Lawslot

To  borrow a phrase, and now for something completely different. Adam Jones’ FT Management blog post, Public speaking tips from Spain, caught my eye this morning.

Very good.

All too often law firms’ websites (invariably still brochure-ware, however fancy) and their updates and bulletins are more about the law firm and its lawyers, and less about the target audience. At best this is an irritation, and at worse a definite turn off. I know, as I regularly receive unsolicited updates from accountants and property advisers: most of them, if soft copy, are now routed seamlessly into Junk Mail (I have only recently discovered this very useful application in Outlook); if hard copy, they find their way unread into the recycling bin in very short order.

I follow these rules

• Think about who your target audience is
• Think about what they have told you they want (and not just what you think they want)
• Think about how what you are going to tell them will help them (as well as helping you)
• Think about what you want to say
• Think about the best delivery channel

and then make sure that it only goes to those people to whom it should go (see earlier my post Mailing list hell).

Another issue with newsletters is the mailing list (leaving aside that an email shot is probably better and certainly more environmentally friendly). Having spent much of my train journey to London reviewing one such list, I now understand what GIGO* means: duplications, wrong names, wrong salutations, wrong organisations, wrong addresses. . . to say nothing of the retired, the “no longer” clients and the dead. And all this in 2,300 names.

*Garbage In, Garbage Out