Mediation Marketing and Career Guide: Making Mediation Your Day Job

A mediator recently asked me for examples of top-notch conflict resolution blogs written for prospective clients. Absolutely terrific question and deserving of a thoughtful answer.

There are a number of excellent mediation and ADR blogs now, of course, and I link to and reference many of them regularly in my posts here at Mediator Tech. But there are far fewer that focus exclusively and in a very focused way on the public market (i.e., not all or in part for fellow attorneys, mediators, arbitrators) many mediators are trying to reach.

What makes a top-notch conflict resolution blog for the public market

The blogs that I’m naming here have a number of characteristics in common:

• They are clear about the audience for whom they’re writing.
• They stay on message.
• They have content that’s substantive and speaks to their audience’s questions and interests, not content that’s more of interest to mediators and lawyers than to the lay person.
• They have a unique voice. You can tell there’s a person behind the blog and can feel like you get to know them a bit.
• The focus of the content is on the prospective client, not on the mediator-blogger’s brilliance.
• They post regularly enough to stay relevant and are active at present, meaning they’ve had new posts within the last 30 days.
• The writing is competent and professional.

5 top-notch ADR blogs for the public market

1. Resolving Conflict in Teams – Guy Harris does a great deal right with his blog. His intended audience can’t be missed because it’s the title of his blog. His posts consistently offer genuinely good and interesting content for his audience and he stays on topic – his readers know what to expect from him and they get it. He writes regularly enough to stay in people’s minds. And the blog’s layout is clean and navigable (I note he uses WordPress, which I consider the best of the blog software options).
2. Campus-ADR Tech Blog – ACR just awarded Bill Warters the 2008 William Kriedler Award for Distinguished Service to the Field of Conflict Resolution and when you visit his blog, you begin to understand why. Bill’s blog is one of the few that’s stood the test of time – just take a look at that archives list. He’s relentless about staying on topic and he knows his audience extraordinarily well (and as someone who’s been in higher ed as both a professor and a dean, I can say that with some authority). Bill has a knack for finding cool stuff that makes his readers want to stay subscribed.
3. Colorado Family Solutions Center – This blog’s audience and focus is crystal clear in 10 seconds. If I were a divorcing parent looking for a mediator who could help me navigate co-parenting, parenting plans, and negotiating child-rearing issues with my soon-to-be ex, I’d feel like I’d come home when I landed at this blog. Posts provide careful and creative details on the kinds of topics divorcing and divorced parents care about because they’re dealing with them every single day.
4. Pace and Kyeli: Authentic Communication – This blog has a unique design and tone that set it distinctly apart, and the authors don’t bland-ify themselves to try to speak to everyone. When you read Pace and Kyeli’s posts, it’s easy to see that they write in a way that conveys real consonance with their “authentic communication” tagline. They speak with passion about what they believe and honestly about their own attempts to live those beliefs.
5. Real Divorce Mediation – Nancy Hudgins’ and Debra Synovec’s blog is shiny new and it’s joined the blogosphere with a bang. Nancy and Debra are abundantly clear about their intended audience and the blog’s content echoes that clarity beautifully. Their posts so far provide a nice balance of resource and advice and I can imagine prospective clients getting a very good scan of what it would be like to work with either of them.

The limits of this list

I hesitated before sharing this list, because I know, inevitably, I will have missed some blogs that are equally due celebration but that I don’t know about yet or don’t have the time to follow carefully. And the list is English language-oriented because both my German and Spanish are just rusty enough to make discernment difficult in those languages.

Kudos to those who write these blogs for creating sites that do a terrific job of conveying their styles, competence and knowledge for clients. Do you know of a conflict resolution blog that’s well done for the public market? Please share it in the comments!

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MediatorTech.com.

In Choosing a Perfect Blog Name, Chris Garrett offers some terrific wisdom about a domain name’s ideal characteristics:

1. Readable
2. Pronounceable
3. Spellable
4. Memorable
5. Concise
6. Unique

What if you’ve already got a well-established domain name that isn’t all that it can be, yet don’t want to lose the traffic that knows of your old business name’s URL? Or you’ve purchased alternate domain names that you don’t use as websites but want to point to your primary domain?

Fear not. Here are two web strategies to the rescue:

• Domain forwarding is the redirection of one domain name to another domain name. A person typing in www.ConstructionMediation.com, for example, is seamlessly taken to www.ConflictResolution.com. Domain forwarding is inexpensive ($4-$8 per year). You would use domain forwarding if you have a primary site and have purchased related alternate domain names (with no websites operational on them) that you want to point to your primary site.
• Domain mapping is the process of re-mapping your entire site using a new name, so that the URLs of all your web pages will now direct a visitor to the new page with the new address. For example, if you have a blog hosted by Typepad, your domain name will be www.OldBlogName.typepad.com. Let’s say that your original blog site has 50 articles and a number of regular web pages. You certainly wouldn’t want to forward the old domain to your shiny new domain, because that would prevent people using your new domain from seeing any of the material on your original blog. Through domain mapping, a visitor to your site could find your “Mediation FAQs” page by using either www.OldBlogName.typepad.com/faqs/ or www.ShinyNewBlog.com/faqs/.

This closes out my short series on domain naming for mediators. If you haven’t been with us since the start, the first post was Naming Your Domain: Make It Easier for Clients to Find You Online. If I can ever be of assistance as you apply what’s been discussed here, I welcome your exploratory call.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

Your domain name is like an online business calling card. It says something about who you are, what you do, or how you can help. Preferably, it conveys professionalism, credibility, and stability, which are particularly important for helping the relatively young ADR field create public trust and interest.

In this third article in a short series on naming domains , I offer some considerations in choosing the right domain name for your mediation practice.

Your business brand and your domain name should be the same. I say “business brand” instead of business name because your business may have several brands. For instance, my formal business name is Tammy Lenski LLC, under the umbrella of which Making Mediation Your Day Job exists. I made the decision to create a new brand (Making Mediation Your Day Job) and domain (www.MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com) for this portion of my work because it makes good business sense to do so.

Choose your business/brand name and domain name at the same time. This, of course, only makes sense if you’re newly in business and still forming your business presence online and off. If you’re experimenting with possible business names, be sure to find out if the domain is available before making a final decision. I recommend PowWeb and GoDaddy to check out the availability of domain names.

What if your business name or brand is already taken? If you’ve already established a business presence you don’t want to change but don’t yet have a well-developed online presence for your business, there are several ways to work around a domain name already owned by someone else:

• Choose an alternate extension. Though .com is the prevalent choice, there may be other viable options, including .info, .biz, .org or your country extension (e.g., .uk). The web is full of competing opinions about whether or not these alternates are good business sense or not, so do what feels right to you.
• Add hyphens. As with alternate extensions, there are strong opinions both for and against hyphenated domain names. Some suggest that names like www.your-business-name.com work better in search engines and make the name more memorable because the separate words stand out. Others say it looks contrived, signals “late-comer,” and is annoying to type.
• Offer to buy the domain name from the other owner. I don’t know how realistic this is but if none of the other options are acceptable, it may be worth seeing if the current domain owner might sell. You can find the owner of a domain name by visiting Network Solutions WHOIS Search or Internic.

A few other recommendations to keep in mind. Your domain name can be up to 67 characters long (or 63 characters before the “.com”). That’s a whole lot of letters. To use those letters well, consider:

• Choose a name that’s brief enough to be easily memorable but with enough substance to say something. While there’s also competing wisdom out there about domain name length, many marketing professionals seem to be suggesting that shorter is better as long as it’s got substance as to who you are or what benefit you offer.
• Browsers recognize upper- and lower-case letters equally. So, if you’ve got a long-ish domain name to put on your business card, consider printing “YourBusinessAndBrandName.com” instead of “yourbusinessandbrandname.com.”
• It’s so inexpensive to buy un-owned domain names that there’s nothing to prevent you from buying multiple domains to protect your business name. So, if you’re primary domain name is ResolvingBusinessDisputes.com, you may also want to register ResolvingBizDisputes.com and ResolveBusinessDisputes.com. There’s even a way for your extra domains to send people to your primary domain and I’ll cover that in the next post.

The first post in this short series was Naming Your Domain: Make It Easier for Clients to Find You Online. The next post is Choosing an ADR Domain Name: Fixing Naming Mistakes.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

There’s a certain statewide ADR association whose website I visit on occasion. Every time I want to go there, I have to Google them or check my bookmarks, because they use a free domain host and the resulting web URL (www.orgname/freehostname.com) is far from memorable. In fact, it does more to advertise the free host than the association. It’s puzzling that, with owning a domain name now so inexpensive ($5-$15 per year) and the cost of hosting equally inexpensive (I pay $7.77 per month and get terrific service), the ADR association has persisted in this approach for almost a decade. And they’re hardly alone among ADR practitioners and associations, unfortunately.

It’s good business sense to have your own domain name (e.g., www.yourbusinessname.com) instead of a generic host’s name, like that of the unnamed association. Here’s why:

• Your own domain name is, ideally, more memorable, and therefore easier to find you online. When people are looking for you or your business, they’ll typically think of it by name.
• Your own domain name conveys professionalism and credibility. Your own domain name, especially in an increasingly web-savvy public, tells your visitors that you take your business seriously. And in a field still struggling to create a professional identity, your professionalism efforts move us all forward.
• Your own domain name conveys stability. Using a free host that inserts their domain into your URL suggests to your visitors that you’re testing the waters and not sure you want to commit for the long haul.
• Your own domain name offers you some control over your site. When you use a site like the unnamed association, if the free host folds, so does your site. When you own your own domain, you can use whatever host you want, like taking your cell phone with you when you switch wireless providers.
• You get email addresses with your domain’s extension (e.g., yourname@yourdomainname.com). Most, if not all, domain name registration services offer a number of free email addresses as part of your package or for a tiny additional fee. This lets you send email that’s got the same professional feel as your domain name. An added bonus is that your email becomes a tiny viral marketing tool…when people see the domain name in your email address, they may be curious enough to check out your site (a new client came to me that way recently…who’d have thunk it?).

The first post in this short series was Naming Your Domain: Make It Easier for Clients to Find You Online. The next post is Your Mediation Domain Name: Strategies for Naming a Website.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

If you didn’t know Google’s website address, could you guess it? What about Netflix? Or Mediator Tech? You sure could, and these domain names make finding these service organizations’ website a whole lot easier. That’s what your domain name should do for you.

Perhaps a prospective client met you at a gathering and recalls your name. Or maybe they read a press release about your ADR business and want to read more about what you have to offer. Or maybe a friend mentioned you to them and now they want to track you down.

They could Google you, of course. The risk is that their search might yield other ADR providers that catch their attention, or that they don’t find you at all. Ideally, your domain name (the name that somone types to find your website, like www.MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com) should be guessable and memorable.

The growth of the ‘net means more competition for eyeball time and a whole lot more domains out there with potentially similar names for similar services. To walk you through the important considerations behind naming your website, I’m starting a short series on the subject today and will continue with it over the next two weeks.

Already have a domain name and are thinking, “It’s too late to change it”? Not to worry! There are strategies for managing this and I’ll cover those in the series. The next article is Name Your Mediation Domain: Why ADR Practices Should Have Their Own.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.