Knoxville lawyer Stephen A. Burroughs’ persona goes viral on social media

“I think it’s both flattering and amusing. It makes me laugh.”

Stephen A. Burroughs.

Stephen A. Burroughs Memes page on Facebook

Travel along any major roadway in Knoxville and drivers will likely run into Stephen A. Burroughs.

Whether it’s an ad on one of the many billboards his face is on or a Knoxville Area Transit bus, the personal injury attorney has become one of the most recognizable people in the city. His advertising strategy has cost him more than $1 million over the last five years but has rewarded him with more than half his client base and a cult-like following among locals.

And in less than two weeks, a Facebook memes page dedicated to Burroughs has garnered more than 4,300 likes and growing. A meme is a catchphrase or concept that spreads widely on the Internet.

“I think it’s both flattering and amusing. It makes me laugh,” Burroughs said of the Facebook page. “I appreciate somebody recognizing my marketing efforts and acknowledging that I’m making some headway in what I plan to do in developing a name and image for myself in the community.”

His larger-than-life persona has been likened to the notoriety of martial artist and actor Chuck Norris and he’s been referenced as Knoxville’s own Old Spice Guy, but Burroughs said he’s always just wanted to create a successful business.

“I wanted to get clients, and I wanted to render good services for my clients. The combination between effective advertising and winning my cases and making my clients happy is exactly what happened,” he said.

David Jacobs, director of digital innovation and strategy for The Tombras Group, a Knoxville advertising and public relations firm, said Burroughs’s spreading popularity from traditional into social media is a prime example of how “offline feeds online.”

“It’s a very good example of something going viral, and it’s just a portrait photo,” Jacobs said.

Burroughs didn’t start out making a big splash on billboards and buses until three or four years ago.

When he first began his practice in 1999, Burroughs relied heavily on word of mouth, referrals from other lawyers and clients and the phone book.

About six years ago, he decided to get more aggressive in his marketing and began to dabble with traditional media.

“It was just little things,” he said. “It was a matter of experimentation. I would try a little bit of this and see if I would get a response. If I didn’t, I would change the content, change the times it was appearing. If I kept toying with it and nothing seemed to work, then I would say, ‘Well, that must not really be for me even if other people may have success with it,’ and I would just go to something else.”

Eventually, Burroughs decided to give outdoor advertising a try and he appeared to find his niche.

“The outdoor market proved to be really responsive to my message and my image,” he said. “So after buying a couple of them and getting some response, I thought, ‘Oh, this must be it. I’ve hit on what works for me.’”

Burroughs quickly went from two billboards to 31 in a year and a half. Then he began to appear on buses.

“There’s some areas in town you can’t have billboards and some areas where they’re not seen. I thought it would be cool to have some other type of outdoor advertising to tie it all in,” he said.

He currently has about a dozen bus wraps but plans to increase that number soon. He’s also begun to air a few television and radio spots.

“You just see him everywhere. It’s a classic example of when people get behind a brand. He’s made an icon of himself,” Jacobs said.

“He’s making some smart decisions. While he might be somewhat overexposed, it’s obviously working for him,” Jacobs added.

Burroughs said he’s not too worried about overexposure yet. His Facebook fans are “encouraging me to keep on going.”

Ryan Clark, a freshman at the University of Tennessee majoring in piano performance, created the Facebook memes page nine days ago. He said he thought it would be something funny shared among friends and has been surprised at how popular it has become.

“Driving to and from campus, I always saw his ad and found his facial hair magnificent. It just seemed like a perfect picture for a meme,” Clark said. “I can’t grow facial hair. It demands my respect.”

Clark admitted he was initially concerned he would receive a cease-and-desist letter, but within a few days, Burroughs was posting on the page himself.

“When I realized it was actually him, I danced around my dorm room,” Clark said.

It’s that participation that sets Burroughs apart, according to Jacobs.

“It’s true involvement not just exposure. He’s just kind of letting it live,” Jacobs said.

Almost every day when he’s out, people will either say something in passing or they’ll stop and talk with him.

On this particular day at the KAT center, a man waiting for the bus asked Burroughs if he was the lawyer on all the ads. Indeed, Burroughs acknowledged. Burroughs writes the content for his ads.

“I know my clients better than anybody,” he said. “As a trial lawyer, in order to do a good job, I have to be able to understand people and what people want and what people listen to and try to relay that.”

His peers, however, aren’t always so supportive. Personal injury can be very lucrative. The first step is getting the clients.

“There are other attorneys who wished they had as many cases as I do and wished they made as much money as I do who are as a result not happy about me advertising. Either directly or indirectly through other people, they have made that known,” Burroughs said.The head of the Knoxville Bar Association did not respond to requests for comment.

Regardless, don’t expect Burroughs to slow down any time soon.

“I had always planned to take some of the money I make and enjoy it and then take a ton of it and reinvest it,” he said. “That’s what I continue to do right now.”

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A Magazine Bets That Readers Play Tag

The Condé Nast magazine is hoping that readers will use their cellphones to connect to additional digital content through mobile codes. For example, readers intrigued by the pop star Rihanna — and who want to know more — can use their phones to interact with a Facebook logo on the September cover issue and access a video of the singer answering questions about her life. Inside the issue, they can point their phones at more logos to learn about discounts, giveaways and other offers from the magazine and advertisers.

Readers can also immediately “like” the magazine or “like” an advertiser’s page and have deals delivered to their mobile phones.

“Our theme is social networking across the board,” said Jenny Bowman, Glamour’s creative services director. “Social is so huge that we wanted to take it to the next step and make it seamless for our audience.”

Glamour’s effort is part of a push by beauty and fashion magazines, which have long relied on lush advertisements and spritely content to keep audiences faithful, to assure that digital-era readers come back for more. Many women’s magazines, particularly at Condé Nast, struggled to capitalize on their readership when they began migrating content to the Web.

Other publications have experimented with a variety of quick response bar codes to interact with readers, although Glamour said its Facebook-enabled issue, which uses Social SnapTags from SpyderLynk, a Denver provider of mobile marketing technology, was the first of its kind. Allure, another Condé Nast magazine, published a “Free Stuff” issue in August with Microsoft Tags, another form of mobile code, that readers could use to get giveaways. The issue drew some 428,000 interactions last year, and 400,000 so far this year, said Marie Jones, a magazine spokeswoman.

Entertainment Weekly, a Time Inc. publication, attracted 240,000 interactions, also using Microsoft Tags, for its three most recent movie preview issues, said Fran Hauser, president for digital at the company’s lifestyle brands.

Use of mobile codes has soared this year, rising more than four times from January to June, according to a new survey of 100 magazines on newsstands. The study, by Nellymoser Inc., a mobile engagement company in Arlington, Mass., found that 373 codes appeared in the magazines surveyed in June, up from 88 in January.

Such codes are particularly popular among magazines focusing on fashion, home, family and homemaking, according to the study authored by Roger Matus, a Nellymoser executive vice president, and Ann Carver, an analyst.

“Social media was a very small percentage of action code use six months ago,” the authors found, “but now scanning to share via Facebook, Twitter and/or e-mail are included in 18 percent of all campaigns.”

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For its September issue, Glamour used Social SnapTags, which display Facebook or Twitter logos inside a code ring. IPhone (and soon Android) users can download an app that lets them simply hover their phones over the tag to open content. Camera phone users need to snap a picture of the tag and send it.

In the first week after the Glamour issue hit the stands on Aug. 9, there have been 100,000 interactions, and 25,000 of those occurred in the first 24 hours, said Ms. Bowman, of Glamour. So far, fans of Glamour’s Facebook site have risen nearly 18 percent, to 385,500, she said.

“The tags drive consumer participation,” said Nicole Skogg , founder and chief executive of SpyderLynk, which created the SnapTags. “There’s a ripple effect in interest when the users can move seamlessly to a page.”

Glamour partnered with Rihanna, who has nearly 44 million fans listed on her Facebook page, for the September issue, the magazine’s biggest of the year. The 402-page magazine has a feature story on her, with a SnapTag to open her video chat. Glamour, which created and executed the Facebook-enabled campaign in-house, worked with 25 advertisers to participate in offers. Lancôme, for example, is offering a chance to win a year’s supply of eye makeup for participating readers. Gap clothing store is marketing a 40 percent discount on an item. Other marketers are offering incentives like coupons, free trips, gift cards and free samples.

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Participating brands like Zappos, Nivea, Skinny Cow, Dr. Scholl’s and Tresemmé also can add to their fan base when a mobile user hits the Facebook “like” button for the brand, said Ms. Skogg.

Also, Glamour readers who interact with a tag designed to look like a pink bow-tied present can immediately access deals from Glamour, including contests and freebies. They can also follow their favorite magazine editors by snapping the Twitter tag.

Despite industry interest in mobile action codes, a new study of some 349,000 magazine readers found that only 4 percent took a picture of a code that they saw in magazines. The numbers are from Starch Advertising Research, a unit of GfK MRI, and cover the first six months of 2011.

Tags have been slow to steadily catch on with consumers, in part, said Ms. Hauser, at Time, because “they don’t always add value.

“A lot of publishers are using such codes, but they can’t be added frivolously for the cool factor. The question is where does it make a better experience for the user.”

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