Don’t you cringe when you hear marketing and lawyers in the same sentence? Didn’t you go to law school instead of an MBA program so you never had to deal with marketing or sales of some sort? That may be true, but I am afraid you’re stuck with marketing as long as you have or need clients. The good news is the Internet and social media can take both the stigma and the pain out of the process. It works, and it is often absolutely free. You just need to know some basics.

Let’s assume you’re not Edward Greenspan or Abraham Lincoln. You’re interested in reaching out to three groups: clients, potential clients and colleagues. You know how to use the Internets, and you don’t mind some publicity. Before you go any further, remember: choose strong passwords and use some password management software. That should keep you reasonably safe from identity theft. Finally, have an open mind and grow a thick skin. Some people on the Internet have a foul mouth. Beyond these simple warnings lie huge online marketing opportunities.

The power of free online marketing is in social media. Here is how it works. Social media is a way to publish messages for a circle of followers. If some of these followers have their own followers, you all form a network. When your message reaches your circle, one or more of its members can pass it on. It’s exactly how rumours spread in small towns. But social networks are bigger and faster thanks to instant and massive online communications. Some celebrities have online circles consisting of hundreds of thousands of people. Imagine the PR possibilities. And the media is social because online audiences themselves do a lot of heavy lifting in spreading the message.

That’s exactly how sites like Twitter work. You get your own page. You can post short messages on it. If you get someone to care about it, they can subscribe to your updates. You can subscribe to other people’s updates. Each subscriber can scroll through a page consisting of updates posted by his or her circle. If a message is interesting enough, it can propagate through the network reaching awfully many people.  All for free. You just need to get the community to care. Facebook and LinkedIn are similar, but they used to focus on building online people networks. Now they imitate Twitter by encouraging members to post updates. Social media works because millions of people are on these sites typing away or reading every minute of every day—millions connected into a network.

Every message on the Internet that matters works like this today. Forums, blogs, good old websites, you name it. Unless the message gets into social media, it’s probably lost. I am not talking about paid advertising of course. That’s an exception, but you probably already know that money can buy you eyeballs. If you don’t want to spend a lot of money, social media can help you.

Take blogs, for example. A blog (click for an example) is just a webpage where you post articles on a regular basis. It usually looks like a sequence of postings sorted in chronological order. Often authors allow readers to post comments or questions under each posting. Twitter postings are similar to blog posts, but there are two important differences. First, your posts on Twitter must be 140 characters or less. There is usually no length limits on blogs. Second, Twitter organizes readers into a cohesive community making it easy to pass on posts (tweets) through the network. The length limit also simplifies spreading a message through the community. Shorter messages on average probably have higher chances of being read than long blog posts. Remember, the key to social media is the speed and the reach of your message.

Forums are one of the oldest methods of online discussion and content distribution. A forum (click for an example) is a webpage with a list of topics. Each topic is a link to another webpage with a list of posts on this topic. Each post is also a link leading to a page that contains responses to the post. That’s how people talked online fifteen years ago. That’s how many of us still talk today. Unless the forum is members-only, anyone can choose to check the postings. But you have to scroll through all of them to see if anything interests you. Then you can choose to respond. If you are interested in several forums, you have to check all of them regularly. There is no circle trusted to post only what interests you. You have to sift through the content yourself. But some forums are so popular that this is not an issue.

(to be continued)