practicehacker

From Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop – some good advice about how to get found online:

• Don’t Be Ordinary. Unique ideas will take you further than throwing money at marketing
• Create Good Content. Blogs, videos, podcasts, social networks, and tweets get noticed
• Optimize It. Optimize posts to be found on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
• Promote It. Post your content as many ways as you can and email it to interested parties
• Measure Results. Act once, measure twice and keep measuring for continued success

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.

Lawyers are calling it social networking burnout. Law.com reports that corporate America is losing its taste for social networking sites and shutting down access to Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. Recent back-to-back studies show a big chunk of corporate America banning Twitter and Facebook from the workplace. The news for the media world is even grimmer. According to an August survey by ScanSafe, 76% of companies block employee use of social networking sites — up 20% from February 2009. And social networking sites have become productivity enemy #1. Indianapolis-based Barnes & Thornburg is seeing companies block Facebook “all the time.” The firm has banned Facebook itself, and Twitter is next. I think what’s happening is social media is starting to simmer and the lawyers, PR teams, HR teams, and marketers are realizing that all these problems can occur, said one associate at Gunster Yoakley & Stewart of West Palm Beach, Florida.

I think what’s happening is social media is starting to simmer and the lawyers, PR teams, HR teams, and marketers are realizing that all these problems can occur, said one associate at Gunster Yoakley & Stewart of West Palm Beach, Florida who focuses on technology and the Internet.

Prism Legal’s Ron Friendman liveblogged (a/k/a real-time blogged) Richard Susskind’s discussion of the future of the profession at ILTA 2009.  Here are the Top 10 disruptive legal technologies on the list:

Document Assembly. Has already changed markets. Providing document assembly online allows for economies of scale. Charges and hours don’t have to relate, making this technology “disruptive.

Always on Connectivity. Lawyers can, and are expected to, be on call 24/7.  Deal with it.

Electronic Legal Marketplace. Your value in the  a frictionless marketplace. Clients can select legal services in the electronic marketplace and even choose to go with non-lawyer alternatives.

E-Learning. Law schools have long been falling down on the job. The Internet can revive learning with realistic simulations.

Online Legal Guidance. Interactive advice systems in the “latent legal market” (see Suskind, The Future of Lawyers). Sounds like self-guided document automation.

Legal Open-Sourcing. A la Wikipedia. Crowd-sourcing communities of interested individuals can result in better answers than throwing the problem to a single individual.  Consumers more likely to talk to friend with similar problems than a lawyer.

Closed Legal Communities. See Legal Onramp. Clients and In House Counsel can pool legal information and check a common knowledge-base before consulting pricey outside counsel.

Workflow and Project Management. High volume, low value work can be made into off-the-rack solutions; making certain lawyers into de facto project managers. Project management requires significant training, but lawyers aren’t getting any. This is a disruptive trend because it highlights the fact that as efficiency increases, billable hours decrease.

Embedded Legal Knowledge. In the future legal knowledge will be built into compliance systems making the contributions of highly-trained counsel less necessary except for unusual assignments.

Online Dispute Resolution. Dispute resolution as a service. Services like CyberSettle versus time spent in Court or in the arbitration system.

Earlier this year in my Smalllaw column I wrote about the use of location-based services and Twitter to create a real-time feed (posts, dockets, hearing outcomes, files, research, etc.).  Let’s call it a Casestream.  And while location-enabled applications such as Brightkite, Twinkle, and Loopt have been with us for a while, the advent of Google Lattitude means everyone can experience and potentially adopt such services. Just look at the potential of applications such as Foursquare. How much longer until the legal profession gets into the act?

Yesterday Facebook, the application that convinced a generation of soccer moms it was okay to post semi-candid pictures of themselves no matter how disturbing, bought Friendfeed, the best social application you’ve never heard of.  When I read the news I wept. No, seriously. I wept at the end of an era.

Freiendfeed makes me feel smart. Facebook makes me feel like I need a shower. Friendfeed brings out the best in users. It promotes discussions about cutting-edge topics and insights. Facebook brings out the worst in users  – many of them highly placed people who should know better – by soliciting the mundane and celebrating the average. See the difference?

I hope Facebook leaves Friendfeed alone, but I have no illusions. As it stands I’m positive that hordes of Facebook users will thunder into Friendfeed, choke it with pointless chatter, and leave it a disaster area when they move on a few weeks later.

If you find something online that’s worth keeping I hope you feel a little sad when it gets “discovered” and you know it’s about to lose its special character. That’s how you know it was worthwhile in the first place.