With his breakthrough performance in Kindergarten Cop, Arnold showed us why he would someday be Governor of California and leader of the free-world. Or whatever. In the meantime, here are some “baby steps” (get it, Kindergarten, baby steps?) to using social media in your practice, courtesy of Sociable Lawyer.
1. Do not be afraid to try
2. Share your knowledge
3. Polish your online rep
4. Strength in numbers
Posted via email from practice (redux)
Bet you don’t know which pizza place in Des Moines has the best deep-dish. Bet you didn’t know you wanted to know, either. Well you do. And these sites are going to tell you where to get it. So ask yourself. Were you thrilled by location-based service Foursquare? Did you jump for joy when Q&A phenom Quora came online? If so then you’ve been waiting for these 1/2 dozen local Q&A sites. Each one is begging to show you what’s going on in cities and countries you’ll never visit and have no business asking about:
Now pardon me while I track down a dry-cleaner in Nome, Alaska. Awesome!
This recent piece in ComputerWorld highlights the growing interest in hosted Microsoft Exchange. No surprise; but why now? And if you use Hotmail or Gmail, you may even ask why hosted Exchange is worthwhile at all. If so, consider this:
First, hosted Exchange offers full-featured contacts, calendaring, and e-mail in tight integration, just like the Outlook on your desk. Meanwhile, it spares users the typical pain in the ass features of a self-hosted Microsoft product: compatibility issues, upgrades, backup problems, disaster-recovery, smartphone support, spam filtering, patching, etc. In effect, with hosted Exchange you get your own “virtual e-mail server” in a secure, faraway datacenter, but only pay for what you use, usually on a monthly basis. Microsoft has been using this deployment model for some time in the educational market and it has worked.
Second, whereas Microsoft takes a top down approach to security, Google generally works from the bottom up. For instance, Google generally starts with consumer-facing products and scale them upwards until they can work in an enterprise environment. Thus Gmail, Google Calendar, GTalk, and a host of Google consumer toys has been integrated and reborn as Google Apps. Microsoft on the other hand usually starts with enterprise products, makes an obscene amount of money via licensing, and scales down to smaller business and consumers. This was the genesis of Outlook.
Third, consider that the gap between Google Apps and Microsoft Office is getting narrower all the time. And with its Office 365 product Microsoft is blurring the line between it and Google even further. Office 365 retains the look and feel of MS Office, while saving the organization tons of money and virtually eliminating the need for beefed-up IT departments (sorry IT guys).
As with all technology, lawyers are the last to know. Once the cat is out of the bag though, news spreads fast. Your opponents are going to take every advantage they can, so you should too. Ultimately hosted applications such as Exchange and web-based applications like Office 365 and Google Apps are the future. And why not: law firms are about serving clients, not endlessly fiddling with their IT infrastructure.
About a week and a half ago, I wrote a post defending Apple against the location FUD being spread. Due to some real, but minor issues (which have already been resolved) Apple was at the center of this. Then the focus seemed to shift towards Google. If Apple is “watching you” with the iPhone, Google must be as well with Android devices, right? Sure, if you’re a paranoid looney. Naturally, that group includes the US government. In an effort to attach their names to these highly publicized complaints and companies, certain legislators have called upon executives to testify before Congress. On Tuesday, those companies will deliver a Location 101 lesson to Congress. As I noted in the previous post, the press certainly isn’t helping with any of this FUD — and may actually be more than a bit to blame for it. After the Apple FUD started spreading, who else but The Wall Street Journal started digging into Google’s location approach as well. The shocking discovery? An email from a Google project manager to co-founder Larry Page stressing how important it is for Google to have their own location database for Android. … No. Shit.
Read the full article on practice (redux)
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