Filed under Social Media

So you’ve got this 2 ½ year old start-up company, Avvo, running a conference in Seattle, Washington called “Advanced Social Media Training for Lawyers.” As I explained in an earlier post, the nexus of social media and legal marketing got me hooked on going. I’ve gone to legal marketing events where social media is a component of the event, but not a legal marketing event where social media is the focus. I was curious to see a) who would go b) what would be their interest and c) what was the content of the event.

Is this Conference Legit?

My first concern was the integrity of the conference organizer.  Company produced conferences might often be viewed by internal staff as shooting fish in a barrel. With all those live one’s in a room it’s hard to resist the temptation to reel in as many as possible. While Avvo CEO Mark Britton opened and closed the conference, he served as effective conference bookends and actually had something of value to say. Although sales staff silently trolled, they mostly stayed busy helping to manage event logistics.

About the Attending Lawyers

The event was attended by  about 200 lawyers including some bar association types and a very small smattering of legal marketing consultants. Lawyers were mostly small boutique firms liberally represented by plaintiff and consumer law. Although Perkins and Coie was an event sponsor, I didn’t meet any others from BigLaw.

Attending lawyers were largely media and technology savvy. Off-topic conversations included discussions of office efficiency and personal productivity. As a group they had crossed the chasm. Few were questioning the social media proposition as much as they were working to define their strategies and tactics to leverage new media. Only the professional crowd I met at EduWeb, a conference I attended for higher education educators earlier last year, showed a higher level of media and technology savvy than this group of mostly younger lawyers.

All About the Content

The best presentations and presenters connected their message directly to the attendees. Doug Mandell, discussing LinkedIn, had taken the time to evaluate every attendee’s LinkedIn profile against 14 criteria. When the performance average proved to be 8 of the 14 (57%), Mandell assigned the crowd an “F”. That got everyone’s attention. Tim Stanley of Justia riveted the crowd, ending the first day by going 50% over his allotted time (with permission) and then still apologizing for talking so fast.

The second day began with an optional 1 hour of CLE credit on the subject of Ethics in Marketing. Although not an attorney, I “audited” the session and found the information compelling. The downside of social media and the ethical issues dominate most lawyers’ thinking on this marketing strategy. Yet keynote speaker Bob Ambrogi @BobAmbrogi observed, “”As far as I know there has never been a disciplinary action against an attorney for answering questions online.”

Susan Lyon @SusanLyon from Perkins and Coie presented the perspective of a large firm practicing attorney who also maintains a broad public persona on Facebook and Twitter in addition to the more business-oriented LinkedIn. Susan confronted common concerns by lawyers about establishing the right balance between privacy and social networking.

Random Acts of Meanness

The event was not without some mild excitement. Midway through the first day, event organizers were confronted with some non-attending jackass Twitter flame throwers. Although there may have been a message in their sarcastic comments, it was obscured by their rude and disruptive behavior. Conference organizers didn’t blink at this menace and the dialogue flowed around the scofflaws and at a higher level.

Always Finish with Beer

We closed the conference properly with  Beer for Bloggers at Kell’s Irish Pub with local resident and legal blogging maven Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog picking up the tab. Thanks, Kev.  All told it was a bold and successful move by Avvo. And we had some great beer, too.

P.S.

Yes,  I went bird watching on the Kitsap Peninsula after the conference with a friend who works at Amazon. We found 43 bird species and I added 8 life birds to my list.

I attended the Avvo “Advanced Social Media Training for Lawyers” conference in Seattle last week. It was excellent. There were many topic-relevant highpoints. What I’m about to share was not one of them.

Like many well-organized conferences our broadband-enabled conference room included an active Twitter community of attendees. Non-attendees were also chiming in at #avvo. As a best practice, the Twitter stream was also displayed in a Twitterfall on the podium. That is, the Twitter-enabled backchannel of commentary and opinion was brought forward to complement each presentation. I find this kind of total immersion Presenter – Twitter environment works well to stimulate my active engagement with others based on the presenter’s material. Except this time I experienced a new twist.

In the midst of the topic-relevant Tweets, non-attendee @ScottGreenfield scolds, “This #avvo used car salesman conference is deeply disturbing.” @btannenbaum @btannebaum added, “Remember something you avvocating maniacs, if you’re not a good lawyer, people will find out, despite your blogs and online garbage #avvo.” @ScottGreenfield continues, “We’re twitting about the #avvo conf in Seattle. We are living it via twitter. It’s very ugly.”

Ironically, the essence of what these two harassers were saying was not incorrect. In fact, they had some great points about abuse of social media, thoughtless blogging and even the alleged “social media gurus” (SMG) who industrialize the process of building real human networks.  However, as one who was present, what was clear was there was a mis-match between their sterotype of the interests of the attendees and the reality of what people were focused on learning and being taught. The flamers were flinging mud but they had the wrong target.

In the end, the rogue Tweeters were not effective but simply annoying, prompting @kaitlinjanusz to respond, “no one wants to hire attorneys who are malicious to other attorneys via social media. The avvocating conference is wonderful.” I, too, elected to offer my two cents, observing with some tongue in cheek, “Most diminished brand of the day: @ScottGreenfield. Forget it. I’m not referring any of my criminal friends for you to defend. #avvo.”  After a few more insults directed at the conference organizers, the attendees and me, the squabblers went away – hopefully to do some legal business and not editorialize by remote.

Without being too doting, I credit the Avvo conference organizers to unflinchingly maintain their commitment to the public Twitter feed and stoically ignore the Twitter flames. Reality is an adventure and Avvo seemed to be up for the experience in this, their first social media conference. Howsoever it was structured, an engaging conversation emerged among attendees as well as several not present. In the end, the conference was a richer experience for everyone. And the flamers were simply noted for being jackass.

I’m going to the AVVO Avvocating Advanced Online Marketing Training for Lawyers conference in Seattle in a couple weeks.  Three things about this event turn me on:

First, the conference focus is the nexus of two of my professional interests, online marketing and the legal industry. Looking forward to a snapshot view of where online marketing is specifically impacting a specific targeted vertical market.  And since the legal industry is, generally, so incredibly retarded in the uptake of these strategic online marketing opportunities, I already feel a certain amount of dynamic tension revolving about this conference. Will it be fear and loathing? Resignation? Or general embracement of new strategies? It will be interesting to see where the attendees line up on this stuff.

Second, the presenters represent a cross section of what is happening in both legal marketing and online marketing. Bob Ambrogi and Tim Stanley founder of Justia have deep roots and genuine street cred in the legal industry. In media, social and otherwise, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Microsoft and Twitter will all have representatives pressing their case. And event sponsors Steve Willey of Savitt Bruce & Willey and Susan Lyon from Perkins Coie will probably introduce more legal vertical reality into the conversation. There’s more, but you get the idea. Reps from the major players in the online marketing drama will be putting the best face on online business development opportunities for lawyers. Will the conference attendees be sympathetic? Will they get it? Or will it be the more commonly heard fears of downside risk prevail? I’m eager to find out.

And third, I’m looking forward to some winter birding in the Seattle area. I guess it’s pretty rainy now. But, in the approximate words of Thoreau, “if you want to observe wildlife, go in wild weather.” Following the conference I’ll probably remove myself to the Kitsap Peninsula for the following weekend to digest the event’s proceedings and pick up a few life birds.

This trip should be revealing on all fronts.

After work yesterday, I went to work. I joined up with 90 other people to practice our marketing craft. Here was the set up. A nascent organization, Windy City Social, was sponsoring a Marketing Challenge. Three business cases were presented and the crowd dispersed into nine teams to tackle the marketing challenges of each case. Pizza, beer, competition and collaboration at the Cubby Bear in Chicago.

The self-acknowledged un-cool General Motor’s Buick division challenged the crowd to help build a marketing program to bring the average age of their buyers down by about 20 years. No longer selling Electras and LeSabres, Buick’s  newest models were arguably cool enough for their target 35 – 55 market and they were looking for new ways to get the word out. Southwest Airlines, already in possession of the cool factor, desired to share their “bags fly free” differentiation with less frequent travelers. And for truly “cool” in the literal sense, the Chicago Special Olympics sought to grow participation in its Lake Michigan Polar Plunge annual winter fund raiser, now celebrating its 10^th year and having grown to over 1200 chilly plungers.

Teams had 90 minutes to consider the objectives, develop a plan and assemble a presentation. I joined one of the three Polar Plunge teams. Ten of us, having never met and with no appreciation for each other’s skills or background sat in a circle and stared at each other, perfunctory name introductions already forgotten. Go.

Amidst the cacophony of nine teams hammering out their solutions, our group’s leader, Daniel Honigman, filtered the input. Simple, he dictated and we responded by eliminating multiple affinity groups and market segments and focused on one. With that focus, ideas flowed and Daniel contemporaneously captured, structured and edited our draft into a rough PowerPoint. Stop.

Nine 5-minute presentations later we’d heard songs, monologues, skits, taglines and positioning statements. The business case sponsors voted and winners were announced. But actually, we all won as each of us refined and sharpened the skills we need in our day jobs including working quickly, effectively prioritizing, collaborating synergistically and presenting convincingly. It was a hard day’s night, but I had a ball.

It is rare for a day to go by that we don’t receive some kind of inquiry about Drupal. In fact, in response to the inquiries, our lead Drupal developer, Doug Vann, published a Drupal-related blog post just last week. In his post he addressed the question, “What’s All the Buzz About Drupal”

So we’ve decided to offer a hands-on Drupal Training Workshop to dig a little deeper into the question of why Drupal is getting a lot of buzz.  Let me emphasize right away that this workshop is aimed at website administrators and marketers who are NOT deeply technical. Web developers who are technical but want to also understand the business case for using Drupal would also find this workshop useful. I took a very similar course from Doug over the summer and found it to be a great way to orient myself to Drupal. And this course has the advantage of also being hands-on.

We think that some of the likely candidates for this workshop include people who are in the following situations:

Leverage Social Media
Drupal is social publishing software.  Chances are you are encountering challenges integrating social media with your present content management software. You can find out if Drupal might take you closer to where you want to be.

Micro Sites
We know that a complete corporate website overhaul may not be in the cards for you today, but you may have some business initiatives you want to pursue online.  When budget and timeline are significant constraints, Drupal may offer an implementable solution. Our client, the Lake County Forest Preserve District just launched a simple Drupal microsite on a very short leash. Not only was the outcome successful, but they have a Drupal site in which they might explore capabilities in anticipation of some future re-development of the District’s main website.

Dated, Proprietary or Non-existent Content Management System
Perhaps you are still managing your website using either page-based content management systems like Adobe’s Contribute or just making changes in the HTML website code. The Drupal CMS might provide a relatively easy evolution of your website to something considerably more powerful and requiring fewer technical skills to manage.

I suspect I haven’t captured the scenario of everyone who might be interested in migrating their website to Drupal. For an investment of your morning on October 13, 2009 and $40, you can assess your website problem against this solution. It could be a very efficient way to gain clarity on your requirements as well as evaluate this particular option.

If you are interested in one of the 18 seats available, you can register here.

If you ask 10 different people to describe Drupal, you will get 10 different responses. That is because Drupal is so many things. Open source social publishing software, a web content management system, a web content framework, a web applications framework; these are some of the answers you will receive. If you break down these answers you quickly find a couple key points that stand out.

Open Source

Drupal is open source. This means that no one owns the code that makes Drupal what it is. It is also FREE to download and FREE to modify. Indeed, a 10,000 plus sized developer community is making Drupal better all the time. Drupal is indeed a Web Content Management System (CMS). In the 21st century it is not acceptable to have a website that only a programmer can control. A robust CMS like Drupal allows the end user to add, delete, edit, moderate, and publish the content that is on their site. This puts the power of the website into the hands of the site-owner NOT keeping it in the hands of the site-developer.

Social Publishing Software

Drupal is social publishing software. The prevailing idea behind Web2.0 is to have user contributed content on your site. Drupal allows users to create content, blogs, articles, new groups, multimedia, etc. Drupal also allows finite control of permissions so that only allowed users can add specific types of content to the site.

Web Application Framework

Drupal is a Web Application Framework. If you have some new and inventive idea that has never before been done on the web, bring your napkin sketches to Drupal. The well documented and well designed Application Program Interface (API) will aid you in writing the code to allow Drupal to make your idea into reality.

Large Developer Community

Drupal is a LARGE and growing community. Drupal is controlled by no one but owned by everyone. The community thrives on a concept that is sometimes described as “Collaboration, not competition.” By doing this, the community organically forms into overlapping cells of teams that take on the necessary tasks that have made Drupal an enterprise level solution to the web development needs of mom-&-pops, NGOs, NFPs, and Fortune 500’s as well. The community successfully handles security updates, feature adds, accessibility concerns, and the ever changing integration methods employed by 3rd party entities such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others.

Drupal continues to win awards every year in a variety of categories from a variety of sources. Many members of the Drupal community are celebrated authors, employees of major companies, holders of multiple degrees, and genuinely nice people who donate a lot of free time to grow and aide the Drupal project and community. More and more companies are leveraging Drupal to build large scale, feature rich sites in relatively short time spans. With Drupal and all of its add-on modules being free, companies can spend more of their resources on configuration rather than the old system where every new project started out with re-writing a lot of the same old code.

Here is a link to the conference Tweets (will link to a spreadsheet).

There was a lot of great content presented and shared at the2009 Eduweb Conference that ended in Chicago.  I’m hoping to share some of what I learned soon. But I wanted to quickly post my latest obsession with conference tweeting.  In this case, with considerable brute force I have cut and pasted all the #eduweb tweets and sorted them in chronological order (earliest to latest).

If you have the slightest interest in this, you will find a spreadsheet with 4 tabs.  The one you want is the one I called Final Chronological Sort. The other tabs are for those who want to play with the rawer file export.

You will find that we have about 1500 Tweets. Some were lost because the Twitter search tool would not let me go further back. And, of course, people are still posting new Tweets but I had to cut it somewhere.  So I believe I have the greater bulk of the Tweets. Have fun.

If you know a better way to grab these Tweets than cutting & pasting from Twitter’s native search, share it here.   Other interesting things to mine might be the number of active Tweeters and the volume ranking of all Tweeters.  Not sure what useful Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) come out of this, but it is always good to measure.

As I write this, nothing can really hold a candle to the significance of online social media influencing the events in Iran.  But then most of us are observers, not participants, in this particular social media event. Every day, however, some of us are either traveling to industry conferences. Or, as the case may be in today’s business environment, we aren’t funded for that trip out of town or even out of the office.

In the last several months I’ve attended two conferences in which Twitter factored in as revolutionary in the conference experience. In each case, a hash tag (#) preceded a few characters to help me hone in on Tweets from each particular event. For example,

our Web Content Conference last week was Tweeted with #wc09. Instantly a community of publishers sprouted to both report the very uttering of the conference session presenters as well as to editorialize contemporaneously with great zeal like kids in the back of a classroom exchanging notes.

It may sound chaotic – some might even say idiotic. But the impact of all this chatter is jaw-dropping. Here are just some of the immediate impacts of this behavior.

• Content is memorialized – Dozens of note takers stream their 140 character thought nuggets onto Twitter where they are easily corralled for re-assembly and review.  All those interesting links and references are captured for post event recall.
• Content is shared among non-attendees – Can’t make the conference? That doesn’t mean you can’t be involved by reading the published stream. And don’t stop there. Add your own comments or questions back to the attendees or other non-attendees.  In essence, be part of the conference community really or virtually.
• Content is shared among attendees in different breakout sessions – Torn between two simultaneous breakout sessions? Attend one in person and the other virtually by following the Twitter feeds from the other session(s). Why wait to find out the other session was great. Some have been known to get up and move to the other breakout session based on the Twitter feeds.
• Content is shared among attendees at other similar-topic conferences – You’re at the marketing conference in DC but the Tech show is happening in Chicago at the same time. Now you can go to one and tune in to the other.
• Attention level & interest is apparent from Tweet activity – Was the Tweet stream active during your presentation? If not, perhaps its time to revisit your material.

I have experienced all of the above during my conference participation as attendee, presenter and long distance lurker. The impact is electric and riveting.  The engagement level is intense and, in the end, you make contact with a lot more people than you might without the tool. Only one admonition to meeting planners: Your conference venue better have wireless connectivity. Or we’ll Tweet about you.

If you’re like many marketers, delving into social media may feel like stepping onto a roller coaster; exciting and super scary all at the same time. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say, “I don’t get Twitter. Why do I care what someone had for breakfast today?” The truth is, social media is here to stay, it can help your business and if you’re a marketer I hope you’ve already bought your ticket.

In a keynote presentation at the Web Content Conference, Rob Rose argued that we are in a transformational stage in marketing. Those of you who cringe when you hear the term “social media” will love his view that when it comes to this Web 2.0 world where there are “no rules.”

The bad news is that if you’re looking for an easy road map to follow or a step-by-step guide to guarantee success, there isn’t one. The good news is that innovation wins; and you can use the skills and ideas that you already have as a marketer to make social media work for you. Don’t be afraid to blaze your own trail.

If social media is still an unknown to you, don’t let your fears paralyze you. You don’t have to be “this tall” to ride, but you do have to jump on.

True/Slant homepage

Or so said Jock Whitney, one-time publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, and now says the tag line of a fledgling news team who have taken that idea to the perfect place to test it—a social media news site.

True/Slant.com was launched  in April with some new ideas about reporting, advertising, and engaging readers. True/Slant introduces a new model in online news—one of many models we have discussed here various times that will emerge as on-line news picks up the mantle where print appears to be laying it down.
Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal online reviewed the site when it launched and described the advertising model this way:

True/Slant will run regular Web ads throughout. But, in a highly unusual move, the site plans to offer advertisers their own entire pages where they can run blogs and try to attract a network of followers. These will have the same design and features of the journalists’ pages, but will be labeled as ad content.

It’s an interesting idea—a sort of on-going advertorial—that allows advertisers to be part of the site using content, ads, (and maybe links to their sites) to gain and keep the attention of readers; another reminder that perhaps content (relevant, useful content) is still king after all. Hear that Twitter? Some people still like more than 140 characters.

There are so many interesting things about trueslant.com–the  name for one. Contributors are talented, experienced journalists who specialize in a topic or area so the site as a whole has an expanse of topics much the way large newspapers do (or used to) art, food, travel, politics, money, science, fashion, entertainment.  It’s hard for traditional newspapers to get this type of seasoned and credible journalism in one place and still be able to afford to pay for it.

Readers  are welcome to join the site and act as “mini” contributors, uploading photos, commenting, recommending, like all social media site, being part of the conversation–all of which are tracked on the site– and filing out their own profiles.

Reader Stats

You can follow contributors or topics, get only the news you want via RSS, or upon logging in,  go straight to the topic or contributors page you are interested in, rather than just being handed “front page news” based on what editors think we think is important. (Which is something other sites like Newser.com haven’t had the courtesy to do yet. Nor do many other news sites have this type of  good original content–at the same time snarky and entertaining, informative and thoughtful.)

Journalists are free to talk about a more broad range of topics that sometimes focus on geographic areas of the country giving national exposure to local happenings. That brings to mind the Guardian’s Stephen Glover’s comments regarding one reason he thinks American news papers are failing at greater rates that European, that is, the strong emphasis on local, rather than national circulation.

Why are newspapers faring even worse in America than in Britain? Partly because the internet is more ubiquitous there, and has taken more readers away from print. And partly because American titles, being with a few exceptions city-based, are particularly dependent on local classified advertising, which is flying to the internet or, during the recession, simply drying up.

Maybe the idea of bringing news from around the country to one centralized location will give a little more density to the True/Slant model of on-line news.

One feature I will be watching with interest, American Crossroads, is that of a Mid-west writer with a focus on stories from the Heartland and how they mirror the US as a whole. This writer is also a documentarian, filming “a documentary about the horrific 2006 slaying of an Indianapolis family of seven.” As the film takes on life, True/Slant readers and  contributors will be encouraged to provide feedback, contribute relevant content, and be a part of the film making process or just watch as the story unfolds.  Interesting way to involve your audience, not to mention the story is a compelling one full of contradictions and “social, ethinic, political and economic” complexities that may well reflect the current angst of our nation.