Social Media

Subscribe to Social Media via RSS

The very last session I went to before our wrap up at LMA14 was "Can the C-Suite Lead the Social Media Law Firm?" with presenters Deborah Grabein (@dgrabein) of Andrews Kurth and Michael Hertz (@michaelhertz) of White & Case and moderator Kevin O’Keefe (@kevinokeefe) of LexBlog. 

The description of the session in the conference book reads:

While Fortune 500 executives are beginning to leverage social media, law firm executives are lagging." 

Two C-Level decision makers (not practicing lawyers) in Am Law 200 firms made the decision in the fall of 2013 to start using social media, personally . They wished to experience how their use of social media could help change the perceptions of their brand, better equip them to lead their marketing and business development teams, and help them guide individual lawyers in their use of social." 

With five months of strategic consulting and coaching, these executives became active content creators and social media contributors on blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+."

Learn about the personal and firm wide challenges and rewards these law firm executives experienced, and will continue to experience in their personal use of social media." 

Continue Reading Key Takeaways from “Can the C-Suite Lead the Social Media Law Firm?”

Several years ago, when we first started to see social media take the stage, I jumped right in with both feet and never looked back. I was fortunate to be an early adopter – I say fortunate, because that means that most of my mistakes in using social media were seen by only a few people early on. I got to learn the lingo and understand the norms for each of the platforms before I was connected with hundreds or thousands of people. 

When I speak about social media, I still recommend playing around on the platforms first to understand how to use them. But today, I want to talk about the incredible importance of listening first when you join a new platform (and this advice goes for even the savviest social media user, since every platform has its own unique style). 

To give you a little background, before I switched my major to computer science, I was an anthropology major, and ended up minoring in it. I LOVE anthropology, and what really ignited my passion for it was the work I did in linquistic anthropology, which is defined as:

the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life"

Continue Reading Social Media: The Importance of Listening First

Yesterday, we discussed the first part of the excellent webinar with David Ackert & Jonathan Fitzgarrald on LinkedIn 2.0. When chatting last night with my fellow SIG leaders, Nancy asked me why it was I considered this to be the best session we’d had. She wondered if it was because they got into the "how" of using LinkedIn as opposed to the "why." 

My answer to her was that it was the 2.0 nature of it – it’s safe to assume that those participating in a social media group like ours would be those most likely to have already bought into the idea of social media, and are more focused on how to sell it to their attorneys and its practical use. Even more than that, pretty much everyone has a LinkedIn profile these days – but the idea of setting objectives and fine tuning your strategy to meet those objectives is something that’s really useful to both attorneys, and the marketing professionals trying to get them to use LinkedIn for business development.  

It also doesn’t hurt that Jonathan and David are not only excellent presenters, but also extremely knowledgeable – both when it comes to using LinkedIn and working with attorneys. 

So, if you’re a part of the LMA and have the opportunity to see the recording of the session once it’s circulated, make sure that you do so! Now let’s get into Part II…

Continue Reading LinkedIn 2.0: Efficient Strategies for Busy Lawyers – A Webinar Recap (Part II)

Apparently, this is the week for excellent webinars, because I had the privilege of attending another amazing one this afternoon. The LMA’s Social Media Shared Interest Group offered LinkedIn 2.0: Efficient Strategies for Busy Lawyers, featuring presenters David Ackert (@DavidAckert) of The Ackert Advisory and Jonathan Fitzgarrald (@JRFitzgarrald) of Greenberg Glusker, moderated by our own Nancy Myrland (@nancymyrland) of Myrland Marketing & Social Media. 

Before I get into the meat of the session (and boy, was it meaty!), I want to make sure to note that if you’d like to join the Legal Marketing Association, you can take a look at the options and categories for membership over here. 

And if you’re already a member of the LMA, and want to join the Social Media SIG (we’re cool, I promise!), you can join through the LMA website here. LMA members can also join our Facebook and LinkedIn groups (whether or not you officially belong to the SIG). Continue Reading LinkedIn 2.0: Efficient Strategies for Busy Lawyers – A Webinar Recap (Part I)

Last week, Kevin O’Keefe (@kevinokeefe) caught my eye with his post "Social media for business development by lawyers is a big lie?" It was written in response to Conrad Saam’s (@conradsaam) post "Every Social Media Consultant is Lying to You." 

Regular readers here will know that I’m a big fan of social media, for lawyers and other business professionals. So I know you’ll expect me to refute the points in Saam’s post and support those in Kevin’s (and I will…maybe). 

But I want to start with this statement – I do not think social media is the be all, end all of business development or marketing tools. 

I never have. 

I even tell my attorneys: the likelihood that you’re going to start using a social media platform (like Twitter) and immediately get a client – or ever get a client – is incredibly small. Continue Reading Social Media Works for Lawyers…But It’s Just a Tool

We all know that images are incredibly important in this day and age. When you’re constantly bombarded with information all day long, a bold image can stop you in your tracks and help you to focus on the associated content. 

In fact, this infographic from mdgadvertising has some great information about how important images are in social media, including this tidbit: 

Articles containing relevant images have 94 percent more total views than articles without images, on average."

We’ve talked time and time again here about how important it is to include relevant images in your blog posts, and many, many people do that regularly. 

Because of that, there is rampant copyright infringement happening all over the internet, either with people who don’t understand copyright law, or those who just don’t have the funds to purchase the rights to an image and are just hoping not to get caught.  As a photographer, I’m seeing my own photos pop up more and more for both commercial and noncommercial use, without my permission.

So in a significant move yesterday, Getty announced that they’d be opening up a portion of their images free of charge, through their new embedding feature. Many bloggers and social media connections started jumping for joy…but wait, is it all good news? Continue Reading Getty’s New Embedding Feature – Don’t Get Excited Yet

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending LexBlog’s webinar "Daily Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers" with Kevin O’Keefe (@kevinokeefe). Kevin kicked off the session by saying that there is no perfect way to blog, but that over the past ten years, he’d develop some habits that work for him. 

The session covered: 

  • Essence of blogging
  • Listening tools
  • Posting
  • Complementary Social Media
  • Habits of LexBloggers

Continue Reading Daily Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers – A Webinar Recap