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On Wednesday, I had the opportunity to attend American Lawyer Media’s Social Media: Risks & Rewards conference as an ILN Marketing Partner.  As evidence of the popularity of the conference’s content, the room was almost standing room only by the end of the morning.  (For tweets from the conference, see the #LSMC hashtag results)

The first two sessions focused more on the "risks" portion of the conference, discussing a lot of concerns about social media.  The first speaker was Joel Reidenberg, Professor of Law and Director of the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham University School of Law. His presentation was "Beyond Terms of Use: From Handcuffs to Handshake?" 

Professor Reidenberg began by saying that it’s important to think about Terms of Service as an effort by social media sites to bring some certainty to their own environment where the law is lacking and vague. Terms of Service typically consist of two sets of documents:

  1. Basic user agreement
  2. Privacy Policy, which is normally incorporated by reference, so the two work hand in hand.

Continue Reading Conference Review: ALM’s Social Media: Risks & Rewards – Beyond Terms of Use: From Handcuffs to Handshake?

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

This afternoon, I had the good fortune to sit in on a webinar put on by Kevin O’Keefe & LexBlog, focused on getting back to basics. The topic was on networking through the internet  (I’ll post the link to the recording when it’s up on Kevin’s blog) and since I’ve seen Kevin speak before, I knew the audience was in for some valuable information, which I’d like to pass along to you.

Since we’ve already talked about why social media should matter to lawyers, the next step is to talk about "well, here I am, now what?" Kevin did a great job of addressing that question and more in his webinar and focusing on the concepts that mean the difference between success and failure.

He started by talking about advertising, and that’s something we’ve gotten a lot of requests from our members about. Without fail, every six months or so, I’ll get an email or see someone in person who says "shouldn’t we be advertising as a Network?" As a marketer, I love advertising – I watch tv for the commercials, enjoy a really snappy, slick print ad, and even like to see how some television commercials translate to radio.  

But for our group, it’s not the right fit – to do it successfully would require a major campaign and lots of money, which is generally what I tell our attorneys. But now I can also tell them this – Kevin said that only 14% of people trust advertising. He reasoned that the percentage who trust lawyer advertising is even lower, and said that essentially, websites are advertising too.Continue Reading Getting Back to Basics: Networking Through the Internet – A Webinar from Kevin O’Keefe

During our Annual Conference, I had the opportunity to present on the topic that’s near and dear to my heart – social media. An informal survey of the room revealed that about fifteen attorneys were regularly using social media (I defined "regularly" as logging in once a week and connecting with someone in their network in some way). That still left the majority uninvolved, so I endeavored to convince them why social media might matter to them.

I began with some statistics on social media usage from the AmLaw 100 and 200 firms, adding the caveat that I understand that social media differs from region to region and that it isn’t commonly used in business in many countries. However, I still felt the topic had broad applicability because many firms around the world have American clients and I believe that social media will soon become important for businesses around the world.  Continue Reading Social Media – Why It May Matter to Lawyers – A Re-cap from the ILN Annual Conference