

Christina S.: It is, yeah. 100%. If I couldn’t be on anything else, it would be Pinterest. That’s where I would be.

Sam Glover: I should probably say this right now, when we started chatting at TBD Law and you wanted to talk about Pinterest, I’m like, “Oh, come on.” I mean, I’m a Pinterest skeptic, for real, so I wanted you to tell me more about how this works, and I suspect that lots of people are and I’m going to put on a title on this like “Why lawyers should use Pinterest,” so that they come to the podcast all incredulous. Maybe we should talk them through it. I mean, what is Pinterest like these days? What do the stats look like, and why is it a compelling place to go?

Christina S.: For sure. I’m really glad you asked. Pinterest is definitely skewing more male as far as signups go, which is always the first question. Like, “Okay, yeah, you’re a girl. You deal with a primarily female audience, so that makes sense for you.” But if you think about it-

Sam Glover: No, I mean, it has a reputation as being places that people plan their wedding and things like that.

Christina S.: Right. What’s really interesting about Pinterest, and I’m going to pull these from an Omnicore study, 40% of new signups on Pinterest are men, but only 7% of men are actually pinning things, which makes a lot of sense because it means that they’re using it as a tool to discover new resources, to discover products, and that men aren’t necessarily pinning or using it in the same way as women are, but they’re still on there. They’re still engaging with the platform. That’s one of the first things that I would say to debunk any skeptics that believe that Pinterest can’t work for them.

The other reason that I would say attorneys need to get on Pinterest sooner rather than later is because we’re not there and our consumer base is. If you have any kind of content just like I’m talking about, like maybe you produce a blog or a podcast or I don’t know what other kind of contents are really popular. Those are the two that come to mind. But if you’re producing any kind of content, it means that you can take the content that you are creating and put it onto that platform where then other people that are searching for related topics and ideas can use the keywords that you basically tag your content with and search that.

For example, if somebody is a divorce attorney — I’m an IP attorney. I think I mentioned that in the beginning — but if somebody is a divorce attorney, they’re a family lawyer, and they’re looking for new clients in their area, one of the things that they could be doing is taking all those really helpful blog articles that they’ve written and repurposing them, making a simple, simple graphic in a program like Canva, which is free. That actually has Pinterest templates, by the way, so it’s super easy. You don’t even have to do any kind of hard, heavy lifting. You can just kind of put your title to the blog post on this Canva graphic, download it as a jpeg, and upload it to the platform.

All of a sudden, if you’ve done it properly, it’s now linked to your blog post, and in the description underneath that pin, if you will, that image that’s in Pinterest, you can start to use keywords like, “How to know when to leave a relationship.” Or I’m trying to think of some other ones. You wouldn’t use like, “How to find a divorce attorney in Atlanta, Georgia,” but you would use keywords that are like, “Signs it’s time to move on from a relationship,” or, “How to heal from divorce.” Those kinds of keywords are what people are searching for on Pinterest.

You can really use any kind of content and think about … It’s kind of like the Tylenol, I hope I’m going to get this right, it’s kind of like the Tylenol example that people use with SEO, right? People don’t know that they need Tylenol. All the know is that they have a headache, so they go to Google and they say, “My head hurts. What should I take?” The result is then Tylenol, so you need to be thinking about what comes before the Tylenol? What are they searching for, and make sure that you’re using those keywords as you’re describing your pin, as you’re uploading it to Pinterest, and as you’re crafting that pin description.

Sam Glover: Which is just simple search engine optimization like you might use for anything else.

Christina S.: Yeah.

Sam Glover: Yeah. Very cool. What’s the size of the Pinterest audience? I don’t think you mentioned that.

Christina S.: Yeah, so right now there’s outside of the US 80 million people, which I’m assuming that most people listening to this podcast are probably in Canada and the US. I don’t know the number in Canada, but right now the number of Pinterest users in the US is 70 million, so almost a third of the United States population is on Pinterest, and that’s, I’m trying to think, what’s the active number? I don’t remember the number of active users off the top of my head, but it’s actually pretty high. Yeah, total monthly active users is 70 million, so that’s a relatively good amount of people that are at least using this platform every day.

One other thing I should mention is that what’s really interesting about my Pinterest results, and this is not what I set out to do, but often when you google services that I offer to clients, you can find my pins that are showing up in the Google search. I actually don’t know that much about SEO, but I’m assuming it’s acting like a back link to my website, and it’s bumping up my services descriptions and the services and blog posts and things like that that I’m offering. It’s bumping those up in the Google search rankings as well.

Sam Glover: Yeah, so I’ve been searching for your stuff on Pinterest while we’ve been talking and looking at it. It looks like most of what you’re doing is you’re creating, like you said, a beautiful image that summarizes the post or the headline and includes a link back to the origin, the blog post on your website or on the whatever website it came from. It’s pretty simple and straightforward, and it’s the kind of thing that lots of people already do on Facebook or on Instagram, so pretty easy to start doing something like that, I think.

Christina S.: Yeah, for sure. It really doesn’t take much effort. It’s definitely a little bit of a learning curve, but if you’re willing to put in I would say 20 minutes a week to kind of work on this, you can make some pretty good progress, especially considering that I rarely, if ever, see attorneys on Pinterest because they’ve just written it off, like it’s this … I don’t know. I mean, the reaction I always get is that it’s kind of this frivolous social media platform for decorating your house, and it’s just not true.

If you want to see a really good example of an industry that’s completely captured Pinterest through content, it’s blogging, especially like fashion bloggers and beauty bloggers. Not saying that you guys need to start a fashion or a beauty blog, but you can look at it because they’re really smart. What they’ve done is they’ve created content and figured out how to deliver it to a bigger audience. They’ve figured out where their client or their customer base is, because most of them are selling through affiliate links, and put their blog posts that are interesting and relevant to that audience, they’ve put all of their content in front of them. Now they’re driving traffic like crazy.

I don’t think it would be unnatural, or I guess I should say it’s normal to see, it usually takes 90 days to start seeing results on Pinterest. You have to get yourself set up and you have to kind of get the ball rolling and that kind of thing. You can’t just start with no content and expect this to work for you. But once you get the ball rolling, about 90 days after that, you’ll start to see, you know, 10 people re-pinning you pin a day, 100 people, 1000. That’s how the momentum builds, and again, since it is a social search engine, it’s really easy to reach a lot of people with your content in a relatively short amount of time.

Sam Glover: We need to take quick break to hear from our sponsors, and when we come back I want to keep talking about this and kind of revisit some of the tips you’ve already given, and expand and think about some more tips that you would give to people who are just getting started. We’ll be right back.

This podcast is supported by Ruby Receptionists. As a matter of fact, Ruby answers our phones at Lawyerist and my firm was a paying Ruby customer before that. Here’s what I love about Ruby. When I’m in the middle of something I hate to be interrupted, so when the phone rings it annoys me, and that often carriers over into the conversation I have after I pick up the phone, which is why I’m better off not answering my own phone. Instead, Ruby answers the phone and if the person on the other end asks for me, a friendly, cheerful receptionist from Ruby calls me and asks if I want them to put the call through. It’s a buffer that gives me a minute to let go of my annoyance and being a better human being during the call.

If you want to be a better human being on the phone, give Ruby a try. Go to callruby.com/lawyerist to sign up, and Ruby will waive the $95 setup fee. If you aren’t happy with Ruby for any reason, you can get your money back during your first three weeks. I’m pretty sure you’ll stick around, but since there is no risk, you might as well try.

Aaron Street: Imagine what you could do with an extra eight hours per week. You could invest in marketing your firm. You could spend more time helping clients in need. Or you could catch your daughter’s soccer game. That’s how much time legal professionals save with Clio, the world’s leading practice management software. With Clio, tracking time, billing, and matter management are fast and easy, giving you more time to focus on what really matters. And Clio is a complete practice management platform with plenty of tools and over 50 integrations to help you automate daily tasks, such as document generation and court calendering. See how the right software can make it easier to manage your practice. Try Clio for free today at clio.com.

Sam Glover: Okay, and we’re back. You’ve identified a few things, and I love and really can’t emphasize enough the idea of gearing your whatever you’re doing towards the problem people have, the Tylenol thing, not the describing the thing itself. I really like that. You’ve said it takes about 90 days to get going, and during those 90 days, what should you be doing to get the thing going? What kind of a commitment should you be putting into Pinterest, to make sure that you’re doing what you need to do to get attention at the end of those 90 days?

Christina S.: Some of the things that you need to be thinking about are your profile. People are coming back and they’re seeing who is actually pinning this thing, why should I be interested in this person? What a lot of people do, kind of a rookie mistake, is they will just literally enter their profile details as it asks them to do. That’s really valuable real estate that they’re missing out on.

For example, if you go to my Pinterest profile and, like I said, I’m in the process of … Because I just started everything under my name, I’m in the process of niching out. But if you go and you see my original one, you’ll see that I have not just my name in that big header, but it’s also a description of who I am and what I do, who I serve. Instead of just writing a quick little note, “Hey, I’m Christina,” or just it says Christina Scalera and maybe underneath it, it says like, “Pins for legal stuff.” That would be really boring and nobody would be interested in that.

Instead, I’ve taken that valuable header space, I don’t remember how many characters they allow you for your name but it’s more than my name has in it, and I have a pretty long name. I’ve taken and put like, “Christina Scalera, attorney,” and then underneath that in the description space I’ve used up all the characters that I can in describing what I think someone visiting that page, what their biggest pain point will be. I don’t have it actually up in front of me, but it’s something to the effect of, “Legal information for creative entrepreneurs. Make sure that you click the link below and get this free download.” Immediately, once they go to that free download page, we have a Facebook Pixel that’s tracking them if they don’t sign up, and then we have an option for them to opt into our newsletter list so that we can then keep the communication going. Instead of having, again, just to recap-

Sam Glover: So if I click on this link to The Contract Shop, then it’s going to start following me around Facebook?

Christina S.: It will start following you on Facebook, yeah. I should mention, that’s actually my other company. The Scalera Law one is in works, is in progress right now, but I think it’s a great testament to the power of Pinterest in that I really haven’t done incredible amounts of stuff. A lot of my friends on there have thousands and thousands of followers and pins, and I have a decent amount of stuff going on, and it’s still sending … I think 3% of our website traffic is coming from Pinterest and we’re working to get that up to 5% at the moment. It’s really interesting because it doesn’t take that much to get started. It’s just really optimizing your bio, and there’s plenty of free resources. Ruckus Legal has a bunch of them. But also if you decide that you want to kind of look at how the bloggers have done this and model your profile after one of them, I think that would be really smart too because they’ve obviously captured this audience and this market, and they’re doing a really great job at it.

I would say setting your profile up well, and that also includes setting up your boards. Again, going back to use the family lawyer as an example, quotes are some of the most popular content to pin on Pinterest. You might have a board that’s all quotes, and some of them have to do with relationships. Those are the things that people will be re-pinning and sharing, and it could have your law firm name dot com at the bottom of that quote, and then all of a sudden it’s getting in front of this larger audience. People are interested. It piques their interest to see that a lawyer’s at the bottom of a quote. They click on it, now they’re suddenly on your website. You can do whatever you want with that traffic at that point. Maybe you’re directing them to one of these opt-ins, or you Pixel them for Facebook or whatever.

Sam Glover: It feels like Pinterest is kind of in the middle of the process. At the beginning of the process, it sounds like you were putting time into creating valuable content. Then you were using Pinterest to spread the word about it, create more for Google to find related to it, create stuff for people to find on Pinterest. Then you’re trying to direct that traffic towards a landing page where you can capture that person’s identity on Facebook or through getting them to subscribe to your email newsletter so that you know who they are and that you’ve made yourself sticky. Does that sound about right?

Christina S.: Yeah, and one thing that you just kind of glossed over but I think is really crucial to point out to the listeners is that it is so important to create content that is really relevant to whatever audience you’re trying to reach, that isn’t just like how to file for divorce in DeKalb County, Georgia, but, you know, “10 things you need to consider before you get divorced in DeKalb County.” Just making that one little tweak to your title to have on your Pinterest image, and as the title of your blog post, can really change the number of times that people share it and the kinds of things that they’re interested in, their interest level in coming back to your website. Thinking about not just the content, like is this relevant to the audience? Is this actually something they want to know, because as you guys have talked about before on this show, people don’t care about case law. They don’t care about what precedent is located in your area. What they care about is the result that they’re going to see in their life.

Really taking a moment to write about the results that are possible in the situations that they’re likely to be placed in, and obviously having lots of calls to action throughout those blog posts to either, whatever your call to action. Set up a free consult with you, or download something, or whatever that next step to working with you would be.

Sam Glover: Yeah, because if all you do is spend time on Pinterest pinning things, even if they’re your own blog posts, you might not really get much out of that unless you’ve thought through like, what are you going to do with people once they end up on your blog post or on your website? You’ve got to have that follow through and that call to action.

Christina S.: Exactly, otherwise you’re just wasting time. I would concentrate, and again part of our strategy is creating … You’re exactly right. We created content at the beginning, got it onto this platform, built the platform, and now we’re looking back at some of our most popular pins. What are people really enjoying, what are they engaging with, what’s Pinterest rewarding with their algorithm, because as you guys all know these algorithms are always changing. So looking at what’s doing well and then creating more of that, now that we have that established base, so that we can continue to provide more of what my audience has told me that they want.

Sam Glover: What do you use to make those decisions? How do you measure that stuff and track it?

Christina S.: There’s a couple tools that I use. I use BoardBooster, and that’s really helpful. It’s an app that you can download and connect to your Pinterest account. It actually, once you get going, it’ll pull from RSS feeds and pin for you. It will also recycle your pins so that you’re not on there 24/7. It’s also a great tool to use if you’re interested in cleaning your boards. Sometimes a pin isn’t performing well, and you can see that on BoardBooster, and you can go ahead and get that pin taken off. It’ll actually automatically kind of scrub your pins for you because you don’t want to have pins that nobody is interested in. Then Pinterest looks at your account and then your pins as something that people don’t want, and they don’t show it as much. That’s a tool that I use.

I also use a tool called Tailwind, and Tailwind’s really helpful because it does something very similar to BoardBooster in that it pulls from the RSS feed so that I can just kind of follow blogs that I like and know that they’re going to have good content. It’ll pin to my boards. I can also bulk upload pins, so I can just kind of do all this on a Saturday afternoon or something and not really worried about it for the next month. It’s not something that I’m checking in with every day or that I’m working on because I’m scheduling all this out ahead of time.

Actually, to be quite honest, I’ve actually outsourced most of this. For $300 a month, you can really find someone that understands Pinterest and does a really great job of keeping up with it and keeping tabs on it, so it’s something that they’ll actually set up for you. In about that price range.

Sam Glover: Do you do that on Upwork, or have you found somebody independently of that?

Christina S.: I’ve never used Upwork. I’m sure you could find them on Upwork. I actually am a part of a lot of different creative groups on Facebook that have lots of moms that are looking for work when they have their kids and they just have some downtime, or they’re side-hustling and they’re trying to build a little extra income on the side. Some groups to look for Pinterest managers in on Facebook would be something like the Rising Tide Society, Savvy Business Owners, and just using the search function. If you guys haven’t noticed in Facebook, they have a search function on that left-hand side of the menu there. It’s kind of in the middle of your screen if you’re on a desktop. You can just search “Pinterest manager” in quotes, or-

Sam Glover: You know, you’re a great example of … Lots of lawyers seem to turn to other lawyers when they have questions about how to use social media and stuff, but you have dived into the groups of people who are actually using social media, rather than trying to find out from colleagues. That strikes me as a much more effective way to do it.

Christina S.: Oh, yeah. For sure. I actually, I never even thought about going to other attorneys, just because, I mean, other than with the exception of this podcast, I don’t feel like there’s that much out there for attorneys to turn to that want to practice law as … I mean, please don’t throw all the sticks at me right now, but practice law as a business. I feel like I’m a businessperson first and an attorney and a law firm owner second, so I’m always looking to see what are the trends in small business, where are these things happening, and where are things moving and shaking, and how can I get in on that action?

Sam Glover: It sounds like you’ve taken the time. You’ve used Pinterest and it sounds like you’ve taken the time to figure out how to use Pinterest, which is the other piece of it. You’re not just fooling around on it, and you’re not just throwing up billboards the way some lawyers do with everything they touch. You’ve actually tried to figure out, okay, what does this thing do? What does it look like? How can I use it? And you’ve played around with it until you’ve figured out what works.

Christina S.: Yeah. Thanks.

Sam Glover: Well, but I mean, I don’t think a lot of people actually take the time to figure out how the tools work. I’m looking at the new iPhone X and the new Apple Watch thinking, “All right, maybe it’s time for me to get an Apple Watch and figure out how this thing works, and see if it can do anything for me. If not, maybe I just sell it.” But I think the same goes for all of these platforms. When people dive into Snapchat early on and start writing about how this can work for lawyers or how not, on the one hand it’s kind of like, “Oh come on, like every new thing.” But on the other hand, that’s how you figure it out. You’ve got to dive in, figure it out, take it apart, see how it works, what’s under the hood, experiment, and then you can take that learning and maybe you can do something with it. It sounds like you’ve done that, and other lawyers who want to make good on what Pinterest is capable of will need to do some of that same work.

Christina S.: Yeah, for sure, and it’s definitely a strategy and it is work, but again, there are so many people out there that would be thrilled to take care of this for you for like $300 a month or something, or there’s courses out there for less than 100 bucks that are really, really good that walk you through how to set all this up on your own. It’s something that you can take advantage of relatively quickly if you’re willing to dedicate whatever resources you do have, whether that’s time or money or both, to make this a tool that works for your firm.

Sam Glover: You’ve mostly convinced me that Pinterest can work. I guess I’m reminded of something Gary Vaynerchuk has said, which is, “Everything works.” It doesn’t mean everything will work for you or for your business or your firm, but everything works. You just need to figure out how it works, do it right, and then see if the return on investment is going to pay off in the end. I guess that obviously applies to Pinterest too, so I really appreciate your perspective and your experience, and thanks for sharing with us.

Christina S.: Yeah, for sure. Thank you for having me, Sam.

Aaron Street: Make sure to catch next week’s episode of The Lawyerist Podcast by subscribing to the show in your favorite podcast app, and please leave a rating to help other people find our show. You can find the notes for today’s episode on lawyerist.com/podcast.

Sam Glover: The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not endorsed by Legal Talk Network. Nothing said in this podcast is legal advice for you.

Continue Reading