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Here on Zen, I talk a lot about why I love social media, and how I think it can be useful to lawyers and law firms.  Now that I’ve got you all convinced, I realize that not everyone knows how or where to start.  I’ve talked about some of the basic principles of using these tools – engage, don’t broadcast; give yourself a small window of time to use them each day, etc – but not the how-to of using them.  So I’m going to be doing a series of social media tutorials over the next several weeks to get you started, and I’m beginning with LinkedIn.

To me, LinkedIn is the most useful social media platform for lawyers, if for no other reason than it’s considered the most professional.  Because of that, most of your clients will be there, so you should be too.  

Here’s a quick note – there is a LOT of information in this post, but don’t be alarmed. It will take you less time to complete your profile than it will to read through this post!

Continue Reading LinkedIn Tutorials – How to Set up a Profile Part I

For this week’s Ask Friday! we welcome guest poster, Cordell Parvin.  I’ve gotten to know Cordell through Twitter, and have been fortunate to see the excellent advice he has for lawyers through webinars and his upcoming video coaching series.  

According to his website, "Cordell Parvin has practiced law for more than 36 years. He has developed a highly successful national construction law practice. During his career, Cordell has been a rainmaker and taught, mentored and coached young lawyers on their careers, work-life balance and rainmaking. Cordell also has been a Practice Group Leader and worked with other Practice Groups helping them to develop their business plans and strategies."

Today’s Ask Friday! question is "What separates super achievers from achievers?"  Huge thanks to Cordell for guest posting this week! 

"A few weeks ago I spoke to a group of first year lawyers during their orientation. As I neared completion of my presentation I asked for questions. One young lawyer asked a thought provoking question: “What is the difference between lawyers who are superstars compared to lawyers who are stars?”

"In my career I have been blessed to work with some really outstanding lawyers. I have also had the opportunity to witness differences between the super achieving lawyers and those successful lawyers who do not reach that status. Here’s my take on the differences.

Continue Reading Ask Friday! Superstars Edition by Cordell Parvin

I’ve spent the last two days talking about how to make improvements to your LinkedIn profile, and getting the most out of your LinkedIn home page.  Today, I want to cover LinkedIn Groups.

On LinkedIn, there are groups for everything, from business networking to animal lovers.  Groups are an excellent way to connect with people outside of your immediate network in areas where you share an interest.

I’m going to focus on the ILN’s group, because I’m the moderator and have the most familiarity with it, but most of this advice can be applicable to any business networking group for lawyers. During my presentation, I started with the "why" – why should the lawyers in the room have any interest in joining the ILN Group on LinkedIn? Continue Reading LinkedIn – Making the Most out of Groups

Yesterday, I talked about what improvements you  might want to make to your LinkedIn profile to get the best results from it.  Today, I’ll talk about the home page screen and why it’s useful to be logging in to LinkedIn periodically – I have LinkedIn set to open as one of the tabs on my browser, so every morning, I open Outlook and Chrome, go through my emails, and check on my browser tabs.  This includes taking a quick look (no more than five minutes) at my LinkedIn home page screen.  Lawyers, I know you’re busy, but if you make this part of your morning routine, you’ll only have to spend a few minutes looking at LinkedIn, you’ll stay up to date on what your network is doing, and you won’t have to try to remember to visit LinkedIn.

There are four things I find of particular importance on your home page screen (which looks like this):

Continue Reading “Hitting the (Other) Links to Develop Your Rainmaking Game – Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About LinkedIn” – Part II

If you read my posts regularly, you’ll know that I have a passion for social media.  I don’t think it’s the be all and end all of business development tools, of course, but I do have a fondness for it and an interest in sharing that fondness with my attorneys.

So I jumped at the chance to present a more in-depth look at LinkedIn to our group at the 2011 23rd ILN Annual Meeting on Saturday morning.  I wanted to stick to what I thought were the most relevant points about LinkedIn, and what would give our attorneys the greatest impact – and for me, there was no greater joy than sitting with one of our attorneys during the subsequent breakout session and helping him fill out his profile, as he repeated back to me snippets of what I’d said. 

Last week, I mentioned a few best practices for LinkedIn, but I’d like to add in a bit more about our session in Lisbon.

Continue Reading “Hitting the (Other) Links to Develop Your Rainmaking Game – Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About LinkedIn”

I’m just back from our 2011 23rd Annual Meeting in Lisbon, and I’ll have lots to share with you over the next week or so.  But what’s fresh in my mind this morning is our session on LinkedIn from Saturday morning – I’d like to share some best practices for LinkedIn, which can be particularly useful when you’re just returning from any conference:

  • Review the attendee list, or the stack of business cards you returned with and make note of the people you met and chatted to at the conference. Search for, and connect to, these people on LinkedIn, making sure to send a personal note with your invitation that refers to your conversations.
     
  • Set your browser to open to the LinkedIn home page when you start it up.  I use Chrome on my desktop, and have set it to open several tabs when I start it up each morning, including LinkedIn – that way I never have to remember to visit LinkedIn and check the latest status updates.  Then, each morning, I scroll through my news feed and comment on or like updates and news, or connect to anyone I might know.  It doesn’t take a lot of time, and it keeps me plugged into what my network is doing.

Continue Reading LinkedIn Best Practices

Here at Zen I’ve decided to start a weekly post called "Ask Friday!" where I’ll take a reader question and answer it.  You can leave your questions in the comments for any post, if you’d like, or message me on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Today’s question comes from Larry Bodine, of Larry Bodine Marketing, who asks "What tips do you have to motivate lawyers to do business development?" 

My number one tip to motivate lawyers is to share success stories.  I’ve found that showing how other lawyers have gotten business through various types of business development activities give attorneys the comfort that someone has tried it before, and they’ve been successful.

But it’s not always enough for me to be the one sharing these stories – it’s often more helpful to get the attorney who’s been successful to do the sharing.  For example, as you know I’m a big fan of social media.  I give presentations to our attorneys at each of our Annual & Regional Conferences, and recently, my presentations have focused on social media.Continue Reading Ask Friday!