Real Lawyers Have Blogs : Advice On Law Blogs and Social Media

Real time search came to Google yesterday. Twitter results are now streamed into the top of search results pages so that you can see what people are saying about the subject searched in real time.

Lawyers should not view this as gimmick. Imagine being able to get lawyers' and business peoples' reactions to cases, news, and legal stories in real time. Doing so you may be able to find the people with the most knowledge on the subject. Want to get real time information on items being discussed at a conference and who's discussing them? Turn to real time search at Twitter.

Here's a YouTube Video depicting the Twitter search results displayed on Google. Below that are three screen shots to show you how you can get to the Twitter results if you are not seeing them on Google.

If you're not seeing the results, click on the plus sign next to 'Web,' as depicted below.

You'll then see a left column displaying search options. Click on the Updates as depicted.

You'll then see real time search results referencing 'Tweets' referencing 'LexBlog' posted my me and three other people.

No one knows how real time search is going to play out, how it's going to be displayed, and how its going to be used, including Google. And especially legal curmudgeons who question any innovation.

But just as search of the Web had value before Google got the world addicted to search, there's value in real time search. We'll be witnesses to how Google and others develop it. We'll then become addicts all over again.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

Need another reason to use your own name, as opposed to a pseudonym, as your username on Twitter? Beyond the fact that your own name is how people know you.

For making it easy for people to give you proper attribution on Twitter on TweetDeck, a desktop application many of us use to Twitter.

I share relevant blog posts of others with my Twitter followers. Rather than just post a blog title and a link, I want to attribute the blog post to its author. I do this by putting the Twitter username of the blog author in parentheses after the text in my Tweet.

See the below example of my Twitter post where I shared Attorney Sam Hasler's blog post, 'What Other Indiana Family Law Blogs Are Saying.' In addition to the post title and link, I gave Sam attribution for the link I am sharing with the '@schasler,' Sam's username on Twitter.

How'd I know that Sam's Twitter name was '@schasler?' I just keyed in 'has' in TweetDeck's autocomplete feature that came up after I hit the '@' key. Up popped Sam's Twitter user name in a brief list of people I follow on Twitter who also have 'has' in their name. See the below for what I mean.

If Sam used a Twitter username such '@Indianadivorcelawyer,' something many lawyers too clever for their own good do, I could have never recalled such a username. I follow a ton of people on Twitter and know Sam as Sam Hasler, not some pseudonym.

In addition to giving proper attribution in your Tweets because it's proper net protocol, using a Twitter user's name lets the person know you've shared a blog post of theirs. If the person didn't know you before, they do now. Getting known is how you get the influencers to follow you and how you network to build relationships.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments (2)
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

The public's growing use of Twitter or other services to share updates provides fertile ground for lawyers to network and engage their target audience.

Per a just released survey on Twitter and Status Updating from the Pew Internet & American Life Project:

Some 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. This represents a significant increase over previous surveys in December 2008 and April 2009, when 11% of internet users said they use a status-update service.

Of particular note for lawyers is that median age of those using Twitter and social networking sites.

• Median age of a Twitter user is 31, which has remained stable over the past year.
• Median age for MySpace is now 26, down from 27 in May 2008.
• Median age for LinkedIn is now 39, down from 40.
• Median age for Facebook is now 33, up from 26 in May 2008.

No question, per the Pew Foundation, that we're going to see nothing but growth in the public's use of Twitter and social networking sites.

[I]t is clear that a 'social segment' of internet users is flocking to both social network sites and status update services. This segment is likely to grow as ever more internet users adopt mobile devices as a primary means of going online.

The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan, nonprofit "fact tank" that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. Their Internet & American Life Project produces reports exploring the impact of the internet on families, communities, work and home, daily life, education, health care, and civic and political life.

Related Posts

• Twitter for client development for lawyers : Being an intelligence agent as good as it gets
• Twitter 101 for law firms and other businesses : From Twitter
• Twitter client development success stories - lawyers and legal professionals chime in

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

New media author and consultant, Louis Gray, reporting from Blog World '09, blogs that even in this age of microblogging (Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed), blogs are far from dead.

Even as the microblogging space seems to be white hot these days, the world of longer-form blogging is still seeing impressive growth, with all major blogging platforms showing greater than 20 to 40 percent growth year over year, and record users, blogs and total readers, according to Compete.com data and a presentation from Google's Rick Klau, product manager for Blogger, who spoke at Blog World Expo this afternoon. Rick reported that his platform, Blogger, which I use, is now seeing nearly 300,000 words per minute, scaling to 417 million words per month, from more than 10 million content creators. (emphasis added)

I couldn't agree more with Klau (also a lawyer) that "Microblogs are complementary, not competitive, [they are] a driver of attention and engagement back to the blog."

As Klau reports is the case with his blog, Twitter has become the highest traffic generator for my blog outside of search. As is my practice, Klau suggested "Rather than trying to fight against the flow on microblogging, to embrace it, and make sure your content is available to these disparate networks, while remembering to engage where it lands."

Microblogging allows you to engage your audience on subjects on which you've wrote at length on your blog. Klau explained by pulling your blog content into Facebook or Twitter, you need not force a conversation (comments) back onto your blog. If you try to drag people from where they are comfortable communicating, you may lose the opportunity to engage your target audience.

Your blog will continue to be your brand and home base, just adapt to this world of microblogging, as Gray advises, so as to complement your blog.

It makes sense to participate wherever the content lands and wherever your readers are, without pushing to centralize the conversation on your site, but there is no substitute for long-form conversations and being passionate.

I'd suggest any law blogger begin to use microblogging. There's too much to gain through engaging your audience and further enhancing your reputation as a leader.

Though there will be some non-blogging lawyers microblogging, I think they'll find it minimally effective for client development without a place to build their brand through longer insight and commentary that a blog allows for.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

Thanks to all of you who attended today's webinar, Why Twitter Matters to Lawyers, part of the ABA Journal's Legal Rebels' 24 Hours of Rebels. We had a great turnout of close to 500 attendees.

You can download the above mindmap that Kevin used in his presentation. You can also view a previously recorded webinar on Using Twitter for Client Development.

You might also enjoy reading about some Twitter client development success stories that legal professionals using Twitter have shared with us.

We hope this webinar was helpful. If you have any questions about Twitter or anything discussed in the webinar, feel free to contact Kevin (kevin@lexblog.com) or contact our Client Services team (support@lexblog.com).

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

It's foolish to argue whether legal professionals can use a social media tool such as Twitter for effective client development when many lawyers and other legal professionals are already doing so. Twitter's just a tool, among many other social media and networking tools.

If Twitter fits within your client development strategy, you've figured out how to use Twitter to brand yourself as an authority, and to engage your target audience so as to build relationships, that's great. If Twitter doesn't fit within your client development strategy, you don't understand it, you think Twitter's a waste of time, and other tools work better for your client development, that's great too.

I practiced law in rural Wisconsin. I had a couple of lawyer friends who curled for fun, and for client development. Yes, shuffleboard on ice with team members, a rock, and brooms. They spent hours on weekends curling and even traveled to curling tournaments around the state and country.

These lawyer curlers built relationships with curling bankers, insurance adjustors, and business owners through curling. They told me how they got legal work from these relationships built through curling.

What's the chance these two lawyers would quit curling for client development if I told them curling was a waste of time, that interest in curling was on the decline, that most people who started curling quit, it takes too much time, and that 80% of the conversation taking place while curling was mindless babble unrelated to the law and business?

I didn't curl. Didn't understand it as a client development tool. And couldn't imagine 'wasting that much time.'

But I sure didn't call those two lawyers out for telling me and others that curling works for client development. I didn't go on an anti-curling campaign to save any Wisconsin or Minnesota lawyers who were thinking of curling for fun and client development.

A couple years ago I was much like Larry Bodine. I saw little value in something called Twitter which allowed one to share 'what they were doing now' in short 140 character blurbs. 'My cat just rolled over' was not the makings of client development as I saw it.

In speaking engagements before legal professionals I wouldn't even let on that I had a Twitter account for fear people would think less of me.

Two years later, like many business leaders, lawyers, reporters, publishers, and association leaders, I see Twitter as a powerful branding, relationship building, and research tool.

On the branding side, I agree with venture capitalist and author, Guy Kawasaki, that Twitter is the most powerful branding mechanism since television.

We've all been a witness to Twitter's unparalleled growth.

• Ranked as one of the 50 most popular websites worldwide.(Alexa)
• Fastest-growing member community website, growing at six times the rate of Facebook in February. (Nielsen)
• Third most used social network with six million unique monthly visitors. (Compete.com)

Many legal professionals and I discovered how to use Twitter for client development. We're building meaningful relationships with our target audience of clients, prospective clients, referrals sources, and influencers of those three (bloggers, reporters, publishers, conference coordinators, and association leaders).

We're not spending too much time on Twitter, we're having fun using Twitter, we're using Twitter for client development, and we're getting clients as a result. See:

• Blog post listing sample of Twitter client development success stories from lawyers and legal professionals.
• Blog post on Twitter for client development for lawyers by being an intelligence agent.
• Lance Godard's Twitter interviews with practicing lawyers, many of whom use Twitter for practice and client development.

There's no time here to detail how we use Twitter in a smart, strategic, and time effective fashion. I've regularly blogged, spoke, and done webinars on the 'how to's' of Twitter for client development. Other seasoned lawyers and well respected legal professionals have done the same. (See Heather Milligan's blog posts on Twitter as one example)

All of us sharing how Twitter works were driven by our desire to help other legal professionals, not by, if you buy the Bodine argument, a vast conspiracy to see that American lawyers waste their time on mindless babble.

What of the many lawyers and business people registering for Twitter who didn't keep using Twitter? Welcome to the world of technology and Web 2.0 applications. Millions of people register for social networking websites and other Internet applications and stop using them.

Naysayers dissing technology is nothing new. It's recognized sport in the legal profession which hangs on to the past like grim death.

Many lawyers believed the use of a phone in rendering legal services was unprofessional and, of course, unethical. A small group of radical lawyers decided to use the phone, probably for perceived mindless babble.

When I began to teach lawyers how they could use blogs for client development, you'd have thought I killed someone. 'What a waste of time. No one reads them, especially a lawyer's target audience. They take too much time. Over 50% of people who start blogging, stop blogging.'

I heard it all. Like many things, I knew I was onto something, if for no other reason, because of the resistance I was meeting.

I may have brought out the anti-Twitter crowd by championing Twitter's use by lawyers. I may have provoked them further by pointing out what they didn't understand when they dissed Twitter. By arguing the merits of Twitter for client development on an ongoing basis I may have even created a forum for the naysayers to draw attention to themselves.

I'm sorry. I was just trying to help lawyers the best way I knew how.

For now, can't we agree that many lawyers and legal professionals are effectively using Twitter for client development? It makes no sense to tell others that's not possible and that to learn to use Twitter like these professionals is a waste of time.

Note: A copy of this post is included in a thread at LegalOnramp began by OnRamp CEO, Paul Lippe, entitled 'Bodine v. O'Keefe re Twitter and other Social Media.' Legal OnRamp is social network for in-house counsel and invited outside lawyers and third party service providers.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments (7)
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

90 per cent of the people (things) who begin to follow me each day on Twitter are machine generated. These things are not included in my current followers as these things stop following me when I don't follow them back. Let me explain.

Each day I go into my email to see 50 or 60 separate emails informing me that 50 or 60 more people started following me on Twitter.

Being the nice guy that I am (or idiot) and wanting to get to know certain real people through Twitter, I open up each mail from a person with a real name, click on the link to the user's Twitter page, and see who the new follower is. I then follow back about 10% of the people who started following me.

How did these people who have nothing in common with me come to follow me? Machines.

People, starved for attention or wanting to spam me with 'law of attraction' or 'how to get 30,000 followers on Twitter' tweets should I mistakenly follow them, sign up for machine driven Twitter auto-follow services.

Some machine then goes out for them and automatically follows people on Twitter who have used a term in Tweets that these clowns said they have an interest in when they signed up for the machine service. The same machine unfollows people who do not fellow these people back - if you get the numbers you're following too high in comparison to the number you're following Twitter won't let you follow anymore people.

Believe it or not there are even legal professionals who use these auto follow machines. I can see that from the same people coming back to follow me when I didn't follow them a month earlier when they last followed me. The machines stopped following me when I did not follow back and now the machine is back.

This machine thing is nuts. It's like someone wanting to network and engage people in the flesh but sending out machines to do it. Imagine machines showing up at a Rotary meeting or a networking function at an industry event. Machines that say I am here to get you to get to know Bob Smith, but Bob lacks the social skills to do it personally.

These machine buyers remind me of Greg Storey's description of the folks who buy SEO gimmicks from snake oil sales people as deep-sea life forms so anxious to get discovered that they'll do anything to get noticed especially if it means fifteen seconds on Discovery HD.

I'll continue to spend my 10 or 15 minutes per day seeing who the people are who follow me on Twitter. There's too many good non machine driven folks I'd like to get to know. And even with the deep sea life causing us all grief, Twitter remains fun and an excellent way to both brand my expertise and build relationships with people.

PS to Larry Bodine: Add this post to your 79 factoids proving that any legal professionals who say they are successfully using Twitter for client development are lying. ;)

• Email This
• Print
• Comments (4)
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

Imagine 15 years ago as a practicing lawyer taking 30 minutes in the morning to skim news headlines from 400 or 500 reliable news sources you selected because they offered news and commentary related to your work as well as monitoring keywords relevant to your area of law (clients' names, subjects, cases, and the like) for their use in the news and private commentary.

Then in the same 30 minutes you instantaneously shared 10 or 12 of those headlines, with a very short comment, with 1,000 people who looked as you as a reliable authority in your niche. The people you shared the headlines with included clients, prospective clients, referral sources, and their influencers (reporters, publishers, conference coordinators, civic leaders, association leaders, and the like).

Let's get crazier yet. Imagine many of the recipients of the information you shared in turn shared the information with their friends, business associates, reporters, and association leaders. Of course they gave you attribution as the source of the information.

As long as we're getting nuts, imagine a little button in their attribution to you which everyone knew to push to see what you did as a lawyer and who you do it for. Because of course those second hand recipients wanted to sign up to get these morning blurbs from you. They too saw you as a trusted and reliable source in your niche area of the law.

Imagine if I told my law partners in 1994 I was going to start to do the above as a means of tasteful and effective client development? "Sure, When cows fly. Go make in your office and take your medicine."

Well, with the use of a newsreader and Twitter the above is not only doable, it's something I try to do each day.

Not only do I learn by skimming the latest news so as to improve my company's service to clients, but my brand as a thought leader in my niche is going through the roof.

Blog traffic up. Comments on my blog up. Speaking engagements up. Calls from reporters up. Calls from law firms asking me to speak at their firms up. Employee swagger at my company knowing folks are working at the known leader in the industry up. And most importantly, bottom line revenue up.

This 30 minutes probably produces a higher ROI than any client development work I do.

Let me give you a couple examples from my use of Twitter this morning.

I shared that use of Microsoft's Bing Search Engine was up for the third month in a row and had a 9% market share.

A few minutes ago I was able to see that 84 people had clicked on the link I shared on Twitter earlier this morning.

Among a number of other things I shared on Twitter this morning I tweeted word of my blog post referencing Larry Bodine's piece in Marketing the Law Firm Newsletter saying that Twitter was a waste of time for client development.

A few minutes ago I was able to see that 161 people had viewed my blog post via the link I shared on Twitter this morning.

In addition on both of those items I saw numerous legal professionals and other folks share what I tweeted with their followers on Twitter ('retweeting').

I have over 6,000 people who follow me on Twitter. The vast majority of those followers are lawyers, other legal professionals (managing partners, CMO's CKO's, CIO's), marketing & communications professionals, reporters/editors, publishers, conference coordinators and the like.

That group has a high percentage of what I'd call innovators, leaders, and influencers. They are go getters growing their businesses. They think outside the box. They spread what they read and hear via email, blogs, newspapers and conferences.

These folks have come to rely on me for news and commentary I see on networking through through the Internet, client development for lawyers, social media/neyworking, 'Web 2.0' and the like. I am their trusted intelligence agent.

This is the type of audience a PR professional dies for. And a tool to put me in touch with my target audience on a daily basis? Never happened before.

And as an added kicker I am nurturing and making meaningful relationships with the people I want to get to know. We're becoming friends of each other.

Start small. You are not going to have 1,500 valuable followers overnight. Growing an audience interested in news related to your niche area of the law from 50 to 100 to 500 can take time.

That's okay. You're strengthening your brand as a reliable and trusted authority in a niche and making relationships with your target audience everyday. It's the stuff law firm client development dreams are made of.

Call Twitter mindless babble that's beneath lawyers if you like. Smart lawyers and law firms will ignore such mindless rhetoric and use Twitter as a high ROI relationship building tool.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments (3)
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

With legal marketing professionals opining Twitter is a waste of time for client development, it's no wonder lawyers are in a time warp when it comes to adopting innovative and effective technologies.

Where is a seasoned lawyer looking to build and foster relationships with clients, prospective clients, referral sources, and the influencers of those three (reporters, bloggers, publishers, conference coordinators, and industry associations) to go? Per Bodine, in addition to LinkedIn and few other worthwhile mediums for client development:

• Facebook, a great place for building relationships for younger lawyers, but not where I am telling senior rainmakers to spend their time.
• Martindale-Hubbell Connected, which may have potential, but is no where near the place where a lawyer's target audience and the influencers of that target is hanging out yet.
• A law marketing listserv run by Bodine, with some good discussion between legal marketing professionals, but with obviously little potential for networking.

The first third of Bodine's piece went way out of its way to belittle the power of Twitter as a relationship building and networking tool. This should comes as no surprise as Bodine is making a name for himself in bashing Twitter.

The basis for his argument appears to be that most lawyers don't use Twitter and that 40% of the discussion on Twitter is mindless - as if the conversation among lawyers and local business leaders in the country club on men's golf day is that of complex legal matters.

Based on the results I am hearing lawyers are getting by building relationships through Twitter, and getting clients as a result, I am beginning to think that Twitter offers the highest ROI of any networking/relationship building tool.

It does not take a lot of time to key in 140 characters sharing niche legal and business news/commentary with an accompanying link and retweeting commentary from an A-List of bloggers, reporters, business leaders and the like. Both build followers and valuable relationships.

Plus you'd have to be flat out nuts these days not to be monitoring real time conversation on Twitter mentioning your firm, clients, competition, and keywords & phrases related to the niche in which you practice.

I suppose if Bodine were around in the days of Alexander Graham Bell, he'd be siding with the lawyers who thought a lawyer's use of a phone in rendering legal services was clearly unprofessional and, of course, unethical. A small group of radical lawyers decided to use the phone, probably for perceived mindless babble.

Let's keep an open mind as to innovative client development tools for the American lawyer. What's so bad about just saying a medium appears to be working for some folks, I don't use it to much, I don't understand it, and we'll have to see how things play out?

Perhaps I shouldn't get worked up about misguided advice and opinions from someone who I don't believe understands Twitter, but Bodine's piece is in Marketing the Law Firm Newsletter, a part Law Journal Newsletters published by American Lawyer Media.

Bodine's piece will passed around by managing partners and chief marketing officers clinging to the past. The piece risks needlessly keeping the legal profession lagging behind the industries, corporations, and consumers we serve. That's a disservice to the American lawyer.

9/23 Update: In the original post (before updating) I mistakenly labeled Bodine's opinion piece as an article in American Lawyer Media's Law Technology News (LTN). I originally saw Bodine's piece on American Lawyer Media's Law.com website under a heading 'Law.com LegalTechnolgy | Featuring Legal Technology News.'

I mistakenly and stupidly assumed Bodine's piece was put out by LTN, not even catching the different names - 'Law.com LegalTechnology | Featuring Law Technology News.' Bodine's piece was not published by LTN.

The gist of my post (before updating it) called out LTN for labeling Twitter a waste of time for client development, something I described as a disservice to the American lawyer on LTN's and ALM's part.

I apologize to Monica Bay, Editor of LTN, her team at LTN, ALM, and you my readers for my mistake.

ALM employees, including Monica Bay, have a history of effectively using Twitter as a communication and relationship building tool. The last two LegalTech shows put on by ALM included panels on the power of Twitter, both of which panels were spearheaded by Monica Bay. At Monica's invitation I participated.

What I did was more than taking a cheap shot to LTN and ALM, it was sloppy blogging and exercising poor judgment on my part. I will try to do better.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments (15)
• Trackbacks
• Share Link