I am very lucky to serve as the co-chair of LMA’s Think Tank Committee together with Jonathan Mattson, chief marketing and business development officer of Tucker Ellis in Cleveland and a member of LMA’s Ohio Chapter.
The Committee itself is relatively young, formed several years ago with the mandate to generate intellectual capital to help the LMA Board of Directors better understand some of the strategic issues faced by legal marketers and by the legal profession as a whole. Since the beginning of this year, Jonathan and I have taken two key steps towards driving the Think Tank’s mandate forward: first, we expanded our directive, to provide intellectual capital not just for the Board, but also for the membership at large; and second, we have set about generating content to fulfill an ambitious editorial calendar.
You can see the product of our first efforts by visiting the Think Tank page on the LMA’s website. Go to LegalMarketing.org/ThinkTank, and you’ll see a set of Skype-based interviews undertaken by one of the Committee’s members Paul Gladen, of Muzeview, on the topic of intellectual capital. Each video vignette – approximately 15 to 20 minutes in length – tackles a different aspect of the development and distribution of intellectual capital, an important element of a legal marketer’s work.
Our next “thoughtware” output is something I’ve dubbed: the “Acceler8” program. (The international Legal Marketing Association is to be assigned rights to the trademark!) It is a series of eight short webinar-style recordings, each addressing a key trend we believe is coming in 2014. They will be delivered approximately once a week between now and the end of 2013.
We’ve recruited speakers from many different parts of LMA. Robert Algeri of Great Jakes and former chair of LMA’s Technology Committee, will give the first presentation, provocatively entitled: “Website Practice Area Descriptions are Awful: How Market Forces and Technology Mean We Must and Can Fix Them.” The remaining seven sessions are follows:
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Peggy Heffner, public relations and social media manager at Dechert LLP and Lisa Jaycox, head of U.S. marketing and communications, Gorkana USA, present “The Visual Social Media Platforms are Coming! How Tumblr, Flickr, Instagram, Infographics, Pinterest, YouTube, Vine, and SlideShare Will Bring a Revolution in Legal Marketing”
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Elonide Semmes, president of RightHat, presents “From Firm Ground to Quicksand: How Law Firm Branding Will Become Ever More Complex in 2014”
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Alina Gorokhovsky, strategic Advisor, and previously Chief Strategy Officer at McKenna Long & Aldridge presents “We Have Seen The Future: How Big Data and Analytical Tools Will Give Business Development and Marketing Powerful, New Insights”
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Keith Ecker, vice president, Jaffe PR, presents: “The Content is the Message: How Sharing Content and Engaging Directly with Prospects and Clients Will Be Essential to Marketers”
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Ben Greenzweig, principal and co-CEO, Momentum Events & Consulting, presents “Thought Leadership Requires Balance: How Marketers Will Allocate and Promote Intellectual Capital Across Proliferating Channels”
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Mark Young, president, ShiftCentral, and Mark Power, founder, Concep, present “Marketing Goes Mobile: How Resources for Business Development Will Have to Be Available ‘On-The-Go’”
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Gerry Riskin, founding partner, Edge International, presents “Change is a Constant - so is Resistance: How Firms Will Have to Accelerate Their Ability to Adapt”
New material will be added to the Think Tank page as it becomes available. Additionally, we highlight new content through the LMA’s social media, such as its Twitter feed and LinkedIn page.
If you have a topic you’d like to see addressed by the Think Tank, or if you would like to participate as part of Think Tank session, please reach out to me at iturvill@freeborn.com or to Jonathan Mattson at jonathan.mattson@tuckerellis.com.