Marketing philosopher Seth Godin, to whom all legal marketers pray every morning in the hope that some lawyer, somewhere, will send them a check,  Will they internalize this bit?

The road to the bottom is paved with good intentions, or at the very least, clever rationalizations.

National Geographic goes into a cable TV partnership and ends up broadcasting shameless (shameful? same thing) reality shows, then justifies it as a way to make money to pay for the good stuff.

Restaurants serve chicken fingers to their guests’ kids, because it’s the only thing they’ll eat.

Some comedians give up their best work in exchange for jokes that everyone will get.

Brands extend their products or dumb down their offerings or slap their brands on inferior substitutes all in the name of reaching the masses.

And that’s the problem with the shortcut. You trade in your reputation (another word for brand) in exchange for a short-term boost of awareness or profit, but then you have neither. Yes, you can have a blog that follows every rule of blogging and seo, but no, it won’t be a blog we’ll miss if it’s gone.

But isn’t this what it’s all about, smearing one’s glory all over the internet, no matter how undignified, shameless, deceptive it takes to make you “stand out” with the thousands of others similarly vying for those few legal bucks as yet unclaimed?

If anything-for-a-buck isn’t a sound approach for selling laundry detergent, could that possibly suggest that it isn’t utterly fabulous for lawyers?

It’s occasionally ironic that the consummate marketer and a disgusted curmudgeon see much in common, but it happens.

Yes, you can pander, and if you’re a public company and have promised an infinite growth curve, you may very well have to. But if you want to build a reputation that lasts, if you want to be the voice that some (not all!) in the market seek out, this is nothing but a trap, a test to see if you can resist short-term greed long enough to build something that matters.

Too many lawyers are hungry.  Too many, despite your self-proclaimed brilliance, fail to apprehend the long-term consequences to yourselves and the profession, of running the race to the bottom, as if being first to arrive makes you a winner. 

No lawyers builds his real reputation on the internet.  Sure, lawyers who are glib, willing to pretend to care deeply about every disembodied twitterer or commenter, will gather a tribe.  It’s easy to fool with the mass of others in the race for digital validation, just as the person who is so foolish as to think their number of Facebook friends truly love them.  For those who believe that follow-back reflects reality, they will confuse reputation with carefully crafted internet persona.

But they’re fools. Your internet friends come and go, and when they find that the thousands of hours put into pretending to like other people they don’t know on the internet doesn’t create anything of real value, but merely sucks away their time and tricks their pheromones into overdrive when they get a #followfriday, until one day someone in the real world smacks them for sitting there in the tattered underwear with three day’s growth of beard, banging a keyboard in fury because someone said something wrong in the internet.

Some will look into the mirror and realize how insane they’ve become.  Some will just continue to bang, their original purpose forgotten and their only remaining goal to pander more than anyone else.

It can’t be said that there aren’t people who will sing your praises because of your twits or blog posts.   Kevin O’Keefe has told me how some people are great lawyers, even though he’s never seen them in court or read a word of their motions.  He was once a lawyer, but he believes that twits and blog posts are good enough substitutes for real legal work.  He wants to believe. He needs to believe.

But even Seth Godin knows better.  He doesn’t believe. He reminds us to distinguish between the lies we tell ourselves and reality.  The things lawyers do to pander may serve them for the moment, but will diminish them in the long term.  It will demean us all, for it makes lawyers no better than brightly colored boxes of laundry detergent that proclaim “new and improved!!!” when it doesn’t work. 

People will remember what you claimed. People will remember what you produced. People will remember that you failed and your claims were empty.  What will you then do to pander?