How Much Are Your Social Media Efforts Worth?

Everyone’s on Facebook (even my parents).  You’ve got to have blog (even if no one reads it).  How many tweets did you send today (3-so far, but I’ve had meetings all morning)?  Social media is a buzzin’ (still) and will be for the foreseable future.  Businesses all know that they’ve got to be in this space, but many do not know why?  Furthermore, most businesses do not know whether they are succeeding.

Heather Holdrige posted a great blog on Frogloop.com about the return on investment in social media for businesses.  Her post went   into an overview of social media growth (“(NYT reported last week that time spent on social networks has exceeded that of email)”  and then discussed the metrics for social media success developed at the Women Who Tech TeleSummit, where she was a recent panel speaker on the topic. 

This chart that she posted shows a great quick reference guide to whether your social media efforts are working: 

How are you measuring your social media success?

 

Metadata For Lawyers = Ethics Violation? (It depends …)

Chase Edward Scott and David Hrickik posted a fantastic article in the June 2009, ABA Young Lawyers Division newsletter, titled “Metadata: Are You in Danger of an Ethics Violation ?”  They give a good summary of the pitfalls of metadata (the “data about data” that gets stored on all electronic documents) for lawyers.  The thrust of the article asks what the lawyer’s duty is regarding confidential metadata embedded in a document transmitted in discovery?  It seems that some argue that failure to remove such metadata is a breach of the lawyer’s duty b/c everybody knows about metadata. 

In the authors’ experience, though, the oppososite is true: most attorneys have never heard of metadata, let alone understand how to handle it.

The authors say that as technology becomes more pervasive and these issues common knowledge, negligence claims will be unavoidable.  “Attorneys should make every effort to prevent disclosure of confidential information.”

Interestingly enough, the ABA has not issued a formal ethics ruling that targets metadata.  Most states rely on catch-all phrashing in their professional responsibility rules about “dishonest, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.”  The following chart sums up state bar positions on such violations:

State Bar Associations Opinions on Metadata Searching

Ethics Violation	No Opinion	No Ethics Violation
New York Florida Arizon Alabama	Most states	Maryland Colorado DC

 I do not think that states will be able to narrow this issue much in the future.  Search technology just gets better and better as the years go on, and even efforts to conceal privileged information may be futile.  This will only increase the scope of what we call “work product” and becomes privileged information.  As we strive to find a balance between technology and a lawyer’s duty the watchword (as always) will be reasonableness.  The last thing I think any state bar association wants to do is create e-discovery vaults where obtaining electronic documents of value becomes impossible b/c of futile metadata removal efforts.

Best Practices: Building Online Communities (intro of sorts)

Ever since creation man has built communities.  Our first communities were tribal and used for survival, but in today’s wired world the online community is all about finding common interests and opportunities to connect that compell us to spend time sifting through the profiles and prattling of others (call it our “snooping instinct”).  But how do these communities even get started and how can businesses benefit from leveraging the natural instinct of the herd to click together?

 As the Manager of Academic Content Development for LexisNexis I have built mini-communities with my employees and partnership teams on our Share Point, and have partnered with Martindale Hubbell Connected (think “Linkedin for lawyers”) to find ways of integrating content into the growing community there, (I also manage the Nefesh B’Nefesh (aliyah/Israel) group on Linkedin).  The best resource I have found on building communities is a site called “Community Spark,” written by community guru Martin Reed.  Martin’s tips have helped to refocus my approach from one of content dictator to content facilitator.  A primer that I suggest for any community devleloper is 95 things I have learnt in 9 years of community building.  This is a list of short suggestions for building and managing a community.  Here are my favorites from the list:

23. Don’t be fooled into thinking members will use features even if they requested those features.

24. Keep features down to a minimum …

27. Change your community rarely …

38. You need to highlight the best content and give strong calls to action …

47. Asking questions is the single most effective way of generating activity in an online community.

48. You need to share information about yourself …

64. You need to act as a matchmaker by introducing members to other members …

71. You need to cater to your members – not your own wants or needs.

72. Trust is critical.

73. You need to give out a lot of ego strokes and compliments …

80. Do not edit or delete negative comments about your brand. Respond to them openly.

81. The more you moderate or intervene, the less active your community will be.

82. You need to delegate some tasks to trusted members.

83. You should give trusted members additional responsibilities and powers …

88. You can’t be afraid to experiment …

91. It can be easy to forget that a real person sits behind every member name.

92. You need to be passionate about your online community.

 

Group dynamics depend on creating a place where people can shine, bring what they do best to the table, and feel a part of something greater than anyone of the members.   Aliza Sherman of Webworkers Daily said:

Bottom line: Online community building is about the people first, the shared interests or experiences next, and the tools are the means of bringing people together in new ways.

What has been your experience with community building?

Virtual Law Firms

During an economic slump all businesses look for ways to save. The law firms are no exception. This article from Legal Technology shows that a mix of in-house counsel and virtual law firms, (using attorneys from off-shore operations or homebased offices) can be a cost saver. But at what cost? Is it harder to manage your legal team when they are homebased?  Following best practices for virtual teams is one step, but what other challenges are presented when your in-house counsel is virtual?

Delicious – Getting Web Cred as a Yummy Bookmarker

This post is a confession: I am a nOOb when it comes to Delicious – the social bookmarking site.  For the uninitiated, this is the description of Delicious on their Help page:

Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.

What I like about the site is that my bookmarks show up on any machine I work on.  The tool bar is installed on my home and work computers, so everything is centralized.  It works a lot like Twitter in the sense that you find interesting people who tag things that you find interesting too and follow thiem.  As you discover things of interest people follow.

That’s the formula, but what is the reality?  What is your experience as a web tagger?  This is the promise of Web 3.0 and beyond: our search results will be more relevant and the web will learn about us from the identities we establish.  Can sites like Delicious be the pre-cursor to it all?

Relevant and Reliable: Why Martindale-Hubbell Still Matters

Martindale-Hubbell is a LexisNexis company that serves as an attorney and law firm search, branding, and rating service.  Similar to traditional, premiere search listing services like Yellow Pages and Google, customers of Martindale (attorneys and law firms) can pay for a priority listing, which syndicates their information across other consumer facing search resources (see below for more details).  Two weeks ago, the blog What About Clients put up a post, Martindale-Hubbell: Should we all “just say no?” in which they questioned whether the service was worth the cost and questioned what attorneys really got for listing there.  Dave Danielson, VP LexisNexis Client Devlopment for Martindale-Hubbell commented on the post, giving reasons for Martindale’s legitimacy.  This prompted What About Clients to post a blog today titled,  Towards a Reinvented Martindale-Hubbell, where they featured Dave’s comment and highlighted the new direction of Martindale. 

What follows  here is my comment to the second post.  I do not know if it will be approved by the editors at What About Clients, but thought it made for an interesting blog post here:

This will be a biased comment; I work for LexisNexis (albeit in a separate division), but I will try to comment here as an attorney and a blogger interested in technology, rather than an employee plugging his company (i.e., this is not LexisNexis talking here).  With the disclaimer out of the way, let me comment: I too had similar questions about Martindale’s relevance in a Web 2.0 world.  We all have access to free marketing tools (blog, twitter, social networks, etc.), so why would anyone need to pay for a listing in Martindale?  The answer is two-fold: (1) consistent brand syndication (aggregated on MH & Lawyers.com), and (2) legitimacy. 

On point (1) Dave Danielson said it above, (regarding a paid listing on Martindale) “that listing puts them in Martindale.com as well as Lawyers.com and also syndicates their profile/contact information to many alliance partners like Google, Yahoo, CitySearch, MSN, superpages, and many others.”  This is repurposing at its finest – the effort that would go into an individual managing such syndication efforts so that their brand can aggregate consistently across multiple consumer platforms would cost more than the fee to list with Martindale, both in time and money.  In today’s fast paced world, people want to see your name whereever they look.  The word “search” in online life has a strained meaning at best; most of us do not look beyond the first page of Google results. 

On point (2), ratings and feedback matter to the consumer.  Creating a legitimate snapshot via AV ratings gains legitimacy and credibility among both colleagues and potential clients; this translates into more business.  Martindale presents an opportunity to be the more relevant than others in a client’s search results. 

Along these lines, a feature that is on Lawyers.com (and would be great to see on Martindale) is client feedback.  An enhancement to this feature, and something very useful for Martindale would be the ability of clients to enter a net promoter score (scale of 1-10 measuring whether they would recommend this lawyer to a friend).  When choosing a service or product I find such ratings helpful in deciding whether to put my hard earned money there. 

In sum, Martindale provides many existing benefits (syndication, search and profile, legitimacy), and has the potential to do so much more, especially with M-H Connected (think Linkedin for lawyers).        

What are your thoughts about Martindale’s legitimacy?  What about the new, attorney networking service Martindale Hubbell Connected?   Are you a member?

I Stand Corrected: Personal Contact Lens (The transparent OLED done one better)

I posted a blog last week titled, “Hey Time Magazine: Where’ My Active Contact Lens,” which questioned certain predictions made by Time Magazine in 1998 about what technology for the next 50 years would look like. One ambitious projection was an “active contact lens” that connected to the Internet and allowed for HUD (heads up display). While we can’t expect Lenscrafter to start selling these babies anytime soon, an interesting article from Geek.com discusses. “an integrated, autonomous system designed to augment your visual experience with information relevant to your personal surroundings and immediate circumstances.”  Check it out – this may just be cool enough to get me over that icky feeling I get when I think of putting a lens directly on my eye (I’m a glasses man)..

Best Practices: Managing a Virtual Team

The 21st century promised us a completely virtual future; one where we would attend board meetings as holograms (think Darth Vadar and the Emperor in Empire Strikes Back), teams would have little structure, and freedom would lead to copious productivity. Reality reveals that our sci-fi driven expectations shadow reality, but don’t necessarily define it.

Virtual teams can and do work, but they need structure and guidelines to manage the flexibility that running or working on such a team requires. Having managed a mostly virtual team for 2-years now I have learned that everything from selection of homebasers to platform choices must be considered and revisited as you go. What follows are some best practices I have learned:

1. The Right People – not everyone is right for home-basing or virtual work.  When I  started managing a mostly home-based team I had to get used to the midnight email responses to questions I had asked at the end of the day.  At first I tried to manage this practice, urging my team not to log on after work hours (after all, we only paid them on the expectation that they worked 35 hours a week).  Once I started home-basing a bit myself, I realized that this was more for their convenience of taking care of little things when they had an extra moment than my need for their response first thing in the morning (these guys were not sitting at their computers for hours after hours; they were leaving the computer on and quickly responding to quick items).  Ultimately, the home-baser should be someone who knows how to stay in touch during work hours, has flexibility in their response to challenges, and can effectively communicate using all forms of contact (email, phone, IM, Share Point, social media, etc.); this segues into the next point…
2. The Right Technology – this is so crucial when managing a virtual team.  In my experience, using phone, email, IM, Share Point (described next), social media platforms, and video conferencing can help a virtual team feel closer.  We have yet to do a full pilot of video conferencing for the team, but having used it individually, seeing faces of home-based employees during a conversation makes a difference
3. The Right Collaboration – Share Point technology has helped our team stay connected.  Some of the ways we use it:
   • Discussion Boards – post a discussion thread for anything that requires feedback from more than 2 people.  This results in a continuous discussion rather than disjointed discussions via email.  All responses are centralized in one place and can inform future best practices
   • Shared Documents – working documents, tracking sheets, and presentations are the types of documents we tend to store centrally
   • Wiki – (my favorite feature) we use in 4 ways: documenting evolving best practices, posting team meeting agendas, project work, and individual status sheets.  The beauty of wiki lies in the “History” feature which tracks all changes made from the beginning of the page posting.  Also the interlinking of information between pages and items on SP or other sites makes wiki an essential collaboration tool for the virtual team
4. The Right Feedback - evaluating and giving feedback to any team can be uncomfortable, unless of course it good feedback, but with the virtual team, engaging in regular feedback is crucial.  These are people who can’t read your body language when they see you by the water cooler, so giving feedback in varied forms (written, phone, public recognition, etc.) goes a long way.
5. The Right Mission - more so than any other team, the virtual team requires a clear mission and an evolving process.  Repetition of the goal, the process, and the current progress is key.  For people working off-site, it is easy to find their own best way of doing things, which can result in losing sight of the team direction and preferred practices.  When it leads to necessary change based on collaborative and incremental adjustments, such independence becomes a source of innovation, but when it results in fragmentation and inefficiency the virtual worker becomes a detractor.  Not every industry, company, or mission needs teams, (see Why Teams Don’t Work, An Interview with J. Richard Hackman by Diane Cout in this month’s Harvard Business Review), but the fact remains that most businesses do use teams, and for those who make use of virtual teams articulating these points must be done.
6. The Right Meet - finally, nothing helps build a virtual team more than a meeting in the “meat world.”  Having some face-to-face time scheduled for annual conferences or even special visits can add greatly to the progress and connection a virtual team makes with each other.

These five suggestions are just a few of the things I try to do with my virtual team.  What best practices do you use with your virtual team?

Apple’s Investor Call – Disappointment?

Apple said “no” to a Mac OS netbook, but tried to pump us up about better iPhones, bigMacs, and revealed bits about a competitive pricing plan for mobile users that will keep low-cost competitors at bay. I guess that is good news for us poor people. Read all about this teaser to June’s developer’s conference on Geek.com.

Hey Time Magazine: where’s my “Active Contact Lens” (linked to Internet to surf web w/eyes closed)?

I don’t know why I kept it, but something just told me I should.  It was the winter of 1997, and Time magazine had this article called “Shape of Tings to Come” in which they predicted what technological advances we would see over the next 50 years.  These lists always fascinate me b/c they blend a limited outlook with wild imagination to produce mixed results.  I smile at human progress when I think about my father reading Dick Tracey comics in the 1950s and wishing for a wristwatch commuicator radio, or my own childhood yearnings to talk to friends on a Star Wars comlink, and then I see kids walking around with an iPhone updating their Myspace pages and finding directions to the nearest pizza place, (I’m still waiting for that lighsaber though).  

Alan Kay said, “Technology is anything invented after you were born,” … Danny Hillis, modified that definition: ‘Technology … is anything that doesn’t work yet.” (Law School 2.0, David I. C. Thompson)

It’s an apt definiton.  What fascinates me, little mobile media centers in our pockets, will not wow my children.  Since I couldn’t find the article itself on http://timemagazine.com, which has a fantastic archive, by the way, I have linked a PDF of it to this post, (please don’t sue me Time magazine). 

The first thing I notice reading the list in 2009 is that some of the things have in fact come to fruition, albeit at different times than predicted: “wall mounted, 1-m-long flat screens show television” (2001), “mobile phones with video cameras and screens enable people to watch files or play computer games from their home or office” (2003), and “new cars are equipped with anti-collision radar, thermal imaging systems to improve visibilitiy (okay, this is a stretch), on-board computers that detect and warn drivers about imminent faults, and satellite based automatic global positioning systems.”  In 1997, these advances were the future; today they are our next purchase. 

Some of the predications haven’t quite happened yet as predicted: “male birth control pill or contraceptive injection becomes commonly available,” (1999), ”the active contact lens, linked to the Internet, allows the wearer to read E-mail and surf the World Wide Web without even opening her eyes,” (2005), and “clothes made of smart fabrics automatically warm up the wearer in cold weather and cool him or her down in hot weather” (2006).  While these developments haven’t happened in the timeframe predicted, given the state of technology how far off can they be?

As for the future, (I still want my hoverboard  from Back to the Future 2), some of the predictions in Time were ahead of schedule, such as this one: “computers connected directly to the brain are able to recognize and respond to thoughts, obviating the need for hte manual input of data and commands,” (2025).  Haven’t seen this yet?  Take a look: 

Who knows, maybe we’ll expand the average lifespan of humans from 78 years to 140 years long before the projected 2500 deadline?  (Techiyas ha-maysim anyone?)

What are your technology predictions and time tables?