Following on earlier posts about Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for law firms, this entry will look at the last of the Big Four social media tools, blogs. In all the recent excitement over the three famous brand options, we sometimes forget that blogs started it all; equally, we can confidently predict that if unforeseen disasters were to befall social networking, blogs would be the last ones standing. As before, this post will look at the use of blogs in the enterprise context, for firms in general rather than for individual lawyers. That’s an important distinction for all these tools, but especially for blogs.

I wrote about law firm blogging 2 1/2 years ago, at Law21, and my opinion at that time was that blogs were a mediocre fit for law firms (as opposed to the lawyers inside them):

Blogs are the perfect vehicle of modern lawyer branding. If every lawyer in the country started a blog, each would be as unique as that lawyer’s fingerprint. An individual lawyer can, through her blog, show herself to be, yes, smart, expert and thoughtful, but even more importantly, memorable, personal, unique — all the things to which people are attracted, and precisely those things that a law firm cannot be. Firms are things; lawyers are people — and clients prefer people.

I still think that the benefits of blogging tend to accrue to the blogging lawyer more than to the firm where he or she works, and that a lawyer’s voice and personality are the key elements of a truly successful blog. But I’m no longer prepared to say that a law firm can’t use blogs as effective marketing and communication tools. My opinion has evolved because both blogs and the profession have evolved since then too.

Blogs have evolved mostly by becoming so plentiful, even borderline ubiquitous. The ABA Journal‘s Blawg Directory recently added the 3,000th law blog to its roll, while Kevin O’Keefe reported in March that 96 of the AmLaw 200 had blogs, a 149% increase since August 2007. Over at Stem’s Lawblogs.ca, the number of Canadian legal blogs has surpassed 200. Statistically if by no other measure, blogs have become sufficiently widespread at law firms that a watershed moment is at hand: firms will shortly be asked why they don’t have blogs rather than why they do.

As blogs become more common and accepted, they also become regarded as just another communication and marketing tool, perhaps even a conventional one. I’d argue that this has been a negative development for blogs, in terms of quality: being grouped with routine legal alerts, bland newsletters and self-serving press releases has lowered the bar for what blogs can be, risking a concomitant lowering of our expectations and standards for them. But the fact remains, these blogs do exist and they are being read, and that should be neither denied nor lightly dismissed.

Equally, it has to be acknowledged that law firms have evolved more quickly, in their use and appreciation of blogs, than I would’ve figured in 2008. Granted, many law firm blogs still leave a great deal to be desired. Some bloggers seem to think they’re still in law school, publishing lengthy case summaries of recent decisions that would bore lawyers, let alone clients, who happened upon them. Some are clearly doing nothing more than feeding the SEO monster — you can recognize the “keyword phrases” they’ve been directed to sprinkle liberally throughout the text. And still others evidently feel unsure about just what they’re doing with a blog, or hesitant to move outside a narrow zone of safe and predictable content.

But for all that, the quality of many law blogs, even at well-known regional and national firms, surpasses what I would have expected. That’s a credit to the bloggers, who found their own voices and the confidence to use them, and to their firms, which have relinquished enough control over the process that a lawyer can blog without looking over his or her shoulder. Clients are starting to notice as well, as one survey suggests in-house counsel take blogs into consideration in choosing law firms (though it’s also worth noting that blogs have their limits in this regard).

So I’m now prepared to say that yes, a law firm can use blogs effectively as a modern marketing, communications and branding tool — especially since blogs also function very effectively as “conversation starters” in the other three social media networks. But firms still need to follow some rules if they want to continue to extract value from blogs and increase that value over time. Here are some of my recommendations about how a law firm can blog effectively; I’d invite you to add your own in the comments section.

1. Publish numerous blogs. Unless your firm is exceptionally small and focused, you should publish several blogs simultaneously. The reason should be clear: does your firm only offer one type of legal practice? If not, then why would you offer only one blog to the world? You should run as many blogs as you have (a) practice areas you want to support and (b) lawyers willing and able to offer that support. Larger firms should have a blog for every practice group of any consequence. Reed Smith has 12 blogs, from employment and real estate law to life sciences and media and entertainment in China, all professionally branded. Womble Carlyle, a substantially smaller firm, has no fewer than 18 blogs, including super-niche categories like supply chain and furniture law. If it’s possible for a law firm to have too many blogs, I haven’t seen it yet.

2. Brand the blogs as yours. Some of the best and most widely read lawyer blogs out there are written by lawyers who work for mid-size and larger firms, but you’d never know it to glance at the blogs themselves. They operate on free platforms like Blogspot and WordPress, and you need to look hard to find the name of the author’s firm or its logo anywhere on the site. I can understand how this situation comes about — the lawyer doesn’t want to (or can’t) get the firm’s approval to blog, or the firm wants to maintain its distance from and deniability regarding the blog. So the blog lives in a netherworld, building up the lawyer’s profile and expertise without channeling those benefits to the firm. And what happens if the blogging lawyer leaves the firm, as he or she often does? The blog and its advantages go with the lawyer, and the firm is left with nothing. Take pride of ownership in your lawyers’ blogs, support them, own the domains in which they’re published, and insist they be brought into the firm’s marketing sphere (but see also entry #4, below).

3. Maintain a deep bench. As just noted, law firms whose lawyers blog (even if they blog under the firm banner) run the risk that if the lawyer goes, so does the blog and its branding benefits. Accordingly, every blog should have a multitude of active contributors. The main reason is that if one blogger defects, several remain to fill the gap — the analogy I use is Saturday Night Live, which keeps losing stars to Hollywood (from Chevy Chase through Eddie Murphy and Will Ferrell), yet keeps going because the ensemble cast stays behind and supports the brand. But there are other reasons: for one thing, more names and faces in the Author column support the idea that this really is a firm blog, not a one-lawyer project. And blogs are an easy and effective marketing development tool for new lawyers who rarely get other opportunities to establish a public presence and who are usually already comfortable with the medium. Check out Pitblado LLP’s Pitblawg for a good example of an author ensemble.

4. Let your people go. The one thing about law firm blogs in 2010 that has most pleasantly surprised me is the emergence of lawyers’ true voices and personalities in their blogs. I had expected, reasonably enough, that a combination of overt pressure from senior partners and self-censorship by nervous lawyers would render most such blogs a whiter shade of bland. But blogs become popular precisely because their authors are informal and accessible in their tone, when you get the sense that they have freedom to express their opinions (obviously within reason) and demonstrate a wider range of personality and interest than a website biography can reveal. Firms owe it to themselves and their lawyers not to muzzle these blogs or modify these voices — this is how more and more branding and business development will be done in the years to come, lawyer-driven rather than firm-driven. By all means, prepare policies and codes of conduct to guide your lawyers and temper their enthusiasm where appropriate; but otherwise, let your people go.

I was speaking with the 80-year-old (and still active) founder of a mid-size firm the other day, and one of the things he mentioned was that he wants to start up a law blog himself. Not only do I think that’s terrific in and of itself, it’s a great example for every other law firm out there to let down their guard and embrace what blogs offer. Law firm blogs are the natural successors to and improvement upon law firm newsletters, which have long since lost their power. In ten years, if not sooner, they’ll be utterly unremarkable on the law firm landscape. Your firm shouldn’t wait that long.

Of all the social networks, I remain enamoured with Twitter the most. Its simplicity makes it extremely versatile, both for content distribution and relationship building. I also think it delivers value at a personal level and at the same time can represent brands and businesses.

But one place where Twitter drives me crazy, and has for the past 3+ years,  is the lack of systems reliability –  a.k.a. the ‘fail whale’ which displays whenever Twitter has exceeded user capacity. If you’ve used Twitter for any period, you not only know what the fail whale is, but expect it to appear! It has become an accepted part of the Twitter experience.

Will they fix it?  It’s hard to imagine they will, and if a serious effort is being made, it must be a long term project.  The company is now extremely focused on making money, “Promoted Tweets”, and the like.  Desperately trying to show they have a business model.  Which is all well and good, but shouldn’t the technology itself be rock solid? If the plan is to take the company public, you’d think the delivery technology would at least be an equal priority.

Twitter’s fail whale teaches us that mediocre technology is ok.  As I said above, we expect routine systems failure from Twitter. And it’s sad. The days when we would ask of web companies ‘how solid is their technology?‘ or ‘does it scale?‘ seem to be over.  If you can create a cool web application, and it works 98% of the time… that’s probably good enough.

And the worst part? I unfortunately and admittedly no longer care. I accept that there will be days when I must refresh the browser window 5 or 6 times, or shut down Tweetdeck and try again in 5 minutes (somewhere, an Engineer dies a little inside because of users like me).

Twitter’s problems won’t arise because of Users though. Really. It’s not my company, so mediocre and good enough aren’t my concern. Investors, on the other hand might eventually decide to nitpick. Perhaps not now, and maybe not even at the IPO, but eventually. Twitter is going to have to compete.

Frankly, it’s a bad call on Twitter’s part not to remedy this situation early and take this unreliability out of the investor equation. It will eventually burn them, because no company is a market darling forever.

Following on my two previous entries that talked about how law firms can use Facebook and Twitter, respectively, it’s time I turned to the last of the Big Three social networks, LinkedIn. Once again, my focus won’t be on how individual lawyers can best use LinkedIn (although I will spend some time there), but rather, on how law firms at the enterprise level can make the most of this platform.

Speaking generally, I’m much less bullish on what LinkedIn can do for law firms than what either of the other two networks can offer. I’ve come to view Facebook and Twitter as dynamic platforms that offer interesting and even exciting possibilities for law firms to tell their stories and shape their online personas. LinkedIn, by contrast, is more a place where your firm should have a presence, in order to cover off all your online networking bases and to support your individual lawyers who are generating contacts. But it’s more limited in its scope and in the benefits it can deliver. LinkedIn is a place you need to be; Facebook and Twitter are places where you want to be.

LinkedIn’s enterprise vehicle, the way in which corporations and organizations appear on the site, is the Company Profile. Here are a few random examples of corporate Company Profiles: Warner Brothers, British Airways and Research in Motion. And here are a few random examples of law firm Company Profiles: Gowlings, Alston & Bird, and Simmons & Simmons. Click through to view them, and the first thing you’re likely to notice is that they all look pretty much exactly the same. LinkedIn doesn’t provide the ability to customize the appearance or even, from what I can tell, the functionality of each Profile: they’re all very slight variations on a single template. That probably has its advantages, but saying something interesting or differentiating about your firm isn’t one of them.

Moreover, the features that the Company Profile does offer won’t provide a great deal of value to law firms in terms of generating client interest. Once you get past the Overview tab at the top (which in most cases reproduces or summarizes the “About Us” page of the firm’s website), the Company Profile splits into two columns, one focused on individuals within the firm and the other focused on the firm itself. Leaving aside the former for a moment, the latter provides information like number of offices, headquarters location, industry (“law practice” — who’d have guessed?), number of employees, and year of founding, data that qualifies more as trivia than actionable knowledge. “Common job titles” hardly varies from firm to firm, “top schools” matters not even slightly to clients, and “median age” is not only useless but also misleading — is the median age at Cravath Swaine & Moore really 29? That illustrates a fundamental drawback: these aren’t statistics about the firm itself, but rather about those members of the firm with LinkedIn accounts.

Turn back to the first column, where the focus is on individuals, and you do get some more interesting information — although not necessarily the kind the firms will enjoy. “Current Employees” is helpful for finding out which members of the firm are in your LinkedIn network (and it can be amusing, in a Six Degrees of Separation way, to see how many different people connect you to a given law firm). “New Hires” is nice-to-know information, nothing more — any really important talent acquistiion will have been trumpeted elsewhere. “Former Employees” can be more illuminating — in our highly mobile profession, it’s interesting to see who used to work where — but it also serves as a public display of Who’s Left The Firm, and that may not be something a firm likes having advertised. (The “Activity” tab at the top of the page is even more problematic: I saw one firm’s “Activity” page that consisted entirely of people who’d left the firm, sometimes for rivals.)

These differences bring out an important point: LinkedIn is a social network built primarily for individuals, not businesses. The focus, the connections, and the interesting facts are about specific lawyers and other professionals within a firm, not the firm itself. The firm is noteworthy only as the common denominator that these particular LinkedIn members share for the moment. Now, that might in fact reflect reality to an uncomfortable degree in many firms, but it doesn’t serve any organizational interest to emphasize it. As I’ve written before (and shortly will again) about blogs, LinkedIn is first and foremost an individual vehicle, not an enterprise one. It’s hard to use LinkedIn to advance your firm’s profile or to engage your clients — to communicate as a “firm qua firm” — in a substantial way.

LinkedIn’s real problem, in this sense, is that it doesn’t offer companies much more functionality than they can get from their own web page or, increasingly, from Facebook. A firm’s home page communicates far more information about the firm in a much more engaging, unique format — most law firm LinkedIn pages feature excerpts from the firm’s home page. A greater challenge is coming from Facebook, which as I’ve noted before, is taking business users far more seriously these days. There’s not much that a company can do on LinkedIn that it can’t do on Facebook, and there are a growing number of things it can do on Facebook that LinkedIn just isn’t built for. It reminds me of Homer Simpson’s complaint when he learned he had to travel to Canada: “We already live in America. Why do we have to go to America Junior?”

Now, it’s appropriate to point out here that Facebook has its own share of problems these days. For one thing, I think they took a major step backwards by switching from “Fan Pages” to a simple “Like” button — fandom is far more visceral and committed than mere liking. But Facebook’s biggest headache these days concerns privacy issues. This New York Times article underscores the fact that Facebook is uncomfortably close to pushing its users too far in this regard (although it’s also worth noting, as did a wise person on Twitter the other day, that Facebook users get all the privacy they pay for).

But these privacy issues, serious as they are, concern individuals, not corporations  — from an enterprise point of view, in fact, the more information about itself that it can circulate, the better. A company or firm that exploits Facebook for its data-gathering and market research uses is bound to suffer some blowback from the privacy controversy; but a firm that uses Facebook to connect with members, clients and “fans” and to relate its narrative should have much less to fear. And in any event, Facebook has a vested interest in maximizing organizations’ return on investment in the site, which leads me to believe it will continue to encourage apps and features that further this goal while trying to satisfy basic privacy worries. This will probably cost Facebook some users, maybe a lot, but it’s a choice the platform needs to make if it wants to graduate from a pastime to an actual going concern, and it’s not one that should discourage firms from exploring its potential benefits.

Now, despite all my foregoing issues with LinkedIn and law firms, I still do counsel firms to create a Company Profile on LinkedIn — but I do so with the caveat that they’re covering off a potential liability rather more than opening up intriguing new frontiers. I can almost guarantee that, no matter what size your firm, at least some of your employees have LinkedIn accounts (one million lawyers populate the network, at last count). If the firm for which they work doesn’t also have a LinkedIn account connected to their pages, then they’re essentially orphans, and that’s a problem. Your firm isn’t getting any of the network benefit of having its employees build profiles and make connections — all the potential clients and recruits and recommenders that they’re acquiring aren’t able to link through to your firm and learn more about it. Not only that, these connections, all of whom are themselves evidently adept at social media, draw adverse conclusions about your firm from its absence on LinkedIn, and could well transfer some of those inferences to your employees.

And the fact is, certain benefits can be gleaned from maintaining and paying attention to a Company Profile for your firm. Larry Bodine points out a new “Follow” feature that can allow you to monitor what your corporate clients are up to. Guy Kawasaki notes 10 advantages for small businesses using LinkedIn, including using the “Answers” feature to promote your firm’s expertise and finding potential lateral recruits. Kevin O’Keefe’s own list provides five benefits, like using the “Buzz” feature to see what people are saying about your firm. Adrian Lurssen at JD Scoop links to several useful articles about how lawyers can maximize LinkedIn’s potential. And it’s true that while Facebook is coming on strong, many executives are still very uncomfortable using the same platform both to conduct business and to check in on their teenagers (see Larry’s summary of Hubbard One’s enlightening social media survey in this regard).

So LinkedIn is useful for law firms (and very useful, I still think, for individual lawyers). But overall, I’d still place it third behind Facebook and Twitter as a social media platform with the potential to power up your firm’s online presence and tell an effective and unique story. The irony is that the conventional wisdom describes Facebook as the frivolous personal site and LinkedIn as the serious business one. But Facebook is figuring out ways to let companies and organizations carve out their own identities and communicate as stand-alone entities, whereas LinkedIn still appears to be the sum of its individual member parts and not too much more. Both platforms are still evolving, of course, and this battle is far from over, but I think LinkedIn has some work to do.

Following on my last post, which looked at the uses of Facebook for law firms, I thought I’d review the uses of Twitter in the law firm context. As before, I’m going to focus less on the benefits that Twitter can deliver to individual lawyers (which I’ve covered a couple of times at Law21) than on the best ways that law firms as corporate entities can utilize this social media tool.

It’s easy to use Twitter poorly, something millions of users demonstrate every day by updating their followers about what they’re doing, thinking or feeling at any given moment. There are extremely few people whose opinions and emotions are so compelling and central to the public good that we should hang on every character (up to 140) in which they’re detailed. The interest and utility of a Twitter account can be measured inverse to its focus on the Twitterer himself or herself. A good Twitter account talks about and links to things that matter to its readers, the same as a good blog or a good newspaper does; a lousy one assumes that the reason you’re following it is because you’re deeply, intimately interested in what the Twitterer is, says or does.

Law firms, unfortunately, are doing a lousy job with Twitter, every day, in growing numbers. I’ve reviewed dozens of law firm Twitter accounts, some owned by global giants and some by midsize or smaller operations, and in almost every instance I’ve come away shaking my head. Here’s what a typical law firm Twitter account contains:

• copied-and-pasted headlines from the firm’s press releases, with a link thereto;
• copied-and-pasted headlines from the firm’s newsletters or blogs, with a link thereto;
• news that a lawyer at the firm has appeared in a media outlet, with a link thereto;
• news that a lawyer at the firm has received an award or designation, with a link thereto;
• news that the firm has successfully completed a client engagement, with a link thereto.

The firm’s Twitter feed is essentially a 140-character encapsulation and rebroadcast of its Media Page — and as a former member of the journalistic cabal, I can tell you that the Media Page is generally the most useless page on a law firm website, even (especially) for the media. These Twitter feeds assume that you, the reader, care exclusively about what the law firm and its lawyers are doing or saying. Even the happiest and most satisfied law firm client, though, would probably not derive much value out of a channel that features exactly one program, 24/7.

These firms aren’t setting out to appear narcissistic and self-aggrandizing on purpose, even though that’s often the effect. What these results often reflect is the firms’ confusion about exactly what their Twitter feeds are supposed to be doing — why their firms are on Twitter at all. That’s understandable, because Twitter is so new and is still evolving, and most firms aren’t yet equipped to cope with online social media anyway. But it’s still no reason to Twitter incessantly about oneself — or, as a few of the largest law firms in Canada and the U.S. are doing, to create a Twitter account and leave it completely blank.

A good law firm Twitter feed keeps two things in mind: (1) it’s all about the clients, and (2) it’s not all about the firm. Updates deliver breaking news of interest to the firm’s clientele, or provide links to reports of interest and importance to clients’ industries, or spread the word about upcoming events and opportunities that could deliver value to clients. They RT (re-”tweet” — I’ll only use that verb in quotation marks) good updates from other Twitter accounts, ensuring that all the links in such RTs are valid and respectable. They follow the feeds of other Twitter users they like, and of the clients and potential clients they hope (but are certainly not entitled to expect) will follow them back

Here what’s critically important: not all of the reports and events that appear in a firm’s Twitter stream need to be (or should be) firm-sponsored or firm-delivered. If you restrict your links to firm news and events, you’re doing two things: you’re drastically restricting the scope and value of your Twitter feed to your readers, and you’re pretending that your clients live in a hermetically sealed environment where they don’t know about, can’t get, and wouldn’t want to hear about anything other than Wonderful You. That’s not how the world works.

More importantly, it’s not how social media works either. The open exchange of news, ideas, opinions and insights, conducted freely in order to share value and deepen knowledge, is at the heart of systems like Twitter. If something is good, you spread the word about it, regardless of where it came from, because your goal is that those who listen to you are enriched for doing so. So if there’s something in the Globe & Mail or the Washington Post or The Guardian that your desired reader base would be interested in, share it and link to it. The same applies to particular accounts on Twitter that consistently deliver value: share them and link to them. The same applies, dare I say it, to your competitors: if a rival firm has a really incisive analysis of new legislation, think long and hard before deciding that your readers, your clients, and your potential clients don’t need to know about it. Think of what that says about you and the confidence you have in your own work.

Yes, there should always be updates in a firm’s Twitter feed that link to what the firm itself is saying or doing; a law firm is not a disinterested publishing house. But these should be the exceptions more than the rule — the change-of-pace, the commercial breaks in between the regular programming. And they should be marked as such: a firm-centric Twitter update should be prefaced with something like “New at [firm name]:”, so that the reader instantly knows that he or she is being referred to the firm’s own site, not somewhere else. The overall effect is that the Twitter feed is a micro-publishing entity, one driven by the interests of the audience but “brought to you by” the law firm. That’s a publishing and broadcasting model people recognize and understand.

As with Facebook, there are rare instances of firms that use Twitter well; they tend to be smaller firms that specialize in particular areas of law. Simmons Law Firm of Illinois links to news stories, reports and fundraisers that will interest people concerned with mesothelioma and asbestos. Texas family law and civil litigation firm Patel & Warren provides links from all over and, in a nice touch, Twittered last December that its firm was closing early due to bad weather. Ontario IP firm Ridout & Maybee has a pretty good mix of its own work and links to useful and sometimes just plain interesting content elsewhere. I haven’t seen any large firm Twitter feeds I could recommend, but in fairness, when your client base is essentially “everyone,” it’s difficult to have a coherent editorial strategy for your social media communications. The big-firm practice groups I’ve seen on Twitter, though, could do better.

As I say, it’s still early days yet for Twitter and especially for law firm ventures into this still-evolving space. I’ve yet to see a law firm break out and become a trailblazer on Twitter, in terms of setting a new standard for law firm Twitter use that changes the way we all think about this new medium. There’s no reason, as of right now, that your firm can’t be the one that does it.

I gave a presentation last week on social media for law firms that looked at ways in which firms — rather than individual lawyers — can make the best use of tools like blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Over the next few weeks, I’ll summarize some of my points on this topic, starting with this post on Facebook.

Like most people, I began using Facebook purely as a social tool, adding friends and family and acquaintances-I-haven’t-seen-since-high-school to my contacts list. About a year or so ago, however, I began getting Facebook connection requests from business contacts, which felt a little odd — Facebook was for people I knew well and with whom I was willing to share updates about kids’ skating lessons, whereas more distant or professional contacts were more appropriate for LinkedIn and Twitter. So I tried to keep my personal and business lives in separate social media spheres, and from my conversations on the topic, I’ve found that many lawyers have tried the same thing.

Those distinctions are rapidly collapsing, though. Facebook recently passed the 400-million member mark — it would be the world’s third-largest country by population — and that much critical mass means that Facebook is a business tool whether we like it or not. Law firms are coming to this realization as well, and many are dipping a toe in the Facebook waters by setting up a Fan Page, a firm account that provides information about the firm and invites other Facebook members to  become “Fans” (a designation that costs nothing and serves to indicate support or appreciation for a given company, product or service — see my previous post about setting up a Facebook Fan Page). Unfortunately, most of these firm efforts are so tentative as to deliver very little value, and most seem to indicate a misunderstanding of what Facebook offers that a website doesn’t.

A typical law firm Fan Page merely repeats what the firm already offers on its website, and in much less detail. A short description of the firm taken from the website’s “About” page, a series of links to press releases taken from the “Media” page, and that’s about it: Website Lite, basically. I won’t pick on any firms by linking to their underachieving Facebook Fan Page, but if you search for any given large firm’s presence on Facebook, what you’ll likely find will confirm this.

What Facebook offers firms is the chance to tell a different story about themselves, or show a different side of themselves, than what is possible or appropriate to tell and show through other communication means, such as a website, a newsletter or a brochure. No law firm is really a one-dimensional creature that can be summed up completely by a corporate website — or if it is, it has bigger problems than social media. Most if not all law firms are complex, multi-dimensional communities of service professionals and service offerings, and some of those dimensions are more effectively conveyed through non-traditional vehicles like Facebook.

For instance, a Facebook Fan Page allows a firm to post photos and videos of a staff function, a charity fun run, or a lawyer’s TV appearances. It can let a firm start up discussions of interest to its Fans involving industries or communities that the firm serves. It can showcase upcoming events, either at the firm or in the community (perhaps including events that the firm sponsors). It can incorporate updates from the firm’s Twitter account, if it has one, or point to interesting or important developments in the law or with specific clients. Anything that a firm is or does that could benefit from the interactivity and sense of community that Facebook engenders is a good candidate for inclusion on a Fan Page.

Although there are many examples of firms under-utilizing Facebook, there are also a few very good examples of getting it right. Silicon Valley powerhouse firm Fenwick & West has a Fan Page worth studying: front-page updates incorporate the firm’s Twitter feed and include profiles of firm clients and their successes, the photo gallery includes shots from a turkey lunch and a LEED celebration, and the documents page links to all the firm’s shared documents hosted at JD Supra. Or consider the Fan Page for Wolfe Law Group, a construction law firm with offices in New Orleans and Seattle. Its Facebook page includes photos of employees building houses in post-Katrina New Orleans and downloadable SlideShare presentations by the firm’s lawyers. Patton Boggs’ Facebook page has a detailed biography page explaining its public policy, litigation and business law work, and a series of links to podcasts and events like local jazz festivals. You can learn a lot more about these firms and how they differ from their rivals from their Facebook pages than you would from their websites.

Facebook has only scratched the surface of what it can offer users, so I fully expect that the number and variety of features and functions available to Fan Page owners will increase in the years to come. The important thing to remember isn’t that every firm needs a Facebook page — I don’t think that’s the case — but that firms need to find out what social media vehicles like Facebook offer in terms of new ways of marketing themselves, new means by which the character and brand of the firm can be communicated, and new opportunities to develop a multi-faceted profile in the online world. Your website can’t tell the whole story of your firm, and you don’t need to force it to try — there’s a world of channels opening up to your firm, and now’s the time to experiment and figure out which ones deliver the best results for your marketing, branding and communications goals.

Spurred by Martha Sperry’s recent post about the numerous benefits to bloggers that Facebook offers, I decided it was past time for me to revisit and complete an old project: creating a Facebook Fan Page for my blog Law21. It’s still early in the process, and I’m learning as I go, but I can see a lot of valuable applications of a Facebook Fan Page to a legal practice, and I thought I’d share some of my initial thoughts here.

By way of brief explanation: a Facebook Fan Page is a dedicated page on Facebook for your business, organization or other commercial entity. You use it to publicize and promote your business by publishing news, updates, information, offers and so forth, and by inviting your professional contacts and interested friends to become “fans.” These people show up as members of the Fan Page, they can post messages and engage in conversations on the page, and they receive new entries from the Fan Page in their Facebook update feeds. Considering there are now 400 million people on Facebook, there’s good reason to take it seriously as a marketing platform. Nicole Black has an excellent summary of how to set up and use a Facebook fan page for a credit union — you should go read that first, substituting “law firm” in the appropriate places, and then come back here.

Setting up a Facebook Fan Page for your law practice is one thing — turning it into an exceptional value-add for both its members and your business can be another. A lot of Fan Pages seem to just sit there, rarely issuing updates, not really telling visitors anything interesting about the company or taking advantage of the features Facebook has to offer. This silence suggests that their owners created the Page because someone told them to and haven’t given it much thought since. These desolate Fan Pages don’t give people any payoff for becoming fans, and their low member totals are duly reflective. Their lesson is: don’t start a Facebook Fan Page unless you intend to give it regular attention; like an abandoned blog, it can actually drive down your prestige by conspicuously collecting dust by the side of the road.

Many other Facebook Fan Pages are active, but they’re not always the right kind of active. Just like a lot of personal Facebook accounts and Twitter feeds, these Fan Pages suffer from IAAM Syndrome: It’s All About Me. Every update and every data point on the Page is all about the business: its latest accomplishment, its newest office, its most recent press release, and so on. Absolutely, there should be some of this content — part of the goal of a Fan Page is to keep your Fans engaged in what you’re doing and what you’re up to, and to use them to spread that word far and wide. But it needs to be balanced, if not outweighed, by content about and focused on the Fans and what interests them.

For every entry on your Fan Page about your firm’s activities or offerings, there should be at least one or two entries that focus on your Fans: a link to a mainstream news article about one of your key practice areas that your clients (and potential clients) care about; a question or opinion poll about a current-affairs issue that affects your client community; a conversation-starter that lets your fans kick around an engaging topic, serious or otherwise. As Niki says in her article, a good Facebook Fan Page is a community, and you should do what you can to encourage interaction, facilitate dialogue and build relationships within that community.

On top of that, you can make this community even more special by giving your Fans bonuses or insider access they can’t get from your website or your firm’s newsletters. Write an article that’s only accessible by clicking on a link from your Fan Page. Provide an exclusive offer — a half-hour’s free consultation, say, or free parking in your building, or a list of kid-friendly diners near your office — that only your Fans will hear about. Set aside one hour to do a question-and-answer session for your Fans on any legal subject of interest. Give people an incentive to become Fans and to pay close attention to every new announcement or addition to the Page — increase their sense of belonging and exclusivity.

What’s more, remember that Facebook offers you a lot of unique options for packaging your content. You can create Photo Albums of your office or staff members, maybe for a special event like a birthday or baby shower, helping to humanize the members of your firm who are otherwise only known through those stiff, posed, smiling photographs on your website. Schedule Events at your firm like in-house seminars or outside speaking engagements by lawyers. Post Videos now and again, either little three-minute advisories from the managing partner or links to a relevant and interesting item at YouTube. Use the RSS Grafitti application to send your Twitter feed directly to your Fan Page. Profile one of your Fans once a week or once a month, introducing him or her in more detail to the other members of the club.

In short: keep it active, keep it interesting, and keep it about your Fans. Those are the three keys to a successful Facebook Fan Page — and, not incidentally, to everything you do, say or publish under your firm’s banner.

As we  just announced on Clawbies.ca, the nomination period is now open for the 2009 Canadian Law Blog Awards, with the awards list set to be released on New Year’s Eve.

This is the fourth year we’ve held the awards, and similar to last year, we’re bringing back the social nomination to let everyone share their favourite Canadian law blogs!  You can read more about he nomination process on Clawbies.ca, but here’s a quick rundown on the 2009 rules:

1. You can tweet your nomination on Twitter, but please include the hashtag text: #clawbies2009. We’ll be monitoring!
2. You can also email in your favourite blog, along with a sample post or two, or any other notable highlights to Steve Matthews at steve@stemlegal.com. It’s not a public nomination, but still perfectly acceptable.
3. And perhaps the most influential method, write a blog post about three other Canadian law blogs you currently read and tell us why those blogs are important to you.
4. If you are nominating via your blog, remember to act like a humble Canadian and tell us NOTHING about your own blog.  In return, we promise the nominator’s blog will receive a thorough review, as will your suggested peers, PLUS you get a chance to plug a fellow Canadian blogger!
5. Don’t include or suggest categories. We’ll figure out that part.
6. You don’t have to be a Canadian to make a nomination.
7. Don’t bother nominating Jordan Furlong.  Feel free to say nice things about him, but he’s kinda conflicted now. :)
8. And finally, we’re on the look out for sleeper picks! That fantastic blog flying under the radar!

Vote early and vote often! (pretend that volume counts, even if it doesn’t…)  And have fun promoting the Canadian legal blogosphere.

Cheers!
Steve

I’m about a week late with this post, but it’s always a good time to plug ABA Techshow! Right?

The paper I wrote with Reid Trautz last year, titled Supercharge Your Referrals With Technology, has been released as part the Best of ABA Techshow series. It’s the full version of the paper that was given out to attendees, in PDF format & around 15 pages.  I just re-read some of it, and was reminded of some of the great ideas we covered.

You can download more presentation papers from ABA Techshow, which runs again March 25-27th, by clicking over to the newly created section on the conference website.

And speaking of Mr. Trautz … Every year Reid publishes his guide on holiday shopping for lawyers. Reiding Reading his blog a few minutes ago, I notice the 2009 Gift Guide went up a couple days ago. It’s great fun, as usual!   Where else would I find an online store for a gas-powered blender! (seriously, near the end…)

My latest Web Law Connected column is up at Slaw.  The article is titled Social Media & Business Productivity, and addresses the current trend of law firms using proxy servers to block in-house access to social media websites.

Perhaps unexpected, I really sit on the fence on this issue; and didn’t take the anti-blocking stance.  There are a number of ‘middle-ground’ alternatives which few firms have explored to date – including time based restrictions, and role-based (ie. based on business need) blocking.

The opinions and solutions on this issue are, unfortunately, extremely polarized.  I think it’s also worth noting that neither extreme position (global blocking or unfettered access) actually aligns with the business goals of most law firms.

For a more detailed review, please link on over… I think the article does a reasonable job of describing my thoughts on the debate.

I spoke at the Pacific Legal Technology conference this past Friday with Susan Van Dyke. The topic, as perhaps expected, was web 2.0 tools for lawyers, with a slant toward business development.

The PPT slides are now available via slideshare, and embedded below.

Heather Morrison of the CNW Group, formerly Canada News Wire, released a 11-pg report yesterday titled Canadian Law Firms and their Use of Social Media. I am quoted in it, so please excuse the vanity reference.

The report itself offers a nice overview of the benefits of social media investment. That’s important, but the part I appreciated most was the focus on relationship building. Great relationships are a key driver of success for any law firm (or lawyer’s) search strategy. The reason? Relationships not only improve our network of contacts, which alone is a worthy goal, but they form the basis of the link network behind most firm websites.

Links, remember, are ultimately a form of online currency and a driver of what many people refer to as ‘google juice’ – a measure of trust, and better search rankings.

At one point in the paper, I’m also quoted saying that firms ‘not skip steps‘. Let me explain that further. Broken down, I often consider these three components:

• content – eg. blogs, papers, newsletters;
• distribution channels – eg. twitter, email, RSS, JD Supra; and
• relationships - either mirroring & codifying one’s existing relationships with links, or driving new relationships with social media;

Most firms (not all) have content at least partially covered. They may be sending out paper or email newsletters (distribution) and connecting with existing clients. In the past, that’s what firms had to work with. Could they now have more forms of content? or distribute via more channels? Absolutely, but it’s hard to argue that having those basic pieces functioning (think: 80:20 rule, existing clients…) didn’t create some success.

But this 2/3 element scenario, also created a huge gap in search marketing. Without relationships driving links, firms weren’t creating any kind of an ‘after effect‘; where their published content continues to rank well in the search engines, and continues to drive new readers creating exposure. But with Social Media participation (I include blogger-to-blogger relationships here), and creating new relationships with the associated links, firms are often able to make their publishing work harder & longer. In the cases of extremely popular content, years after the date of publication.

As the years pass, and a firm’s volume of substantive publishing increases, so too does this ‘after effect‘.  And the driver in all this is pretty consistent. Having a solid network of ‘web friends’, who are also web publishers, is one tough combination.

There are lots of other benefits to social media usage, which are covered in the report. But that’s my take on the why SM participation reflects positively on search marketing.

About an hour ago, Kelly Phillips Erb, aka TaxGirl, put an entry on Twitter that I think most regular users of the service would agree with:

Some people obviously see value to twitter, and some think it’s a waste of time.  Everyone has a right to critique, so that’s not (entirely) at issue. But when it comes to writing about the nuances of Twitter (or any web tool for that matter) – those ‘how to become a success‘ type stories – having a little experience should be a prerequisite. No?  Frankly, there are a few ‘personas’ out there that I think most of us wish would stop before they start.

Here are my ‘top-10 tests’ to figure out if you should stay away from that fashionable Twitter article:

1. You don’t have an account.
2. You have an account, but have six tweets to your name.
3. You followed six hundred people with no tweets in your account, and can’t figure out why no one returned the favour.
4. You’ve been on (but mostly off) the service for less than three months.
5. You’re a journalist and your editor told you to start an account.
6. You’re a journalist who’s opened an account expressly to write a story about twitter.
7. You’re evaluating the ROI of twitter as a business development tool.
8. You’re a marketing consultant and you think “it’s about time” to write about this twitter thing.
9. You’re intentionally set to write a Twitter critique article purely for the backlash & media exposure.
10. You’re David Letterman. (ok, funny filler. enjoy!)

A fun idea germinating from a discussion with Jordan Furlong… Is it possible to reduce a company’s elevator pitch down to the 140 character limit of a twitter entry?  Brevity never being an easy task, it seemed like a challenging & hopefully productive exercise. So, I’m in.  I’ll queue the entry below up on my own account in a few minutes.

If anyone reading would like to also take part, please include a #TEPitch hashtag.  And for those of you not on twitter, here’s what I came up with:

Stem does leg work to help law firms get noticed: in search engines & social web + build grass roots brands, trans 2 profile & MSM #TEPitch

Fitting everything into an entry like this is near impossible, so getting down to the company’s core services was essential.  Obviously, our phone rings here at Stem because we are a lawyer SEO company. That’s a foundation, so I’m putting it right up front. We also stick to working within the legal industry. I think that’s decipherable from the company name, but important for the message. Our development of new ideas, fleshing out of web brands, and the ‘trickle up’ effect on media coverage round out the last few words.

While we deliver a fair bit of consulting, both informally within our retainer service and via written reports, I always like to say that Stem executes projects on behalf of clients, and that our opinions come along for the ride. The word consulting is also a tough term to differentiate, so while ‘doing the leg work‘ may be too casual for some, at least for me, it’s a more expressive way of putting it.

I’m also overlooking some of the web development work we do, but again (& like any elevator pitch) something had to give.  I consider web development a ‘value add’ element we bring to client relationships, and (at least for now) not directly why we get hired.

So there you have it. My tweetable elevator pitch for Stem. If you’d like to try the same for your company or organization (or blog, or ???), please do. The more the merrier!

And… Happy July 4th to all our friends & clients down south!

Cheers,
Steve

In an ongoing effort here at Stem, we’ve been tracking the growth of the “Law Practice Industry” category on LinkedIn. For a bit more than a year now, we’ve run periodic searches on Google to see how many profile pages are indexed which include the industry class ‘law practice industry’.

Predictably, but still impressively, that number continues to grow. June’s number now shows 840,000 people within the law practice industry. In reviewing these profiles, we see a very high percentage of those people are lawyers; although it is an industry class and not professional.

With all factors consistent on each dated sample, here’s how things have stacked up:

• April 2008: 118,000
• June 2008: 216,000
• December 2008: 406,000
• March 2009: 563,000
• June 2009: 840,000

So what’s new in the world of lawyers on LinkedIn? A couple of observations:

• Groups: From legal marketing and technology to practice-specific groups for almost any area of law you can think of, lawyers on LinkedIn are getting more value out of their network by engaging in discussion. Groups are being used for Job postings, vendor recommendations, general questions, and sharing articles and links.
• Applications: Applications are basically widgets; tools that allow you to add external data into your LinkedIn profile. Two popular amongst lawyers are the Slideshare Presentations app, which lets you share presentations; and the RSS feed display, where you can post the feed from your blog, JD Supra documents, or any other content you like.
• Company pages: Just as important as individual profiles are company pages within LinkedIn. For instance, Clark Wilson’s profile includes a description of the firm’s services, a snapshot of current and former employees, location and contact details, and interesting auto-generated statistics such as median age, gender split, and top schools. Savvy law firms and other companies in the industry recognize this as a valuable opportunity to sculpt their online image.

Want a quasi brave prediction? That 840K number is going to be well over a million profiles by September 1st.

And thank-you to Larry Bodine for his email request to update the numbers!

Project work has been plentiful here at Stem recently (which I’m blaming for my lack of blog posts). And like so many of you whose inboxes are constantly running out of control, I found myself needing to take additional action this week.

On Wednesday, notifications for twitter follows and friendfeed alone peaked at 45 emails, so I decided to route them around my inbox. We use Google apps for business, but the same thing can be done with Outlook or exchange. I simply created a filter for all incoming email from the two services, sending these messages into their own folder, and archiving them out of my inbox.

So here’s my new routine: I’ll scan these ever day or so, and will delete or follow back on Fridays.

Is this novel or innovative? Not at all. Lots of friends have recommended this to me for some time. If the volume had been a little lower, I’d probably have put up with it…  But setting the bar a little lower isn’t always a bad thing, and inbox management helps everyone.  So I’m passing it along.