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You may have guessed that I have a certain fondness for social media. I’ve touted its benefits here before, so it should come as no surprise that I headed straight for the social media session while I was at the LMA Annual Conference in Dallas a couple of weeks ago.

Before I get into the nitty gritty of the presentation from the panelists and my thoughts, I’ll share what the CMO of Nixon Peabody said during the session – “The most significant thing a marketing department can do in 2012 is to develop a social media strategy.”

These are bold words from an industry that was still wondering whether social media had staying power only last year. And I couldn’t agree more. Although, I would go a step further than that and say that rather than creating a separate strategy, social media should instead be used to enhance and drive existing strategies and projects. If the tweets coming from the other breakout sessions were any indication, all of them were mentioning social media in conjunction with their topics – the possibilities for using it for law firms are exciting and valuable.

Continue Reading Social Media is Here to Stay – An LMA 2012 Re-cap Part I

The last two weeks, we’ve been looking more in-depth at the ILN Marketing Specialty Group roundtable, which focuses on what mid-sized firms are doing in social media.  Today, we look at question three, which asks "Do you have a social media policy in place? If so, how are you handling training on both policies and proactive use of social media and tracking of results?" 

Do Kim Dung: Leadco does not yet have a social media policy.

Simone Fell: Not yet, but it’s in development. We already have policies regarding employees’ use of technology and some of the issues would be covered under that. We used to track social media as a firm but we now have a number of lawyers with individual accounts who tweet/blog about a combination of personal and work-related issues, which why it’s even more critical that there be a formal policy in place. We have done some training on how to use social networking tools, which highlighted best practices (eg be conscious of who’s in your audience and don’t broadcast every thought you have without considering the impact) and have offered pointers at our business law and litigation department meetings. We expect lawyers to take a common-sense approach to their online business development activities and consider the same Law Society guidelines that govern other mediums. Continue Reading ILN Marketing Roundtable: Social Media Policies

There are still people out there who think social media is not for professionals.

C’mon, admit it. 

All right, so the likelihood is that those people aren’t reading this blog, because, after all, it’s part of that "social media stuff." But how many of you who have dipped your toe in the water (i.e. joined Facebook, staked your claim on your Twitter name, filled out your LinkedIn profile) are using social media? And how many of you are blogging…regularly? 

I’m sure more than one of you mentally raised your hand as you read that. 

And I’m sure some of you who did are still wondering why the heck you would want to use social media anyway.  So let’s talk about that for a little while. Continue Reading Let’s Be Social – A Look at the 2012 In-House Counsel New Media Engagement Survey

Last week, we looked at the question of firms’ biggest social media successes, but this week, it’s time to look at the other side of the coin – challenges.

The question we posed was "What has been your greatest social media challenge thus far, and how did your firm tackle it?"

Do Kim Dung: The greatest challenge for Leadco is to get agreement within the firm as to what should be posted online.

Simone Fell: Agreement within the firm with regard to what should be posted online and who should be responsible for drafting and managing content. Truly meaningful content is usually generated at the individual and practice/industry level, where ‘experts’ in those areas update topic-specific postings and seek out useful information for their target audience. This is much trickier to do at the firm level as the audience is so broad and our marketing team does not have the time to seek out keywords associated with the firm’s brand and reach out to everyone talking about those topics with a personally crafted tweet, track the activities of our clients in the media and post items of interest to them (which would definitely require vetting by a group of lawyers), nor do they have the expertise to generate legal commentary. As a result, our general firm accounts repost articles and news items that can already be found on our website. 

Continue Reading ILN Marketing Roundtable: What has been your greatest social media challenge thus far, and how did your firm tackle it?

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?

So now we’ve created a very basic Facebook profile, and just as we did with LinkedIn, it’s time to expand on that. 

When Facebook welcomes you, they want you to fill in your profile information, activate your mobile phone, find people you know and control what information you share.  We’ll go through each of these steps, as well as the "why" behind them, in the coming days.  Today, we’re going to focus on step one – filling out your profile information.  Continue Reading Facebook Tutorials – Creating a Profile Part II

Now we are on to a new set of tutorials – Facebook! 

You may be wondering why I would choose Facebook as the next social media tool to delve into – isn’t that for kids?

No!

Also, during our LinkedIn tutorial, you may remember that I posed a question in LinkedIn’s Answers feature to illustrate how to do it – and people answered.  My question was whether Facebook or Twitter was more valuable for lawyers.  Of course, the answer is – it depends.  But overwhelmingly, the responses of the group were "Facebook."  So Facebook it is! 

One of the most valuable things on Facebook is pages (and groups), but since we have to have a personal profile in order to use those, we’re going to start there. Continue Reading Facebook Tutorials – Creating a Profile Part I

Last week, we talked about how you can follow companies on LinkedIn (and why you would want to!). Today, we’ll chat about creating and maintaining a company page. Attorneys, your firm may already have a company page, so make sure to check this out first – this may be something that your marketing department is handling.

We already have a company page for the ILN, so I won’t be creating a new one of those.  But I am in the process of launching a new website for my photographic services, so now is a good time to start a company page for that. Continue Reading LinkedIn Tutorials – Companies – How to Create a Profile

We’re nearing the very end of our series on LinkedIn tutorials – so please let me know if you have any questions that you think haven’t been addressed, and I’ll answer them in our last LinkedIn post next week! 

Today, we’re going to talk about the Company feature on LinkedIn.  There are a few different ways you can use this:

  • Create and edit your own company page.
  • Follow other company’s pages.

Today, we’re going to focus on how to follow other company’s pages, and tomorrow we’ll look at creating and editing your own company page. 

Let’s see what LinkedIn has to say about it in their Learning Center. Continue Reading LinkedIn Tutorials – Companies