Advice for Twitter

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.
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Published on 11/13/2009 11:13 am.
Filed under: blog Tags: , , , , , ,

The sum is not greater than the whole of its parts

Dear World,

Social Media.
Social.
Media.
Why do these two words con­fuse the hell out of so many peo­ple? I don’t just mean con­fuse in the whim­si­cal way your par­ents might be con­fused about how to open a file in an email. I mean con­fused — to the point where peo­ple end up doing things com­pletely bass-ackwards and screw­ing them­selves over.

Yes­ter­day, Scott Green­field and Brian Tan­nebaum posted excel­lent, some­what related and extra­or­di­nar­ily rel­e­vant state­ments regard­ing the need for lawyers to sub­scribe to and fol­low an eth­i­cal guide­line. The over­lap between them lies in a lawyer’s online pres­ence, and since I am so obvi­ously steeped in online real­ity that I instantly asso­ci­ated those verbs as online col­lo­qui­alisms (“sub­scribe” to a feed and “fol­low” on twit­ter) I will focus mainly on the online aspect of the issue.
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Published on 11/09/2009 11:21 am.
Filed under: blawg Tags: , , , , ,

The other kind of Social Networking

I know what you’re think­ing, “Blog­ging, twit­ter, Face­book, LinkedIn, indenti​.ca, what­ever other new­fan­gled appli­ca­tions with man­gled Eng­lish for names are all the rage now.…”

The truth is, I spent about an hour yes­ter­day evening walk­ing around my school’s “Career Explo­ration Fair”. Employ­ees from large law firms, pub­lic inter­est groups and gov­ern­ment agen­cies set up tables hand­ing out info and tschotchkes to curi­ous law students.

It was not a recruit­ment oppor­tu­nity. As a result, I received some solid answers to the types of frank ques­tions I prob­a­bly would not have asked. It was also an edu­ca­tional expe­ri­ence in imme­di­ate net­work­ing; unfor­tu­nately much less enjoy­able (per­son­ally) than the online vari­ety and some­thing I expect I’ll be doing a lot more of.

Published on 11/12/2008 10:26 am.
Filed under: blawg Tags: ,