This afternoon, we released the publication of our ILN Marketing Specialty Group’s Social Media Roundtable.  If you’d like to read the roundtable in full, you can find it here.  However, I thought it might be interesting to examine each of the questions and their responses through Zen, and invite our readers to contribute their own thoughts to the discussion!

The first question we posed was "What has been your greatest social media success?" 

Simone Fell: Our lawyers operate Megawatt (a Renewable Energy blog), The Legalist (a blog hosted on BC Business’s site and focused on employment issues), the Canadian Trademark law blog (IP issues) and BCBlawg (business and IP litigation, run by one of our associates). We are also starting up an Estates & Trusts blog within the next few weeks. The firm has LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus accounts. We still have a long way to go in building our social media presence, but a number of bloggers and journalists are connected to us through these vehicles and have approached us for commentary or republished our posts/tweets. Links to some of our blogs are featured as ‘resources’ on different industry sites. This has definitely raised the profile of certain individuals, increased the number of subscribers to our newsletters and improved SEO by driving traffic to our main website. 
 

Continue Reading ILN Marketing Roundtable: What has been your greatest social media success?

It’s that time of year again – the LMA Annual Conference is coming up in March! It’s a great opportunity to make new friends and renew relationships, so I thought I’d keep a list of those attending as I’m advised, as well as their Twitter names (so anyone interested in the conference who can’t attend can follow along). Also, don’t forget to follow #LMA12 for more information on the conference and during the sessions. 

If you’d like to follow along with a twitter list, check out my list of LMA attendees!

Lindsay Griffiths (@lindsaygriffith)
Kate Lutes (@kklutes)
Laura Gutierrez (@lalaland999)
Jill Clark Rako (@JillRako)
Gina Rubel (@GinaRubel)
Laura Powers (@lppowers)
Gail Lamarche (@gaillamarche)
Heather Morse (@heather_morse)
Megan McKeon (@meganmckeon)
Stacey McGuire (@smcguire13)
Jonathan Groner (@jgronerpr)
Kathryn Whitaker (@KBWhit)

Continue Reading LMA Attendees – the Twitter Edition!

This afternoon, I had the pleasure of sitting in on the Legal Marketing Association’s Social Media Special Interest Group’s (a long name, so we shorten it to LMA Social Media SIG) first webinar.  Our presenters today were my friends Gail Lamarche, the Director of Marketing for Henderson Franklin and Laura Gutierrez, Marketing Multimedia Communications Coordinator with Winthrop & Weinstine.

Their focus? One of my favorite social media topics – LinkedIn! 

I won’t recap the entire webinar, since participation in the SIG, and as a result, access to the webinars, is a benefit of membership in the Legal Marketing Association. But I did learn some great tips from Laura and Gail, which I wanted to share with you. 

Continue Reading Tips for Tuesday – LinkedIn

During this holiday season, we can easily get caught up in the hustle and bustle of trying to find the right gift, baking as many cookies as possible, and saying yes to every party invitation we receive.  But recently, I’ve seen a lot of posts about gratitude and how to spend the holiday season helping others, and that reminds me of what I like best about Christmas (which is what I celebrate; for you, it may be something else!) – slowing down and thinking about what I’m really thankful for as this year winds up. 

Of course, there are many things in my personal life that I’m thankful for – the birth of my newest niece, and becoming her godmother, getting to spend so much time with my nieces that the oldest one gives me hugs for no reason, welcoming a new puppy into my home, which had the extra effect of calming my older dog’s anxiety, having a roof over my head, food in my home, and a job to go to every day. 

But there are also some professional blessings I’d like to take a moment to share with you today – and I’d love to hear about your gratitude lists in the comments! 

Continue Reading What are you Thankful For?

We have looked at a LOT of information about Twitter this week, and we’ll finish out the week with our final post on the anatomy of the home page.  

Yesterday, we continued our conversation about the left hand column, which focuses on the tweets in your stream, replies, retweets, searches, and lists (which I’ll cover in a later post). So today, we’re going to take a look at the right hand column.  

The right hand column serves as a sort of Twitter snapshot for the day, from your perspective. 

Continue Reading Twitter Tutorials – Anatomy of the Home Page Part III

So now we’ve got our profiles set, and we’re building our followers.  I’d like to talk about engagement as we did during the LinkedIn series, but first, I think it’s important to understand the Twitter home page.  Because Twitter does seem to have a strange language all of it’s own, I want to make sure that it’s all understandable as we move through the tutorials.  One of the best recommendations I can give you though, is to play around with Twitter as much as possible – with all of the various social media platforms out there, I’ve found that diving in is one of the best ways to learn what Twitter is all about. 

But along with testing out Twitter on your own, let’s check out the home page now that we have some people we’re following. 

Continue Reading Twitter Tutorials – Anatomy of the Home Page Part I

Now that we’ve got our Twitter profile ready for it’s debut, it’s time to start following people.  Yes, this sounds a bit stalker-ish, and it is, a little, because you’re subscribing to whatever someone else wants to tweet.

But although there are people out there tweeting about everything they ate for breakfast, you don’t have to do this – there can be some use in tweeting if you’ve eaten out at a great restaurant, but we’ll cover subjects to tweet on in a future post! 

So let’s begin by logging into our home page again.  If you left the box checked yesterday to keep you signed in on Twitter, going to twitter.com will automatically take you to your home page. Otherwise, you may need to sign in again. 

Because we didn’t follow anyone yesterday, we’ve still got a lot of options listed for getting started, thanks to Twitter. 

Continue Reading Twitter Tutorials – Follow and Be Followed

Happy Halloween everyone! Since Halloween is my second favorite holiday (after Christmas), I had to take a time out to say "enjoy!" and share a photo of my little "spooks." 

But back to the task at hand – let’s get started with Twitter. To create your profile, we’re going to start by going to Twitter.com. 

As you can see, Twitter says that using their service, will give you "instant updates from your friends, industry experts, favorite celebrities, and what’s happening around the world."  

Continue Reading Twitter Tutorials – Creating Your Profile

Welcome to ILN-terviews, a series of profiles of ILN member firm attorneys, designed to give a unique insight into the lawyers who make up our Network. For our latest interview, we chose ILN member, Thomas Büchli of our member firm Schmidt, Jaton & Associés in Geneva, Switzerland.

In one sentence, how would you describe your practice?
Our firm offers tailor-made and comprehensive solutions that also work in practice. 

Who would be your typical client? 
Life is so varied, that there is no typical client. 

What would you like clients and potential clients to know about you? 
Everything they may consider important for them to work with me. 

What has been your most challenging case? Why? 
The one I am working on now, and in the past, when I worked for a princess in trouble. 

What has been your proudest moment as a lawyer? 
When a former adverse party engaged me as its new lawyer. 

What do you do when you’re not practicing law? 
I listen to Mahlers’ and Bruckners’ wonderful musical landscapes.

What would surprise people most about you? 
That I am terribly scared of lightning, but always look at it. 

What has been your most memorable ILN experience?
A lunch in Vienna in 2010 with very funny ILN colleagues. 

What career would you have chosen if you weren’t a lawyer? 
A choreographer or music-director, since I am a conductor of wind bands. 

If a movie were made of your life, who would you want to play you? 
I think that Woody Allen could probably show perfectly the complexity of my life…

How would you like to be remembered? 
I hope this question comes much too early…Today, I would say as somebody who did it "his way."