In 2012, social media was thrust into maturity by the likes of Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. However, this does not mean that new social networks will not rise to challenge them in the teen years of the 21st century, and legal professionals need to stay on the lookout for change on the horizon. Rising stars like Quora and Inbound.org, for example, are two niche social networks that may present a value proposition for law firms and solo practitioners.

Quora

Question-and-answer (Q&A) sites were Web traffic darlings during the Great Recession, but heavy competition from social networks caused them to fizzle out by late 2010. Quora has been the true survivor of the Q&A era thanks to its proven business model of providing a trusted network, and announced just last week that it is launching Blogs, a product where users will be able to blog on a site with a built-in community.

Quora brings social features to the traditional Q&A platform. Quora derived its initial strength by featuring prominent members of the digerati as experts who answered questions from inquirers who had received exclusive invitations to join. Each question answered becomes a discussion and a story with high potential to rank high on search engines.

Quora is always looking for more experts to join their knowledge-sharing network. As of early 2013, more than 4,500 members were following Quora’s legal community, and 994 questions were awaiting answers. For malpractice attorneys and other legal practitioners, joining Quora could be a great way to attract prospects, rank higher on search engine results and build branding.

Inbound.org

A social network for search engine optimization professionals was imminent, and Inbound.org has stepped forward to fill that niche. Like Quora, the network’s focus is on sharing knowledge more than social interaction. Legal professionals interested in gaining greater understanding of the online marketing world are welcome to join and contribute to the community. Inbound.org has great potential for prospects.

An important reminder to attorneys with regard to joining online social networks: Many state bar associations have their own social media policies and rulings related to social media usage by their members. It is an individual attorney’s responsibility to make sure they do not violate any bar regulations.

Social Media Mondays is a CaseDetails.com series covering different topics in the social media world on a weekly basis. Check back every Monday for more news on social media and useful information on how law firms can use social platforms to their advantage.

As social media’s audience is continuing to grow, law firms need to pay attention to its evolution.

It has been almost 20 years since willisville, a prototype online social network created by the writer of the Friends sitcom theme song, attempted to bring together elements of collaborative interaction and media sharing to the Internet and across multiple devices. Social media is beginning to reach maturity, a fact supported by Nielsen’s State of the Media: The Social Media Report 2012.

According to the Nielsen report, the social media audience in the United States during 2012 was 163.3 million users on desktop and laptops and 171.8 million on smartphones and tablets. Men spend more than six hours on social networks per month; women spend almost nine hours, and both male and female users are spending more time on mobile social interaction than on their desktop computers. Social media is growing at a breakneck pace, something that legal professionals cannot afford to ignore.

Watching TV and staying in the loop with social media

Almost half of social media netizens who own tablet computers use them to interact with friends when they sit down to watch TV. They are increasingly getting their news from trusted sources on social networks because they are interested in the opinions of their friends regarding current events. They also prefer to turn to social media when they have customer service issues since they want to see how brands relate to consumers on a social platform.

These reports of unabated social media growth should convince all law firms and sole practitioners that cultivating a substantial presence on different social networks is imperative. At the current rate of growth, a Fort Myers motorcycle accident lawyer who uses social media tools to the best of their ability should expect to get increasingly more inquiries from Facebook than Google in the near future.

Social media advertising is still an item of concern for online marketers. About one third of social media users are peeved by the presence of ads in their favorite social networks. Alas, this may improve in the future as marketers find ways to make ads less obtrusive and more engaging.

Social Media Mondays is a CaseDetails.com series covering different topics in the social media world on a weekly basis. Check back every Monday for more news on social media and useful information on how law firms can use social platforms to their advantage.

A social media editorial calendar can help you plan for the weeks and months ahead.

Using an editorial calendar in your social media campaign can help propel your firm into the future while maximizing the number of leads you generate. Here are the basics of creating a social media editorial calendar.

First, you should determine what your goals are over the course of a year and break them down into quarters. An immigration attorney, for example, might want to establish a presence on a new social media site and create a certain amount of posts about federal law on existing profiles throughout the first quarter. Since social media is always evolving, you may want to perform some research to ensure that your firm stays up-to-date with major changes. For example, the aforementioned attorney could write a blog post about completing a Philadelphia citizenship application for immigrants new to the United States who are looking to become residents in Pennsylvania. To increase your odds of success, be as specific as possible while setting realistic and measurable goals.

From there, you should break your goals down by the month, week and day. Having a specific day allocated for each project should help your firm stay on track and get things done. To streamline the process, concentrate on one aspect of social media at a time.

What comes next?

Once you have the basic structure of your social media editorial calendar in place, share it with others on your firm’s editorial calendar. Not only can this help you accomplish your firm’s goals quicker, it makes you more accountable, which is beneficial because you’re more likely to see your goals through when others are holding you to them.

In addition, you will need to monitor your results over the course of the year. A vital component of marketing success involves knowing your level of progress and understanding what you need to work on. For this reason, integrate some type of analytics platform so you will tangibly know how successful you are.

Social Media Mondays is a CaseDetails.com series covering different topics in the social media world on a weekly basis. Check back every Monday for more news on social media and useful information on how law firms can use social platforms to their advantage.

The nature and mechanics of common law systems are to blame for the unpleasant spread of legalese. Attorneys are often reminded that overusing legal buzzword expressions such as “in light of the fact that” instead of “because” denotes a lack of creativity. These clunkers achieve buzzword status due to the legal profession’s herd instinct, which is another stock phrase that can easily become unpleasant through endless repetition.

Buzzwords in the social media world

Social media has created a vortex of buzzwords that challenge the legal body of precedent. LinkedIn, the premier social network for business professionals, recently analyzed its vast collection of member profiles and compiled a list of the 10 most popular buzzwords used in 2012. Topping the list in the United States and Canada was “creative,” which seems ironic, and eight words on the list were also overused in 2011. The two new buzzwords are “analytical” and “responsible.”

In its entirety, the list of top 10 LinkedIn buzzwords in 2012 is:

1. Creative
2. Organizational
3. Effective
4. Motivated
5. Extensive experience
6. Track record
7. Innovative
8. Responsible
9. Analytical
10. Problem solving

The Wall Street Journal recommends that job seekers scan the buzzword list and banish those words from their resumes, if not from their lexicon, lest they appear unoriginal and banal to potential employers. This is not so easy, however, since our use of buzzwords is often tied to a deep sense of belonging and trying to gain acceptance within a social or professional group.

Is there a connection between buzzwords and legalese?

If buzzwords are overused or stock phrases to be avoided in the business world, how should we interpret the legalese so often seen on law firm websites? It only makes sense to apply the same advice regarding buzzwords to legalese — and, in some situations, removing legalese from websites makes more sense. St. Petersburg business lawyers may think that featuring legal stock phrases like “cease and desist” and “it has been determined that” will make them appear knowledgeable and stately, but this is rarely the case. Professor Eugene Volokh of UCLA Law School has compiled a list of legal clunkers and their adequate, plain English replacements. It is clear from looking at the list that using the word “sometimes” is more elegant than “on a number of occasions.”

There is a place for legalese, but it isn’t on the social media profiles or webpages of legal professionals. A content strategy resolution for 2013 should be to avoid clichéd buzzwords and stock phrases as much as possible, using fresh voices for writing that speak to prospects and clients in a language that they can clearly understand.

Social Media Mondays is a CaseDetails.com series covering different topics in the social media world on a weekly basis. Check back every Monday for more news on social media and useful information on how law firms can use social platforms to their advantage.

Though they’re often used interchangeably, social media and social marketing are completely different concepts, and you’ll need to understand the difference to truly take advantage of both. Social media is a platform and interconnected system of online communication. From Facebook to Flickr, it encompasses the blogs, videos, profiles and emailing systems that make up the collective “social whole” of the Internet.

Social marketing, on the other hand, is about manipulating social media for the purpose of advertising. It can be seen in the ads on WordPress and the “featured listings” of Youtube. It is, essentially, the virtual answer to billboards and television commercials.

Why does this distinction matter? In her post Untangling the Confusion Between Social Media and Social Marketing, blogger Judy Shapiro compares inept social marketing to its real-world equivalent, asking if we’d tolerate ads during our telephone calls. The answer, of course, is “no,” so why do so many social marketers bombard us with their brands while we’re on Facebook and LinkedIn? It’s because they don’t know any better.

To really maximize the power of social marketing, you need to understand that it requires a different approach than real-world marketing. It isn’t like a billboard or a television commercial, where your audience is forced to see your message whether they like it or not; on the Internet, they can disable all your careful ads with scripts and hacks or even disconnect from the site entirely.

Here are a few simple guidelines for the beginning social marketer:

• Stay relevant. If you’re from a firm of Charlotte bankruptcy attorneys, you shouldn’t be advertising to wealthy consumers in Florida.
• Get involved. You won’t understand the rhythms of social media by staying on the sidelines. You need to jump in, make your own accounts and really connect to your potential clients.
• Know your platform. The people who frequent LinkedIn are different from the people who frequent Instagram. Tailor your methods to your audience for the greatest results.Remember, people online today don’t have to tolerate any particular ad. To spread the message of your firm or practice, make sure your ad is worth hearing or reading.

Press releases occupy a unique but oversaturated market. You can’t go anywhere on the Internet without seeing them, and the good ones can be shared, forwarded and retweeted so often that it seems foolish not to join the fray and hope for similar fortune.

What most people don’t realize, however, is that the majority of press releases wind up forgotten and ignored. They’re too common, argues Why Press Releases Don’t Matter. They’re used even when there’s no real news or nothing worthwhile to say, so users have become accustomed to skipping them over without a second thought.

To reclaim the art of the press release, here are a few suggestions for improvement:

A monthly newsletter is one way to keep clients informed about the recent events and promotions of your law firm. However, creating new content can be arduous, and it is sometimes difficult to conjure up new ideas. One way to generate content is by simply talking about your top blog posts from the month and including links; here is how you can implement this strategy and reap some of the benefits.

To get started, you will need to pick a few of your best articles from the month. You can typically determine these by looking at how many comments and social shares they received. New York City visa attorneys might choose posts about immigration statistics, for example, that were heavily shared on Facebook and Twitter and sparked the most discussion from readers. This way, the odds are good that your email subscribers will want to read them as well.

Once you know which blog posts you want to feature, you should provide a brief description and summary of those posts. Generally, a short paragraph with links will be sufficient. Just make sure that the title and paragraph are attention grabbers and not dull and boring. From there, you will simply need to add a link to each post so your audience can conveniently access and read them in their entirety.

Utilizing this strategy offers three main benefits. First, you should be able to increase your number of blog readers and inform your email subscribers at the same time. By condensing your blog posts and emails into one convenient package, it’s like killing two birds with one stone. Second, you can build your firm’s reputation and demonstrate your expertise when it comes to law. As long as your content is valuable and interesting, it’s reasonable to expect a larger audience in time. Finally, you should be able to capture more leads and turn them into actual clients, which is really the ultimate goal of marketing.

As you develop your firm’s Facebook page, you may wonder how to go about it the best way; this is especially the case for single-partner firms. It can be difficult to decide whether you should sign up for a business account, a personal account to use for your business page or both.

Many law firms see themselves as primarily small businesses and don’t want to diminish their prestige by signing up for personal social media accounts. However, there are drawbacks to only having a business Facebook account.

There are several features that Facebook’s business pages are unable to access. These include:

• Friends: As a business, you no longer have the ability to be “friends” with other individuals or businesses. The reciprocal “friend” relationship is replaced by the one-sided “fan” relationship. This makes it difficult to use social media with the same level of intimacy that a personal page might provide. Some firms find that developing strong connections with past, present and potential clients helps their businesses grow.
• Chat: With a business profile, Hot Springs commercial real estate lawyers and other legal professionals are unable to chat in real time with their clients. Some attorneys find it helpful for networking purposes to be able to answer quick legal questions from potential clients over Facebook.
• Free-To-Post: Facebook is increasingly pushing a pay-per-post advertising scheme whereby business accounts need to pay to ensure that their social media posts show up in their fans’ news feeds. While it is unclear whether and to what extent this also applies to personal accounts, some believe that Facebook is using this scheme for businesses rather than individuals.

Lawyers would do well to think long and hard about whether they want their Facebook marketing strategy to center on a business page, a personal page or some combination of the two.

Social Media Mondays is a CaseDetails.com series covering different topics in the social media world on a weekly basis. Check back every Monday for more news on social media and useful information on how law firms can use social platforms to their advantage.