Tagged with 'social'

The new Internet flavor of the month has arrived in the form of Twitter and law firms are going through their ritual hand-wringing about creating social media policies. “OMG! Someone might utter a legal opinion!” Social media “experts” and “gurus” are popping up like our springtime dandelions and everyone is wildly cribbing social media policy from what were heretofore internal memos at IBM or the US Air Force.

Your Policy: Duct tape your mouth

I have nothing constructive to add to the policy discussion because my policy recommendation would probably be to duct tape your mouth so you couldn’t speak and break all your fingers so you couldn’t type. Like I said, nothing constructive to add. On the other hand, perhaps law firms (and, ya know, every other business for that matter) needs some social media strategy.

Your Strategy: Give this some thought

Policy makers! Relax. Sit back and think strategically about social media for just a minute. Although we seem to be at some kind of tipping point for social media, it isn’t all that new. So, duh, others have been thinking strategically about this for a while. And here’s some of the thinking that I’ve picked up along the way. Yeah, I’ve cribbed it from others too. Except, because I’m a trendy Web 2.0 guy, I call it crowdsourcing. Start here. Then build on it:

Why bother with social media?
Eight years ago I was asking law firms why they wanted to build a website. They didn’t give me good answers. And many built (and still do) pretty crummy non-strategic websites. But very pretty – with clean design and intuitive navigation to nothing in particular. Now you have a second chance to not blow it. Answer this question or go home: Why would you spend one nickel on social media?

What are your targeted objectives?
I see you cowering in the corner without answers. I’m going to make this an easy multiple choice question. Select from these options (It is ok to imagine your own)

• Social media gives us an opportunity to be part of a community where there is a dialog. We might actually learn something about our market if we listen to the conversation that we are involved in.
• We want to establish our authority and promote our brand. By making valuable contributions to a conversation, we will become recognized in the community for our knowledge and authority
• By planting our flag all over the internet we increase the likelihood that people will follow links back to our website where they can learn even more about our deep expertise and our 150 year history.

Who will implement your strategy?
Didn’t think about that did you? Most law firms are renowned for hiring one marketing person for every 10,000 attorneys. Yet now you want to actually conduct conversations online? Just who do you think is going to do that? Your web developer? The associates you just furloughed? You better think through skill sets and resources before you make this leap. Seriously, bro.

What are your tactical tools?
Your LinkedIn presence is hit or miss. Your blogs are siloed in a couple practice areas if they exist at all. You don’t Tweet. You have nothing on YouTube. Nor Flickr. So exactly how do you plan to go social? You want a website with social media capabilities? What the heck does that mean?

What are your metrics?
I know metrics is a dirty word. You haven’t yet figured out how to measure your website performance. And now you’re diving into yet another area of Internet endeavor. And you don’t know how to measure this either. So then this is what we would call a faith-based initiative?

Sorry to ask the tough questions. Maybe that’s why you’re thinking about social media policy. It’s the easy part. The strategy part is just so darn scary. What do you think?

Bzzzzz went the internet when Compete.com published their social media website rankings.  Ok, here they are:

Top 25 Social Networks in January 2009

But that’s not my point. My point is that there is a large universe of people who reside in categories from intrigued to clueless about social media. While some are breathless at Facebook’s 1 billion-plus monthly visits, there is a large universe that doesn’t care. These statistics mean little to them. More than one social media aficionado has noted that nobody’s an expert on social media. But for many “expertise” is not even on their horizon.

I met recently with a non-profit organization looking to get more value from their web presence. I fall in love with the mission of almost every non-profit organization with which we work. I enjoy the passion those involved bring to their endeavor. Yet even these smart, passionate and internet aware people had not yet grasped the strategic value of social media to their mission. For example, wonderful videos they had produced were entombed on their website hidden from the much greater reach of YouTube. And while Facebook was rampant with groups of similar mission, this regionally focused organization did not enjoy the embrace of a similar community.

But the landscape is changing rapidly. Even more telling than the social media site rankings is the rate of change with most social sites experiencing double digit growth month over month.  The adoption curve is taking shape. Whether or not you are monitoring social media site stats, the Internet is changing yet one more time. If you or your organization is not on the train, hop on.  If you are, keeping working at it

I readily admit that the phrase “interest networking” sounds like Dilbert-speak to me. But I’ve been playing with Twine for a while (www.twine.com) and it seems appropriate to describe the experience as finding interests you have in common with other people. However, I don’t think its strength lies in networking because I still haven’t found how to import my contact lists to see who else I know on Twine. I guess I expected that feature because other new-ish networking tools like Plurk gave me that option.

I also tend to automatically correlate Twine with Twitter, even though the only thing they have in common is the first two letters of their name. I was first alerted to Twine from someone I follow on Twitter, so I suppose that’s the connection that’s stuck in my mind.

Twine is in private beta right now, but all you need to do is enter your information to request an invitation. I requested mine back in June and got it immediately. This invite-type beta is a way of artificially inflating the cool factor, but it is in fact cool because it seems to add a social net to the finding of content. Their value pitch is “organize, share, and discover information around your interests.” In my experimentation with Twine, it seems like Twine helps you find web content that communities have chosen. For example, entering “wiki” gave me some articles that the usual net I cast hadn’t found yet, some even from the early 2000s. Try a search with your interests and see what you find – I’d love to hear your experience with Twine.

Twine’s tagline is “Twine takes everything you’re into and ties it all together.” So far, I’d like it to tie my “peeps” and various other networks together a little better, but I think I need to have it tie my interests together instead.