August 2009

First impressions are important. Today, more and more Certified Legal Nurse Consultants are making their first impressions online, not only with the legal community but also with other CLNC^® consultants. So, what impression are you making with your online presence? Do you have a plan to guide and steer your online efforts in the right direction? Here are some strategies for making your first online impression count.

Facebook

Facebook is one of the fastest growing forms of social media. My own Facebook profile is open to anyone to view. This includes attorneys, legal nurse consultants and just about anyone with a Facebook account. Keeping an open profile makes it easier for people to find me and takes up less “housekeeping” time. Other people choose to keep their Facebook profile open only to their “friends.”

Whatever your preference, think about who your “friends” are and what they are saying. Screen your prospective Facebook friends carefully. Do you personally know everyone on your friend list? Whether you do or don’t, you’ll need to check your Facebook postings daily and keep your profile page tidy. While you don’t have a lot of control over your “home” page you do want to cut out postings like “Susan invited you to a squirt-gun fight” or “Jamie scored 100,000 petals on flower-pot-mafia-shootout.”

You may not write something offensive on your “wall,” but someone else might and if an attorney-prospect sees it while vetting you, that might put an end to a relationship before it even begins. Make a choice, Facebook is either business or personal but you blend the two at your own risk.

LinkedIn

Another form of social media is professional networking sites like LinkedIn. We’ve discussed LinkedIn in past blogs. Be sure that the members of any networking organizations (online or offline) that you join act professionally. As social networking grows in popularity, more and more people are drawn to it. But another caveat – be careful who you endorse, recommend and admit to your network. There’s an old saying that people judge you by the company you keep so keep that in mind when signing up for some of the networks out there.

Twitter

As Twitter has grown in popularity, it has also grown in the number of people who send nothing but endless streams of meaningless dialogue (“RT @SammyTune Rock on You Mad Dogue”). In my opinion there are fewer and fewer people tweeting content. Just take a look at the main Twitter timeline and you’ll see what I mean. Yogi Berra is credited with saying something to the effect of “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.” Twitter is rapidly reaching that point as spammers are now getting on board. Despite that, I’m staying with Twitter as an effective way to communicate with my “followers,” that is, people who read my tweets.

Be sure to use Twitter carefully. If you join Twitter you should know why you’re joining and be prepared to put some thought into your tweets. Be careful who follows you and who you follow. Just because someone has 2,121,407 followers doesn’t mean they have something important or relevant to say. There are lots of ways to artificially inflate follower totals using “autofollowing” programs. If you want to follow someone, take a look at who is following them. If their follower list is packed with spammers, crackpots or other undesirables you may not wish to follow that person. Likewise though, it’s easy for people (and their inane comments) to appear on the list of people you follow (and on your timeline). The more popular you become, the more people will try to ride on your coat-tails. (Believe, me, I know. Tom says some people have hung onto mine for so long they couldn’t even stand if they let go and tried to walk on their own.)

I recommend that you cull your Twitter followers, and people you follow, no less than daily. Again, people will judge you by the company you keep and I personally don’t believe Twitter is the place to let it all hang out on your religious and political opinions or anything you wouldn’t want your children to see.

Twitter is also no place for shameless self-promotion and you don’t want to be a serial tweeter. If someone has nothing to do but tweet all day, it’s apparent they’ve got nothing else to do and that tells you all you need to know about their success level. Tweet when you have something to say that informs and entertains.

Just remember to “protect your tweets.” You should approve each potential follower. It’s a slower way to build a following, but more reliable than letting just any old twit follow you. (If you want to entertain, remember Ashton Kutcher can show Demi in her undies but we don’t want to see your spouse in theirs!)

If your Twitter homepage is public and you list it in your marketing materials, you want only professional tweets appearing in case a prospective attorney-client visits your Twitter homepage. That means you follow only people who tweet professionally. My motto is quality over quantity. If you want to use Twitter for personal use only – keep it out of your business materials. There’s no middle road in my opinion. Tweet professionally and to professionals and expect the same back.

Keep It Professional

If you’re using your social media networks for professional use, the same rules apply to all social media sites regarding headshots, biographies and content. Post only a professional-appearing photograph for your thumbnail and reflect the image you wish to convey when adding photographs to your galleries. Those Catwoman Halloween costume shots are out no matter how much you like them.

Write a professional biography for your profile and only post when you have something to say. Make sure your posts are about something you’ll be comfortable with other people reading (friends don’t let friends drink and post). Always remember, social media is a form of communication that will last on the Web for a long time after you (or someone else) have posted and may come back to haunt you when you least expect it.

Remember, when posting anything online there’s no such thing as personal use only. More and more attorneys and their staff are searching the Internet, Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites for such diverse purposes as expert witness screening, jury selection and looking for evidence. Companies have long been Googling not only prospective, but current employees as part of the hiring and retention process. You’re being looked at whether you want to be or not.

Keep It Your Own

In whatever types of social networking you choose to participate, use the same good judgment you would when creating your website or running your legal nurse consulting business. Don’t use materials or intellectual property owned by others without their permission. Remember, as the ultimate publisher, you’re the one who will be held responsible for any infringements.

Find Yourself

Savvy legal nurse consultants run variations of their name through the different search engines at least once a month. These used to be “vanity searches,” but today think of them as “image maintenance.” Look to see what profile you present to the web and to prospective clients. You might be surprised, pleasantly or otherwise. If it’s unpleasant, it’s time to take some steps to correct that image. See you on the Web!

Success Is Inside!

Sometimes we get so caught up in marketing to prospective clients that we forget one of the most lucrative marketing sources – our existing clients. Focusing your marketing efforts on your existing and prior clients will often yield a much higher return on your efforts than prospecting for new clients.

It takes time and effort to create a business relationship with a stranger. Creating and mailing your marketing packets, making phone calls, scheduling and attending interviews and doing the follow-up can swallow precious time you could be devoting to working on cases.

New Certified Legal Nurse Consultants will have to market to new attorneys, but even experienced legal nurse consultants sometimes forget to go back to those existing clients to ask for new business. We’re in a relationship business and I like to think of relationships with attorney-clients as long term. Once you’ve invested the marketing time and money to create a relationship, it is nothing short of criminal to abandon it.

If you’re serious about your CLNC^® business, it’s time to sit down and mark out an action plan for creating new business from old attorney-clients. They already know you so you can easily glide past the gatekeeper. Assuming you provided the excellent work product attorneys expect from CLNC^® consultants, the attorney should be happy to take your call.

Set a time to get together with the attorney. If the attorney is too busy for lunch, try a morning meeting and bring coffee and bagels. When you meet, remember your positioning strategies and your interview techniques. Focus the meeting on the attorney-client. Ask what kind of cases they’ve been working, what’s coming up and what their needs are.

Remind them you have a wide range of CLNC^® skills and offer to help in any way you can. Mention the fact that you belong to an association of more than 6,000 Certified Legal Nurse Consultants whom you can call on to quickly answer any question they may have. Be flexible and think on your feet. Every attorney has different needs and you might be surprised at the niches you have yet to fill (and may not have even thought of).

If the attorney is too busy to meet with you, send a handwritten note and attach an article they may find interesting, something on standards of care, changes in hospital policies (not your own) or let them know about non-reimbursement for “never events.”

Remind yourself that you already know this attorney so you’re not asking a favor, you’re not trying to establish a new relationship – you’re just retying the connection and seeing how you can help. Time spent remarketing will be rewarding for the attorney-client as well as for you.

Off to climb the right CLNC^® tree!

Success is Inside!

Karen, Vickie, Reese & Jill at Disney	Vickie and a Fan

My sister and I took my first nephew, Joshua, to Disney 25 years ago. At that time my legal nurse consulting business was only 2 years old. I had a blast seeing Mickey and Minnie through a child’s eyes, but I also noticed that just looking around this innovative enterprise, I was experiencing a crash course in entrepreneurship.

Everywhere I looked I discovered lessons and ideas for my own legal nurse consulting business. And this was a lot more fun than boring business class with a boring instructor who probably had never owned a real business. Thanks to my nephews, I’ve been to Disney more times than I can count.

I just returned from a trip with Josh’s daughter, my great niece Reese, her mom Jill and my sister Karen.

25 years ago I started with the kiddie rides, advanced to the wild ones as the nephews got older and here I am again starting all over with “It’s a Small World.” I can’t wait for Reese to be tall enough for Space Mountain.

The Disney entrepreneurship lessons live on 25 years later and are as valid today for your CLNC^® business as they were for mine when I pioneered the legal nurse consulting profession in 1982.

The Disney Experience

We pay big bucks to Disney to stand in line, long lines, for long periods of time that would challenge even a nurse’s bladder. And we smile while we are doing it. Some are really smiling even after paying extra to jump the line.

The Certified Legal Nurse Consultant Experience

Give your attorney-clients a reason to stand in line and pay big bucks for you and your CLNC^® services. Sure they could get a mediocre report “yesterday” from an untrained or mediocre consultant, but the smart attorneys aren’t searching for the legal nurse consultant who has a lot of free time on her hands. They seek successful Certified Legal Nurse Consultants who are in demand.

At Disney the more successful a ride, the more successful that ride becomes. Success breeds more success and attorneys (like people) only stand in line and pay big bucks to legal nurse consultants who they perceive to be already successful.

If you are successful and deliver superb work product and 5-star customer service, your attorney-clients will be willing to pay bigger bucks to be at the front of your CLNC^® business line.

Success Is Inside!

Let’s face it, every CLNC^® consultant (or their significant other) has accidentally deleted files at one time or another. And, immediately following the injudicious use of the “delete” key, we’ve all wished we had at least one of those files back. In Windows^®, recovering a deleted file can sometimes be as simple as looking in the Recycle Bin to see if it’s still there and then clicking “Restore” to put it back into its original location. But when the file you’ve deleted was on a USB flash drive or on a camera’s media card, recovery is a little more difficult.

Fortunately there are a couple of options for legal nurse consultants who need to recover files that you may have deleted, purposefully or otherwise. Both apply to Windows XP and Vista^® and may be the difference between repeating hours of work in your legal nurse consulting business or moving along with a quickly recovered file.

My favorite data recovery tool is one called File Recover by PCTools. It’s not freeware but is relatively inexpensive at $29.95 for what it does. File Recover has an easy-to-use interface and will allow you to search by file type (.pdf, .jpg, .docx, etc.) or for all files on your available drives.

Once you start up File Recover it will show any available data drives so you simply tell it what type of files to search for and let it run. It’ll find any deleted files on that drive and tell you whether or not they’re recoverable. Once you select the files you want to attempt to recover, it also lets you select the location to recover them into.

Legal nurse consultants who don’t want to pony up the $29.95 have a freeware alternative, DiskDigger, which comes highly recommended by PCWorld magazine. You can download it from the PCWorld site or directly from its creator, Dmitry Brant. Another cool thing about DiskDigger is that it doesn’t make any registry changes to your computer, so it can be deleted simply by deleting the program itself. It operates much like File Recover and can also scan network drives. This is another intuitively simple-to-use program. I just used DiskDigger to restore a “lost” polar bear photo file and it is quick!

One issue I have with both File Recover and DiskDigger is that the flash device/media card must be plugged directly into the computer (via reader, adapter or USB port), otherwise the programs will not recognize the drive. This means if you’re trying to recover a photo from a camera card, the programs will not see the card while it’s still in the camera. You must dismount the card and use a reader/adapter. USB devices and cards must be plugged into the computer before you start either program. Both work well, but for photos on a card DiskDigger gets my vote. For lost files on a hard drive I’ll go with File Recover.

Either program is a great resource for the Certified Legal Nurse Consultant who occasionally has the need to recover files that have gone astray and one or the other should be in your business toolkit.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

P.S. If you want a great resource site for PCs, check out PCWorld.com – you’ll find all sorts of reviews, tips and great reading for everyone from the novice to experienced user.

If you’ve ever doubted doing what’s right not what’s easy, doubt no more.

A recent article in BusinessWeek reported that ethical companies and companies that have a higher purpose than just making money are the ones that are strongest and last the longest. As business owners we set the tone for the entire company. We should expect integrity not only of ourselves, but also from everyone who touches our CLNC^® business in any way – employees, legal nurse consulting subcontractors, expert witnesses, attorneys and vendors.

If someone acts less than ethical it’s best to disassociate. Over my 27 years in business I’ve had a remarkable success rate, but I have had to discontinue a few professional relationships with people who failed to act with integrity. Sometimes it’s hard to disassociate because it means losing a highly skilled professional, or a valued resource, but let’s face it – people judge us by who we hang with.

In your legal nurse consulting business you will encounter situations where ethical questions arise. When you do, you’ll have to look to your inner voice and decide which side of the fence you’ll sit on. You can’t sit on top of the ethical fence, it’s either one side or the other.

There are any number of ways for doing business and any number of ways for making money. Some are quick and easy and some are hard. In my experience the ethical way is not the easiest, but does give you the highest payoff in terms of personal satisfaction and authentic success. Integrity is a success formula that brings your attorney-clients and their referrals coming back to you year after year.

One of the reasons I offer my risk-free guarantee for the CLNC^® Certification Program is because I believe so strongly in it. My integrity values require that we stand behind our products and programs and our CLNC^® consultants stand behind us in return. Our relationship with our CLNC^® students grows stronger after the sale because every Vickie Milazzo Institute staffer also embraces these values.

BusinessWeek reported that companies “whose moral compass points to true north” are less likely to fail than are those without a good ethical base.

On what foundation is your legal nurse consulting practice built? Which way does your moral compass point? I hope we’ll be able to spot polar bears together on our way north!

Success Is Inside!

I found myself standing in the gas chamber at Auschwitz contemplating how I arrived there. My father’s family is Sicilian – 100%. Picture a 13-year-old boy holding his uncle’s hand, gazing at the Statue of Liberty from the deck of a passenger liner in the early 1900s and that’s Papa Milazzo, my grandfather. My family name, Milazzo, comes from a village in Sicily. My grandparents knew each other as children before leaving Sicily and lucky, against all odds, managed to find each other and marry in the U.S.

My mother was 100% Louisiana. She grew up in Tickfaw and met my dad in New Orleans. Dad had just returned from fighting the Japanese at places like Angaur and Peleliu in the Pacific during World War II – fattened up by the Army to a wholesome 125 pounds. She immediately married him and soon here I was (along with my twin brother and older sister).

Tom’s family has a completely different background. His father’s parents are Polish, both coming from the Krakow area – about an hour north of Oscwiezm, the Polish name for Auschwitz. Tom and I both have vivid memories of our grandparents speaking in Polish or Italian when they didn’t want the grandkids to understand them. Tom’s mother’s side is a little more complicated – and the reason we were here. Tom’s maternal grandfather was Scottish (right down to the tartan). His grandmother was middle-European Jewish. In the 1930s when this zaftig woman married the Scotsman, out of her faith and against her family’s wishes, her family simply said a Kaddish (prayer for the dead) and started setting one less chair at the seder table on Passover. Sixty years later only two members of her family would speak to her. (Aren’t family grudges stupid?) One of those two was Tom’s Great-Aunt Fannie and his Great-Uncle Otto.

Tom remembers that Otto still had the tattooed numbers on his arm from Auschwitz. He’d been collected from his home, transported, numbered and then, luckily, transferred to a work camp. Fannie found Otto there and she managed to bribe his way out. Somehow the two worked their way through unfriendly, Nazi-occupied Europe and to the U.S. Many others from the family weren’t so lucky and never saw the outside of the iron-gate with the “Arbeit macht frei” (Work makes one free) motto outside Auschwitz again.

Main Gate to Auschwitz

So what does a gas chamber and the Holocaust have to do with legal nurse consulting? It may seem like a stretch, but it simply comes down to living with integrity. The other day I was mentoring a legal nurse consultant who faced a difficult choice. An attorney-client who gave her a substantial amount of business gave her an ultimatum: stop working with certain competing attorneys or risk losing his business. If she gave in to his demand, she would keep his business – but at the cost of losing her integrity. After all, if she gave into that demand, what would his next demand be?

Integrity-based decisions are not always easy. After standing in the gas chamber at Auschwitz and in the women’s barracks at the adjacent camp of Birkenau, I’ve seen what can happen when a person’s integrity is broken. If you think about it, all the things we treasure, our family, our possessions, our success, our dignity and our individuality can all be stripped from us. Standing in such a horrific place, I realized how easily we can lose everything – everything except our personal integrity.

If you’ve ever read Viktor Frankl or talked with a Holocaust survivor, you know that each day in the midst of unimaginable cruelty, the Holocaust victims had to decide how to treat others and handle themselves with integrity. Without integrity, even living through those conditions would not guarantee surviving the memories afterward. I couldn’t help wondering how my own integrity would hold out in that situation.

The choices we make determine whether we live a free life or a life imprisoned, and I’m not talking about a physical jail cell. No one would voluntarily imprison herself and be her own warden, yet every time we breach integrity we sentence ourselves to a mental jail. This all came to mind while speaking with this nurse who, to me, had a much simpler and easier choice than anyone ever faced in a concentration camp.

Ironically, the very thought that “work makes one free” was what was troubling this legal nurse consultant. She simply needed to make a choice to keep or break her integrity. I couldn’t make her decision for her, but did encourage her to honor her integrity. When I hung up the phone she was still undecided and still troubled.

About a month later I received a call from her. She made the choice to be true to herself and to what she wanted for her CLNC^® business. She was now happier, relaxed and successful on her own terms.

Temptations abound in not only the business world, but also in our personal lives. No matter how complex a decision appears on the surface, when stripped down to basics, I tell people it’s simple: do what’s right, not what’s easy or most appealing. Remember, no matter what choices you make in your life – they should all be integrity-based. Integrity has the final say in whether we will rise or decline, be whole or broken. When uncompromising integrity is our guide, then our personal and CLNC^® success is authentic.

Here’s to your authentic CLNC^® success.

Success Is Inside!

I’ve slowly grown accustomed to Word 2007 and all its petty quirks and timesaving features that don’t save you any time. One of my chief complaints about the latest iteration of Word is that annoying little “Mini Toolbar” that pops up any time you highlight some text. You know the one I mean – the one that gives you choices for font, size, color, indentation, etc. Any legal nurse consultant will tell you that whenever you highlight text to copy or drag, the Mini Toolbar will absolutely, positively appear right over the very spot you need to grab that text to drag it and drop it.

So, as the chief tech advisor to CLNC^® consultants worldwide, here’s my quick fix. Click on the so-called Windows^® Pearl (you know – the round button up in the top left corner of the screen). Then click on Word Options at the bottom right of the menu that pops up. Next make sure Popular is selected and then uncheck the button next to Show Mini Toolbar on Selection. This will banish that beast once and for all (or until you reselect it). This works in Outlook and the other Office 2007 products also.

Another tip for Office 2007 users relates to the cool little “Quick Access Bar” that is permanently fixed in the top left side of the screen. The tool bar appears in the main screenview of every Office 2007 program except Outlook. In Outlook 2007 you’ll see the Quick Access Bar only when you open a new or existing item (email, calendar, etc.) but you can customize it by type of item (really handy)! I use the cut, copy, paste and print commands on a regular basis but when you’re in any tab other than Home those cut/paste solutions aren’t there (unless you like right clicking a lot). The solution was to add them to my Quick Access Bar!

There is another way for the busy legal nurse consultant to keep productivity running at full steam. By clicking on the little down arrows to bring up the Customize Quick Access Toolbar, you’ll notice that some of your favorite (or most needed) commands aren’t there. Now you can be a Word Wizard and add just about any button you want to the Quick Access Toolbar. Simply right click on the selection you wish to add (no matter what tab it’s on) and then click Add to Quick Access Toolbar. Unfortunately they’re not added in any sort of useful order (they keep adding to the right). To remedy this, simply right click anywhere in the Quick Access Toolbar itself and then select Customize Quick Access Toolbar from the menu. Use the little arrows in the right side of the Customize Quick Access Toolbar box to move your shortcut buttons until you get the buttons arranged the way you want.

Remember, as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, it’s been scientifically proven that time equals money. I’ve just saved you time that will free you up to get those billable hours rolling on legal nurse consulting projects.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

Allergan Medical – remember them? The fun folks who brought us Botox are at it again. They’ve got a new product on the market called Latisse. Does it help a medical condition? No. Does it create the perception of a medical condition? That depends on your point of view and to me it depends on whether or not you’re a consumer and then, it depends on what you think of the FDA and its “stamp” of approval.

Latisse creates thicker and longer eyelashes. According to The New York Times, since Allergan brought this into our lives, via advertising with the obviously “eyelash-inadequate” Brooke Shields, they’ve sold more than $12M worth of this new product. But before you throw away your mascara, wands and spoolies, here’s the rub, or the wiggle, if you will. You can’t buy Latisse over-the-counter; it’s available by prescription only. And, as prescription only, has been approved by the FDA. So, no quick trips to the makeup counter for you. The only “FDA-approved” way you can get fuller, longer eyelashes is with your doctor’s orders. Just try submitting that to your insurance company!

As nurses, we know that FDA approval doesn’t mean a product is safe. I’ve discussed all sorts of products here before that have achieved FDA approval but later turned out to have bad side effects. Does the average consumer understand that? Do they think that “doctor-prescribed” means it’s a good, healthy and safe thing? Do they believe that side effects won’t affect them? After all, isn’t everything that doctors prescribe good for us, and even more so if it’s got the FDA’s seal of approval? Many of us have lived through the age of “better living through chemistry” and found it to be all lies, resulting in coworkers strung out on sleeping pills, anti-depressants or worse.

If you’re like me, don’t you think it’s time for the pharmaceutical companies to stop putting those “ask your doctor about Ineeditnowacol” ads on TV and in magazines? I see these adverts and commercials and half the time don’t know what the medication is for. But I do hear and see the warning that Ineeditnowacol isn’t for everybody and may cause liver or kidney failure, high blood pressure, low blood pressure, internal bleeding, sore gums, sore bums, feelings of depression, hyper-elation or loss of appetite. But does everybody read and understand these warnings? I don’t think so.

I’ve said before it’s time to stop medicalizing conditions as an excuse to sell more drugs. I can understand remedies for allergies, arthritis pain and hay fever, but “eyelash inadequacy?” It’s time to stop hitting consumers with advertisements that make us feel inadequate and instead concentrate on real medical conditions.

While you’re figuring out what you need to have treated next (and why), I’ll be helping myself – to a big cup of healthy green tea and some real foods rich in Omega 3s.

Success Is Inside!

Just about every doctor and nurse in hospitals own a Sharpie^® at one time or another. Some use them for marking patients and others to label their lunch. It turns out that two different studies on infection risk found that good old fashioned Sharpies out-perform surgical markers in protecting patients from the risk of infection.

The 2008 study was conducted in Canada at the University of Alberta followed in 2009 with a study on reducing surgical site infections (SSIs) at Duke University in the U.S.

So long as an alcohol-based Sharpie is capped (and the outside properly swabbed) between uses on patients, the risks of passing on four common resistant bacteria – Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), E. coli, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecalis (VRE) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa – are much lower with a Sharpie than with a surgical pen.

Changing from surgical markers is a great way to do some cost-cutting at your facility while keeping down the risk of wrong-site surgeries. Why not kill two birds with one stone and still have a pen to make your more subtle points?

Success Is Inside!