It's a bit like deciding TV advertising is where you want to spend your marketing dollar and not figuring out which shows your customer demographics are likely to watch. You need to figure out where your potential clients are, and how to reach them before you decide you want to use Twitter, or a blog, etc.

I seem to have a point that legal professionals and other business people saw as well. Maybe I'll cull some of the excellent points you make and weave them into another post on the subject.

I work with professionals and service practitioners and this post is quite accurate. It's definitely easier to choose tactics before (or, in lieu of) an overall practice marketing strategy. But it's a costlier choice to make. Without a coherent strategy in place, there's no differentiation or point-of-distinction that any tactic can communicate or reinforce. As a result the 'empty' tactics become just so much more 'white noise' in an overcrowded and increasingly undifferentiated landscape. Bravo on your post.

The mentality of "I will tell you how to make money on Twitter! Just follow as many people as possible and tell them you can make them money on Twitter too!" needs to go. It needs to go hard. Into that long night. No credits should roll.

Have something to say. Preferably something useful. Don't just hop on the bandwagon because all the 'kids' are doing it and you don't want to be stuck at home babysitting your little sister and watching reruns of Taxi all night crying into your popcorn.

If you have something to contribute and a passion for doing so, the rest will come naturally and these tools will aid that. Someone told me this once, or I saw it somewhere recently. I don't claim credit for it at all, but the basic sentiment is don't go buy a screwdriver when you don't have anything to use it on.