Setting Up Base Camp
Every effective multi-faceted social media strategy starts with a base camp. Think of it as the hub from which all spokes emanate.
While it might be theoretically possible to use another platform like Facebook or LinkedIn as your base camp (at least from the “hub” perspective), the best base camp is your blog or CMS. Why? Your own blog/website/CMS is your little piece of digital real estate that you control, to the extent that you can control anything out on the wild wild web. Facebook and other third party providers can and will change their terms of service at the drop of a hat, change their revenue model or worse, go out of business altogether, and your base camp could become untenable or wiped out. Oh no, it’s way too risky to put your valuable base camp in the hands of a third party.
Blog, CMS and/or website platforms are the more logical choice for other reasons, also. For instance, you can point your personally branded domain name to your blog/CMS, making it a lot easier for people to remember how to get to you. Instead of http://www.facebook.com/editapps.php?ref=mb#/pages/Plugged-In-Lawyer/127402606172?ref=sgm (www.facebook.com/pluggedinlawyer is only slightly better) , it’s http://www.pluggedinlawyer.com.
Another really important reason to use a blog/CMS as your base camp is that your content is exportable, in case you want to pull up stakes and move. For instance, look around this site. Remember how I told you that I set this blog up for less than $35?
That was a stunning start, but Read more…
Top 5 Plugged In Lawyer Posts This Week
The following posts were most popular on Plugged In Lawyer this past week:
Social Networking — Old Concept, New Tools- Getting Your Core Content Circulated
- Ready For Twalking??
- 10 Tips For Starting Your Law Blog
- 3 Easy Steps To Killing Your Brand With Social Media
And a Tracy fave that didn’t get as much love from readers: Wrapping Your Lawyer Brain Around Blogging
Social Networking — Old Concept, New Tools
There was quite a dust-up yesterday over on Real Lawyers Have Blogs about whether law firms should be pushing out content as part of their social networking strategy. Kevin O’Keefe came out swinging with an assertion that law firms focused on pushing out content are missing the finer point of building relationships, which he considers the real purpose behind social networking.
If you read the comments to Kevin’s post, you’ll find people going on passionately for paragraphs and paragraphs about whether Kevin is right or wrong. While I personally believe that people are not going to be interested in having relationships with you in a professional context unless they’ve seen some of your content and are comfortable that you know your stuff, the more interesting observation to me as I watched the dialogue unfold on Kevin’s site and others, is that people think this is a new debate.
Knowingly or not, Kevin hit the nail on the head when he used the cocktail party and bullhorn example. Cocktail parties are old school business development, yet social networking really is nothing more than a virtual cocktail party (h/t to Heather Morse Milligan for bringing this concept home to me). How business professionals, specifically lawyers, grow and market their businesses is nothing new. The only new concepts in this equation are the shiny and new tools of social media and social networking. Kevin is right when he says Read more…
10 Tips For Starting Your Law Blog
From my “when you can’t say it any better yourself” file: 10 Tips For Starting Your Law Blog | Social Media Law Student
Every tip in this post is awesome, but one of his most valuable tips that doesn’t get enough press is to read other blogs to understand where your own blog fits in the specific blawgosphere and the general blogosphere, and to pick up content and style ideas.
What is the easiest way to keep up with other blogs? Subscribe to their RSS feeds and spend 30 minutes a day reading them in your feed reader. Yes, adding 30 minutes to your day might sound like a burden, but aren’t you already following the news? Maybe you should spend less time reading traditional media and more time reading cutting edge media. At this point in time, there is pretty much a blog to cover any news category that you’re interested in. Send all your news to your reader and have a latte with it every morning.
3 Easy Steps To Killing Your Brand With Social Media
Socialmediatoday posted an excellent article last week about the risks of dipping into the social media pool without a clear strategy and plan to execute that strategy. These risks are especially compounded when your competitors are doing everything right.
Three Top Ways To Damage Your Brand With Social Media tells the tale of two cable companies who both launched customer service initiatives with social media, including twitter accounts with the names @TimeWarnerCares and @ComcastCares.
If you look at the Timewarner Twitter page, you’ll that Timewarner is completely disengaged from the process. The only thing the company added to its page is its logo. No tweeting, no following, no nothing. Clearly Timewarner doesn’t “care.”
Contrast that with the Comcast Twitter page, where you see a custom background, a bio and photo for a real person with the chops to address customer service issues and over 36,000 tweets under his belt. This is the very definition of engagement.
Timewarner might be able to get away with a lame social media strategy because customers don’t typically have a choice as to which cable company they do business with, but lawyers don’t enjoy the same luxury. Your target clients have many choices. Be a Comcast, not a Timewarner.
And by the way, even if your target clients have very few choices for service providers, don’t assume that a lame strategy can’t hurt you. Between Timewarner and Comcast, which company do you suppose is attracting the best and the brightest employees? At some point, clients and customers without real choice between providers start asking whether they really need the service at all.
Don’t be a “twit.” Take socialmediatoday’s advice to heart and avoid these three brand damaging blunders at all costs:
- Starting a Twitter account and not using it (extra credit in the damage department if your handle is “we care”);
- Not tracking your brand in social media with monitoring tools (you can’t respond if you don’t track); and
- Starting a social media program, and not telling the rest of the company about it.
As I mentioned above, your target clients have many choices. Be a Comcast, not a Timewarner.
Wrapping Your Lawyer Brain Around Blogging
Having a hard time wrapping your lawyer brain around the idea of blogging? I ran into a very lawyerly white paper called Blogging For Laywers, complete with footnotes!
Back in the day, I wrote long briefs and footnotes were one of my particular talents. My brain doesn’t think in footnotes anymore. My brain thinks in links these days. Nevertheless, I still recognize beautiful footnotes when I see them, and this article struck me as a nice bridge for lawyers who don’t yet think in links.
While you’re at it, check out the author’s blog at Delaware Litigation. He writes a beautiful, classic lawyerly blog on the topic of what else? Delaware Litigation, of course. Not a topic that I personally could write passionately about day after day, but Francis does a beautiful job and has been recognized for his efforts by LexisNexis.
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