Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Did You Receive an Invitation to Join?

People seem to be receiving letters once again from Metropolitan Executive and Professional Registry inviting them, as leaders in their industries, to join the Registry. I have been contacted by a couple of librarians (strangers to me) who were researching this company to see if they were on the up-and-up. They had found my earlier inquiries archived from the CALL listserv and wondered what my findings were back then. See: CALL-L Archives -- August 2002 (#47).

These were my conclusions at the time:

- while this may be a legitimate company, the usefulness of their product is negligible for the purposes of a lawyer wishing to market him/herself;

- the initial cost to sign up may be free or nominal, but then there are additional costs for purchasing things like press releases;

- only those who are in the registry have access to the registry. They state that this is for "privacy" purposes, but what good is listing yourself in a private directory if the purpose of signing up is for advertising?

- from the examples of press releases and mentions I found around on the web, those signed up for the registry were not necessarily the people to whom the lawyer would most want to market him/herself. It therefore seems to function more like a virtual, disparate private club than a useful directory.

To flesh this out a bit, here are examples of how people have used their listings to market themselves:

http://www.douglasmccoy.com/coach.html (mentioned at least a couple times)

http://www.asoulmate.com/html/news.html (second to last item on page)

http://www.newyorklimousine.com/

http://www.multicompgroup.com/history.html

Finally, I should mention I was personally given the honour of an invitation to join the Registry myself a number of years ago. Back before I had done anything like sit on committees or be in any way considered a "leader" in my profession. That doesn't make you skeptical, does it?


Sept. 30. 2006 - at this time comments for this post are closed. I thank everyone for your comments. I encourage you to start your own blog or chat forum on this subject if additional discussion is desired. - Connie