As a part of the ILN’s Administrative team, I’ve been fortunate to have the experience of working with some incredible legal marketers at our member firms. They’ve supported me in my role in the Network and I’ve learned from them time and time again.
Periodically, we draw on them for assistance in answering member firms’
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?
I had the good fortune of presenting to our members at the 2010 ILN Regional Meeting of the Americas on Social Networking and why it may matter to our attorneys. I began by taking an informal poll of the room to see how many in the audience were regularly using social networking sites (I clarified that by "regularly," I meant logging in once a week and connecting with someone in their network in some way). It was a fairly small number – about 15-20% of the audience.
Though social networking is a hot topic, there are still many attorneys who question how it can be useful to them in business development at all, so I gave them a few reasons why, starting with American Lawyer Media, Zeughauser Group & Greentarget’s recent survey of in-house counsel. I mentioned two important points for them that came out of the survey:
I also mentioned that the survey showed that in-house counsel are using blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to get their information and judge law firms.Continue Reading ILN Conference Re-Cap: Social Networking – Why it May Matter to You
The third session of ALM’s Social Media: Risks and Rewards conference focused on social media’s impact on e-discovery, and was presented by Michael Lackey, Jr. a partner at Mayer Brown LLP.
Lackey started with an overview of his presentation, saying it would discuss how social is coming up in litigation and the roadblocks to be aware of. He commented that there are a couple of high profile cases that are defining the limits of what you can get and how you can get it. For organizations that have social media content that becomes relevant in litigation, there are obligations for preserving this information. Often, it is being hosted by someone else, so that creates challenges.
As many of us involved with social media would agree, Lackey said that there’s no doubt that social media is not a fad – it’s here to stay. He mentioned some of the more traditional platforms for social media, but also included lawyer rating agencies and other kinds of technology, such as FourSquare, for consideration in litigation.
He said that consumers have a lot of trust out there and like the interactivity, especially in terms of connecting with corporations. Lackey added that digital word of mouth marketing would top $3 billion by 2013. Continue Reading Conference Review: ALM’s Social Media: Risks & Rewards – E-Discovery & Social Media
The second session of ALM’s Social Media: Risks & Rewards also focused on the risks of social media. Orrie Dinstein, the Chief Privacy Leader and Senior IP Counsel for GE Capital spoke on Privacy and Security in Social Media.
He started by saying that there had been a global conference of data commissioners the previous week in Jerusalem, and the most interesting thing about the conference had been its theme – a new generation (of users, laws and technology), which all converges in the social media space.
It was clear from the comments at the conference that there’s so much interest in the social media space, but no one knows what to do with it and it’s constantly evolving.
Dinstein focused on privacy and security in social media – or a lack of privacy and insecurity. He didn’t offer any solutions, but instead raised a number of points about this complicated space, beginning with security. Continue Reading Conference Review: ALM’s Social Media: Risks & Rewards – Privacy and Security in Social Media
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:
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