Twitter Search for lawyers and law firms : Why it's so important
By now you may have seen the new home page of Twitter placing Twitter Search front and center. For those of you logged in to Twitter by default, sign out and you'll see this new home page.
Why has search been placed front and center? Because the visionaries behind Twitter, their technologists and financial partners, see the value of search with the same perspective that Google did.
Twitter understands the value of real-time search to people and businesses, including lawyers and other legal professionals. Rather than search history (even if it is only a week or month old) you may now search real time conversation, news, information, and links which are being shared via Twitter.
It's easy for many legal professionals to dismiss the value of Twitter Search. It's all coming too fast and being humans we prejudge out of ignorance. One legal marketing professional even dismissed Twitter as ineffective. Don't make this mistake. Use recent history as a guide.
We didn't have an Internet as we know it 13 years ago. There were very few websites. The amount of information stored online and accessible to the public for free was miniscule compared to today.
The only thing we had to navigate what was on the Internet were directories. Yahoo was the most popular. DMOZ, an open source directory in the sense we all contributed to it, was the other. But cataloguing Internet content that was growing at lightening speed could not scale
Larry Page and Sergey Brin had the foresight to see 'search' of the Internet as being more effective than directories. They started Google in the late 90's.
When I started using Google in the 1999 and 2000 people laughed at me. How could anything called Google be of any value?
My previous company was acquired by LexisNexis in 2001. Martindale-Hubbell and its parent, LexisNexis, saw little, if any value, in the search of user generated content. And isn't user generated content all the Internet is?
Today none of us could live without Google and the searching power it gives us to find the most valuable information in the world from the most reliable and trusted authorities authoring such information.
If I told you in 1997 that you, as a legal professional, would not be able to live without user generated content given away for free on the Internet and that you would use Google to access such information, you would never have believed me.
I am telling you today that in the near future you will not able to live without real time conversation and information and that you will access it with a tool called Twitter.
I've been wrong many times before and I'm not the smartest guy in the world. But on lawyers and other legal professionals need for Twitter search, I'd bet my house.
What do you think?
