Show Notes

A successful online persona makes a brand recognizable and appealing. When you’re crafting yours, social media is your best friend — but it can be hard to push through the abundant online chatter. Today’s guest is Danny Aller, the man behind the social media for the Florida Bar and the Tallahassee Beer Society. He’ll be sharing how he navigates through two very different online personas and how to find a voice that’s right for your audience.

Links & Resources

Connect with the Florida Bar:

Website

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

YouTube

Connect with the Tallahassee Beer Society:

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

Check out:

The award-winning #JustAdulting app for teens

The Miami lawyer who inspired #LawyersAreTheCoolest

Our favorite holiday: Love Your Lawyer Day

Podcast Transcript

Episode 1.1 – Danny Aller

In the age of social media, celebrities and pundits aren’t the only ones who can craft a captivating quip in 280 characters or less. Brands are tapping into the power of social platforms like Facebook and Twitter to cultivate a winning persona. The potential that social media holds is staggering — it can dictate whether something gets catapulted into viral fame or remains stuck in Internet anonymity forever.

For brands seeking to get their voices heard over the online chatter, a recognizable social persona can be a game-changer. But it’s no easy task. Messages need to be timely, concise, consistent and interesting. They need to pique the interests of their target audiences enough to engage them in the conversation.

And every audience is different. For fast-food restaurants, their wit has to be as quick as their food. Just ask Wendy’s. The company’s confidence is largely due to its ability to pin down a style that customers relate to and respond to.

You may have watched the infamous chicken sandwich feud go down on Twitter. It all started when Chick-Fil-A tweeted about having the original beloved chicken sandwich, sparking responses from other restaurants, but it quickly turned into a face-off between Wendy’s and Popeyes.

Striking the right chord on Twitter means understanding your audience, developing a consistent personality, and copping a tone that engages and maybe even provokes. OK, that’s one thing if you’re a fast-food restaurant. But, what if your brand is a little straight-laced? Well, that’s no excuse to check your creativity at the door.

The Florida Bar is a perfect example of a buttoned-up brand that’s figured out how to have just the right amount of fun on social media. From posts intended to gently gig bar associations in other states, like this tweet: We’re not saying the Florida Supreme Court is the most GORGEOUS Supreme Court in America. But we’re also not saying it’s not. To legal humor. To cat photos for a good cause…

The Florida Bar seems to have struck just the right balance. Their audience is a more mature and serious crowd that won’t be fighting each other over sandwiches (unless it’s in court). The Bar has concocted a delicate social blend that’s conversational yet informative, professional yet fun to share.

Today, we’re speaking with the person behind this persona and more, Danny Aller.

Hello, and thank you for joining Ubben talkin’. I’m your host, Michelle Ubben, and today we’re discussing the keys to an engaging and newsworthy social media presence. What do you say? To Whom? How often? And most importantly, when can you be funny?

Later we will be speaking with Danny Aller, Public Information Specialist for the Florida Bar and one of the founders of the Tallahassee Beer Society, about how any brand can engage audiences and create a winning social persona.

Danny, welcome.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Danny, when it comes to social media, you have a foot into very different worlds with The Florida Bar and the Tallahassee Beer Society. I take it those are two very different personas.

Yeah, definitely. It’s definitely more of a professional setting in The Florida Bar, but they give me a lot of freedom to have fun with it. Be social, I guess is the best way to describe it. It’s taken the bar from seeming like their big brother and they only want to talk to you when you’re in trouble to, “Hey, we’re here to be able to reach out to us for anything, for resources, for information.” Some humor occasionally here and there. And then obviously with the Tallahassee Beer Society, it’s a lot of humor all the time and a lot about beer at the same time. So two very different worlds.

The bar’s social media has really become the gold standard for bar associations around the country.

Yeah, thank you, I appreciate it.

What’s made it so successful in your view?

I just think the interaction in general. Being able to communicate with your members. One of the reasons they hired somebody to manage the social media full time in 2014 was they felt like they weren’t reaching a big section of their members. And so the communications committee got together and said, “Where are we missing them at? Where they’re not opening the emails, they’re not getting the newsletters, they’re not reading the newspaper. Where are they getting their information from?” And almost unanimously it was social media. So really props to them for being forward thinking. They were one of the first bars in the country to have a full-time social media person. A lot of bars have fallen in line since then. And I think just in general, being able to have a relatable voice and tone with how you talk to people about the different things going on in the bar. You can’t just beat him over the head with CLE’s and news all the time. You have to mix up the content. Which is really the key to our success I think.

Okay. Let’s talk about some of your most successful posts. I love the email like it will one day be read in a deposition.

Right, yeah.

Boy, isn’t that the truth?

It really is. Yeah. That hit a nerve, I think with people. It’s a meme that’s been out there for a while. And it’s a very like legal word of wisdom, I guess so to speak. But at the same time it’s also kind of funny.

Well and then hashtag lawyers are the coolest.

Right? Absolutely. That was a big one for sure. We had a lawyer in Miami that helped get the Rolling Stones to go play down in Cuba, which was no small feat. He paid for the entire thing, set the whole thing up. And when we read the story, I just came up with a hashtag off the top of my head with, “This is really cool. Lawyers are the coolest.” And it just took off. So even to this day, if you go search lawyers are the coolest, you’ll still see people still using that hashtag on a regular basis, that spread all over the world. We had lawyers in the Philippines, and Japan, and across the pond over in Europe that were using it. And if you trace it back to the very, very beginning of it, it all started with us.

And then Love Your Lawyer Day actually landed you in the Wall Street Journal. Right?

Absolutely, yeah.

And props to the lawyer in Broward County who got this going. He runs the Association for Lawyers Public Image. And basically what he does is he tries to promote really, really good positive stories about what lawyers are doing out there. And this was something that he started many, many years ago. It took somebody like us and social media to pick up on it and help get it out there. And now it’s really, really big. If you search social media on November 1st, from that hashtag you’ll find a lot of from Love Your Lawyer Day.

Well, I can think of a few lawyers I love.

Right.

So I’m going to have to let them know today.

Absolutely. I’m sure The Florida Bar appreciates that.

You raise a good point about humor. You really need a certain amount of humor to engage your audience, especially younger audiences. But I think probably everybody.

Right.

And it’s easy for a very buttoned-up organization like The Florida Bar to avoid humor.

Right.

To feel like it’s not fitting for the brand. So how do you find that line?

If you’re hesitating at all, you should probably ask somebody at a pay grade above you just to make that call for you to make sure that it’s okay that you’re on the right track. And I’ve done that a few times where I’ve been like, “No. I think this is a little bit, a little too edgy or whatever it is.” And I think that when you’re able to find that fine line people then expect a good level of humor throughout the content. And so we post legal humor on Mondays and Fridays. When we first started out, we were doing legal humor all the time. And I think it probably, we ran through the gamut of all the legal humor cartoons out there. So it