Social Media Hot Topics

As many of you know, I've been hosting seminars for clients for some time.  Sometimes my topics flop, and sometimes they are hot.  This season, social media is a hugely hot topic with our nonprofit and food industry clients.  Gee, I wonder why.

If you are not yet on the social media bandwagon, consider yourself a dinosaur.  Really, I mean it.  If you don't understand the power of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, you're way behind the game.  I am not saying you need to actively use those in your legal practice, and actually I do think that for most lawyers those are not tools that are going to be much use in reaching new clients.  But they are key to understanding your customers.  Look at the wave of businesses using these tools.  Sure, there will be false starts and odd marketing uses for these things.  But they are also part of the social and business fabric, and unless you are winding your practice down, you've got to understand how these tools affect and are used by your clients.

Does this mean I think you should tweet?  That you should put up a Facebook page for your firm?  That  you need 500+ connections on LinkedIn?  No.  But you should be following all of your clients on Twitter.  It costs you nothing, and the information you will see will give you enormous insight into what is important to your clients.  As for Facebook, if your clients sell anything, they are almost certainly using Facebook.  You can get a pretty good understanding of Facebook if you just put up a decent personal page, find a few innocuous friends (come on, I know you have at least a few) and then "like" a few of your clients.

I suspect I am preaching to the choir because most people who read blogs are already pretty savvy about social media.  But for those of you who have not taken Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn seriously, it's fine with me if you just stay under that rock.  The rest of us will have some fun, make some friends, and conquer the world.