Legal social media needs less networks, more credible outlets

Tech blogger, Rocco Penna, argues that we don’t need more social networks, we need more outlets, in a post at Soshable this morning.

We already have Google Plus, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Plus blogs. We don’t need more social media.

We do not need additional venues through which to share and connect. We have all we need. The niche social outlets are the key to keeping everything rolling properly.

Social outlets? Sounds like curation.

Social outlets keep the content flowing. They expose blogs and mainstream news that fills the social networks with fresh reasons to visit.

Current social networks, though providing a pipeline for sharing among the cutting edge on the Internet, will not cut it for the masses, especially when it comes to thoughtful insight and commentary.

Digg doesn’t fit for everyone with its slow style of presenting the news. Reddit is absolutely terrifying to new users. Flickr is very personal for many, but the it’s often hard to find the right content. Buzzfeed is limited. Tumblr is unlimited (almost too much so, it seems).

It comes down to diversity. There needs to be a more diverse set of valid ways to discover content. Sharing is easy. Finding the content is harder. Perhaps more importantly, social networks are not the best venue for high levels of thought. It’s not an insult, simply a fact. High-end thoughts may be shared on Facebook or Twitter, but for every intelligent tweet there are thousands of frivolous ones. For every profound Facebook status update, there are millions of people talking about their boring lives.

What does this mean for the law?

We have thousands of blogs being published by lawyers. Admittedly some are markedly better than others. But there is no question blogs from lawyers are providing greater access to the law and more insight on legal developments than we have ever had.

The key is separating the art from the junk in the law. What’s this going to take?

• To help more lawyers understand what it means to blog well and the opportunities that await them when they do. Using other social media and networks alone in a flighty half backed way can be wasted energy.
• To empower lawyers willing to blog well with effective and eloquent blog publishing platforms.
• To educate blogging lawyers on the power of social networking tools (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, RSS Readers, Google Plus) so they can learn from the conversation, share what they are reading and writing, and network with peers and target members of the public.
• To separate the good from the not so good blogged content in curated environments breaking down the law by niche areas of the law and locales.
• To distribute this curated law content in easy to consume browser and mobile (key for future) environments so lawyers and the public have ready access to the info they’d like to discover. Think Wall Street Journal or New York Times — you don’t go there searching for a particular subject, you discover items of interest.

No easy task here. but the opportunity awaits the organizations bringing a credible outlet to the legal insight and commentary being blogged by lawyers. I expect the LexBlog team and our law blog network to play a part.