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The short answer?

Yes.

The slightly longer answer? It depends – on the firm and its strategy, and on the consultant.

Let’s talk about firms and lawyers first – some people have claimed that lawyers need consultants to explain social media tools and how to use them, while others have claimed that lawyers can figure out these tools themselves.

And that’s where the "it depends" comes in.  Lawyers are well-educated, intelligent individuals – they’ve graduated law school and passed the bar, haven’t they? So they can certainly figure out these social media tools. It’s not rocket science.

The better question is, should they spend the time doing so?Continue Reading Are Social Media Consultants Really Necessary for Law Firms?

I’ve been debating whether or not I wanted to jump on the bandwagon and address yesterday’s social media debacle with Kenneth Cole.  If you’re not familiar with what happened, both Nancy Myrland and Gini Dietrich wrote great posts that also recap it here and here.

I decided that I did want to add my two cents – I was certainly dismayed by Cole’s tweet yesterday, though not surprised.  If you’ve driven down the FDR in Manhattan over the last ten years, you’ve seen his snarky political billboards on the side of the road.  Why I think non-politicians shouldn’t use their power and money to push their political philosophies on the rest of us is a whole other post, but I thought Cole really stuck his foot in his mouth yesterday.

As Nancy mentioned in her post, he needs some serious crisis communications work – we had a speaker on this very topic back in 2007, so I thought I’d dig through my conference report archives and share some of his wisdom with you.  Although I’m particularly disgusted by what Cole said yesterday, social media and other gaffes can happen to the best of us, and we need to know what to do if we’re in the same situation.Continue Reading Communication Crisis – My Two Cents on the Kenneth Cole Scandal

The ILN has offered a webinar series to our members for the past two years, and in 2010/2011, we offered a three-part series on social networking. In October, we started with, "Social Networking Strategy & Blogging," with Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog and in December, we had Freesource’s Nathan Egan discuss "LinkedIn for Lawyers." January’s webinar with Dave Kerpen of Likeable Media and Nancy Myrland of Myrland Marketing focused on Facebook and Twitter for Lawyers.

Part II with Dave focused on Using Facebook to Grow Your Law Firm.  As I mentioned in my first post, due to some technical difficulties, our webinar didn’t record any sound, so I’ll be re-capping the presentations based on my (hopefully) excellent memory, and the slide decks of our presenters. 

As we mentioned in the webinar introduction, Dave is the CEO of Likeable Media, a social media and word of mouth marketing firm. Dave is one of the leading experts on social media and Facebook marketing, and he and his work have been featured on CNBC’s "On the Money," ABC World News Tonight, the CBS Early Show, the New York Times, and countless blogs.Continue Reading Webinar Re-cap: Facebook & Twitter for Lawyers with Dave Kerpen of Likeable Media and Nancy Myrland of Myrland Marketing Part II

The ILN has offered a webinar series to our members for the past two years, and in 2010/2011, we offered a three-part series on social networking. In October, we started with, "Social Networking Strategy & Blogging," with Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog and in December, we had Freesource’s Nathan Egan discuss "LinkedIn for Lawyers." January’s webinar with Dave Kerpen of Likeable Media and Nancy Myrland of Myrland Marketing focused on Facebook and Twitter for Lawyers.

Nancy kicked off the session with some fantastic information for our audience about Twitter.  I’ll be splitting my posts into two with Part I focused on Twitter and Part II dealing with Dave’s comments on Facebook.

Due to some technical difficulties, our webinar didn’t record any sound, so I’ll be re-capping the presentations based on my (hopefully) excellent memory, and the slide decks of our presenters.

Continue Reading Webinar Re-cap: Facebook & Twitter for Lawyers with Dave Kerpen of Likeable Media and Nancy Myrland of Myrland Marketing Part I

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:

  • Blogs are an increasingly preferred mechanism for obtaining business and legal related industry information.
  • Corporate counsel are getting more of their business and legal related industry information online than from traditional print sources.

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