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The short answer?

Yes.

The slightly longer answer? It depends – on the firm and its strategy, and on the consultant.

Let’s talk about firms and lawyers first – some people have claimed that lawyers need consultants to explain social media tools and how to use them, while others have claimed that lawyers can figure out these tools themselves.

And that’s where the "it depends" comes in.  Lawyers are well-educated, intelligent individuals – they’ve graduated law school and passed the bar, haven’t they? So they can certainly figure out these social media tools. It’s not rocket science.

The better question is, should they spend the time doing so?Continue Reading Are Social Media Consultants Really Necessary for Law Firms?

If you love shoes like I do, you’re familiar with Zappos.com, the online shoe and clothing shop. Since it was founded in 1999, it has grown to be the largest online shoe store.  How did they do it? Largely, in thanks to their CEO, Tony Hsieh.  According to their website: 

In 1999, at the age of 24, Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay) sold LinkExchange, the company he co-founded, to Microsoft for $265 million.

He then joined us [Zappos] as an advisor and investor, and eventually became CEO, where he helped us grow from almost no sales to over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales annually, while simultaneously making Fortune magazines annual Best Companies to Work For list. In November 2009, Zappos.com, Inc. was acquired by Amazon.com in a deal valued at $1.2 billion on the day of closing.

 Not too shabby, huh?Continue Reading Lawyers: What Can We Learn From Zappos?

On Wednesday, December 8th, the ILN offered a webinar with Freesource’s Nathan Egan on "LinkedIn for Lawyers." Because of all the great information in the webinar, I have broken this up into a few posts, with Part I and Part II being published last week.

If You Build it, They Will Come

Nathan said that one of the common objections for lawyers using LinkedIn is that they’re too busy to do any of this, let alone "build a network."  But he assured the audience that they already have a network, built over their careers. They don’t need to build a new network on LinkedIn, just capture the existing network.

He said that LinkedIn does their best to automate this process, allowing users to upload their contacts from an email program. Users can have very few connections and in as little as an hour, send out 100 meaningful connection requests to their network. In the next day or so, those people will connect with you and you’ll have a nice network.

Nathan said that once users have built the network of people they know, continuing to develop it becomes a case of management over time. It should integrate with your work flow, if you’ve set LinkedIn as your home page, and as you see new connection opportunities, you can pick them off one at a time.Continue Reading Webinar Re-cap: LinkedIn for Lawyers with Nathan Egan Part III

On Wednesday, December 8h, the ILN offered a webinar with Freesource’s Nathan Egan on "LinkedIn for Lawyers." Because of all the great information in the webinar, I’m breaking this up into a couple of posts, with Part I being published yesterday.

Now let’s jump right into Part II

Your External Profile – A Brand Beacon

Nathan then took the audience through an individual LinkedIn profile, saying that it can be a beacon for your brand.  He said that in social media, we talk a lot about "inbound marketing" – creating the context for people to come to you – and the profile is really where it all starts in terms of positioning.

Most firms have put lots of money into their corporate websites, which are the umbrella marketing portal for the firm.  Nathan said that they’re looking to help people understand that the LinkedIn profile, the social assets of the firm (which are the people), are now sub-domains of the corporate website.

They have the potential to drive search engine optimization activity back to the corporate website.  Nathan said that by hard linking and key wording the profile in a meaningful way, with the keywords that the firm would want to be found for, they create a tremendous lift in their marketing efforts very naturally and passively.

Nathan said that the idea is to make LinkedIn work for the attorneys in a way that doesn’t take a lot of time. It does involve some upfront work to get it going, but he said the investment is well worth it.  Once the profile is up, running and polished, it becomes a passive part of your professional world.Continue Reading Webinar Re-cap: LinkedIn for Lawyers with Nathan Egan Part II

The ILN has offered a webinar series to our members for the past two years, and in 2010, we’re offering a three-part series on social networking.  In October, we started with, "Social Networking Strategy & Blogging," with Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog.  December’s webinar with Freesource’s Nathan Egan focused on "LinkedIn for Lawyers."  

There’s a lot of great information in here from Nathan, so I’ll break this up into a couple of posts.

After a short introduction from ILN’s Executive Director, Alan Griffiths, Nathan jumped into his presentation.  Due to some technical difficulties, Nathan wasn’t able to share his PowerPoint, but instead offered a fabulous demonstration of the most useful features of LinkedIn and how attorneys can make it work for them.

He started by saying that the ILN had informally interviewed a few of the attorneys before the webinar, and learned that their business objectives for 2011 centered around finding new clients, having better access to & visibility in the marketplace, being able to collaborate and share, and positioning the firm and its lawyers to be top of mind for clients.  Nathan said that these new tools, like LinkedIn, offer a way to help meet these business objectives.Continue Reading Webinar Re-cap: LinkedIn for Lawyers with Nathan Egan Part I

With social media being such a new phenomenon, and social media tools a new technology, it’s reasonable to expect that there are a lot of questions surrounding them. 

During the ILN’s 2010 Regional Meeting of the Americas, I got a question from an audience member that I thought I’d repost here.  One of our attorneys wanted to know if a distinction is made between blogging and social media, and also, how it’s possible to keep employees from using social networking tools at work.

I explained that some people do make a distinction between blogs and social media, but I consider them to be the same thing – my reason for this is that the main idea behind social networking (effective social networking, in my opinion), is that it’s supposed to be social. So when people are commenting on a blog post you’ve written, it’s important to be paying attention to these comments and interacting with the posters.

As my ILN audience knows, and this blog audience may have guessed, I believe that social networking CAN be a professional, as well as social, tool.  I’ve said before, if people are using social networking tools at work, for personal purposes only, that’s a human resources problem – those people looking for something else to do during work time are going to be the same people making personal phone calls or emailing joke forwards.Continue Reading Questions About Social Media?

One of our sessions during the ILN’s 2010 Regional Meeting of the Americas in Houston focused on the always popular topic of law firm management.  The panel was moderated by our Chairman, Peter Altieri of Epstein Becker & Green in New York.  On the panel were Steve Arthur of Harrison & Moberly in Indianapolis, Indiana, Carlos Rodriguez-Vidal of Goldman Antonetti & Cordova in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Doug Winthrop of Howard Rice in San Francisco, California, Bill O’Neill from McDonald Hopkins in Cleveland, Ohio and Anders Lundberg from Hellstrom in Stockholm, Sweden.

Creating Demand

Altieri began by saying that one of the challenges in the current economy for firms is creating demand. In the past, they had much more pipeline work than there is now, in part because clients are trying to do more in-house. He added that even the big firms are coming in and being price-competitive, and asked the panelists to comment on this.

Winthrop said that his firm has been seeing a tremendous rebound in the litigation sector of the firm, which has them quite busy.  Now, they’re facing the issue of whether to hire more attorneys on the litigation side, or ask the business lawyers to chip in.  He said they’re concerned that they’ll find themselves with overcapacity, so they’ve addressed the issue by doing both.Continue Reading ILN Conference Re-Cap: Law Firm Management Panel

The ILN has offered a webinar series to our members for the past two years, and in 2010, we’re offering a three-part series on social networking.  Wednesday kicked off our first webinar in the series, "Social Networking Strategy & Blogging," with Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog.  

After a short introduction from ILN’s Executive Director, Alan Griffiths, Kevin treated the audience to an overview of social networking strategy and blogging.  He shared his experience with getting involved with the internet and what it has meant for him, in order to give the audience some context for the presentation and the benefit of his experience.

The bulk of Kevin’s presentation focused on how lawyers can be successful using social networking tools and why good lawyers tend to gravitate towards using these types of tools.  He began by talking about how few people trust advertising – only 14% – and most law firms on the internet are advertising with their websites.  

He added that a website is necessary for law firms as one point of contact, but said that it doesn’t do much for the firm’s word of mouth reputation.  He likened it to bringing potential clients to see a billboard and expecting that to encourage them to hire their law firm.  For this reason, Kevin said that using social networking tools to drive traffic to the firm’s website is not an effective use of the tools.  Continue Reading Webinar Re-cap: Social Networking Strategy & Blogging with Kevin O’Keefe, LexBlog

Last week, one of our firm’s marketing directors emailed me to see if I had a list of law firm social media policies. Though I’ve seen a few floating around, and know that Doug Cornelius includes law firm policies in his list, I haven’t seen a strictly law firm-based listing.  

Yesterday, in a post called "Social Media Policies for Legal Types," Above the Law mentioned Fast Company’s series of policies, including the guidelines from Harvard Law.  Obviously, a law school’s social media guidelines would be different to that of a law firm, so they offer Adrian Dayton‘s (who advises firms on social media strategy) suggestions for law firms, which can be summed up by his opening thought "Don’t say stupid things." I know Kevin O’Keefe would shorten that further and say "Don’t be an idiot." 

But if your firm is looking for something more comprehensive, I’ll pass along the links I gathered for our legal marketer, with thanks to my friends on Twitter who passed some of these along.

Please feel free to add your own firm’s in the comments as well, and check back to Above the Law’s post, where they’ve invited commenters to do the same.Continue Reading Social Media Policies – Where do we Start?