[The second in a series of twelve year-end posts by our friends in the Legal Marketing Association's special interest group on Social and Digital Media. Stop by for additional posts as the LMA publishes them:]

On this 2nd Day of Social & Digital Media, I am happy to bring you wise and visionary words from one of our 2017 Social & Digital Media SIG Co-chairs, Stefanie Knapp, Online Marketing Manager for Allen Matkins. I know our SIG will be in good hands with her and Karen Cariello's leadership.

Let's see what she has to say! 

What has shifted in the last 12 months in social & digital media?

I think we've seen a legitimization of social and digital media, especially in the legal industry. Digital media has gone from what we have to do because everyone else is doing it to something that is actually generating business. It is a really exciting time to be a digital marketer.

What has caught your eye recently as a smart use of social & digital media?

I've always considered Fenwick & West a leader in our industry in social media, especially on Twitter, and I'm especially interested in what they've done recently with paid promotion on social. As their team has said, you can take the same money you would normally spend sponsoring one chicken dinner, invest that in paid promotion of a key piece of content on social media, and see exponentially more return.  

Has your firm implemented a successful social & digital media strategy or campaign you’d like to share?

For the past 10 years, we've teamed up with the UCLA Anderson School of Management on our California Commercial Real Estate Survey. For our latest release in July 2016, we teamed up with four different commercial real estate companies and interviewed an industry expert from each. They became the focal point for our distribution, which included videos and memes. We provided each company with a media kit that included all of the graphic assets, suggested tweets and Facebook posts, as well as a press release and the PDF of the survey, so that they could help with distribution. We found this strategy to be very successful for us. We had two of the four companies share multiple pieces of content on their social media platforms, but even better is that we strengthened our relationships with all four of these companies. We plan to follow this model again for our February 2017 release. 

...do a small test and present those results as proof that a larger investment is worthwhile.

What’s the biggest challenge for law firms trying to be active in the social & digital media space, and how can they overcome it?

I believe one of our biggest challenges is getting the buy-in to invest more in social and digital media. However, with all of the data that we now have available, we should be able to pull that together to make a compelling case for investment. If you have something new you want to try, do a small test and present those results as proof that a larger investment is worthwhile.

What's the next big thing in social & digital media marketing for law firms for 2017?

Marketing automation will be a big focus for firms in 2017. We have the ability to turn our social and digital media platforms into efficient, lead generating programs. As more firms are testing this on a smaller scale, I think we will begin to see more robust implementations of automation in the legal industry over the next year. 

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[Stefanie Knapp is the online marketing manager for Allen Matkins, a California-based law firm serving the real estate industry. Stefanie manages the firm's online communications initiatives, including the firm's website, videos, and email marketing and social media campaigns. Prior to joining the legal marketing profession, Stefanie was an award-winning reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Daily Journal. She holds a B.A. in magazine journalism from Syracuse University and an M.B.A. from UCLA Anderson School of Management.]