Hey, everyone, welcome to our first LISI livestream of 2023. I am Taryn Elliott, the director of client success and marketing at LISI and I will be your host today for Three Things. We are going to do this Three Things as quickly as possible because I am excited for three things to get to for my weekend, but just because it is going to be quick, doesn’t mean that it’s not going to be important and valuable.

So the Three Things format that we use originated out of a Three Things I Learned this Week that Robyn started probably a year, year, and a half ago. And we are getting back to that format this week in Three Things I learned this Week. As some of you might know, we just launched a blog called “23 in ’23” and every year Robyn writes a list of 23 goals for that year, or 22 goals for 2022, and so on and so forth. And this year, as we were preparing to put her “23 in ’23” blog live, there were three different things that I actually had to Google that she was talking about and I thought those are the three things that I would share this week on this podcast and livestream.

So the first thing is E.S.G., that stands for environmental, social, and governance. There has been a big focus on E.S.G. lately. You’ll see a lot of information from the investing perspective, but I’m gonna talk more about what E.S.G. can mean for your organization. And specifically, E.S.G. is something that LISI is continuing to work on for our organization in 2023 as you will see referenced in Robyn’s blog.

So basically, E.S.G. means making efforts to make the world a better place as you’re also generating profits for your business. McKinsey & Company has a lengthy article on E.S.G. and they took steps to define what each of the letters stands for. So environmental, as defined by McKinsey, include the energy your company takes in, the waste it discharges, the resources it needs, and the consequences for living beings as a result to that.

The “E” also encompasses carbon emissions, climate change, and it’s really looking at how every company uses energy and resources, every company affects and is affected by the environment. So that’s the “E.” Basically, it is how your corporation behaves as a shepherd of the environment. Next is social, and McKinsey addresses social as how your relationship with your company and the reputation it fosters interacts with the people and institutions in the communities where you do business.

The “S” includes things such as labor relations, diversity, and inclusion, and every company operates within a broader diverse society. So really, the social component is looking at the connections your company maintains with its workforce, with its vendors, with its customers, and with its communities where it operates. I mean, additionally, the impact that it has on all of those people, both in its supply chain and the value that it’s provided and really, the company at large.

And finally, governments, I’m sorry, governance, as defined by McKinsey, looks at the internal system of practices and controls, as well as procedures that your company adopts in order to govern itself, make effective decisions, comply with the law, and meet the needs of external stakeholders. Every company, which is in itself a legal creation, requires governance. So governance is really looking at the leadership of a corporation. This can include things such as executive remuneration, audits, internal controls, and shareholder rights.

So it’s three very separate and distinct things but these all are actually really intertwined, not just with your business, you know, no business is outside of any of these bounds, but also with each other. So, you know, environmental could have both an environmental and a social component. Governance, of course, you know, how you are regulated can impact the environmental component as well if you are subject to environmental regulations. So it’s really how they all play together and how they all impact your business.

There’s been a heightened awareness, as I said earlier, but this is something that’s here to stay. Not only are businesses finding that E.S.G. is really important for their bottom line but businesses are finding that this is really important to people for a variety of reasons. This can be important to your talent, both attracting talent and keeping talent within your organization. This can be important to regulators. This can be important to the community, depending on your place in the community. This can be important to shareholders, if you have shareholders. There are a lot of people who are impacted by the approach that you take to E.S.G.

The McKinsey report also states that companies with strong E.S.G. propositions can see top-line growth, cost reduction, more positive regulatory and legal interventions, a productivity uplift, and investment in asset optimization. All of these really, really good things for any organization. You know, at LISI, we just look at these three things as the right thing to do. So you’ll probably be seeing more from us on E.S.G. in the coming year because we are excited to implement even more of that within our organization.

Genuinfluencers

The next thing on the “Three Things I Learned this Week” is the term genuinfluencers. So genuinfluencers was a term first defined by trend forecasters, WGSN, to describe social media stars who use their platforms beyond product placement. So these are influencers who aren’t specifically sharing fashion or beauty or even lifestyle content, like we traditionally think of with Instagram. But these people are sharing important information and not just sharing it, but looking to spread important information that can keep people up to date on topics that might be affecting them.

So a really good example of this is that during COVID-19, a lot of governments were turning to genuinfluencers who had a following and engaged audience who also believed in things such as safe hand washing or vaccination or just getting the information out and using these people who were at a place of influence to share information with their audience. So this goes beyond what we’ve kind of originally thought of and defined influencers as, you know, just people who were showing off or showboating or showing their excess, while also promoting products on social media, you know, to make money, whether or not they really believed in them or whether or not people believed that they believed in them.

There’s also been a little bit of backlash from that in the influencer community or with the influencer community, I should say, you know, public in general, who are wanting to see people who are more real and relatable, which is the goal of being a genuinfluencer, being real and relatable. They’re not trying to be aspirational. People are expecting you to be authentic and genuine and most importantly, transparent.

So these are all hallmarks of being a genuinfluencer. And when businesses are looking to engage with a person in this role, they’re evaluating that, well, yes, they might have more follower, I’m sorry, they might have less followers but those followers are more engaged with the influencer and they’re more engaged audience, making the information that they’re sharing more likely to be received positively. So this is all coming from a place of being grounded and what’s important in individual, but also being relevant to the broader conversations we’re having as a society.

So especially when it comes to legal and law firms or, you know, our business as well, we’re looking to make sure we’re putting our authentic selves forward, that we are putting, you know, all of the parts of us forward, that, you know, what you see is what you get, W.Y.S.I.W.Y.G., just like we talk about with online websites or editors, what you see is what you get. So if you see me on this, you will see me the same as in-person with all the quirky things that are happening on this video. This is what you get when you meet me in person as well.

And really, we have found that the more personal our content is and the more that it represents who we are as people, not just what we think we should be saying, using the grammar that we learned, you know, all through grade school and high school, that’s the content that people respond to most, both on LinkedIn, on other social media platforms, our online website content and really taking that forward and dedicating ourselves to being those people, to being genuine, to being transparent, just being honest about, you know, what it takes to do things. You know, how we got from point A to point B. So genuinfluencers, it’s always hard to drop that middle syllable. Genuinfluencers was the second thing I learned this week and also something on Robyn’s list of 23 goals for 2023.

Position Zero

And finally, the third thing is position zero, which I had a Google, I had a lookup, wasn’t a term I had heard before, I had heard it used as other things, but I thought that it was really, really intriguing. So position zero, we’ve all heard position one as, like, the goal, the gold standard for where you wanna rank on Google search results.

Everyone wants to get to position one for, you know, whatever their search terms are, but position zero, like, that sounds better. And it is, position zero is above the first result. It is organically sourced so it’s not something that you can purchase. And one example of gaining position zero that I saw is gaining position zero is like sitting on the pole position for the Indy 500. You get the inside track at the start, you have a better start position than your competitors, and this gives you a better chance of winning. So better chance of winning the race or if you are a marketer, a better chance of winning that click-through. What you might know position zero as is featured snippets.

So featured snippets are the answers that appear at the top. So if you say something like, where is the most snow in the U.S. right now? Because, say, you want to go skiing this weekend, which might be one of the three things that I’m really looking forward to this weekend. If you ask a question like that, Google will likely find that answer somewhere. And it will not just say, hey, go to this website, and here’s the meta description that they wrote three years ago for this website. Google is gonna say, “Hey, I found this featured snippet in this post that tells me exactly where the most snowfall in the U.S. is, and I’m gonna share that with you in Google.”

So maybe that answers your question, maybe you don’t even need the click-through. But for a lot of people they’re like, “Oh, well, it gave me five options, but I’d really like to know what 10 options are.” Or, “Okay, that was really interesting and answered my question but I want to know more. So I’m gonna click on this article.” So that featured snippet or that position zero is really Google saying, this is the best, most authoritative answer to your question or your query that we can find. So that is what you’re looking at.

What they’re including is generally the answer to the question from the relevant website, as well as the details of the webpage and a link to your website. And you can get up to two times higher click-through rate if you are the featured snippet. So it’s a really powerful space for you to occupy with your content. One of the best ways, although there are several ways to get to the featured snippet, is to answer a very specific question. What is legal marketing? What should I do after I’m in a car accident? Where’s the highest snowfall in the U.S.?

All of those things are a very specific question. And if you were tailoring your content with the question and the answer in a very authoritative way, optimized for S.E.O., your chance of being the featured snippet is a lot higher. Things that also help are including images, lists, and tables that can pull right into the featured snippet. It’s often just one featured snippet, although occasionally, there will be two, but you’re the first thing that people are seeing.

As voice search becomes even more common, Google is using this featured snippet or this position zero as what it’s telling you or the result for its one true answer or its response to the voice search. So if I say, who won the Indy 500 in 2022? Google is gonna say from the website, I don’t know, Indy500Lovers.com, I see that Helio Castroneves won the Indy 500 in 2022 and I am so sorry Indy friends, I was at the race and off the top of my head, I can’t remember who won. So if that’s wrong, please don’t message me. I’ll go look it up afterward, I apologize. But that’s how featured snippets might work.

So there’s a few ways you can increase your chances of ranking in the position zero, and that is to focus on long-tail keywords to target question-based search terms, like I said earlier, like I talked about for a little bit. And to use a clear page structure with headers and paragraph tags. That’s pretty basic S.E.O. 101 that we talk with clients a lot about. Not only that, using headers and paragraph tags works on the backend as your website’s being crawled, but organizing your content on your blog posts or resources or website pages in that way also makes it easier for people to read, to scan, to break down what they’re looking for.

And then the last thing is to keep your answers to questions around 54 to 48 words long, that featured snippets only so long, and after that it cuts off. But you wanna get as much content answering the question in that space as you can. So that way, it is the authoritative answer. You don’t want people to have to read 30 words of fluff to get to the last few words of the answer. And the best thing about position zero or featured snippets is that the results are organically generated.

So that was the three things that I learned this week from us at Team LISI, that was E.S.G., genuinfluencers, and position zero. I appreciate everyone who tuned in today or is listening on our podcast. Our next livestream will be next Friday. LISI is livestreaming most Fridays throughout the year starting at 12:30 on LinkedIn.

So join us next Friday where it will be an Ask Me Anything. Lauren Forbes will be on with Robyn Addis, and they will be discussing Robyn’s goals for 2023 and answering some questions about that. If you haven’t seen Robyn’s blog post yet, “23 in ’23,” check it out on our website, www.legalisi.com. And there are a ton of other resources as well. This will be live if you missed it in the livestream on our website in a few days. And you can always grab it on our podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks, everybody. Have a great weekend, and I hope to see you back on our livestreams in the coming weeks. Bye, everybody.