Why Blending Your Work Life with Your Personal Life isn’t Always a Bad Thing

You’re an attorney. When you’re in the office, you’re all business.  When you’re out of the office, you’re all about rest, relaxation, and spending time on your personal self. But why do the two always have to be mutually exclusive? They don’t have to be, and can create a more complete web presence if you take some time to forge the two together.

Let us tell you a little story about SLS. Not too long ago, everyone in office kept their personal lives completely separate from their work lives. From the time they clocked out from the time they clocked back in again, SLS employees were off to do their own thing and SLS was essentially non-existent until the work week rolled around. Our social media profiles were filled with marketing industry news, and there was no personal touch to be found anywhere other than the occasional staff photo or two. Put bluntly, it was almost as if the SLS brand was faceless, with no personality whatsoever. Then, we took a step back a bit and started to think more about our brand image and how we wanted others to view us on the internet.

At first, we thought that we solely wanted to be branded as authorities in the realm of legal internet marketing. After all, demonstrating authority in your field instills confidence in potential clients. This approach works on a website and even to a certain extent on a blog, but it simply did not work on the social side of things. Flash forward a couple of years and social media is more interwoven in our society than ever. Nowadays, companies are EXPECTED to have a presence on social sites and failing to have a profile on one often (unfairly) raises red flags with those looking to do business with the company.

So, why should it be any different for attorneys? Why should lawyers think that, in order to be authoritative and potentially sign more clients, they need to talk about legal news and nothing else? The answer is simple – they shouldn’t.

The vast majority of people are involved with activities outside of work. For attorneys, especially, there needs to be something a little more humanizing about your firm and talking about certain after work activities on your social media profiles can actually help you. After all, people want to do business with people they like and attorneys already don’t have the most pleasant public perception out there. So, if you’re involved with local charities, participate in 5Ks and bike races, or you’re an avid toy collector, talking about it on social media is very rarely a bad thing and will help people relate to you that much more easily. People expect brands to have a social media presence, so be prepared for that presence to be very thoroughly scrutinized if you’re not being “social” enough.

If a potential client is trying to decide between hiring one of two different attorneys, and those attorneys’ websites have more or less the same content with more or less the same types of case results, then those firms need to have something extra to set them apart from the competition.

Here at SLS Consulting, we’re very much into helping others when we can and getting involved with charity events, so we’d like to think that that’s something that sets us apart from other marketing companies out there. If you’re an attorney, how are you humanizing your brand and helping your firm stand out from the pack? Blend your work life with your personal life (to a certain extent) and the long term branding effects will pay off.

Disagree with our stance on “being social”? Share your thoughts with us in the comments…