practicehacker

Windmill Networking: Understanding, Leveraging & Maximizing LinkedIn

“Dig your well before you’re thirsty”
Neal Shaeffer, Author

Summary: I’ve been a member of LinkedIn since 2007. But like many people I’ve had doubts about the network’s value. In Understanding, Leveraging & Maximizing LinkedIn entrepreneur Neal Schaeffer shares specific suggestions about growing your network. Best of all, the author never talks down to the reader – that allows me to develop my own rational and strategy.

The Good: Shaeffer explains that LinkedIn is meant to function as a virtual favor-bank so members can help one another without obsessively searching for a quid pro quo. The author then goes further by providing a step-by-step guide to: creation, maintenance, and leveraging of your brand, asking for and offering recommendations, answering questions, and other pillars of social networking.

The Bad: While he explains things in a clear manner, Schaffer probably devotes too many pages to his windmill analogy. The result is not necessary to understanding LinkedIn and can get longwinded (ha!). But while I found the windmill abstraction a little forced, it ties in with Shaeffer’s own brand.

The Ugly: Schaeffer explains why LinkedIn (not Twitter or Facebook) is THE site for professionals. But the author comes from a general business background – not a legal one – so his point of view may be slightly off for our purposes.

Evaluation: While not intended specifically for lawyers, Windmill Networking is a great primer for members of the profession interested in using LinkedIn to connect with one another, reach out to referral sources, or recruit a team of professionals to serve our own business needs. I give the book 4 hacks out of 5

The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies:
Smart Ways to Work Together

“Law practice is, has been, and will continue to be a collaborative process”
Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighelle

Summary: The Lawyer’s Guide offers a solid list of resources for lawyers seeking to collaborate. It is practically jargon-free as well, and frames its discussions with a look at the past before discussing more modern modes of collaboration. The book is also a great introduction to technology for lawyers of a certain age (i.e. Baby Boomers), although younger lawyers may find it to be a little too basic.

The Good: The authors of The Lawyer’s Guide display sensitivity to attorneys who came of age before the Internet was pervasive, and they do it without over-explaining or being too didactic.

The Bad: The authors do their best to treat the products attorneys have been using for decades, such as Microsoft Office programs, as collaboration tools. By today’s standards these programs are more likely to obstruct collaboration than to enable it. In the age of Twitter, Wikis, Zoho, SaaS, and Google Wave, they are part of the problem, not the solution.

The Ugly: As I read The Lawyer’s Guide I kept asking myself why the authors didn’t treat technology-enabled collaboration as a smart way to business instead of like the Rubic’s Cube of law practice (perplexing, complex, exasperating). It really isn’t that hard.

Evaluation: Keeping in mind what the books sets out to do, I give The Lawyer’s Guide a hearty endorsement and 4 hacks out of 5. In places it is a bit too basic but overall you can’t go wrong giving this book a read – either because you are a lawyer of a certain age or because you work for one.

10 Things Social Media Can't Do

Seems like every once in a while someone fields a pro social media piece; and right on its heels an anti message. Today’s installment in the culture wars comes courtesy of digiday with the ominous title, Ten Things Social Media Cannot Do and includes such blockbusters as

• (Social Media is not ) a substitute for marketing strategy
• (Social Media cannot) succeed without management buy-in
• (Social Media is not) a short-term project most of the time
  
• (Social Media will not) produce quick ROI most of the time
• (Social Media cannot) be done in-house by most companies
• (Social Media cannot) provide a quick fix to an image problem
  
• (Social Media cannot) be done without a realistic budget
• (Social Media cannot) guarantee sales or influence
• (Social Media is not) just a project for “kids” who “get it”
• (Social Media cannot and should not) replace PR altogether

So what’s wrong with this list? Nothing. I happen to think that it’s pretty realistic. But in these tough economic times, many a company (both start-up and established) is looking to social media as the proverbial Silver Bullet. Boy are they going to be disappointed.

Another day another buzzword. Today it’s the real-time web - one in a series of recent developments making the web more useful. Now the web

• travels with our handheld devices (mobile web)
• alerts us when something happens (web of things)
• keeps us informed as things happen (real-time web)

Much high-quality writing about this comes from Read/Write/Web, host of the Real-Time Web Summit going on right now. Here are some of the companies they’ve featured thus far:

• identica.ca: open-source twitter client like status.net (formerly laconi.ca)
• superfeedr.com: real-time parsing of RSS feeds
• waze: crowd-sourced traffic tips and directions
• zensify: social network topics via weighted tags
• allvoices: distills input from citizen journalists
• pachube: the www connected to your house, etc. (my addition to the list)

While the legal applications for these developments are virtually limitless, even day-to-day applications are intriguing.  At last my refrigerator can call, IM, or e-mail with a reminder to go grocery shopping; or it may just transmit a pre-programmed list to the store based on the fridge’s lastest contents (adjusted for plans to have the neighbors over). Events that I upload from my phone to my calendar are communicated to the refigerator which can remind me to buy party supplies, etc. The list goes on and on.

Now if you don’t mind I’m going to tell my house to raise the room temperature in time for my arrival this evening.

Social IRM Engagement Chart

Social IRM (noun) (so-shal eye-ar-em):  the discipline of managing relationships between influencers (ie: bloggers) and brands (ie: LexisNexis, Westlaw, etc.)

by offering real value with the goal of exciting, maintaining, and harnessing positive word of mouth. Used mostly by marketers and forward-thinking professionals.

light blogging (lyt blo•ging) Noun. Child of Wordpress and Twitter.  Posts contain few  or no words. No account needed. Built for speed. Post by e-mail. Zero maintenance.

Are  you spending more than 60 seconds on your posts? Wish there were a better way? Then you’re in luck. About 2 years ago a mysterious site called Soup.io began displaying whimsical, stylized bursts of information with few hints as to the authors’ identities.  Last year one of my wife’s suburban hausefrau girlfriends starting communicating via  Posterous. This year the trend has blossomed into a veritable cottage industry dubbed light blogging by Twitter luminaries such as Steve Rubel, Louis Gray, and Robert Scoble. All that remains is for Oprah to give her blessing and the charge of the light (blogging) brigade will begin. Until then, you can find your bliss via services such as

• Tumblr
• Posterous
• Soup.io
• Noovo
• Vox
• Profilactic

If you still want to write a novel (more than 10 sentences) you can always go to

• Wordpress
• Blogger.com
• Typepad
• Livejournal
• etc.

But that would be so 2-years ago. Whatever.