The ethical reasons, per Zavieh:

1. Facebook will make you look like you are having fun. When a client sees you having fun the client may file an ethics complaint when you’re delinquent in returning a call or file a pleading at the last minute.
2. Facebook will make you look too wealthy. Your clients will see a reasonable bill as extortion.
3. Clients may see a remark such as having a rough day in court as reflecting information about them and have their confidence shaken in your ability to maintain attorney-client confidentiality.

Say what? This is going too far in scaring lawyers from using what is probably our most powerful socia network to build and strengthen relationships with the people whom mean the world to lawyers—clients, prospective clients, and business associates.

Long before we had the Internet and Facebook, lawyers socialized with clients. They each had of a lot of fun together. We did things together and talked about stuff that had nothing to do with legal matters.

Sports talk, kid’s events, charitable boards, Christmas parties, faxing jokes back and forth, golf events, and God knows what else. And when you’re from Wisconsin, like me, a fair amount of the socializing involved alcohol and got a little raucous—to say the least.

We lawyers got our work done and developed life-long friendships with many clients for whom we represented their businesses and families for decades.

Could such activity lead to an ethical problem? I guess so, but so could the indiscriminate use of a cell phone. We took the risk—assuming we ever thought of it as a risk.

Like it or not, Facebook is used to socialize with friends and business acquaintances. To the extent you opt out of socializing with clients and prospective clients using Facebook, that’s okay. You’re just at a disadvantage in ‘connecting’ with clients and business associates, while your competitors are. Over time you run the risk of becoming irrelevant in the lives of people who are nurturing relationships in social settings online.

Bruce Johnson, The Chair of Privacy & Security Practice at Davis Wright Tremaine in Seattle, starting using his Facebook page 5 years ago. Representing information industry clients on issues involving media and communications, he starting sharing successes of these clients on Facebook.

Clients and their employees started befriending Bruce. This led to Bruce not only sharing relevant media, advertising, and first amendment news, but also vacation pictures with his family.

Later on came wonderful pictures with his grandkids in an easy chair in front of the windows of his high rise condo overlooking the Puget Sound.

To me, Bruce’s Facebook is the stuff life is made of. The joys and thoughts I would want my clients to share in—and which any client worth their salt would enjoy. The discussion of such items would certainly be the precursor to any substantive business discussion.

Sure. I get Zavieh advising that the safest route is to stick to LinkedIn for client interaction, to use Facebook privacy settings which prevent clients from seeing you experience life, and to prevent clients from knowing anything about your kids.

That’s the take little or no risk view and lawyers get bad to be risk adverse.

I don’t believe such action is warranted in most cases. Such action deprives lawyers part of the essence of a successful and enjoyable practice – that’s friendships and meaningful connections with the people you serve.

Lawyers also need to realize people hire lawyers they like as people, not just because of their legal prowess. Remove an opportunity for people to get to like you, and and you’re making it tougher for individuals and their businesses to hire you.

Could you develop such relationships without Facebook? Sure. It’s just harder without it—Facebook is the largest social network in the world and the fastest growing groups joining Facebook are older, affluent people.

And like Zavieh said, “Social media is clearly not a fad going away anytime soon, and it is a powerful force that can be used for good.”

Image courtesy of Flickr by sjsharktank.

This from Christa Carone (@ChristaCarone), CMO for Xerox, in a piece in the Harvard Business Review last month on the power of a CMO leading by example in their use of social media.

Carone understood being an active participant, not a passive observer, was required to understand social media.

She also wanted to show her team, as a true leader, that using social media could change the public’s perception of Xerox as one of a copier company to one of business process outsourcing, where most of their revenue is derived today.

As I read Carone’s story of a using social media for a year all I could think of was law firm CMO’s. Where are they in their active use of social media to make sure they understood social media and leading by example to influence the perception of their law firms?

Carone faced similar challenges law firm CMO’s perceive with regard to social media.

I’ll be honest; playing guinea pig required time that is scarce these days. Maintaining a lively, close-to-real-time presence on any media outlet is not for the faint of heart. How many followers and tweets make a Twitter feed look respectable? How many views make a blog post high-impact? Is my Klout score high enough? And ROI? Let’s not even go there.

And of course the personal versus firm brand, an issue that often paralyzes law firm marketing.

Our executive team is proud of the Xerox brand presence in the social space, but we have a team-oriented, humble culture. I didn’t want to be seen as a chest-thumping “celebrity” executive who uses social media as a megaphone and whose personal brand can outshine their professional one

Rather than just starting to use social media Carone got clear on her strategy.

I set out to connect with communications professionals and marketing thought leaders, the most relevant audience for me as a marketing executive. Before taking the plunge, I carefully considered what value I could bring to the social conversation in a very crowded field. I thought about how Xerox helps customers so they can focus on their real businesses — and my purpose as its CMO. My answer was clear: giving a real, clear-eyed take on the business of marketing and communications. Marketers have a reputation for being full of hype; I wanted to share information about and examples of smart, yet simple, marketing and communications

Facebook was reserved for Carone’s personal life, so she started on Twitter, and later, blogging.

I didn’t have a huge Twitter following then and I still don’t. Quantity is never the point. Quality engagement always is. I tweet a few times a day — much of it is sharing what I’m reading, watching, and inspired by in marketing, branding, communications, leadership, and the occasional a-ha moment I have as a runner and/or as a parent. These are topics I live and breathe every day.

What Carone most enjoys by being active in social, as do I, is the way it helps build connections with others in the business.

I’ve been surprised by the number of people, fellow employees included, who introduce themselves at large events to say they read and share my tweets and blog posts. It’s nice to know someone hears you when you’re talking in a forest.

One of Carone’s favorites is when a woman approached her after a speaking engagement (something she’s asked to do more often now).

I never thought I’d see the old brand Xerox represented by a woman in an orange dress who tweets and talks like she’s my next door neighbor. I thought Xerox was stodgy; now I can tell you’re not.

Carone’s advice to CMO’s getting started with social media:

• Be conversational. Initiate or amplify conversations with clients, prospects, media players and employees. Remember: the only legitimate social media voice is the same one you would use in a room full of peers. You’re not leading a seminar. You’re having a conversation around the virtual water cooler, or even better, at a collegial cocktail party.
• Don’t sell. If you want to sell, buy an ad or an advertorial or, perhaps, sponsor tweets. Otherwise, contribute insights and stimulate conversation by expressing a point of view.
• Enlist a team. It’s just a reality that busy executives will sometimes be out of commission in closed-door meetings or airplanes without Wi-Fi. Chatter on digital media outlets is 24/7. So be open to asking trusted advisors to watch your blog and social media feeds while you’re “dark” and alert you when it’s important that you respond.
• It’s personal. And, it only works if it’s authentic. That means it won’t work for any professional who sees it as a burden instead of an opportunity.(emphasis added)

Social media has now become a natural part of Carone’s day and has changed how she gets, shares, and talks about information. She says if she’s “[S]uccessful in getting just a handful of people to see a new face to the new Xerox, then it’s worth every tweetin’ moment.”

Last Friday in New York I had a couple beers with the CMO of a top 10 law firm. I could sense their excitement with a social media initiative underway at the firm.

After a half hour, they said I’d like you to personally coach me on various aspects of social media. They wanted to understand what social media was, how to use it, and to lead by example. I’m pretty excited about the opportunity to work with them, and possibly later on, their firm as a whole.

In the 10 years since founding LexBlog I believe that’s the first time a CMO made such a request of me. Maybe it’s my fault in not making the offer, I don’t know. But the law firm CMO’s who are blogging and using other social media, especially as it pertains to communicating the firm’s message, are few and far between.

As a law firm CMO, are you leading on social media? Are you, personally, communicating the firm’s position and brand, through social media? Assuming not, don’t you see it as a lost opportunity? Could it even be a dereliction of duty?

Thanks for your story Christa. No question I liberally cited from your piece — it was just too good. ;)

Flipboard, a personalized magazine of articles and posts created from your feeds and social network, is extremely popular with lawyers because of its non-techie, eloquent interface for receiving and reading customized news.

While reading content, not as many lawyers share what they are reading with their network. Sharing what you are reading is an excellent way of not only staying top of mind with your existing network, but also growing a network of like minded people.

Let alone the fact that lawyers who share info and articles on niche subjects establish themselves as authorities by serving as ‘intelligence agents.’

Flipboard’s new sharing interface makes it easy as ever to share what you are reading on Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, or even via an email or text message.

Here’s a blog post from the Duets Blog I came across flipping through the LXBN Network on Flipboard on my iPhone.

I now tap on the ‘Flipboard screen’ to pull up the post to read it.

When I scroll to the bottom of the article as I read it I see a share arrow. Clicking on it, I get the below interface making it oh so easy to share what I am reading and include a comment as well.

No truth to the rumor that I have stock options in Flipboard. Flipboard is just doing one hell of a job in delivering publishers a wonderful distribution platform, and readers a wonderful reading and sharing solution. A sharing solution that leads to networking opportunities for lawyers.

Facebook’s being number one with 1.1 billion members is not a surprise.

EMarketer believes that just over half, 51 percent, of all internet users visit Facebook at least once a month. The company also stated that worldwide Facebook penetration will only continue to grow higher, reaching 60 percent of internet users by year’s end.

Behind Facebook, things get more interesting. There are numerous companies fighting it out for second place, with Google+ out front at 26 percent of internet users. Google+!? Yes, Google+. As eMarketer stated, “In the US, Google+ gets limited attention, though its user base is growing. Worldwide, Google+ has been much more successful.”

Looking at LinkedIn as far down the list is a mistake. It trails only number four, Twitter, the fastest growing network percentage wise, in non-Chinese networks.

Chinese social networks will always be near the top. Per eMarkter:

Chinese social networks garnered among the greatest percentage of users worldwide, a reflection of both the vastness of the social audience in China and the limited availability of foreign properties, like Facebook, in the country.

For lawyers and law firms doing international work, take note of the countries with the greatest rate of growth in social networking. Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the US, and Russia. Mobile is driving this growth.

For lawyers, LinkedIn is going to remain the social network of choice. It’s full of clients, prospective clients, referral sources, and Influencers such as association leaders and mainstream media. Lawyers also feel a sense of safety and professionalism that they don’t sense in Facebook.

Proceed at your own peril though, if you, as a lawyer, are ignoring the networking opportunities Facebook provides. Relationships are built upon getting to know each other and establishing trust and friendship. Such relationships can be borne out of much more than legal or business exchanges.

Who’s to say sharing your children’s graduation or recital pictures which a client gives a ‘Like’ to on Facebook isn’t a more powerful way to nurture a relationship than sharing a legal article in LinkedIn? Heck, I think that Facebook exchange is more powerful.

My point is Facebook is the largest social network. You don’t need lessons or a social media policy to get out and use it to nurture relationships. Sure, you need to use some common sense as a lawyer in the way you use Facebook, but you’d be foolish to take a pass on the world’s, and this country’s, largest social network.

People buy from individuals they know, like and trust. Social media makes you approachable, establishes your expertise, and allows you greater interaction with your readers than ever before.

A word of mouth reputation is the most powerful business development asset there is for a lawyer. Much of establishing that reputation takes place on the Internet these days. Not through a website, but by engaging your target audience.

Maybe I am nuts, but I look at lawyers questioning the value of social media as akin to lawyers in years past questioning the value of fax machines, email, and cell phones. Virtually all lawyers will be using the Internet for networking — call it social media or anything else — it’s just going to happen.

Just as the case with email and cell phones, you’ll simply not be connected if you are not using social media.

If you must resist, perhaps a better way to look at the question of whether social media will go away, giving you a pass, is to acknowledge that the fundamentals of social media have always been with us. What’s to go away?

We have always networked as lawyers to build relationships and grow our word of mouth reputation. Much of it just takes place on the Internet today.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Scootie.

I was asked by the marketing director to help them respond. There are ought to be special place in heaven for marketing folks working in firms.

I initially said to ask the lawyer if they ever listed their firm and its lawyers in Martindale-Hubbell. Why did they? It was only three books written on parchment-like paper that grew to 12 volumes that cost the firm about $100,000 a year.

The answer would have been that to be considered a ‘real lawyer’ you needed to be listed in Martindale. If you weren’t listed and rated AV, you didn’t exist and wouldn’t get referrals from lawyers across the country whom you had never met.

Like Martindale years ago, you use LinkedIn because it’s what your clients are using, Jack. It’s just common sense.

Media Post reports nine out of ten (88%) use LinkedIn ‘often’ or ‘very often.’ 73% said LinkedIn said LinkedIn is their favorite network social networking, leaving Facebook and Twitter behind.

If I were still practicing law, I am making it easier for my clients to nurture relationships with me, let alone me them. I want to make it easy to be found when people look for me by name and for my contact info – people are using LinkedIn for this. Clients don’t like be hassled with clumsy websites on mobile to find an email or cell number. I want my referral sources to know that people they refer to me can look me up and be impressed. They’re all using LinkedIn.

Most importantly, I want to go where my clients, business associates, referral sources, and prospective clients are hanging out – where they’re are networking. A good chunk of that is taking place at LinkedIn today.

At some point, professionals advising lawyers need to take the gloves off. The value of LinkedIn is not open for debate. To challenge LinkedIn’s value is childish.

If a lawyer chooses not to use LinkedIn, that’s fine, they’ll just not be quite as effective in their business development and gradually become irrelevant to the many business people who network online, in addition to offline.

They’ll also be competing against all the other skeptical lawyers asking ‘What will LinkedIn do for me?’ As opposed to competing against a smaller pool of lawyers who have learned to use the net for business development.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Carbon Arc.

Nearly 90 percent of affluent consumers use social media, and do so for professional reasons per James Dohnert (@jamesdohnert), referencing a recent study by LinkedIn.

The study measuring consumers interaction with financial institutions is highly relevant to law firms who are looking to engage a similar audience – those with investable assets between $100,000 and $1 million.

Look at these key findings, all spot on when it comes to why law firms ought to be using social media to engage clients and prospective clients.

• One out of every two surveyed use social media to connect with other professionals.
• One in three use social media to engage with professional content.
• 36% use social media for discovery and consideration, meaning they are seeking advice on the things they’ve learned through social media.
• Timely and relevant content is one of the most important things this group is looking for.

Rather than ‘broadcasting’ content, LinkedIn advises that financial institutions, and I think it the same for law firms, to drive conversation through social media. Engagement and discussion on social media lead to greater influence and improved lead generation.

LinkedIn says because this group is so active on social media, they could prove a key market for financial institutions. Why not law firms too?

Sure, not all of your clients and prospective clients are active users of social media. But a growing number of them are. With most law firms using social media ineffectively the door is open for you to take advantage of the market opportunity.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Herval.

Rising from the depths of a dot com Winter, as co-founder, Reid Hoffman, called it, LinkedIn is now a successful public company with over 225 million members and almost $325 million in quarterly revenue.

I found LinkedIn pretty scary when I first saw it in 2003. Why would I as an employer want to showcase my employees (and their resumes) by connecting to them? And what employee would want to broadcast that they were looking for a job?

Take a look at LinkedIn in 2003. It didn’t look all that different than other social networks. It was the day of Friendster and MySpace afterall.

But in the ten years since, as The Next Web’s Ken Yeung (@thekenyeung) explains, LinkedIn has evolved into a contact relationship management service, but for individuals.

Where are we headed in our use of LinkedIn?

In 2012, co-founder Allen Blue was asked about the future of his company, to which he replied that LinkedIn’s role has always been to help every professional find a job that they love and be great at it. He believes that soon there will be a world where “people are doing what they love, not just what they have to. Where professionals understand that the work they do is one of the most significant ways in which they can contribute to their communities and the world.”

In the past decade, LinkedIn has surely changed the networking paradigm that millions of people were accustomed to. No longer are we hunting through newspapers or doing speed dating for business professionals.

Many of us have abandoned Monster, CareerBuilder, and other traditional online job boards in favor of LinkedIn because it appears to offer more context into not only what we can share about our professional accolades, but also learn about new opportunities, companies, and the people we want to be connected with.

As a lawyer, you needn’t look at LinkedIn as your vehicle to a new job or new firm, though you could. Look at LinkedIn as a vehicle to connect (in a real way) with people you’d like to meet. People you can learn from, people who will serve as a source of referrals for you, people who will share your content, and people who may become clients.

If you haven’t played around on LinkedIn of late, check it out. LinkedIn’s new Contact feature will prompt you to keep notes, make reminders, and tag contacts for networking purposes. Share content (of others preferably) and you’ll find people you’d want to connect with asking to connect with you.

Look at LinkedIn, as Blue tells it, as a network which enables you to do what you love, not just what you have to — boy, do lawyers need some of that.

——-

If you have a minute, read Yeung’s article. It’s a story of how a company becomes an overnight success after 1o years by weathering a few storms along the way and not being afraid to audible when change was needed.

On behalf of LexBlog, InsideCounsel, the Metro New York Chapter of The Legal Marketing Association, and the New York City Bar Association, I invite you to attend.

There are some excellent speakers and panelists, including keynote speaker, Michael Hertz, Chief Marketing Officer of White & Case and co-founder of Probono.net. John Corey (@jecorey) of Greentarget will be presenting the 2013 findings from the just released In-House Counsel New Media Engagement Study. I’ll be moderating a group panel discussion to wrap up the Summit.

We expect 175 partners, associates, marketers, communicators, business developers, and technologists from law firms to attend the event running from 8:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. It’ll be at the Graduate Center of The City University of NY in midtown Manhattan.

For more information about the event and to register, go to the Business Development Institute site. Please use promo code LB to register at the discounted rate of $175.

Thanks and hope to see you next week.

PS – If you’d like to get together next Thursday afternoon/evening or Friday, my email is kevin@lexblog.com and cell to call or text is 206 321 3627.

Image courtesy of Flickr by nycstreets.

Masiuk, who does estate planning and elder law work in Southampton, PA, is no ‘rah-rah social media guy.’ He’s “more of the relationship-oriented, conversational, visual, touchy-feely type.” As Masuik describes it, he’s a reluctant participant.

It wasn’t until Masiuk and his partner saw a sign at an Amish market stand that read “Please ‘Like’ Us on Facebook,” that he thought ignoring this new trend would be done at his peril.

Blogging, tweeting and posting to Facebook for quite a while, Masiuk wondered if anyone was listening.

Then, almost overnight, the world changed for me.

It came when I was reviewing my appointments and saw that my book for the upcoming week was virtually full. I asked my assistant where all these new potential clients had come from and was surprised to learn that each and every one had found us online.

Why should Masuik or any of you expect blogging and other social media to work overnight?

…[A]s I thought about the history of our firm, I remembered that everything worthwhile about our firm for the past 27 years of our existence has taken discipline and time—time to nurture, develop, attract, sustain and just plain grow. You might say we’ve spent 27 years becoming an “overnight success.”

Masuik’s and any lawyer’s unease and impatience is about much more than social media itself.

…[I]t’s about Change and our ability to accept and adapt to it. Trust me, at this stage of my career, the last thing I had in mind was adapting to a Brave New World in communication, relationship building or marketing, but here I am, nonetheless, faced with a simple choice: either we adapt–or fold our tent and steal away into the darkness of anonymity. Since I still am passionate about serving the needs of those with estate planning or elder law challenges, I will find a way to adapt, because it matters.

Finding a way to adapt because it matters – to the people you serve, to yourself, and to your family.

When I left the practice of law 14 years ago to help lawyers build relationships and a strong word of mouth reputation via the Internet, and in particular when I founded LexBlog 9 years ago, I told lawyers to have faith.

Like building relationships and a reputation offline as means of building a practice, it takes time I told lawyers, but it works — even you don’t understand why at first.

I find stories like Masiuk’s very moving and, I hope, inspirational to lawyers wondering whether to make the commitment to social media.

Have faith — it can be a life changer.

Image courtesy of Flickr by eschipul.