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Law Firm Marketer Gone Wild
Legal marketers abound. Some are reputable and generate positive results, others are simply ineffective, but still, do no harm besides wasting a lawyer's money. Then there's the third category of marketer who's discussed over at Mark Bennett's Defending People blog: one who causes damage to the reputation of the lawyer for whom he's working.
Here's what happened. Last week, Mark Bennett discovered that his blog's content had been scraped and posted at Melina Benninghoff's law firm blog (at this time, the blog has been removed and the law firm Web site, Benninghoff Law, isn't working, either). So Bennett took Benninghoff to task at his blog, and in short order, was contacted by Benninghoff's marketing agent, Wayne Conley, who asked Bennett to remove content concerning the issue. Bennett refused, but he took pity on Benninghoff, offering her this advice:
Melina, Wayne Conley has done irreparable harm to your reputation. If you paid or even allowed him to do it, you’ve got nobody to blame but yourself. Outsource your marketing, outsource your reputation.
If, on the other hand, he does not, has never, and will never work for you, then I’d be happy to publish a correction as soon as you explain how it is that you allowed someone outside your control to build your website and trade on your name, and why you never did anything about it.
The moral of the story. Be careful -- very careful -- of who you allow to market for you online. As this incident bears out, bad publicity is NOT always better than no publicity.
(H/T Brian Tannenbaum).
Posted by Carolyn Elefant on September 8, 2009 at 04:43 PM | Permalink
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