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    Entries in Twitter (11)

    Tuesday
    09Mar2010

    Return of the portal?

    DateTuesday, March 9, 2010 at 10:24PM

    Anyone remember the web portal craze around the turn of the millenium?

    I am not the first to draw a comparison between this and the way in which some of the current crop of Twitter clients (Hootsuite and TweetDeck being the two I have used most) are expanding their reach to become more like "social media portals".

    However, take a look at today's post on the Hootsuite blog announcing that "Just in time for SXSW" Hootsuite will be adding Foursquare and MySpace to the list of social networks it supports.

    I'm not sure yet whether the Foursquare integration will be added to the Hootsuite iPhone App (so that users can check-in via Hootsuite on the go) or whether this is limited to seeing your friends' Foursquare activity via Hootsuite on the web. Either way, it is quite an interesting development.

    Are we going to see a second round of the "portals war" as social media clients vye to aggregate your friends' activities across all the different social networks?

     

    ps. on an unrelated note... if you are going to SXSW then my jealousy knows no bounds. Austin is a great city and with the addition of music and tech... Any tips for how I can persuade my firm that it would be a worthy use of my expense account would be most welcome!

     

    AuthorPeninsulawyer | Comment1 Comment | Reference1 Reference | |
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    Tuesday
    09Mar2010

    Outsource your tweets?

    DateTuesday, March 9, 2010 at 2:36PM

    Does it make sense to outsource your tweets?

    A simple enough question, but it has started some heated debates on Twitter.

    As I wrote in my I am not a social media expert post a couple of weeks ago, there are social media experts out there who advocate outsourcing your tweets. In fact (surprise, surprise...) they will create them for you.

    My view? There are two basic ways for law firms to use Twitter. I wrote about this in Tweeting in Convoy so I won't repeat it all here, but you either:-


    • use a "corporate" Twitter account almost as an alternative to an RSS feed to give information about the firm, news, events etc

    • allow individuals within the firm to run their own Twitter accounts to interact with clients, prospects and others in a more personal way and build up relationships

    • adopt the "convoy" approach with a corporate feed, but also individual accounts.

    I can see how the production of content for the first type of account could be outsourced. After all, it doesn't rely on social interaction or personality.

    My only question would be why a firm would spend good money paying a social media guru to do this.

    All it needs is a free TwitterFeed account to pick up the RSS feeds from the relevant part of your site and feed it to Twitter.

    Tweets about events, firm news etc. which don't feature on your site are going to be produced by your marketing team in any event. They can tweet them as easily as email them to the social media consultant.

    I don't see how the second kind of account can possibly be outsourced. Your Twitter followers want to have a relationship with you, not with a marketing company.

    Look at the debate on the other side of the Atlantic about legal ghostblogging (triggered by Mark Bennet's rent a brain with Ghostbloggers post on his Social Media Tyro blog) to get an idea of the strength of feeling about this. I particularly like the graphic comment on the original post from The Trial Warrior:-


    "It’s like getting a rectal exam at the doctor’s office and then finding out that the doctor was away that day."


    If you outsource the creation of your firm's tweets to a third party (without suitable disclosure) then you risk this kind of reaction from people who believed they were tweeting with someone from your firm.

    At a deeper level, how is a social media marketing firm going to know enough about your firm to produce interesting, engaging content without your input?

    How are they going to deal with replies and conversations? Are you happy for them to run with these and come up with a response on your behalf… or should they call you up every time to get your comments?

    There are a few arguments which have been floated to try to justify this outsourcing approach:-

    Lawyers are busy people... they don't have the time to use Twitter


    My glib answer:- if you are so busy that you don't have time to use Twitter for businesss development then you don't need to use Twitter for business development.

    Nobody has the spare time anyway - it has to be diverted from the time you would be spending on things. A lot of the time I spend on Twitter is the odd minutes when I couldn't fit in a whole lot else anyway.

    You don't do your own printing, you send it to the printshop. What's the difference?


    Last time I checked, the printers didn't produce the content for your business cards and brochures. They print what you tell them.

    Outsourcing your tweets isn't like using a printer; it's like sending the social media guru in your place to a client drinks event you have been invited to. Sound like a sensible idea?

    Marketing is my thing... I will be able to do it better. You concentrate on the lawyering


    Quite possibly true, but we are not talking about "marketing" in terms of email campaigns, cold-calling, advertising or public relations. In these areas, the marketers are the experts.

    But when it comes to chatting with potential clients one to one, building up a rapport and showing them that you could help them? There is only one person who can do this… you.

     

    If you have money to burn then outsource your "corporate" RSS-style tweets. I doubt anyone will be too bothered, and this isn't really where the value lies in Twitter anyway.

    And if someone suggests you outsource a Twitter account with any kind of personal element to it (your individual account or simply a more "chatty" & personal corporate account)?

    Just keep in mind that image of the social media guru turning up at the drinks reception and picking your name badge off the table...

    AuthorPeninsulawyer | Comment3 Comments | Reference1 Reference | |
    tagged , , , in , |
    Thursday
    25Feb2010

    Scams, claims and Twitter games

    DateThursday, February 25, 2010 at 10:21PM

    I watched tonight's Cutting Edge documentary on "Claims, Scams and Compensation Games" with some interest… although I am not a personal injury lawyer.

    The solicitors who were featured in the documentary had already gone on the record to say they were unhappy with the way the programme had been edited and to accuse the makers of "selective editing" and stereotyping claims lawyers (I'm not quite sure what they expected, but that is a whole different issue).

    They also posted their own take on the documentary to their Twitter account in advance of it being aired as well as running it in the local press.

    Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of Twitter "backchannel" during the show (most of it fairly negative about the claimants) and I wondered if the solicitors might use their Twitter account to try and do some damage limitation.

    I even tweeted them myself to see if anyone was home.

    Rather than just passively posting their rebuttal to Twitter for their own followers to see, would it have made sense to reply to some of the people tweeting about the documentary with a link to their reply document and get their own version of events across?

    It would probably require careful handling as it could easily backfire and "fan the flames", but I wonder if anyone even considered it.

    For tonight, at least, their Twitter response seemed to be "no comment".

    AuthorPeninsulawyer | CommentPost a Comment | |
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    Tuesday
    23Feb2010

    Law Web 2.0?

    DateTuesday, February 23, 2010 at 6:38PM

    What is Web 2.0?

    I ask, because a criticism I have seen levelled at a number of law firm websites is that they are "flat", "brochure ware" and most crushingly of all... "so Web 1.0".

    The recent comments about the Shoosmiths Access Legal site on the Law Society Gazette LinkedIn group give a pretty good flavour (unfortunately you have to be logged into LinkedIn to follow the group link... sorry).

    Wikipedia has a very detailed definition of Web 2.0, but to me the core of the concept is the move from "information" sites to "participation".

    Some lawyers and (to a lesser extent) law firms have proved enthusiastic users of Web 2.0 social media tools for business development, but how many law firms have actually embraced Web 2.0 in their own web sites?

    Looking deeper than this, to what extent is it even possible for a law firm site to make this "information to participation" shift?

    The expeditionary force in the Web 2.0 infiltration was the blog, which has found its way into a number of sites (although in many cases what is termed a "blog" is more of a re-badged news feed which lacks the comment facilities to give it real Web 2.0 credentials).

    The other area which is seeing some real marketing spend at the moment is the integration of online legal drafting technology into sites. Jon Busby blogs about this over at his Legal 2.0 blog for those who want a more detailed rundown (disclosure:- by day, Jon is the business director at Epoq Legal... other online drafting platforms may be available!). Some firms are also taking the next logical step into e-commerce (i.e. clients buying and paying for their legal work via the site itself).

    A number of sites have incorporated "follow us on Twitter / Facebook" buttons (my favourite being a local firm I won't name whose Twitter button on the main site of their page links to an account with a single follower and one tweet dating from July 2009 - well done guys!).

    Social sharing and bookmarking buttons seem to be less common, but the Access Legal site referenced above does have these. I haven't managed to track down a site with the Tweetmeme button and counter to allow articles to be easily re-tweeted, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are some out there.

    So what else does Web 2.0 have to offer which law firms could be incorporating into their sites?

    Looking at the Wikipedia page for inspiration some other options might be:

    • social networking elements (maybe via Ning or similar?)

    • wikis (Wikivorce is great, but I don't think it is really a wiki in the Web 2.0 sense of allowing users to edit content)

    • web-based communities (client forums?)

    • video sharing (maybe not ideal for law firms, but who knows?)

    • Mobile applications tying back into the site

    I may have missed a site somewhere which has one or more of these features, but my gut feeling is that law firms won't necessarily incorporate these more "social" aspects of Web 2.0 into their main sites.

    Law firm web sites are effectively providing information and branding for the firm. This requires control over the content and the level of user participation requiered for a wiki, a forum or even unmoderated blog comments is likely to conflict with this.

    This isn't limited to law firms. Even the parts of the Twitter site which are about Twitter, Inc. are effectively a flat Web 1.0 site combined with a blog - and there is probably no need for them to be anything else.

    So what would the perfect law firm website contain? Online drafting technology and the associated e-commerce functions seem to be the most logical next step, but other than that the focus seems to be on integration with external social media and Web 2.0 (rather than building them into the site).

    It is risky to make this kind of prediction, but I wonder if law firm web sites (in the sense we currently recognise them) have much further to go? Will the next stage of development actually be to strip out features rather than adding them in?

    We are already seeing this to an extent with LinkedIn. A public LinkedIn profile is already the first port of call for many people when preparing for a meeting with a new business contact. Why not just replace your lawyer "bio" pages with a link to their LinkedIn profile?

    In ten years' time maybe firms will just maintain a "core" site which is used to provide online legal services, e-commerce, client areas and basic information about the firm. The more social and participatory elements would come from the blogs, wikis, tweets and buzzes of their individual lawyers, which would orbit around this core.

    What do you think? Is there more Web 2.0 functionality left to be built into law firm sites... or is it time to streamline things?

    AuthorPeninsulawyer | Comment10 Comments | Reference1 Reference | |
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    Sunday
    21Feb2010

    I am not a social media expert

    DateSunday, February 21, 2010 at 10:16AM

    I am not a social media expert.

    I am an enthusiast. I am happy to share anything useful I may have learnt (for whatever that may be worth), but I make no claim to be able to advise others on how to use SM to grow their business.

    However, as Charon QC pointed out in his Outsourced and Ghostwritten post this morning, there are all manner of experts or even "mavens" and "gurus" who are staking their claim as paid social media experts.

    I have been participating in a debate on Twitter this weekend about the wisdom (or otherwise) of outsourcing your law firm's tweets to legal marketers or other social media rockstars.

    For what it's worth, the solicitors and barristers I follow on Twitter (many of whom are using Twitter very succesfully for business development) were universally against the idea... but then again none of them would claim to be "gurus" either.

    I may not be a maven, but I know enough to recognise an attempt to court controversy and boost web traffic for a new business when I see one so I am stepping back rather than fanning the flames.

    What I will say is that if your web marketer, PR agency or guru suggests you outsource your tweets to them then it pays to ask them a few questions about their social media credentials and track record.

    Ian Lurie's post on his Conversation Marketing site:- 10 Questions to Evaluate a Social Media 'Expert' is a good starting point if you are looking for some relevant questions to ask.

    If they have radical ideas about outsourcing social media content and the like then ask them for hard details about the clients they are using them for and some solid data on the ROI those clients have received (Olivier Blanchard's slide deck on the Basics of Social Media ROI which I have linked to before is an excellent resource if you are struggling with how to define this).

    If your social media "expert" can't answer these type of questions convincingly then think long and hard about handing over your money.

    Anyone can have a theory on how best to use Twitter, but my personal view if they can't lay out their track record convincingly and actually demonstate some ROI?

    I couldn't give two hoots.

     

    AuthorPeninsulawyer | Comment6 Comments | |
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