Two aspects of the guide stood out for me. One is its refreshing emphasis on strategy, relatively rare in such guides and even more rare in law society advisories. Many social media guides focus too much on the “How to” without paying sufficient attention to the more important “Why bother?” Before undertaking any communication or marketing initiative, you have to be able to state clearly and concisely why you’re doing it, what you hope to get out of it, and how you’ll measure your success. Law societies often get stuck in admonishment mode: don’t do this, don’t do that. It’s nice to see that trap avoided here.

The second interesting aspect of the guide is its multiple references to the law of unintended consequences. In one respect, this reflects the more traditional regulatory concern that something could go terribly wrong, so be careful out there and be home by 11. But from another perspective, this really is a timely and necessary reminder. Lawyers share (and then some) the general human tendency towards tunnel vision, the failure to see the big-picture implications of small actions. This is especially problematic with social media: many lawyers don’t appreciate just how powerful it can be — for good, yes, but very easily for destructively, irredeemably bad. One Tweet, one sentence in a blog post, one line in a Facebook update can easily become “viral” in both senses of the word.

Kudos to the Law Society of England & Wales for a social media guide that gets lawyers thinking about both the exceptional and the mundane, and reminding us that the one thing lawyers crave most — control — is the one thing social media explicitly does not promise.

Some law firms get it right: the emailed article includes a link directly to a web page where the article can be found. In those cases, it’s only a matter of moments before I’ve got a tweet lined up summarizing the article (if the title or headline is good enough, I simply reproduce it) and linking to the piece online.You can tell those firms by how frequently they show up in the Twitter streams mentioned above.

But some law firms, unfortunately, miss the opportunity. They email the article, but the link (if you can find it) leads to their main publications page, leaving the reader to try digging around in the archives to locate a URL (sometimes the article hasn’t been posted to the website yet). Other firms attach the article as a PDF, or post it on their website in that format. And other firms provide nothing: the article apparently exists only in the body of email.

So this is a reminder, to law firms as well as to the rest of us, of one of the most important rules of the new social media world: if there’s no link, it might as well not exist. Good content is being under-circulated and under-read because its email recipients can’t post it to Facebook, tweet it on Twitter, or link to it on LinkedIn. Remember the advantage that emailed newsletters first had over the paper kind? That’s exactly the advantage that linkable articles have over every other kind.

This isn’t an either/or situation: you don’t have to choose between emailing an article to your contact database or posting it on your website. You can do both. Ideally, you post the article online first, as soon as it’s ready (that’s an entry-level definition of blogging, by the way). Then you email the article afterward, either on its own or as part of a collection of articles (aka, a newsletter). “Real-time publishing” means exactly that: the moment it’s ready, you publish it on your website. There’s no production schedule. There’s no waiting for that last article to come in to fill the hole on page 4. That’s how we used to publish; we don’t need to do it that way anymore.

So my modest suggestion to law firms is this: don’t email any content unless it comes with a clear, obvious link to a web page where the content can be found. Social media users (and there are several hundred million of us) would love to share your excellent content. But we can’t share an email. We can only share links.

What’s instructive from this story is the distinction Martin draws between appropriate behaviour in the House of Commons and in the Twittersphere:

Martin said he would never use that kind of language in the Commons — where the NDP has obeyed a self-imposed heckling ban since the spring election — but argued Twitter is different. “We don’t heckle. We don’t use vulgar language. We behave in the (Commons),” said Martin, who is known for his bombastic style of speaking. “What I say to my private universe is an expression of what I am really feeling and I don’t apologize for that. I don’t retract it. [Emphasis added]

That’s a thought-provoking (not to mention musical) turn of phrase. On one hand, of course, you’d have to be delusional to believe that what you say on Twitter or any social network is “private” in any real sense of the word. One of the first rules of social media is that everything you say, do or post online can go viral worldwide in 24 hours if it delights or outrages enough people.

At the same time, however, there’s something to be said for the right to speak in dual capacities, one professional and one personal. This is not a right we widely acknowledge today: a company employee who expresses an unpopular or vulgar opinion is invariably held to have damaged the company’s reputation and to deserve sanctions. But do we lose the right to speak our mind when we start drawing a paycheque? Can we only be one person in public, the professional one? Are we entitled to a “private universe”?

This is already an issue for law firms, and it’s only going to recur more frequently. Witness the case of the law firm associate who tweeted about a note left in her luggage by a TSA agent referring to a certain personal item. I’m guessing that her employer was at least a little embarrassed by this story, and if so, understandably. But it simply highlights how difficult the internet has made the maintenance of meaningful divisions between our private and professional selves.

I see many lawyer Twitter accounts whose biographies use up precious character space to note that “Opinions expressed here are my own.” I even see it occasionally on lawyer blogs, inserted by bloggers worried that something they say might be taken as the official position of their firm. This tells me that we’ve gradually lost the ability to let people speak on their own behalf, and if we dislike what they say, to limit our dislike to that person and not transfer it to the people and organizations with whom they’re associated. We don’t really believe that a public figure — and we’ve defined that term broadly enough to include almost everyone — has the right to a private universe.

So in that environment, how should you conduct yourself as a lawyer using social media? There’s no safe or easy answer. You could use social media only for professional purposes and never reveal your personal side; if you can manage it, that’s definitely your best bet. If you want to have both a personal and a professional self online, you could strive for blandness, writing or posting little or nothing that could reasonably offend a cyber-passerby; that’s not only difficult, but it also kind of defeats the purpose of social media generally. Using Circles on Google Plus, choosing a specific audience for each statement, might be an effective if cumbersome answer; but what’s to stop one of my “personal” contacts from sharing my observation with the world at large? The fact is, whatever I say to one person online might as well be said to everyone.

Despite all that, I still like to think that I’m entitled to a private universe online, a place where “my personal capacity” means exactly that. For example, I keep my blogs and Twitter feed as close to 100% professional as I can, but not everyone abides by that rule. I follow the Twitter feeds of people who issue both professional and personal tweets in the same stream, and some of the personal ones have bothered me enough that I’ve unfollowed those accounts. I do think you should choose a personal channel and a professional channel and keep them separate.

For myself, I use my Facebook account to express my personal observations. Now Facebook, of course, is the farthest thing from a private universe: I’ve been advised that Facebook users who are not my Friends have read (and disapproved of) my postings there, yet my privacy settings are as locked-down as I can make them (which, at Facebook, isn’t very). But you know what, if someone whose attention I didn’t invite reads something intended for an audience that doesn’t include him, then there’s not much I can (or want to) do about that. Beyond self-censorship, what else is there?

So for the time being, anyway, be very cautious. We live in a highly sensitive world that likes to take offence and to impute that offence to as many people and organizations as possible. It’s a given that being obscene and obnoxious is and always will be asking for trouble. But think twice about expressing your personal, political, or religious opinions in social media unless you’re unusually willing to face the consequences, including career-limiting ones.

In future, for better or for worse, I think we’ll end up giving people more latitude than we do now to “be themselves” in public, to maintain a private universe. But today, in the absence of universally acknowledged lines, you have to draw your own lines and take responsibility for where you draw them. Free speech is not free, in the sense that no responsibilities or ramifications attach to it. Speech has a price; learn that price early, and make sure you don’t end up with a bad case of sticker shock.

1.  It seems that many leaders regard social media as something that should be left to “marketing” or “communications.” What role, if any, should leaders play?

Leaders who regard marketing and communications as not meriting their attention are either too busy for their own good or don’t fully appreciate the degree to which a law firm’s reach and reputation is linked to its business success. For social media to really catch on within a firm, there has to be clear buy-in from the top — not just from the managing partner, but to the extent possible, from senior rainmakers and other influencers.

Some firms talk a nice game about the importance of social media to their marketing and business development, but then delegate complete authority for social media to a young partner or a communications staffer. That will have exactly as much impact on the firm’s communications culture that you would expect it will. If you want social media to have a reasonable shot at success, you need to provide some visible leadership. A managing partner’s blog would be a nice start.

2.  Is social media “up there” as a strategic issue for law firm leaders?

Law firm leaders are not treating social media as a strategic issue, nor should they. There are only so many truly strategic matters that a law firm’s leadership can address and execute at one time, and issues like market reputation, talent retention, workflow redesign, and rainmaker management are going to occupy most if not all the available bandwidth. Those are the keys to firms’ survival and growth; social media may be more than just a “nice-to-have,” but it can’t be called “strategic” unless you seriously stretch the meaning of the word.

Two exceptions. One is if your firm has certain characteristics (e.g., start-up clientele, virtual offices, extremely strong consumer focus) that place a powerful social media plan at the core of the firm’s marketing and business development efforts. Two, we don’t yet know what social media is going to become. Social media can reasonably be said to be in its infancy, but this is a pretty massive infant. It’s correct to say that for most firms today, social media is not a critical strategic matter; it would not be correct, or wise, to say that social media will never come to completely dominate online interaction, or that such a development is decades away.

3.  What should leaders know about social media?

Law firm leaders should understand two things about social media. The first is to ensure they don’t swallow too much hype. I once told a conference of managing partners that they should have a social media strategy if they also have a magazine strategy and a billboard strategy. That is to say, social media is a communications tool, one of those in the toolbox their firms have been using for decades.

Social media should be part of a sophisticated and well-supported communications strategy — and this is where I’d say most firms are lacking. Firms that ask me about social media strategy quickly find themselves in a conversation about communications strategy, answering questions about how they approach their newsletters, websites, magazine articles, advertisements, media interviews and so on. Social media is a tool, and it’s not as important as the box it’s carried around in.

The second thing law firm leaders should understand is that they have never seen a communications tool like this. It’s true that magazines and billboards and social media are all communications tools; but no magazine in the world has 750 million subscribers the way Facebook does, and nobody uses billboards to issue hourly updates on legal issues, as Twitter allows you to do. Social media has something else that no other tool offers: two-way communication.

Social media allows the public to talk back to a company; more importantly, it also allows members of the public to talk to each other about a company. If social media provided law firms nothing else but the opportunity to receive instant feedback on their content, respond to public inquiries, and conduct free market research about their brand and the things that matters to the people who care enough about the firm to talk about it, social media would be a breakthrough technology. And that’s only one small part of what it does.

4. Some leaders would undoubtedly feel the social media landscape is awash with blogs, tweets and posts and that any further contribution their firm makes will get lost in this – any comments?

I’ve also come across some lawyers who feel that way. Oddly enough, they don’t feel the same way about a traditional media landscape already littered with advertisements, advertorials, and lawyer-contributed content: they’re more than happy to keep buying ad space and sending in articles to overstuffed magazines. This tells me that the problem is not with an overdose of social media content; it’s with the fact that social media is new and still developing and lawyers don’t trust it yet.

Far fewer law firms publish blogs than newsletters; far fewer have Twitter feeds than send articles to their local legal newspaper. Compared to the traditional sea of legal content, social media is as close to a “blue ocean” as lawyers are likely to find. But it’s not going to last forever, and the firms that wait the longest for everyone else to jump in will find that the pool really is too crowded by the time they arrive.

5.  What are the stand-out benefits that arise from a strategic and structured approach to implementation of social media that leaders should be aware of?

Here’s just one. There are no better, more effective and more affordable content publishing and distribution platforms than blogs and Twitter (or possibly Google Plus). It’s almost ridiculous how easy and cheap it is to publish a blog and create a specialized legal news feed on Twitter: much easier, faster, and less expensive than cranking out and mailing yet another printed newsletter (or emailing yet another PDF newsletter).

Law firms produce tons of content, and with some editing, most of it will prove very effective in building profile and attracting business — if it receives outstanding (defined in both quantitative and qualitative terms) publishing and distribution. No law firm in the world has an email database that can compare (either in size or in pass-along functionality) to Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus. Create blogs, as many as you can manage, as niched and as specialized and as client-focused as you can make them.

Trust your people to publish great content and give them the best and most advanced editing, publishing and circulation functionality to multiply the impact of that content a hundredfold. Then watch the marketing and business development payoffs begin to pile up.

This set of changes, though, seems to have struck a deeper chord. By taking away users’ ability to see their updates in their preferred order, creating a distracting “roll” display of updates in the upper-right-hand corner, adding new and unasked-for features mimicking Google Plus offerings, and other tinkerings, Facebook seems to have uncorked much of the bottled-up irritation its users have been waiting to unleash for some time now.

Does this remotely matter to lawyers? Facebook is not the social media vehicle favoured by most law firms to promote their business, and most lawyers tend to view Facebook as a fun or social application rather than a professional one. (That’s been my approach — Twitter and LinkedIn for business, Facebook for family and friends). And as the cartoon linked above suggests, it’s unlikely that even this fiasco will put a dent in Facebook’s growth or lead to mass account deactiviation.

But this incident does serve as a useful reminder of an important point: third-party social media platforms are both extremely dynamic and completely outside of your control. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus and any number of other online platforms are fluid by nature and will always be making changes big and small. You can complain about these changes all you like, but it’s very unlikely you’ll force a rollback to an old version; actual “New Coke” scenarios are vanishingly rare. One of these days, though, some platform could go too far and really trigger a migration, and if it’s a platform in which you’ve invested marketing time and money, you won’t be too happy about that.

This is one of the main reasons we like blogs so much: they’re all yours. You control the format, design, structure, colour scheme, imagery, interactivity and everything else. More importantly, you own and control the content: what you put on Facebook ultimately does not belong to you, and if Facebook fell into a black hole tomorrow, all the data you’ve placed there would disappear with it. If Twitter collapsed next week, all your pithy Tweets would be gone. And so forth. These services are tremendous distribution and amplification tools for your (hopefully blog-based) content, but that’s really all they should be.

Complaining about Facebook is almost as much fun as using it, and the same goes for these other platforms, still in their infancy and trying to achieve the impossible task of pleasing a vast and demanding audience that pays $0 annually in user fees. Enjoy the sideshow; just remember that no third-party platform should command too much of your online marketing attention.

The second item should be of great interest to many law firm Marketing Directors. Think: ‘brand monitoring’.  If you’re responsible for tracking mentions of your firm’s lawyers or the firm’s name online, this will be a tool that you’ll want to add to your routine.

Unfortunately, Google+ does not have RSS feeds enabled yet; so automating the notifications for these mentions isn’t possible.  But with the release of the G+ API last week, things are moving in the right direction, and hopefully this kind of solution won’t be far off.

In the interests of fairness (and because you can never really be 100% objective about yourself), Warren and I excluded ourselves from the survey. Nonetheless, friends of Stem Legal will no doubt have noticed that the list of 24 included our very own Steve Matthews, who happens to be a colleague of one of the article’s authors. I did think about taking Steve’s name out of contention, too, but in the end we concluded that wouldn’t be fair to him: his tremendous influence through social media was clear from both the statistical and anecdotal perspectives. In the interests of full disclosure, though, I thought that was worth noting here.

So, your turn: did we overlook anyone on our list of 24? Any other observations about the list or the column in general?

After reading it, there will be little doubt that I am enthusiastic.  And frankly, after several years of “ho-hum” evolution online, Google+ is a welcome addition.  I am particularly excited about its potential to build upon the concept of social networking, creating ties to the tangible business results that Google has delivered in the past.

I also realize that I can bluster all I want about lawyers and firms becoming ‘early adopters’.  Those that currently see new files coming through the door via their websites and web presence will be the quickest converts.  But after that, the questioning will begin…  Is there enough time to manage yet another social network? How does it compare against our other in-house social media projects?

As I said in the article, benchmark your firm website’s referral metrics.  Google+ may not have the adoption numbers (yet); but the parent company does likely hold the number one spot for sending people to the webpages that describe your firm and its services.   In my view, that’s a potential worth betting on.

Then, without warning, someone taps you on the shoulder. You turn around, and there’s a person standing there you don’t recognize, although his name tag is prominently displayed. He says nothing, but holds out his business card for you to take. He’s also holding out his other hand, palm up, to indicate he’d like your card in return. And then finally he says, “Hi. I’d like to add you to my professional network.”

Now, based on that opening, what are the chances you’re going to even take the card from his hand, let alone make the effort to build this up into a worthwhile, mutually beneficial professional relationship? I’m guessing pretty small. Yet that’s exactly how thousands of people seem to think LinkedIn ought to be used.

I’ve lost count of the number of LinkedIn connection requests I’ve received from complete strangers that don’t contain a personalized introduction or any other indication of who the person is and why I should connect with them. I need a reason to make a direct professional connection with someone, especially when that connection is going to be prominently visible throughout my online network. A person who doesn’t even say who he or she is, and why he or she wants to connect, comes across as a mere contact collector, and I treat them accordingly.

If you’ve ever sent me a LinkedIn request like this and haven’t received a response, it’s not because I’m a jerk; it’s because I think it’s rude to request a public professional connection from someone to whom you’ve never introduced yourself. And it’s worse with Facebook requests: replay the previous scenario, except the total stranger introduces himself with: “I want to be your friend.” Creepy? Yeah, I’d say so.

If you’ve already got a personal, real-world connection with someone, then I think it’s fine to send a standard-form LinkedIn or Facebook connection request, sans personal note (though I try to send a quick reply of thanks if the request is accepted) — you’re simply formalizing and cementing an existing contact. If you only know the person faintly or not at all, however, and you’d like to connect, there are better ways to do it. Modify the standard LinkedIn text like so:

• “Hi, I’m Jane Smith, a colleague of [your existing contact] Rob Johnson at XYZ LLP, who says you’re a great person to know in this industry. I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”
• “Hi, my name is Eric Jones — like you, I’m a graduate of X Law School and I also practice commercial law, although I’m based in Oregon. I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”
• “Hi, I’m Jennifer Rogers — I read your recent article on entrepreneurial activity in China, which is an interest of mine. I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”

And so forth. Or if you’re reluctant to approach a total stranger with your name and interests, use a go-between: LinkedIn’s Introduction feature allows you to ask an existing contact to make the initial approach. But either way, introduce yourself to the person by indicating who you are, what you have in common, and ideally some indication of why you’d like to connect — you know, like in real life. Most people will respond to this far more positively than to having a business card wordlessly shoved in their face.

Unearned familiarity is a malignant side effect of our increasingly social world: the desire to connect with someone seems to outweigh any consideration of that person’s interests, preferences, and yes, privacy. The right to be left alone still exists, even on the internet. So does the right to control one’s increasingly public circle of business acquaintances (or more powerfully, in the case of Facebook, friends). We’re still judged by the company we keep, and we have the right to control that company in ways that reflect best upon us.

Politeness matters, especially in an age when fewer people than ever practise it. Expand your LinkedIn and Facebook networks carefully, respectfully, and with a personal touch, and you’ll find that network growing in quality even faster than in quantity.

Today is the official launch of Small Firm Innovation, and I’m excited to finally be able to talk about this fantastic new website. Developed and sponsored by Clio, Small Firm Innovation inspires lawyers through first-person accounts of small-firm success.

Small Firm Innovation is a resource by, for and about solo and small firm lawyers, and it provides insights and advice on the realities of running a law practice. From the practical (how can I go paperless?) to the philosophical (what exactly is success?) to the perennial (what is my work really worth?), each post is written by someone who lived through the experience, wrestled with the idea, and came out a little wiser.

Jordan Furlong and I will participate in both an advisory role, as well as being contributors. My first post outlines 10 ways for solos and small firms to boost their online profiles; Jordan’s first post will be published shortly.

The  contributing group of authors range from well-established solos to new law school grads, alongside a handful of management, media, finance, web, and marketing consultants (that’s where Jordan and I fit in). And we find ourselves in pretty good company: Edward Poll, Rob Hyndman, Colin Cameron and Bob Ambrogi are just a few of our cohorts on this project. Russell Alexander, our solo/SF client in Markham, Ontario, is also contributing.

Small Firm Innovation will also be active on facebook and on Twitter (@sfinnovation).

The site was conceived of during the financial crisis, when many newly minted lawyers were hanging their own shingles or joining small firms. Jack Newton and Rian Gauvreau of Themis Solutions (Clio’s parent company) recognized that there was tremendous strength in numbers among these small firms and sole practitioners.  As Jack puts it:

“The needs of solo and small firm practitioners are often underserved in the greater marketplace and media, but they actually represent the majority of the legal market. Solos and small firm lawyers can learn a lot from each other’s successes and missteps, watching for pitfalls to avoid while also encouraging their fellow solos and small firms to experiment with new ideas.”

Congratulations, Clio, on developing such an excellent resource for a deserving community!

For more than a century, newspapers, radio and television have dominated public discourse, to the point that we collectively think of them as a colossal wave of content called the “media.” But that’s not accurate. Newspapers, radio and TV don’t create content — they distribute it. The word “media” actually signifies empty vehicles or containers used to carry something of substance. Reporters create content; radio playwrights create content; sitcom producers create content; newsprint, radio waves and TV signals don’t. The “media” are simply the mechanisms by which this content is profitably sold and efficiently circulated to the end user (at virtually no charge, thanks to advertising).

We need to understand Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in the same way: they’re media. None of these gargantuan social networks creates one ounce of content (and neither does Google, by the way). They distribute other people’s content to their users, and they’re working on essentially the same advertising-driven business model as newspapers and TV. The significant difference between “old” and “new” media is that in the latter case, the content’s consumers are often also the content producers. (Often, but not always: Hulu should eventually trump YouTube, for example, because more people want to watch professionally produced content than home videos of babies and kittens. And as the Bin Laden story illustrates, Twitter amplifies official news, but it doesn’t create it.)

Now, blogs are not media. Blogs are content. A blog is a one-person (or one-organization) publishing house with a narrow editorial focus, very low costs, and an extremely small number of authors. In terms law firms are familiar with, a blog is an electronic newsletter published on a web page and updated in real time. Your law firm can create and maintain a blog because your law firm produces content — principally through your lawyers’ expression of their knowledge and insights in their subject areas.

Your firm might be quite good at creating content (although 80% of what lawyers write and say could be written and said far more clearly and usefully, from their audience’s perspective). But your firm, in all likelihood, is not very good at distributing content. Your mail and email lists are small, and anyway, unsolicited content delivered through these media nowadays is very likely to be quickly recycled or deleted. And it’s not like you own a printing plant.

So you need a better distribution system for your content. Up until about five years ago, you’d have had to try getting your lawyers’ articles or insights featured in newspapers and magazines. But those media have very narrow doors through which tons of legal content is trying to squeeze; the entry costs are high. But then along came Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and suddenly you had a range of extraordinarily powerful and accessible distribution platforms within easy reach. Hundreds of millions of people collectively access content through these services every day, and you can add your content to these vehicles with tremendous ease.

So this is the first thing lawyers need to understand: they are content producers, but they are not content distributors. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are distributors, and law firms should channel their content (through blogs, newsletters, podcasts, videos, whatever) into these vehicles. When you hear someone say that “lawyers ought to be using social media,” this is what they mean (or what they should mean, anyway).

That’s the first point. Here’s the second: social media are actually ideal for lawyers, because both social media and law practices rely on the same functionality: the recommendation.

• Twitter lives and breathes through the ReTweet: a recommendation (through repetition or forwarding) by one user of insightful, funny, or important content in another user’s Tweet. The ReTweet rewards the creator of a high-quality Tweet with peer recognition and a wider audience for his or her information, but this only works because the ReTweeter’s readers trust his or her judgment and will pay attention to his or her endorsement.
• Facebook’s Like button, which was on zero websites when it first launched and is on 2.5 million one year later, is nothing but a recommendation engine: one user’s decision to lend his or her credibility to a person, place or thing via an endorsement. (It’s also the basis of Facebook’s advertising hopes, by the way). If your friend Likes something, you’re more inclined to give it a look because of that recommendation.
• LinkedIn drives users’ desire for better career prospects through its Recommend function: if a direct contact in your network has recommended the work of another, that person earns instant credibility with you. But you don’t even need a specific Recommendation: just the fact that a person on LinkedIn is directly connected to your colleague or friend can provide at least a small degree of confidence in that person’s bona fides.

And the recommendation, as we all know, also happens to be the core business development tool of the legal profession. A potential client might come to you because she was dazzled by an article you wrote or an interview you gave. She might come to you because you were charming and approachable at a community event. She might come to you because your Yellow Pages ad was the biggest and yellowest.

But more often than not, a client comes to a lawyer because a family member, friend or colleague whom she trusts recommended that lawyer. It’s a truism that the best marketing a lawyer can do is to serve a client successfully and well; lawyers who accomplish that feat can and do expect new business to flow in through the client’s recommendations.

That’s what I think lawyers should keep in mind when considering how to use social media in their marketing and business development efforts. What powers social media and what powers legal marketing is really the same thing: the trustworthy recommendation. So you might want to think about ways to expand that common ground between your practice and the increasingly crowded and chaotic — but really remarkably simple — social media world.

Earlier this year, Facebook introduced a new feature called “Sponsored Stories.” The name is half-accurate: they’re certainly sponsored, but it’s a stretch to call them stories. Currently, in your Facebook news stream, you’re notified whenever one of your friends clicks the “Like” button on a Facebook page — or in fact, on any page anywhere on the internet (such as an article on CNN.com or at The Onion).

Nothing unusual there — part of the fun of Facebook is that you can point your friends in the direction of something interesting or amusing simply by “Liking” it. It costs nothing to Like and costs nothing to notice the Like, which is why most news streams are filled with Likes, and after awhile you stop paying much attention to them. Facebook has long wanted to leverage this sort of activity by its users, but it learned from its 2008 Beacon debacle not to automatically broadcast news of a user’s purchases to his or her friends. So it had to come up with something else. Now it has.

Facebook has hatched a plan to monetize the Like. “Sponsored Stories” offers businesses the opportunity to upgrade the impact of a Like, moving it out of the ordinary news stream and into a separate box on the right-hand side of the column. Every time a user Likes a product or service, checks in at a coffee shop or shoe store, or otherwise connects with a company that has paid to join the Sponsored Stories program, the box appears on the page of all of that user’s friends. In turn, if that friend Likes the Sponsored Story or the product behind it, that fact is posted to all of his or her friends’ pages, and so forth. This video explains how it works, and this Mashable article provides more details.

What’s Facebook up to? MIT’s Technology Review answers that question in an intriguing article titled, “You are the ad.” Some excerpts:

Facebook aims to be not just a place to advertise but an entirely new way to advertise — one that uses the power of social networks to create and amplify brand messages. In essence, the company is pushing a highly charged version of word of mouth, long seen as the most valuable of all marketing because people view friends’ recommendations as more credible than marketers’. …

“This is in many ways the Holy Grail of marketing: making your customers your marketers,” says [Facebook COO Sheryl] Sandberg…. “For the first time, you can do word-of-mouth marketing at massive scale.” To put it another way, when we use Facebook we no longer just view the ad; we become the ad.

What sets Facebook apart from online rivals, especially Google, is that its advertising is aimed not at influencing immediate purchases but at branding, something online ads have never done very well. “We’re not really demand fulfillment, when you’ve already figured out what you’re going to buy — that’s search,” explains Sandberg … “We’re demand generation, before you know you want something.”

This is something altogether new in the online advertising world, and although it’s off to a relatively slow start, “Sponsored Stories” taps into a very real facet of social networks: a genuine interest in what your friends like to read, use and do. Facebook is absolutely right that recommendations and word-of-mouth are the most powerful marketing tools, and it realizes that shaping brands — “demand generation” — is poised to pick up where traditional advertising (including Google’s search function) leaves off. If this works, Facebook can transform itself from a social phenomenon into a marketing juggernaut.

Why does any of this matter to law firms? Because personal recommendations and referrals just happen to be the way most consumers and small businesses (and a number of large companies too, I’ll wager) choose a lawyer. What did you do the last time you needed a lawyer in an unfamiliar area of practice for a personal matter? Most likely, you asked a friend or family member who they’ve used in the past or who they’d recommend. And when it comes to friends and family members, Facebook has about 600 million of them on hand.

So consider the result of a lawyer or law firm signing up for the “Sponsored Stories” program. The firm’s Facebook page already has a “Like” button, but the firm’s website and blog could add such buttons too. Every time a Facebook member “Likes” something about the firm, that fact is promoted to all the member’s friends.

Now, how many of those friends will be looking for a lawyer at that very moment? Vanishingly few — people looking for lawyers at a given moment are using Google. But those friends will all see the recommendation, will take note of the firm’s name, and will lodge that information somewhere in their cerebral cortex, theoretically to be retrieved when the need for a lawyer does arise — or more interestingly, will perhaps get them thinking about their own nagging legal needs. That’s demand generation, and that’s a very intriguing concept for a legal profession looking for new sources of business.

Caveats abound. Most midsize, large, and full-service firms would find little value in a service like this today (although in future, who knows the degree to which even the biggest corporate GCs will be using Facebook). As the MIT article notes, “Sponsored Stories” is in its infancy and hasn’t come close to Google’s ad revenue; the whole project might be abandoned if it doesn’t fly (although Zuckerberg & Co. seem deeply committed to it). Facebook itself has no guarantee of a long and fulfilling existence.

But the core of an extremely interesting concept for online legal marketing is definitely here. Good lawyers create relationships of trust and reputations for reliability with their clients. Personal endorsements from trusted friends are a very powerful tool for generating legal business. Any company that can connect these facts and create a relationship cascade through a social media platform should get the legal profession’s attention.

I thought I’d add a few quick thoughts to the points I raised in the PracticeLink article:

• Once you’ve established a new-media presence — and that can be as simple as a good website with solid content or as bells-and-whistles as a regularly updated blog and constant Twitter stream — don’t be shy about bringing that to the attention of the writers or the periodicals whose coverage you’re seeking. Reporters do read blogs and Twitter feeds, but you don’t have to wait to be discovered like a starlet at a Hollywood soda fountain: drop them a line with links to let them know this resource is available to them and that you’d be happy to assist them with their stories. Your work can speak for itself from that point.
• Occasionally, I hear lawyers complaining that bloggers who get quoted in the news aren’t the “best” or most informed lawyers on a subject, and that reporters should do a better job hunting down the legal profession’s leading lights rather than defaulting to the easy blogger quote. To which I say: waiting for journalists to climb your mountain and seek out your wisdom will exercise your patience but accomplish little else. If you think lesser lawyers are out there blogging, go out there and start a blog yourself to prove your superiority. Maybe those bloggers know more about the law than you’d care to admit.
• If and when you do attract the attention of a media representative, the old rules of dealing with reporters still apply: return calls as quickly as you can, ascertain the journalist’s deadlines and whether you can realistically meet them, determine in advance the thrust of the reporter’s story and if possible the nature of the questions she plans to ask, and, above all: unless you have an extremely solid relationship with the journalist, remember that there’s no such thing as “off the record.” Respect for the other’s professionalism is a given, but trust is earned over time.

Share your thoughts here about the PracticeLink article — do you have experiences linking old and/or new media to relate?

When I was running a national lawyer magazine, we recognized that we simply couldn’t provide reasonable coverage of every type of law practice and every sort of law-related issue potentially germane to the readership. So we decided to focus on business and client service issues for law firms and to track developing changes in the marketplace. Our choice wasn’t any better or worse than any other; what matters is that we had to choose to concentrate on some areas and only occasionally touch on the rest.

A similar strategic challenge faces “full-service” law firms. We sometimes refer to such organizations as “big firms” or “BigLaw,” but I think that’s misleading: I’ve seen firms with as few as 30 lawyers and firms with as many as 2,000 both describe themselves as “full-service,” meaning they offer a range of legal services that meet the vast majority of marketplace needs. But here’s the problem: the more you try to do and the more markets you try to engage, the thinner you stretch yourself and the harder it is to identify just what you’re all about.

This dilemma is currently manifesting itself in, of all things, the debate over whether and to what degree full-service firms can use Twitter. My friends at The Lawyer newspaper in London started the ball rolling with an article about a marketing agency’s ranking of major UK law firms on Twitter. The agency’s report raised, but perhaps insufficiently emphasized, the unusual spectacle of Norton Rose’s 10th-place position in the list despite having Tweeted exactly zero times.

Brian Inkster’s The Time Blawg has an excellent summary of the enormous debate that has ensued among lawyers, marketers and social media advisors. The commentary on Brian’s post poses the fundamental question raised by the report: can a large law firm use Twitter at all? There’s a developing sense that the answer to that question is no, for a variety of reasons. My contribution is to suggest that a large (or full-service) firm faces challenges in using Twitter, but perhaps not the ones we might think.

Some commenters believe that big firms can’t use Twitter because a faceless corporate entity can’t engage with its followers: it can’t answer questions, participate in dialogues or otherwise affix a personality to the logo. I’m not sure I agree, because I don’t think Twitter is primarily an engagement tool. Using Twitter to have conversations is like standing at the front of a room with a microphone holding one-on-one discussions with individual audience members: everyone else has to endure one half of a dialogue in which they likely have little interest. Those who’ve experienced overly interactive CLE presentations will know what this feel like.

Instead, I think full-service firms struggle with Twitter precisely because they are full-service — their mandate is to be all things to everyone, or at least many things to many clients. Successful Twitter accounts are always about something in particular, whereas full-service firms are about legal services in general. Faced not with the problem of having too little to say but the challenge of having too much, full-service firms make the same error on Twitter that they often make in other marketing efforts: fear of committing to a narrative, fear of focus, fear of failing to regularly remind everyone that they’re available to do everything. As a result, the firm’s Twitter feed ends up focusing on the firm itself; hence the endless line of big-firm Twitter feeds that do nothing but link to the firms’ own announcements and articles.

The solution, I believe, is for a full-service firm to develop a range of Twitter accounts, each devoted to and operated by a practice or industry group. As I’ve written before, I think Twitter is a publishing vehicle, and as noted above, it’s difficult to publish coherently about a massive range of topics. But a practice or industry group can provide that level of focus and specificity, and as a result it will attract readers (aka potential clients) interested in that focus while still carrying the firm name and reinforcing the firm brand.

What the UK Twitter report didn’t point out, but should have, is that boutiques and smaller firms produce many of the best law firm Twitter feeds — not because they’re more “personal” and “engaging,” I believe, but because they necessarily pursue a narrow focus: they’re restricted in the type of work they offer and/or the marketplaces in which they offer it. That restrictiveness used to be a marketing drawback; nowadays, in a billion-channel long-tail market in which people can find precisely what they’re looking for, that focus and restriction has become a marketing advantage.

Full-service firms can copy that advantage by giving their practice groups (or preferably, industry groups, with a client viewpoint) the opportunity to develop their own narratives on Twitter, not to mention through blogs and other social media vehicles. So far, I’ve found only two full-service law firms that maintain practice group Twitter accounts: Winston & Strawn’s advertising law group and Perkins Coie’s privacy and security group (courtesy My Corporate Resource chart) — I invite you to let me know about other examples in the comments section. These accounts direct readers to interesting and useful information, sometimes their own and sometimes others’, exactly the way a good Twitter feed should.

Full-service firms can use Twitter effectively by harnessing the power of their practice groups to dive deep into a subject, engage readers on the specific issues that concern them, and demonstrate a mastery of the subject area at hand. Firms with many such niche Twitter feeds, in turn, will realize that they’ve found a way to explain to a 21st-century marketplace what “full-service” now really means.

I use four social media vehicles: blogs (my main blog Law21, my regular contributions here at Law Firm Web Strategy, and a regular column at Slaw), Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Each of the four presents a different opportunity to interact with the world at large, and I try to maximize the specific strengths of each one.

Blogs: I try to adjust the content of what I write in each of the three blogs: social media and communications topics here at Stem, Canadian-focused legal issues at Slaw, and the whole wide gamut of my law-related interests at Law21. But at each stop, my voice is the same: the Professional Me. I rarely insert myself into the narrative as I’m doing here, and it’s extremely rare that I get seriously personal — this is about as close as I’ve come, actually. Partly this is because I’m actually a pretty private person, and partly it’s because I don’t have nearly a big enough ego to believe you should care what I’m about. But mostly it’s because I consider these blogs professional publications that come with readers’ expectations of appropriate tone and content. It’s the ex-journalist in me, I suppose.

Twitter: It’s been difficult for me to stay true to my aim for Twitter, which is for it to be entirely an extension of my professional self, a broadcast of my blog entries and news of interest to a changing legal profession. It’s hard because I’m often tempted to mix it up with personal observations and my particular brand of humour (that not everyone gets), everyday stuff I’d really enjoy saying or forwarding to the 1,800-odd people following me, but don’t. Certainly, the evolving wisdom of Twitter is to let that mixing happen, to dilute (or freshen, depending on your perspective) the professional with the personal. A few people manage separate Twitter accounts, but most can’t, and I expect I’d be one of them. People follow me for my professional observations, not because of whether I think John Farrell will be a good manager. So Twitter also contains the Professional Me, in a way that tries to complement what the blogs achieve.

Facebook: As a result, Facebook is where the Personal Me comes out, in status updates and links to videos, news stories and so forth. Over the last week, that’s included observations on Armistice Day imagery, a link to a brilliant high-school football trick play, 50th birthday wishes to my brother, a Simpsons reference (natch), and a link to a John Lennon/Van Halen mashup. But I’m also cautious, and not just because I intentionally leave my privacy filters low and need to be careful what I say. I’ve learned, as we all do by a certain age (and as my young relatives on Facebook will soon learn) that you don’t give all of yourself away all the time to everyone, because who you really are is something valuable that merits sharing with a select few people. Equally, I rarely link to my professional work on Facebook; if you read my page, you probably wouldn’t know what I do for a living.

LinkedIn: This really is the odd one out in the social media quadrangle, because despite the best efforts of its administrators, LinkedIn really isn’t a social fourm. It’s a place where you keep your online CV and hang out your professional credentials, because it’s one of the first places people will look to find out (a) if you’re legitimate and (b) if you and they know anyone in common. What I’ve been doing lately on LinkedIn is culling contacts and declining new connections with people whom I don’t know and who don’t introduce themselves. I want to get to the point where I can say that I’ve had some meaningful personal contact with everyone on my Connections page — not for control issues, but because thanks to LinkedIn, the company you choose to keep has become incredibly important in people’s judgment of you.

I don’t offer these anecdotes as recommendations of how you or anyone else should use social media; I only want to observe that the partial pictures we sketch of ourselves through social media form a mosaic of how the world sees us, and we are entirely responsible for the accuracy and completeness of that mosaic. Speaking for myself, I want my mosaic to be 100% accurate, but far less than 100% complete; I don’t want to lead a life online as well as offline. I don’t expect privacy from social media — as someone wisely pointed out, you get all the privacy on Facebook that you pay for — so it’s up to me to decide what my social media face is and why. For now, that face is almost entirely professional, and that’s exactly how I like it.

But that’s just me. How do you approach it?