I’m a fan of Ellen Freedman, Law Practice Management Coordinator for the Pennsylvania Bar Association and management consultant.  Good person, smart professional, and pretty good at her job.

Ellen and I have spoken in the past, so it was nice to see a comment posted from her on one of my recent posts.  She didn’t agree with my position - vehemently disagreed, in fact - but that’s no problem.  At least my post forced her our of exile, blogging for the first time in months.

But just like that, the post on her blog was gone.  POOF!

Ellen, where are you? And why did you take down the post about formatting of email marketing messages?  Did you change you position, take down the post because it was unsightly, or something else entirely?

I hope you didn’t remove the post because it came out against me, though.  I love divergent opinions, especially from someone as smart as you.

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Roger Parloff from CNN has this article about a rejection letter sent by a second-grader to a law firm in response to an offer of a job interview.

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If you think it does, think again.  Check out this photo of Steve Ballmer’s office.

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Different search engines use meta data in different ways. While it’s well accepted that unique, keyword-rich and well written title tags are an absolute must for your search engine optimization efforts, some SEO experts have discounted the value of meta description and meta keyword tags in the past.

Vanessa Fox, product manager for the Google webmaster tools, has confirmed that unique meta description tags for each web page help Google determine the uniqueness of a web page. The meta description tags are used to create the text snippets that are displayed in Google search results underneath the page heading.

Google would normally create this snippet by looking at the content surrounding the query term on the web page. However, for more generic searches, where appropriate content is not found on the web page, Google will simply grab some text from the top of a page, which is often part of the site navigation, and highly unsuitable to be displayed as text snippets for a search result.

On November 5, 2006 Vanessa posted on onto Google Groups that, for “most queries, the generated snippet is based on where the query terms are found on the page . . . But for some more generic queries, where a logical snippet isn’t found in the text, the generated snippet seems to be coming from the first bits of text from the page - in this case, boilerplate navigation that is the same for every page.”

If there are unique meta description tags available, Google will use these instead as a text snippet. So keep the following rules in mind for all your web pages:

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First off, what the heck is an elevator pitch?  According to Wikipedia, it’s “the concise description of an idea in the time span of an elevator ride, or a few minutes. Typically used when referring to entrepreneurs trying to pitch an idea to a venture capitalist or top executives in order to receive funding.”

“That’s nice,” you say.  “But I’m not pitching the idea of bankruptcy to venture capitalists.  Why am I even reading this?”

If you can’t think of a reason for an elevator pitch, you’re not thinking like a pro.  When you meet someone at a party and they ask what you do for a living, which of these two answers sounds better:

1.    I’m a bankruptcy lawyer

OR

2.    I help people work through their financial difficulties so they can build personal wealth and get a fresh start

Clearly, it’s the second answer.  The first one elicits a response such as, “Oh, OK,” whereas the second one gets, “Really?  Wow, I know a lot of people who are having some tough times.  Do you think you may be able to help?”

The underlying issue behind an elevator pitch is the fact that you need to be remember that you sell a solution, not a service.  Bankruptcy conjures images of people panhandling on breadlines, and it scares the wits out of people who need it most.  That goes for your callers, people who come to see you, and the public in general.

Remember the debate leading up to BAPCPA?  Debtors were either sad, poor people on the verge of losing their homes or they were dishonest, greedy misers looking to game the system.

Who the heck wants to be lumped with either group?

Your clients and prospects need to know that they’re hard-workers, they’re honest, they aren’t going to be poor forever.  They’re having some problems, but it isn’t the end of the world.  They need help getting back on their feet, they don’t need a hand out.

What’s YOUR elevator pitch?  Comment to this post and let’s hear what you’ve got to say!

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