On Wednesday, December 8h, the ILN offered a webinar with Freesource's Nathan Egan on "LinkedIn for Lawyers." Because of all the great information in the webinar, I'm breaking this up into a couple of posts, with Part I being published yesterday.

Now let's jump right into Part II

Your External Profile - A Brand Beacon

Nathan then took the audience through an individual LinkedIn profile, saying that it can be a beacon for your brand. He said that in social media, we talk a lot about "inbound marketing" - creating the context for people to come to you - and the profile is really where it all starts in terms of positioning.

Most firms have put lots of money into their corporate websites, which are the umbrella marketing portal for the firm. Nathan said that they're looking to help people understand that the LinkedIn profile, the social assets of the firm (which are the people), are now sub-domains of the corporate website.

They have the potential to drive search engine optimization activity back to the corporate website. Nathan said that by hard linking and key wording the profile in a meaningful way, with the keywords that the firm would want to be found for, they create a tremendous lift in their marketing efforts very naturally and passively.

Nathan said that the idea is to make LinkedIn work for the attorneys in a way that doesn't take a lot of time. It does involve some upfront work to get it going, but he said the investment is well worth it. Once the profile is up, running and polished, it becomes a passive part of your professional world.

So when you're in a meeting, working with clients, or even sleeping, your online profile is working on your behalf, developing clients for you, giving people context, giving them information about your background and core areas of expertise....