Teaching Lawyers to be marketers

On October 4th, I’ll be making a presentation at the Legal Profession Assistance Conference 5th Annual symposium on provincial lawyer assistance programs. 

Last year I was flown out to Halifax to present marketing 101 to a diverse group of lawyers representing provincial lawyer assistance programs who wanted to learn how they could do a better job at marketing their programs to their members. 

This year’s topic – Catalyst for change: Tools to deliver the wellness message 

I’ll be picking up from last year’s presentation and talk about how each program can leverage social media and mobile in their marketing communications. 

I also had the program coordinator send out an advance email asking attendees for questions they hoped would be answered during the presentation. I’ve received 11 great questions which I’m in the process of incorporating into the deck. 

The interesting challenge about marketing the Lawyer’s Assistance program is that you get virtually no word of mouth – no matter how great your programs are.  The last thing a Lawyer will do is admit weakness – so admitting they are using these services would be career limiting. The program helps lawyers struggling with stress, substance abuse and life balance issues.  

Knowing that a big part of the power of social media is word of mouth – how do you leverage social media while still being discrete & respecting privacy? 

I’m looking forward to the challenge and have mostly finalized my approach and point of view.

What do you think? Comments / input welcome.