Are you a lawyer advertising in the phone book, still?

Here is a wonderful article on the benefits of lawyers advertising on YouTube. My videos are as professional as Findlaws, and at a fraction of the price.

Commentary: Marketing with YouTube
by Jane Pribek
January 6, 2010

The other day, after viewing the latest humorous Saturday Night Live skit on YouTube using a link someone e-mailed me – I mean, the other day while I was working – I got to wondering about the potential for YouTube as a marketing tool for lawyers.

I searched “Wisconsin lawyer” and “Wisconsin attorney” and found that a few of you have incorporated the free, online video-sharing Web site, now owned by Google, into your marketing repertoire.

One such lawyer is William H. Green of Green & Kapsos LLC in Milwaukee, who has posted five videos on YouTube.

The videos were filmed and edited by Findlaw, and they’re posted on the firm’s Web site as well. They weren’t cheap, Green says – he declined to give an exact pricetag, but said they cost several thousand dollars.

Still, he has no regrets. “They were a bargain for how professional they look,” he says.

More importantly, Green is fairly certain that prospects don’t use the Yellow Pages to find lawyers as often as they used to. So he’s opted to spend fewer marketing dollars on the Yellow Pages and has diverted that money to upgrading the firm’s Web site.

Adding the Findlaw videos was step one toward that goal.Posting videos on YouTube is simple. You need to login to Google, click on the yellow “upload” and “video file” buttons, locate the file on your computer to upload, and click on it. You can add a title, description and tags to make the video easy to find.

You can also opt for strict privacy settings for videos of your family, or “public” for a video about your law practice. And, for the Web 2.0 types reading this, there’s an autoshare feature, so that you can automatically post your YouTube videos to Facebook and Twitter.

Green faithfully surveys all new clients and prospects about how they found him. So far, no one has claimed his YouTube videos brought them in. But the videos haven’t been posted for very long, and the holidays are a slow time for lawyers like Green who concentrate on divorce and bankruptcy.

He predicts that he will see business from the videos soon. Until then, he’s committed to creating a “multimedia presence” and experimenting with new technologies for marketing as they become available.“I know a lot of lawyers who don’t advertise, who don’t do anything to market themselves or try new strategies to build their client base. It shows in the way they practice law; they don’t challenge themselves in that regard, either. But I’m trying to build something here,” he says.

Is there a downside to YouTube? I wrote a column several months ago about attorneys advertising on Craigslist, the free online classified advertising service, and a reader commented that it seemed like “advertising in a brothel.”He makes a point: People judge you by the company you keep, and there are a lot of just plain awful videos on YouTube – along with a few really hilarious SNL clips, sports highlights, political commentary, etc.

But on Oct. 9, 2009, on the third anniversary of YouTube’s acquisition by Google, one of its creators announced in a blog posting that YouTube was serving "well over a billion views a day" worldwide. That’s a huge audience and a great deal of potential exposure.