As a personal injury attorney who relies heavily on the internet for new clients, I found this post extremely interesting and beneficial. One problem that we are experiencing is the fact that many of our clients do not have Google+ pages and when they set one up to post a review, the reviews aren’t coming though to our Google+ page. Presumably Google is considering them spam. Any thoughts or solutions for this problem?

http://www.reddit.com/r/nova/comments/173tr6/good_divorce_lawyer_in_nova/

I seriously doubt these users are about 35 years old.

Just a lot of sources out there.

http://www.reddit.com/r/nova/comments/175hqw/in_need_of_a_lawyer_any_advice/

I hope I didn’t offend by my comment. I certainly didn’t mean to. I think your blog post on this topic (and the many others you address) is of immense worth.

And you are right. When I went back through your post, you very clearly state that it is a survey of internet users. I have been having issues with yellow pages lately, so I have been fixating on those potential users.

Again, thanks for the insights you give to all of us.

The goal was to understand initial (offline) and mostly online behaviors and answers two and three dealt with that specifically; “we created a Google Survey as to how consumers might find a specialty lawyer and what things would they look for while online in their search”.

So yes, while the survey might undercount the offline population, estimated at 20% of the total adult population, it is spot on for the internet population.

According to Pew Research, those not using the internet are Senior citizens, those who prefer to take our interviews in Spanish rather than English, adults with less than a high school education, and those living in households earning less than $30,000 per year are the least likely adults to have internet access.

You would need to adjust survey question one to account for those users. Given the frequency of elderly in that group, Yellow Page, asking another lawyer and asking a friend would go up (perhaps by 20%) and the internet stuff would go down (perhaps by the same amount). Clearly that would make using a search engine still very significant but would reduce Facebook to near zero.

Like any survey, you need to understand the biases intrinsic to the group being surveyed. In the last presidential election, there was a lot of biases in the offline phone surveys since many companies didn’t survey mobile phone users. That caused errors that skewed the results to older, more republican respondents. Google Survey, despite its online bias, was the most accurate survey overall.

Perhaps, unless your practice targets the elderly, Hispanic or the poor, a more significant group of behaviors to focus on would be that group of folks that ask their friends first who to use. What would they do as a second step? It would seem to me that many times, friends would not know who was a good lawyer and that a large number of that group would move onto the internet.

@Kerry
Public endorsements are a problematic in many legal fields that’s for sure. Bankruptcy & criminal are two examples. Reviews are a form of social where some sites like Google now require real names and that effectively either reduces or eliminates Google as a site for those types of lawyers. Certainly it also affects FB as well.. not a simple problem.