Real Lawyers Have Blogs : Law Blogs, Social Media, Twitter

Sarah Needleman reports in Monday's Wall Street Journal that big businesses are finding it critical to monitor social media as part of their public relations efforts.

A growing number of businesses are tracking social-media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter to gauge consumer sentiment and avert potential public-relations problems.

Ford Motor Co., PepsiCo Inc. and Southwest Airlines Co., among others, are deploying software and assigning employees to monitor Internet postings and blogs. They're also assigning senior leaders to craft corporate strategies for social media.

Shouldn't law firms being doing the same for matters about their firm and the matters in which their firm is representing clients? In this day and age when it's so easy to set up a dashboard via RSS feeds monitoring names, subjects, and sources it borders on negligence for law firms not to be doing so.

Not only do law firms need to monitor the likes of Facebook and Twitter, law firms need to respond quickly. Per corporate communications pro, Shel Holtz, "Social media [has] magnified the urgency of crisis communication, seemingly small incidents can quickly spread into bigger PR problems via the Web."

Scarier yet for law firms is not having all communications go through the law firm's traditional communication channels. Per Needleman:

Some companies are training staffers to broaden their social-media efforts. At Ford, Mr. Monty plans to soon begin teaching employees how to use sites like Twitter to represent the company and interact with consumers.

Coca-Cola Co. is preparing a similar effort, which initially will be limited to marketing, public affairs and legal staffers. Participants will be authorized to post to social media on Coke's behalf without checking with the company's PR staff, says Adam Brown, named Coke's first head of social media in March.

We've already seen how woefully unprepared law firms are for this type of monitoring and rapid response. Embarrassing emails from law firm management leak to blogs or main stream media. Virally passed across the Internet, without any response from the firm via social media, these things take on a life of their own.

I heard from one national law firm communications director that stories spreading across the Internet about senior partners thinking of leaving the firm, whether true or not, all but put the firm on a path leading to its demise.

For lawyers doing litigation, there's little question news and information about matters in dispute are going to be spread across Twitter and Facebook. A gag order is going do do little to quash discussion effecting the news, your bargaining position, and the views of a fact finder - judge or jury.

No one's got the perfect answer on how to monitor social media and how to respond yet. All we know is that not monitoring social media is a dangerous proposition and not responding in a timely fashion via the same social media is even more dangerous.

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Twitter is going mainstream reported the WSJ's Jessica Vascellaro last week.

A wide range of people and businesses are finding interesting uses for the brief notes (140 cahracters).

• Doctors are using Twitter to update patients about office hours.
• Local groups such as the Los Angeles Fire Department are using it to share details about service calls with interested residents, occasionally with graphic descriptions of the victims' conditions.
• Dozens of major companies, like computer maker Dell Inc., use Twitter to share deals and product news with people who sign up for the service.

Lawyers should look at the professionals, including other lawyers, using Twitter for business development and to get business done.

• Andrew Flusche, an attorney in Fredericksburg, Va., used Twitter to promote a webinar he was holding on trademark registration. The session got 15 attendees, compared with seven for a subsequent seminar he didn't promote on the service. Flusche has also found the service handy for referring cases to experts in other areas, as well as keeping up with professional contacts he doesn't see often. 'You get interesting glimpses of them,' he says. 'It's a different way to network with people and get to know them.'
• A real-estate agent follows feeds from more than 1,000 people, including neighbors and fellow real-estate professionals looking for those who are seeking real-estate help in his area. He then provides an instant hotline by sharing info on Twitter. He's also received responses to inquires he made on Twitter from a mortgage broker across the country allowing him to close a sale the next day.
• Professionals are using Twitter during conferences to share a steady stream of news and information.
• Online shoe retailer Zappos.com Inc., of Henderson, Nev., has more than 450 employees using the service to communicate with one another on topics ranging from politics to marketing plans. Zappos Chief Executive Tony Hsieh kicked off the trend by launching his own personal Twitter account, and continues to blast out updates about his activities to his more than 14,000 followers.
• By listening to its corporate name on Twitter search, Comcast Corp. resolves dozens of customer-service issues a day over Twitter. When it hears of a complaint, Comcast looks up the customer and calls them.

I'll add the story of Milwaukee business lawyer, Chris Moander, who I met last week. Just 9 months out of law school has picked up 5 good business clients via Twitter. And that's just since Chris started using Twitter - 6 weeks ago!

Though Twitter's user base is still relatively small (1 million plus users), it's up from 282,000 last year. And these numbers are likely low as much of Twitters use is via unmeasured mobile phones.

Stay tuned.

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If you haven't started noticing traffic coming to your law blog from the Wall Street Journal already, you soon may. I'm already seeing traffic from the WSJ and so are a number of LexBlog clients.

How? The Wall Street Journal is now running in its law section syndicated law blog posts from influential law blogs. You'll see the law blog posts under the headline 'Breaking Law Stories From Around the Web' on the right side of the page as you scroll down.

Click on one of the blog post titles and you'll receive the entry text of the post, a link to the post, and a link to the law blog. You'll also receive links to each of the blog posts which referenced the blog post.

Here's a screen shot from the WSJ highlighting a blog post from LexBlog client Todd Smith that the WSJ pulled in by syndication. You'll then see a couple posts from this blog along with other law blog posts which referenced Todd's original post.

How cool is this? The only thing better than publishing content to your own law blog is having major publications like the WSJ publish your content to their readers.

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41 years ago Paul Steiger began his career in journalism with the WSJ and LA Times in 'an industry of family-owned newspapers... setting off on a momentous period of growing power and profit.' Next Thursday he leaves the WSJ, including 16 years at its managing editor, and an 'industry in upheaval, with slumping revenues and stocks, layoffs, and takeovers of publishers that a decade ago seemed impregnable.'

The Journal's editors asked him to retrace his experiences of the past four decades in search of insights into how all this happened, what may happen next and the implications of all this change for readers, the nation and society at large.

'Read All About It' is Steiger's story chronicling the days of Camelot, where investigative reporting had no bounds, including first class air travel, to today, where newspapers have been 'shredded by the Internet.' It's a lengthy and great read on how newspapers may have returned to their past where 'less than 50 years ago, American newspapers were in the main relatively small, narrowly profitable, family-owned, locally focused and hotly competitive.'

Take aways for me are the contrasts of feast and famine Steiger draws:

The cornucopia of national, international and business news, sports, and especially opinion available free on the Web is rich beyond historical parallel. Anyone with a fact, a comment, a snapshot or a video clip can self-publish and instantly compete with the professionals.

At the same time, the vast array of investigative reporting and foreign correspondence assembled at American newspapers over the past several decades is being cut back at all but a few publications, as papers succumb to the pressure to cut costs.

Many journalists and academics see in these cutbacks a threat to the democratic ideal of a well-informed public. Some urge turning to philanthropy or an expansion of public television as a way to fill the gap. Others have begun to argue for a government subsidy for newspapers -- an unlikely prospect for now.

And the struggles faced in the industry's transformation:

Many papers are seeking to leap ahead in adapting to the movement of readers and advertisers to the Internet. This means tightly holding down costs of print publications while leveraging metro papers' principal unique assets: local reporting staffs and local ad-sales teams.

Cash from newspapers' own Web offerings has grown fast but needs to grow faster, because at current rates it will be years before it makes up for the slumping inflow from the still-much-larger print side. As Google, Yahoo and similar Internet enterprises suck away ad dollars, many newspaper companies hope to gain new revenue by forming once-unthinkable partnerships with each other and some of these same rivals, particularly Yahoo.

Positive for us is where Steiger is headed. To a nonprofit called Pro Publica as president and editor-in-chief.

When fully staffed, we will be a team of 24 journalists dedicated to reporting on abuses of power by anyone with power: government, business, unions, universities, school systems, doctors, hospitals, lawyers, courts, nonprofits, media. We'll publish through our Web site and also possibly through newspapers, magazines or TV programs, offering our material free if they provide wide distribution.

Pro Publica is funded by philanthropists providing $10 million a year in funding. As Steiger eludes to, it may be that philanthropy will be one business model protecting investigative reporting so important in a democratic society.

Empowering hundreds of bloggers with LexBlog, I can't help believing that lawyers blogging on niches using their examination skills will also play a role in investigative reporting. Such blog content may not only be read on the blogs themselves but be syndicated to the likes of the Wall Street Journal.

Tapping into such free editorially controlled syndicated content gives newspapers local and niche legal content, perhaps better than they ever had. Opportunities lie ahead.

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Per Kevin Rose, now that the Wall Street Journal is providing the public full (free) access to the WSJ's online articles, the WSJ has started placing Digg buttons at the bottom of their articles.

Digg is a community-based popularity website where news stories, blogs, and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted through a user-based ranking system. Obviously Rupert Murdoch sees greater revenue through Internet users virally promoting the WSJ's content than charging WSJ subscribers under a closed subscription model.

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