All right, welcome to another edition of our webinar series. Today is webinar part two of persuasive communication. We're talking about topic, tone, and timing.
And what I've done today is I've intentionally kept the slides light so that I can have more of a dialogue with you and share the information with you. If you have questions, you can ask them. As a reminder, for logistical purposes, if you have a question, please use the chat feature to get my attention and then I can unmute you and you can ask the question or you can just ask the question right in the chat.
This presentation is about 30, 35 minutes and then we'll answer questions for as long as you like. Follow up, you can follow up with me at the email address there. You can follow up with me on the community website or we can have a conversation.
There's my phone number, you can see it on the screen. You can also, if you'd like to make an appointment, go to timewithdave.com, that's T-I-M-E-W-I-T-H-D-A-V-E.com. Make an appointment and we'll be happy to have an extended conversation. So our agenda today is right here and this is the only other slide we have and that's topics for communication, the tone, and the timing.
And we touched on communication topics in our last session. I wanna remind you that the topics for communication are always receiver based. That means that when you set out to communicate with your audience, you want to communicate with them based on their language, you wanna communicate with them based on the things that they are concerned about, worried about, interested in, the things that they want.
You want to communicate with them in a way that is familiar and comfortable to them. Now in part three of our series, which will be Thursday at 1 p.m., we are going to cover delivery and how you deliver these communication methods, the methods of communication. So we're gonna talk about email, we're gonna talk about speaking engagements, we're gonna talk about webinar, we're going to talk about using podcasts or even video to deliver this information to your audience.
Today our focus is on topics, tone, and timing. So let's talk for a moment about topics. And if you'll permit me, now I can't see what I'm doing because I took my glasses off.
If you'll permit me, I am going to stop the screen share and we can continue our conversation. So topics, in terms of what you should be talking about with your audience, it's important for us to understand the difference between what your audience wants and what your audience needs, what your audience wants and what they need. Your audience will often want things that are really of no use to them or they'll want things that are unattainable or they'll want things that are symptoms and not the actual problem, okay? So when people come to you and they tell you that they want something specific, what they're talking about is they're usually talking about a symptom and not a problem.
So for us, for those of us who are in the advice business and all of us here on the webinar today are in the advice business, people come to us and they're talking about symptoms. They're not necessarily talking about the actual problem. So it's our job to get to what the actual problem is.
So how do we do that? Well, when we're talking to an audience, what you need to do is you need to have one-on-one conversations with your best clients and that's how you identify what the actual problems are. So in your communication process, you have to explain to folks that the thing that they're focused on isn't really the problem. So how do you do that? The way to do that is to get them to understand that this is really their idea in the first place.
So let me give you an example. My clients often come to me, whether they're lawyers or CPAs or professionals in the world of consulting, my clients will come to me and they will say, I'm having a big problem. I'm not getting enough referrals.
So I say to them, okay, let's talk about what you're currently doing. Let's talk about your current strategy for attracting referrals. And they tell me, well, I just, I just do a good job.
My lawyers, the lawyers who work with me are famous for saying, well, I'm a good lawyer. I mean, you should just be a good lawyer and people should refer you. And what I have to get them to realize is that people don't know, number one, that you want referrals.
Number two, they don't know how to refer you. And number three, they don't know who the ideal person to connect you with really is. So the challenge is not that you're not getting enough referrals.
The challenge is you're not communicating in the right way with your clients that enables them to refer you. So what we do is we sit down and we talk about the last referral that they received. And they go into this whole story about how they did a great job of taking care of the client and the client was super happy and the client then said to them, if there's anything I can ever do for you, let me know.
And they said, oh, you know what you can do for me? You can refer me to everybody you know. I love referrals. And then they realized that that person started referring them after that happened.
And I say to them, wait a minute. You said to me, you don't get enough referrals. You're telling me about the ideal referral situation.
The missing ingredient there is that you communicated with your client in a way that helped them understand, number one, that you needed referrals, that you wanted referrals. Number two, that you would accept referrals from them and you identified the ideal client is just like them. And then number three, you told them how they could refer people to you and you asked for the referral.
So the challenge was not that they weren't getting referrals. The challenge was that they weren't communicating in the right way. So when you're coming up with a topic to communicate to your audience, you have to remember to focus your topic, to focus your communication in the world of your client.
That's the critical thing. That communication needs to zero in on the client and it doesn't need to be focused on you and what you wanna talk about. So when it comes to topics, focusing on what's happening up here for the client is critical.
So if you are going to select a topic for your client right now, and Nancy's on, she's an intellectual property attorney. So if she's going to focus on selecting a topic for her client right now, the topic for the client should be how to monetize intellectual property. It shouldn't be how to file a patent with the USPTO.
Sure, some of the people who come to Nancy are gonna be interested in the nuts and bolts of the patent process. But most people who go to Nancy are either filing patent applications because they wanna protect their invention or because they wanna eventually license out their invention and monetize it. So the nuts and bolts that interest Nancy, the whole process that interests Nancy is not something she should write about unless she knows a specific segment of her audience is into that.
Writing about monetization is more important because that will attract more people because that's what they really want. So when you're setting your topic, set your topic in the eyes of the receiver, in the mind of the receiver. Okay, now let's talk about tone.
Let's try and do the screen share program thingy one more time here. Let's see, share screen and desktop one, share. And here we go.
Come on now, there you go. All right, let's talk about tone. All of you know how to write.
As I scan my audience here for the webinar, I see you're all professionals. In fact, everybody here on this particular webinar is all, you're all attorneys. So you all know, and I've seen all of your writing.
You all know how to write and you all know how to write like a professional should write. The challenge that you and I are going to have from a communication standpoint is when you write, your writing is going to be very, shall we say, academic oriented. Your writing is going to be much more, your writing is going to be much more focused on, your writing will be much more focused on being professional, being detail oriented and being factual.
And my hope for you is that you shift your writing style from an academic type exercise or shift your writing style from a fact oriented writing for say the court to a more friendly writing style. My preference for you from a marketing communication standpoint is for you to always write the way you speak, not using slang or jargon, unless that's your style. I want you to write the way that you normally communicate with people.
This is especially important if you're writing email. Now articles, you're going to want to be a little bit more formal, but still having a friendly tone is important. And even if you're speaking on a webinar like this, or if you're speaking in front of an audience, my preference is for you to make your style, to pattern your style after a dialogue, to make your style seem like you're having a conversation with the members of the audience, because that's how people will relate to you.
And always remember that people connect with you based on emotion, and then they use logic and patterns of facts to justify the decision for either hiring you or investing in your services or buying a product. They connect initially because of emotion, and then they justify it with the logic and the facts. So your tone needs to be friendly.
Your tone needs to always be professional. You guys, as I'm looking out here, you're lawyers, you can't get away with some of the funky stuff that somebody who is writing for a catalog could get away with, or somebody who's being very folksy can get away with. Occasionally a lawyer can get away with that, but that's not my, that's not a recommendation I make to most attorneys.
I want you to be professional, yet friendly. And I want you to be an authority. Do not default to the attorney's language that leaves an opportunity for somebody to equivocate, okay? I don't want you to say, this will work for 99% of the people, but it doesn't work for 1%.
Or I don't want you to say, this works for most people. Keep in mind that your results will vary. I want you to be an authority, okay? You can never promise an outcome.
As a lawyer, you can't promise an outcome. You all know that. But you can state your opinion emphatically.
I want you to adopt the George Bush mentality of being often wrong, but never in doubt. That, I can't even, I can't stress to you how important it is that people understand that you're confident in your opinion. You can say, this is my opinion, and then state it, but I want you to state it confidently, because that's what people are paying you for.
Nobody wants to go to a surgeon who says, listen, we're gonna take out your appendix, and 99% of the time, it goes fine. Nobody's gonna go to that surgeon, right? They're gonna go to the surgeon who says, appendicitis, I've done 1,000 of them. It's gonna be great.
It's gonna work out just fine. In reality, if it doesn't work out fine, the patient's probably gonna be dead, so they're not gonna care, right? The family will care. But we wanna go to a surgeon who's confident they can get it done.
People come to you, people hire you because they're confident you can help them. So you can be confident, authoritative in your writing while stating an opinion and without promising an outcome. Wanna make sure we're all good with that.
Anybody have any questions about that right now? No, we're good? Okay, all right. So when it comes to tone, authoritative, friendly, like you're having a conversation with someone, vocabulary is important. People need to know you're intelligent, but they also don't want to feel stupid, right? So if you're writing to someone directly, like for example, in a personalized form of communication like an email, I wouldn't use one of the vocabulary words that we share on the community website all the time, like the words you need to know.
I wouldn't use like an SAT word in an email, even if it's a mass email to an audience because email is a very personal form of communication. If you wanna use an impressive vocabulary word in a speech, I'm all for it, go nuts. If you wanna use an impressive vocabulary word in a white paper or a free report that you send out, I'm all for it.
Why? Because people are not gonna be challenged or have an issue with looking up a vocabulary word that they see in a white paper that you've sent them. They'll just look it up and they won't think anything of it. But if they feel like they're reading an email that you sent them and in the email there's a $2 word, there's a big vocabulary word, that's gonna turn them off a little bit because email is a more personalized form of communication.
So professional, friendly, and also very opinionated and very authoritative. And one of the ways that I love to express opinions, especially for professionals, is through telling stories. You can tell a powerful story about either a case study that a client had or something that happened to you personally and then state your opinion as fact afterward because you had that experience.
Nobody can take away an experience from you. Nobody can challenge an experience you actually had. So if you had something happen to you and you think that this is something that can happen to most people and you wanna share it in a speech or you wanna share it on a webinar or you wanna share it in an email or in a white paper or in an article you're writing for publication, share the story and then use that story to tie into an authoritative statement, all right? Let me give you an example.
I work with, let's talk about real estate attorneys. I work with real estate attorneys and my real estate attorneys now in New York City are having a really hard time because these real estate attorneys represent landlords. And I see Nancy shaking her head.
She knows what's going on with the rent laws in New York City. The rent laws in New York City have swung all the way in favor of a tenant to the point where it is almost impossible. And I'm not exaggerating.
It's almost impossible to evict someone even if they haven't paid rent. So when my real estate attorney clients are talking to their prospective clients and let's say they're writing an article for their prospective clients to be published in a local real estate paper, a local real estate trade publication in New York, one of the things I have them do is I have them tell stories all the time about how they have worked with attorney, they have worked with their landlords to give proper notice and they tell a story and in the story they talk about, Nancy's telling me it's true anywhere in New York State, and in the story they talk about how they have given proper notice and the proper notice resulted in the court saying, well, this notice was proper and that will serve as a good notice for eviction. And the law was enacted in June and one of the things that they did in the law was they changed the way the notice period is.
So my clients as attorneys could go out and say, this is the right way to give notice and the landlords would say, no, that's crap because the court's not gonna accept it. So the way they reinforce their authority is by telling a story or giving a case study of how they've given proper notice and how the court has accepted it, then they have that authority to say that. Does that make sense? So using the story as a way to confirm your opinion reinforces that authority, okay? So when it comes to topic, tone, and timing, let's see if we can do this again.
Topic, tone, and timing, we're talking about, share, we're talking about friendly, right? I want you to be friendly in tone, I want you to have a professional demeanor in your communication, and I want you to communicate with confidence and authority. All right, now let's talk about by far the most controversial aspect of my persuasive communication system, and that's timing. When it comes to timing, how frequently you communicate with your clients, I want you to communicate with, first, here's what I want you to do.
I want you to think about how frequently you could communicate with someone and it would be uncomfortable to you. So think about your best friend, think about the person who's most important to you in the world. If I think about it and I think about my wife, Carrie, how often could I communicate with her where it would be uncomfortable for her? Well, these days, being quarantined, being locked in our house, we pretty much communicate every five minutes when I'm not working.
So I can communicate with her 20 times an hour and it wouldn't be uncomfortable. That's how I want you to think about communicating with your clients, okay? Your goal with your client is for you to have a relationship where they feel comfortable calling you about anything. So you may be going out to an audience to communicate with them, and you're thinking to yourself, these people don't know me, they don't like me yet, they don't trust me, I can't communicate with them six times an hour.
Those folks, they're gonna reject me completely. And here's the interesting thing, okay? For many reasons, I am not a huge fan of social media, but for our purposes today, social media provides us with a fantastic example. If you look at Facebook, or you look at Instagram, or even these days TikTok, many of you may not even know what TikTok is.
People, and people of all ages, are fascinated with people who are on social media and who post things on social media frequently. I know people who are my age, I'm in my 50s, I know people who are younger than me, and I know people who are my parents' age, my parents are in their 80s, who check their Facebook profile a dozen times a day or more. I know people younger than me who check their Instagram profile two or three times an hour or more.
I know you, all of you, check your email constantly. You have the little dinger that pops up, and so you get, when you're getting an email right now, probably you're gonna check it while I'm talking to you. Right? Frequency of communication with people we trust is never too much.
So when you're starting a relationship, you need to start from the premise that if what I'm saying is valuable, if what I'm saying is relevant, and if what I'm saying, if what I'm trying to communicate is timely and interesting, right? Valuable, relevant, timely, and interesting, the four elements of good communication. I'll say them again. Valuable, relevant, timely, and interesting.
People will listen. They will read. They will partake in what you have to offer.
Okay? Valuable, relevant, timely, and interesting. Some of you may know, those of you who are from Miami, you may know a gentleman by the name of Bill Hanson. He owns Bill Hanson Catering.
Bill is a friend of mine. Bill did my wedding. Bill catered my wedding to Carrie in 2006.
Bill then, after he catered my wedding, became a client of mine, because I'm just that good, right? I had paid him so much for the wedding, I needed to make him a client. That's another little lesson, but for another time, okay? Bill catered my wedding. Recently, in the beginning of this year, in the beginning of 2020, Bill's 75 years old now, in the beginning of 2020, Bill started emailing everybody without any notice on a daily basis.
He used to email people, being my client for years, he used to email people once a week. He hasn't been a client for a couple of years, and then I noticed, I started getting an email from him every day. And his emails have a, they tell a story, but they also have a religious call to action at the bottom.
And personally, I'm a religious person, but I believe my religion is personal, so I don't beat people over the head with it. I don't go out and evangelize or prophesize for any particular religion. But Bill feels very strongly that he wants to share what he learns from his religion with other people.
So I got my first email from Bill in January, and the subject line was about business, so I immediately opened it, and he tells a really good business story. And Bill is a fascinating person. He's got a very good writing style.
He's a very, very smart guy. And he opens up with a story, and then I'm hooked, right? I read the story, I'm hooked, and then we get to the God part at the end, and I'm like, oh man, I invested all this emotion in this, and now he's gonna tell me that he wants me to convert to his religion, right? So what do you think happened the next day? Next day, I get another email from him with a subject line, and I know, I know he's gonna hit me with the God message, right? But I opened it anyway, why? Because it was interesting. The last email was interesting.
Now, we're in April. He sent me probably 90 some odd email messages. I'm not necessarily in it for the reason he wants me to be in it, but I'm hooked.
I'm reading his stuff every single day because it's interesting. And now, with the whole coronavirus situation, it's really timely because he's talking about business stuff with coronavirus, he's talking about personal stuff with coronavirus, and I gotta tell you, even some of the God stuff, which I wasn't a big fan of at the beginning, it's relevant and it's powerful given the things that are happening today. So what is Bill's communication doing? It won me over because it was relevant, it was interesting when I first got it.
And when I first got it, it was relevant to me because there was a business message to it. And then he included some timely stuff, which kept me coming back. And now, he's got me.
I mean, I'm hooked. I come back every single day. Now, I'll admit to you, there are some messages that fall flat with me, all right? So he sends out seven of these a week.
I mean, can you imagine the guy's writing seven days a week, sending it to me? Probably five, four or five every week are really good. Another one is relatively interesting. And then a couple, yeah, I could take or leave.
Am I gonna unsubscribe? No, because there's enough there to keep me coming back. And this is my point to you about frequency of communication, okay? The pushback I get from everybody all the time is that, listen, Dave, weekly communication is too much. People actually say this to me.
Weekly communication is too much. This guy's communicating daily. And the ones I'm not interested in, I bail after the first paragraph.
But I read them every day, and I skim what I wanna read before I read it because he's given me enough to keep me interested, to keep me coming back. So let's bring this back to social media, right? If you look at social media these days, the people who are out there delivering interesting content, 80% of it is interesting to you. The 20%, you just throw it away and you don't think twice about it.
Sometimes we'll aggregate it and we'll look at their stuff on a weekly basis and we'll only go through what we want. That's what you're gonna find with your communication. When it comes to frequency of your communication, you're gonna find that you can't over communicate.
People are only gonna opt out if they're not interested in what you have to say over the long term. And those people who opt out, we can't worry about. You gotta communicate on a regular basis with your entire audience.
You're gonna keep the people who are most important to you. All right, so Steve has posted a couple of good questions. Let me answer these questions really quick.
Let's see. All right, so I'm gonna take your second question first, Steve, okay? How do we communicate with people when we have no connection with them in light of the bar rule against solicitation? Okay, very good question, Steve. And this is particularly relevant to lawyers, but, and I see we have Carlos on, who's a non-lawyer.
Everybody can use this. So Carlos, don't tune out, stay with me. All right, here's what I want you to do.
There's a couple of ways to do this. Steve, the first way to do this is to be introduced to someone else's contacts first and then communicate with them. So let me give you an example, okay? Klitzner's on here too.
And Klitzner has no video, so he must be like wearing a baseball cap or in his pajamas today. So Klitzner's on and you and I, Steve Siegel. Oh, there he is, no baseball cap.
Look at that handsome guy. Oh, come back, come on, don't turn us off. So Steve Siegel, you and I talked about you getting together with Klitzner to target bankruptcy attorneys, okay? Here's what you should do.
Klitzner could introduce his list of bankruptcy attorneys to you and say, dear friends, I wanna introduce you to Steve Siegel. He's got a very important article that he's written about bankruptcy and the medical profession. So those of you who deal with doctors, you need to connect with Steve because he's an expert.
So what Steve Klitzner does is he introduces you to them in that email and he says to them, here's Steve Siegel's article on bankruptcy. If you're interested, subscribe to his email newsletter by clicking this link, okay? Now, 10% of the people on Klitzner's list will then subscribe to your newsletter list, Steve Siegel. But I would contend, and the bar has supported me on this more than once, that because Steve Klitzner then introduced you to all those people, if you wanted to, you could then communicate with them from that point forward because Klitzner made an introduction.
I wouldn't do it that way. Here's what I would do. I would then have a second opportunity where you and Klitzner do a webinar together and you email your list, Klitzner emails his list, and the two of you together address issues related to bankruptcy, the IRS, all those things.
Now, you've communicated with Klitzner's list twice. In theory, Klitzner communicated with your list twice because you sent one of his articles to your list in advance. So these people have now been introduced to you two times, you've done a webinar.
The third communication would be you sending out the webinar recording to your list, Klitzner sending out the webinar recording to his list, okay? At that point, if Steve Klitzner turned over his whole list to you and said, go ahead, Steve, email them to your heart's content, you've now been introduced to them three different times, we sent the webinar recording, I don't think you would ever have a bar issue with connecting with those people. The bar issue comes in if you spam them one time and you say, call me, call me, call me, I want to help you with X. What you've done is you've reached out to them three times through an introduction with Steve Klitzner for educational information in your weekly email newsletter that you're going to forward to them after those three introductions, you're going to educate them before you ever hit them with a call to action. So they'll get four email newsletters, educational email newsletters first, and then the fifth one you'll say, if you ever need help with a medical bankruptcy case, connect with me.
So for my purposes, I think three communications where you're introduced, then another four communications where you're educating them, then in the three and five is eight, in the ninth communication, you invite them to do business with you, I don't think that's a problem. And here's the thing, we're talking now about you being introduced to other attorneys, so you're never going to have a problem with other attorneys, right? If you were to go to docs, okay, I think that eight step process with doctors would even be sufficient to cover you from a solicitation standpoint, because you've been introduced. And the argument that I would make to the bar, and I have made this argument successfully in the past is, okay, so if Steve Klitzner took Steve Siegel to a networking event, and they walked up to a doctor and Steve Klitzner said, Dr. Smith, I want you to meet Steve Siegel, he's an excellent healthcare attorney, you guys shook hands, had a conversation for five minutes, you gave him your card, he gave you his card, that introduction, you could then email him forever, and you'd never have a solicitation issue, right? So my argument to the bar would be, this is identical to that.
And given the nature of the situation we have now, where you might not be in a networking situation until you get a vaccine 18 months from now, I don't think anybody would ever give you a hard time about that. So that's one way to get around it. Now, I said this works for people who aren't attorneys.
Here's the important thing, okay? Forget about the solicitation rule. The trust that is conveyed from me introducing you in an email, or the trust that is conveyed from me inviting you onto a webinar and introducing you to my audience is incredible. So I prefer to, I can solicit anybody I want, nobody would ever stop me, but I prefer to be introduced to people in that type of a setting.
I want you to invite me to do a webinar with you in front of your audience, because your audience trusts you. Now they're gonna trust me because you've invited me to appear in front of them. Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
Thank you. All right, so your other question. Ah, one of my favorites.
What social media channels are right for lawyers? None, don't waste your time. And I'm not joking. I would much rather have you spend your time writing really smart educational pieces and pitching them to trade publications or sending them out to your audience.
That is a great use of your time. Record a video, a five minute video, and send it out to your audience. That is a great use of your time.
I want you to think of social media as dessert, okay? So when you create a great social media channel, create a great piece of content, post it on every social media outlet you want. But that's dessert. If you get anybody that stumbles upon you as a result of social media, that's bonus business, okay? There are people who will come to you and they will tell you that they can get you 15 clients a week via LinkedIn, all right? If they wanna do that for free, go nuts, right? But don't invest your time, don't invest your money in that until you've exhausted the proven ways to connect with clients and to attract clients.
Now, that's how I feel, but I realize that a lot of lawyers, a lot of you, are going to be interested in using social media because it's convenient. So can you use social media to attract business? Yeah, I think you can. Here's the thing, it's a lot of work and that work is better spent doing other things.
Here's what I want you to do. Create your content, put it on Facebook, okay? You can put it on Instagram now. I started for several months, for January, February, and March, I was really busy and I was traveling.
So I had stopped doing my daily podcast. I started doing my daily podcast again this week because why not? I've got the time to create the content, the content is valuable. So I'm doing a daily video and an audio podcast, I'm releasing it out through iTunes and all the podcast outlets and then the video goes up every day at 5 p.m. on YouTube, right? It's a video that's less than 10 minutes in length.
I'm taking those videos now and I'm uploading them to Facebook, I'm uploading them, as long as I keep them under 10 minutes, I'm uploading them to LinkedIn and I'm sending them out on all the social media outlets. Now, IGTV, Instagram TV can hold a video that's less than 10 minutes, so I'm putting it on Instagram as well. I'm doing that because it's just another distribution outlet but my feeling is not that I'm going to get a client from that.
My feeling is that it's a way to reinforce my brand but what I am doing is now I'm experimenting with a call to action that says, if you know an interesting business leader, I'd like to interview them on my show and I think social media will help me with that. People will forward the video to other people who they think could be good interview guests and I may get some interview guests and those people may turn out to be clients. I think social media can be used to amplify your message but and keep in mind that our next segment on Thursday is gonna be all about delivery systems.
I think social media minus podcasting and minus video distribution on YouTube, so Instagram, Facebook, now TikTok. We'll talk a little bit about TikTok. I don't think you guys are ever gonna get into TikTok.
I'm not into TikTok yet but those things, they amplify your message. Nancy's writing to Steve that she's gotten good referrals from Facebook groups. Groups are important and she's glad to share it with you.
So groups and Nancy, why don't we do this? Open your mic up, talk to us about what you're doing with Facebook groups and how you've made them work. I think that would be valuable. Okay.
I belong to a bunch of lawyer-oriented Facebook groups. One of them is called Solo Says. One of them is called Successfully Solo Friends.
One of them is Solo Attorney Support. They're a bunch of them and what I do with them and these are all lawyers in there, okay? So I have absolutely no problem with sharing the fact that I do intellectual property law and you need to refer to me. And because I do voodoo law and other people don't, I tend to get people say, oh yeah, if somebody comes to them and says, I have a scathingly brilliant idea.
I've just written the next Harry Potter or I've just invented the best thing since sliced bread or whatever. People tend to remember that I met this person on Facebook and I don't know anything about her practice, but here's her name and number if you wanna get in touch with her. And I've gotten some business that way.
The important thing to note is that that audience is a focused audience for you, right? So, and you know what, Nancy, that is a really important thing. So groups, if you can get into a Facebook group that where you're all targeting similar clients or Facebook group where you can connect with people who would be your audience, I think that's good. Also groups on LinkedIn could probably be valuable.
So that's what I've been doing, Dave. It's just, you know, and has it panned out? Will it support me for the rest of my days? No, but you know, I've gotten some good business on it. Great.
You know, one of the things I'm gonna mention on Thursday's call, or Thursday's webinar, because Thursday we're talking about delivery systems. I'm going to talk about these neighborhood social media organizations like Nextdoor. I don't know if you guys are familiar with Nextdoor.
Also there are specific focused organizations based on geography for like moms. There's a, my wife belongs to two mom chat groups. Miami Moms is one of them.
And there's another mom chat group that she belongs to. Those are, those exist specifically for referrals. Like that's how we got the guy who takes care of our pool.
Like we found them through, Kerry found them through Miami Moms. And he's a super reliable, like he's the most reliable person I've ever had work on anything in my home. He shows up the same day, every week.
He's, you know, he's super on top of it. He has a billing system where I can actually pay him. Like it can be automatically deducted from my credit card.
I don't have to like run outside at eight o'clock in the morning with cash, like with every other pool guy. Like this is a real, he has a real business. And we found him through Miami Moms.
Well, I did something with, we don't have anybody from Offutt Kerman on the webinar today, but I did something with the family law attorneys at Offutt Kerman. And I had them jump into those groups in their area. And it turns out that family law attorneys can get referrals from the general public, from those like groups, those mom chat groups.
So I'm gonna touch on, I was gonna touch on the community based groups, but you know what, Nancy brings up a good point. So I'll look into Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups a little bit. You know, I, for what I do, I don't really leverage them that much, but I think you guys should give it a shot and see, you know, because it is so valuable from a business development standpoint and an expertise standpoint, that now that I think about it, you know, the Panthers here in Miami have that Panther network and it hasn't been as active as it used to be.
But what used to happen is it was like a list serve. People would post stuff on there and say, hey, do you have a form for this? And the person would say, well, instead of practicing law that you don't know about and asking me for the form, you should, you know, make me of counsel to you. And, you know, we could share the fee and I will just do it for you so that you don't get a malpractice suit.
Go ahead, Nancy. I actually got some really good business that way. The New York State Bar Association used to have this really cool list serve from the general practice people.
And I went on that general practice list serve as an IP lawyer. And it's amazing the amount of business I got. This was right out of the gate.
You know, this was 15 years ago. And they, you know, they were like, oh, we have a patent lawyer with us. Oh, good, oh, good.
You know, I can send her this, I can send her that, you know, and, you know, some of it panned out, some of it didn't. But, you know, I actually spent a fair amount of time working with a litigator. I don't litigate.
I hate litigation. I think litigation is just the breakdown of the entire system. But I was working with this litigator who was trying to do transactional stuff for this guy that he had on his, the son of a rich client of his who was investing in Brooklyn real estate.
So we were putting together LLCs to hold this real estate and to do the, you know, to handle the construction and the refurbishment of these brownstones. And, you know, it lasted for, I don't know, six months or so. And it was a lot of fun.
And, you know, we were doing the contracts with the contractors and the contracts with the purchasers of the real estate. And what happens when the real estate goes belly up because the contractors don't get there in time and, you know, where COVID-19 hits or, you know, whatever. And, you know, it was, that was a lot of fun.
That was, and that was a, that came strictly from the listserv. You know, and it's interesting that you mentioned that, Nancy, Carlos is with us today. And Carlos is a real estate expert.
He's a realtor. He was the president of the Miami Realtors Association, which is, I think, the largest real estate association in the United States, the largest local real estate association in the United States. And he does a lot of work with attorneys.
He's an expert in, he does expert testimony work, but he also is an expert in selling property through a divorce and that sort of thing. So, Carlos, you could, if they would allow you into a group, a lawyer's group, you could do presentations to groups of lawyers, offer to do a presentation to a Facebook lawyer's group and have them opt into your webinar as a result of connecting with you in the group. I mean, that goes for all of you.
If you're gonna join one of those groups, add value and offer to do a presentation for them on a topic that they want to hear about that's in your area of expertise. All right, to recap today, we covered, we touched on topics. That was part one of our persuasive communication series was the topic and making the topic receiver-based.
Today, we covered tone in detail, how your tone should be friendly, professional, and authoritative. We also covered timing, how frequently you should communicate. The more frequently, the better.
And you need to communicate with people more than you're currently comfortable communicating with them. I gave you the example of Bill Hanson and Daily. I don't expect that any of you are gonna communicate daily, but at least weekly to your list.
If you're gonna post stuff on social media, you could literally post stuff three or four times a day on social media, and you can repost on social media over and over again. And we're gonna talk about all of that, delivery of your message on Thursday at 1 p.m., 1 p.m. Eastern time for people who are watching the replay. If you're on the West Coast or in the UK, it's 1 p.m. Eastern time is Thursday's webinar if you wanna ask questions live.
Here's your homework from today. Your homework for today is I want you to decide how frequently you're going to communicate with your audience, how frequently you're going to communicate with your audience, and then after you decide how frequently you're going to communicate with your audience, I want you to then come up with a content calendar. And the content calendar is very simple.
If you decide you're gonna communicate with your audience weekly and you're gonna send out that email every Tuesday at 1 o'clock, I wanna know what four topics you're covering this month, what four topics you're covering next month, and what four topics you're covering the month after. That's your content calendar. If you're gonna do twice a week, I wanna know what two topics you're covering this week, what two topics you're covering next week, then you can go in and create an outline for each of the topics, or you can go in and full-blown write the articles.
So create a content calendar. Once you have the topics, then do an outline for each topic. And then if you want to, then you can write your entire communication.
My preference is for you to leverage your expertise. I always prefer video or audio communication because it allows you to just do an information dump without the need to organize your thoughts. But if you wanna write articles, write articles.
Yes, Nancy. Before I turned into a lawyer, I was for many years a technical writer, which means that a lot of what Dave is saying, I was sitting there going, yeah, that's right, that's right, that's right. But one thing I'm going to say is that the articles don't have to be long.
In fact, the shorter they are, the better they are. People don't like to read long. So don't write long.
Two paragraphs will do it. Yeah, I mean, look, my advice on writing is always this. It needs to be as long as it needs to be for you to make the point you wanna make and be interesting, entertaining, and informative, right? So there's a lot to be said for brevity.
When it comes to video these days, unless you're doing a webinar or an interview or a full-blown presentation, I like to keep the videos to less than 10 minutes. When it comes to an article, if you can get the article in two paragraphs, God bless you, do the article in two paragraphs. That's great.
So I would love to see you do a 500-word email every week. But if you had a story to tell and it takes you 1,500 words to tell that story and you can hook me and pull me in, God bless you. Do the 1,500-word article occasionally too.
So- You know what I would do with that, Dave? I would send a short email and say, read my article, here's the link. Yeah, the only challenge we have with that is we find that once you get people off the page, you lose them. So they won't- Oh no, put the link on a separate page.
No, no, I know. But if a lot of people won't click on the link to go to where they have to go, they would prefer to see it right in there. Just make it as long as it needs to be to tell the story.
If it's something that you can get in two paragraphs, all the better. All right, any other questions before we adjourn for the day? Keep in mind that Zoom has done something which is probably for all of our benefit, but it turns out it's a bit of a pain in the ass for me. I used to be able to send you the link to my personal meeting room and sending you the link to my personal meeting room, that would allow you just to pop in here without having to enter a password.
Well, apparently people with nothing better to do are now bombing Zoom meetings and they're showing up in Zoom meetings and posting porn. I should be so lucky that somebody would show up and give me free porn, right? But that never happened to me, but Zoom is now requiring a different password for each meeting. So you'll get, I'm gonna send it out tonight because I didn't give you guys enough notice for today.
You'll get a meeting notice for me tonight for Thursday's meeting, and then you'll get another one Thursday before the meeting that will contain the right password. I was planning on just using the same meeting for all of our meeting room for all of our meetings so you could click and go, but apparently these people have ruined it now for all of us. So I gotta do a different password for each meeting.
If for some reason you don't get an email from me or it gets lost in your junk and you find yourself Thursday at noon or Tuesday at noon or Friday at three and you don't know where the meeting is, you can, you guys all have my cell, you can text me and I will make sure that I get you the password. My cell is the number I give out to everybody, 786-436-1986. But in case, to keep the Zoom bombers out, we gotta do a password now.
So look for the password tonight, look for the password an hour before or a couple hours before the meeting on Thursday and reach out to me in between if you need anything, okay? All right, it was great seeing everybody. Again, I'm here for you if you need anything. Stay healthy, stay well, and we will speak as a group next, or this Thursday, two days from today.