Point & Glick

I had an idea the other day for a ser­vice twit­ter should offer to corporate/registered accounts.
One thing peo­ple have noticed is that twit­ter seems to have very high search engine rank­ing; so that if I were to Google my name, one of the top links is my twit­ter page. That has raised some con­cerns in the past about how a lawyer can be viewed by poten­tial clients who look the lawyer up online.
My idea is to allow firms to lever­age this strong search engine rank­ing of twit­ter. A firm can have its own twit­ter ID, but, as any social media guru will tell you, it’s bet­ter to have an indi­vid­ual face peo­ple can relate to. So a firm will appoint an indi­vid­ual to be the face of the firm on twit­ter (and what­ever other social net­work it deems nec­es­sary). That’s pretty darn straight­for­ward.

The twist came when I started think­ing about per­sonal brands in the con­text of the firm’s larger brand. What if a firm hires some­one with a strong and respected per­sonal brand, such as a lat­eral hire or — I’ll be com­pletely hon­estly self-centered — a recent law school grad­u­ate who built rela­tion­ships with other legal pro­fes­sion­als using social media.
What if twit­ter would allow a reg­is­tered account to link or asso­ciate an exist­ing indi­vid­ual account to the firm’s account, thereby allow­ing a search of the firm’s name to also turn up the individual’s twit­ter account?
The reg­is­tered account holder would start the process off request­ing an account to be asso­ci­ated with it. Then twit­ter would have to act as the gate­keeper, requir­ing proof from the requester that there is a valid ratio­nale to asso­ciate the indi­vid­ual account with the reg­is­tered account. Some­thing like proof of employ­ment should do. Then the reg­is­tered account holder can deter­mine when it it time to dis­as­so­ci­ate the indi­vid­ual from the reg­is­tered account.
Rev­o­lu­tion­ary? No. but I think it could be very useful.