Real Lawyers Have Blogs : Law Blogs, Blawgs, Law Firm Marketing

I'm heading down to Los Angeles today for Incisive Media's LegalTech West Coast conference. Crazy as it sounds I am blogging this from 38,000 feet on free WiFi on a Virgin America flight from Seattle to Los Angeles.

I'll be part of a panel tomorrow, June 25, from 2:15-3:15 p.m.: What is Twitter and How Can I Use It? I will be arriving in LA around 3 p.m. today, so if anyone wants to get together to chat about blogging, social media, or just to get together for beers, don't hesitate to call my cell, 206 321 3627, or drop me an email. If anyone is getting together dinner tonight and has an extra chair, I'd welcome the company.

As to tomorrow's Twitter session Monica Bay, the editor-in-chief of Law Technology News, will be moderating, and the other speakers will be LexThink founder and "Innovational speaker" Matt Homann, California appellate and technology lawyer and blogger Denise M. Howell, and Baker Hostetler associate Nina K. Goldberg.

LegalTech New York was a great time earlier this year. As for that conference, you can follow other conference attendees on Twitter over at LexTweet. If you're attending LegalTech and not in the Twitter feed, let me, @kevinokeefe or @lexblogsupport know and we'll add you in.

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We had a great turnout at this morning's client webinar on using Twitter for expanding the reach of your blog and for client development.

If you missed it or want to re-watch, you can watch the recording here or on our Support site.

LexBlog CEO Kevin O'Keefe discussed how to use Twitter to connect to people you might otherwise not have met, as well as how you can use it to follow blog posts, news and hot discussion topics.

We had close to 200 attendees at the webinar, which is great to see. If you have any questions about Twitter or anything discussed in the webinar, feel free to contact Kevin (kevin@lexblog.com) or Stacey (stacey@lexblog.com).

And mark your calendars for next month's webinar, on Thursday, June 18, on Creating Effective Blog Posts.

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There's still time for LexBlog clients to sign up for tomorrow's webinar on how to use Twitter for client development and to expand your blog's reach.

The webinar - held exclusively for clients - will take place tomorrow, Thursday, May 14, at 9 a.m. PST/12 p.m. EST. You can register here. (For registration information, direct message Support on Twitter or contact Stacey.)

Kevin O'Keefe will cover a variety of topics, including:

• What is Twitter?
• How is Twitter being used by attorneys and other industry leaders today?
• Who are some of the "big guns" in the legal industry using Twitter, and what are some examples of how they use it?
• What value does Twitter hold for business professionals/attorneys?
• How can Twitter be used as a business development/marketing tool?
• Which Twitter applications are worthwhile, and which are lame?
• What are some etiquette tips on using Twitter for professional social networking?

We hope you can make it.

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If you haven't yet signed up for the next edition of the monthly LexBlog Client Webinar series, don't wait any longer. Our upcoming webinar is on Twitter: What is it? Why should I use it? How do I use it?

This webinar will help show you how you can expand the reach of your blog and your brand using Twitter.

The webinar - held exclusively for clients - will take place next Thursday, May 14, at 9 a.m. PST/12 p.m. EST. Mark your calendars and register now. (For registration information, direct message Support on Twitter or contact Stacey.)

LexBlog CEO Kevin O'Keefe, a nationally known authority on the use of Twitter for lawyers, will go over the basics and take your questions.

Topics include:

• What is Twitter?
• How is Twitter being used by attorneys and other industry leaders today?
• Who are some of the "big guns" in the legal industry using Twitter, and what are some examples of how they use it?
• What value does Twitter hold for business professionals/attorneys?
• How can Twitter be used as a business development/marketing tool?
• Which Twitter applications are worthwhile, and which are lame?
• What are some etiquette tips on using Twitter for professional social networking?

LexBlog Client Webinars are turning the LexBlog community of bloggers into some of the most influential bloggers on the net. We hope to see you all there.

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Kevin posted a few days ago about why it's a no-brainer for law students to be on LinkedIn. But as Northeastern University law student and social networking consultant Leora Maccabee can attest, convincing law students of the value of social networking tools for career purposes can be an uphill battle.

"I think some law students just have no idea what it is and what the value of LinkedIn is," Leora says. "These are the students who ask me, 'well, why SHOULD I use it.' These students should be the primary targets of career services offices at law schools, since the students would get on and start using the site if someone just nudged them in that direction."

Leora is doing her part to demonstrate how useful social networking tools can be for law students. She started an independent social networking consulting business after listening to lawyers at Northeastern Law's Women in the Law Conference describe how they found sites like LinkedIn and Facebook confusing and hard to use. Now she blogs and Twitters (@LeoraMaccabee) about the value of social networking, like in this post on Lawyerist on How Law Students Should Use LinkedIn.

At Northeastern, she has worked with school administrators in various offices to create a law school presense on Facebook and LinkedIn. The group pages were created and populated with news, and alumi and students were encouraged to join the groups and create their own pages.

"We have tried to explain that this is just another tool to identify people they may want to connect with and it is another marketing tool for themselves (a way for them to control the way they present themselves online, if they are googled, etc.)," says Randi Friedman, Northeastern's Assistant Dean/Director of Career Services.

But it can still be difficult for law students to see how helpful social networking can be. A recent training session Leora hosted on using LinkedIn drew only a dozen students, instead of the 30 or 40 she had hoped. In her informal chats with her fellow students, some common concerns about social networking emerged.

• Privacy concerns. Students are worried about friends or strangers on Google knowing where they work or attend school.
• Online networking is a "cop-out" and inferior to face-to-face interaction.
• Time consuming. Especially if an employer does not want their employees to be on Facebook and LinkedIn at work, these activities would take up non-work time.
• LinkedIn is "just one more thing to update."
• One 3L told her, "When a partner at a firm makes me have one, I'll set it up."

Another hurdle for law students, particularly those in their 20s, is that they are so used to using sites like Facebook and Twitter purely for personal or social use that it can be hard to see using them for professional purposes.

Still, that's not to say that law schools and law students are not making use of LinkedIn. Leora notes that alumni groups are flourishing: searches for "law school" and "School of Law" return close to 250 groups.

And she has several strong arguments and examples at the ready to convince students of its value:

• The high Google page rank of LinkedIn, which can be a good way to influence what people see when they search for you online
• The ability to develop and market your brand
• The ability to maintain relationships with classmates and colleagues
• The ability to seek advice from experts in your field
• The ability to find a job and find who that you know is connected to that job

Those who see the value are responding to her advice.

"A 3L friend of mine in law school (who did not yet have a LinkedIn page) was trying to find people working at a certain place of employment in New York in connection with a post-graduate employment job application she was about to send them," Leora says. "I went to my LinkedIn page, typed in the employer and learned that another student at our law school had interned at the place of employment a few years ago. Turns out that my friend and this other student were friends, but since they had never really spoken about the job search, or about past employment, they had yet to make the connection. My friend left that conversation determined to set up a LinkedIn account."

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With 30 new discussions in the last week, the Legal Blogging Group at LinkedIn continues to be a great resource for feedback and conversation about blogging and social networking.

• Lost in the blog world: what to do?: Los Angeles estate planning & elder law attorney and director of Client Relations Elizabeth Meehan asks several questions about the purpose of blog, frequency of posting, and what makes a blog good. There are 22 comments on this post already, clearly a hot issue for group members.
• My blogging has dropped off since...: Seattle law firm accounting manager Robert Wood confesses how his Twitter addiction is affecting his blogging. This is another fascinating thread with plenty of members admitting their own Twitter "problems."
• Twitter privacy issues: Switzerland trademark attorney Alfred Strahlberg raises the question of privacy and Twitter.

Kevin O'Keefe is the moderator of the Legal Blogging group on LinkedIn. If you're already a member of the Legal Blogging group, join the discussions or start your own. If you're not yet a member of the group, you can request to join.

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Help me make my connection for a Delta flight from Atlanta to Seattle guys (Delta's delayed flight has put me at risk). We'll use Twitter.

My original Delta Airlines, @deltaairlines, flight from Birmingham to Atlanta scheduled to leave at 5:40 is delayed 2 1/2 hours which would cause me to miss my 9:35 Delta flight to Seattle. Rather than spend the night here as proposed by the Delta agent to others, I asked to get on a flight at 6:56 PM to get in Atlanta at about 9 (time change of hour).

The Delta agent here in Birmingham tells me there's a good chance I'll miss my connection in Atlanta and there's no way the plane could wait even 5 minutes extra giving me time to take the train from concourse C to B. In the good old days airlines did that. Southwest Airlines, @SouthwestAir, still does.

But how about you guys Twitter @deltaairlines asking that have flight 1036 wait a few minutes for Mr. O'Keefe, who you are causing to miss his connection in Atlanta, so he can get home to his family tonight in Seattle. Reference this blog post so they understand.

Delta, like other companies using Twitter, is using Twitter for customer service. They'll hear about me via your tweets and mine. They'll have an agent in Atlanta holding the plane a few minutes and welcome me on board (I'm an eternal optimist).

What a customer service story? I'll then Tweet to 3,600 telling them what Delta did and my 3,600 followers will retweet etc probably reaching 15,000 or 20,000 people.

Hope I'm not being selfish for asking. Thanks for the help.

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You can't technically be spammed via Twitter in that you need to agree to follow someone to get the junk they may be tweeting.

But that doesn't stop the spammers, the 210,000 underemployed who have self described themselves as social media experts, or the 'under loved' from trying to get you to follow them on twitter.

How do they do it? They look for the Twitter users who have a large number of followers (3,000 or more) and start following them. Doesn't matter that person they seek to follow on Twitter is not sharing things of interest to them or is not a person they want to get to know better.

Why do they start following random people? They're hoping that they get followed in return.

What happens if you don't follow them back? They stop following you. They become Qwitters.

You only get to follow about 2,000 people on Twitter unless you have an equivalent number following you. When you're following for the sake of getting followers you just can't afford to follow people who don't follow back.

For awhile I bought into this game. I followed Guy Kawasaki's advice that if you wanted more people to follow you on Twitter you followed everyone who followed you.

Guy's logic, courtesy of Robert Scoble:

It's courteous to do so and because when you do, some people will respond to you and eveyone who follows them will see this--which is more exposure for you.

In addition, like a lot of other folks, I wanted more followers. It made me feel good, I guess more important, and it certainly made more people follow me. When I broke into the top 1,800 most followed on Twitter I'd have 50 or 60 new people a day following me.

But at the risk of being unloved and looking less important, I made the decision not to follow everyone who follows me. If that causes the social media expert who teaches yoga while on the beach in Malibu to stop following me after I don't follow them back in a couple days, I'll suffer through the pain.

Maybe I'll be viewed as a Twitter snob or God forbid I'll fall off page one of LexTweet, our community of legal professionals using Twitter. I'll suck it up and survive some how.

Going forward, I'll follow those who it makes sense for me to follow. If it looks the person may have an interest in the things I share via Twitter or an interest in getting to me know me, I'll follow them.

I'll follow those who have an interest in the things I have an interest in - the law, the media, blogs, social media, journalism, PR, sports, fellow CEO's & leaders of innovative companies, my competition, family... Heck, like everyone my interests are pretty diverse. And I'll of course I'll follow those people I want to get to know.

You'll need to develop your own style as to who to follow. I'm just not certain you want to encourage all the spammers, so called social media experts, and the under loved to keep stalking people on Twitter by needlessly following them.

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The buzz after President Barack Obama's speech earlier this week didn't all stem from his proposals about righting the nation's struggling economy.

The hot topic in blogs and mainstream media alike this week has been the rise in Twittering politicians – a trend made clear by the steady stream of Tweets coming from Tuesday's joint session of Congress.

"On the House floor. Awaiting State of the Union speech. We need positive solutions," wrote Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla., @IRL).

"Some Republican Senators are standing and clapping, including McCain. Great!" said Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore., @repblumenauer).

A Washington Post column took a critical stance on the politicos Twittering, as columnist Dana Milbank took lawmakers to task for their "attention-deficit disorder".

It's bad enough that Americans are paralyzed by economic jitters. Now the president has to deal with lawmakers paralyzed by Twitter. At a time of national emergency, when America needs the focused attention of contemplative and reflective lawmakers, they are dispatching rapid-fire thoughts in 140 characters or less.

But the congresspeople and senators who have taken to Twitter tout the ability to reach their constituents immediately, and without a filter.

In several Tweets on Wednesday, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo., @clairecmc) explained her reasons for signing on with Twitter. She currently has over 10,000 followers.

"I started tweeting for the inauguration. I wanted to share the excitement of the occasion with others...My kids helped me by explaining how it worked. They also told me to be candid and random to keep it interesting...The best part is being able to directly talk to Missourians about my day without reporters editing!"

Attorney & Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas, @johnculberson and #7 at LexTweet) with almost 9,000 followers and close to 2,000 updates, sent out a series of Tweets on Wednesday explaining his passion for social media with reference to Thomas Jefferson's philosophy of participatory government.

"New media is the future & will absorb old media very soon," Culberson wrote in several Tweets. "No matter what your politics are - I hope you follow me here bcz we share a passion to be a "participator in the gov't of [our] affairs...And bcz you share my passion to make gov't truly transparent & elected officials totally accountable bcz we know exactly what they r doing."

McCaskill expanded her take on Twitter in an email, saying that Twitter helps her "paint a full picture" of what's going on with her.

"Constituents are certainly expecting more openness and transparency from their government," McCaskill wrote. "Tools like Twitter are just another means for elected officials to be more accountable to their bosses, who happen to be the people in our home states. Whether it’s Twitter or some other way to share information with people, elected officials are smart to get on board."

While some Twitter accounts are clearly manned more by aides than by the politician in question, some are truly the direct voice of the senator or representative. The result of this is a level of access to politicians previously unimaginable. Even if some of the messages come from assistants, it's not hard to envision the majority of political figures having Twitter accounts in the future. As this kind of access becomes more commonplace, it's easy to see how being behind the social media curve could become a distinct political liability.

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