Bill4Time is proud to be part of the Kennedy & Mighell Report by Legal Talk Network. Here’s a little commentary to give you some insight into one of their podcasts.
Lawyers are pretty fearless. They do a lot of the dirty work that we find intimidating in the courtroom. It can be pretty cut-throat and ruthless out there. For the rest of us non-lawyers, those tough dramatic scenes you see in the movies is enough to make your blood pressure go up a few notches.
But there are only a few things lawyers find a bit intimidating. One of them is technology (so I’ve been told). It encompasses the complicated – such as HTML, C++ and JavaScript – to the very simple, namely social media. Or is it that simple? Not according to thousands of lawyers who have talked to Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell, legal technology experts from LegalTalkNetwork.com. Each social media site seems like a completely different social planet: you have different configurations, features, and communicating vehicles to new a few.
The Argument for Social Media for the Technology Skeptical
Social media is here to stay. It can’t be ignored when the growth of social media adoption is rapidly increasing.
There have been well-established companies that have taken far too long embracing technology and are struggling now to catch up because they see their underdog competitors taking their clients. You don’t want to be part of the statistics. The fact of the matter is that legal technology experts indicate social media to be the main way people are going to communicate in the future. Start now while there is still a big window to allow a learning curve. It takes time to build a following just as it took time to build your clientèle. So how do you start?
The Simplest Answer
Kennedy and Mighell offer a single answer: try a few and see which works for you. It’s ok to not embrace all of them. Start out with finding where your audience frequents. Ask yourself things like:
- Do many of my clients use their Twitter account often?
- Are my clients on Facebook on a regular basis?
- How often do my clients visit LinkedIn?
The key factor is not if they have an account there, but if they use it regularly. You can get these answers simply as asking them or looking them up in Google. You can see how active they are by seeing the amount of followers, friends, and sub-groups.
Once you find one or two social media sites that work for you, stick with it for a while. For starters, try to:
- Join groups that appeal to you.
- Follow like-minded people.
- Send out a friendly “hello” to people in those groups.
See what others are doing, especially those that you already respect and see are comfortable in interacting on the site. Do what they do. Soon you will find that the more you contribute, the more you will get responses. I wouldn’t recommend anything that promises things like hundreds of Twitter followers overnight. In the end, it won’t do much for you. Building a social media presence will take some time and effort, but in a short time, you will develop a good network and things will unfold. Sometimes to learn the path requires walking it.
Manual for Social Media Sites
Don’t you wish there was a manual for these things? With the dynamic nature of technology, the manuals are written as we go along. You can find a bunch of How To articles on the web, but here are few to get you started:
- The LinkedIn Blog
- Google Results for Using Twitter for Business Development
- How to Use Facebook for Professional Networking
Listen to the podcast and get more information to enrich you social media know-how and get you going on the technology wave!
