Law and Technology

Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook, Oh My!

By Helen W. Gunnarsson

Are you LinkedIn? Facebooking? Tweeting? Or still figuring out what it's all about and why you should care? Here's a lawyer's guide to social media.

You log on to the Internet every morning as soon as you get to work, if not as soon as you get out of bed at home. Though you carry a cell phone and return voicemails promptly, e-mail, which you check throughout the day, is your preferred and frequent means of communication with your colleagues, your clients, your friends, and your family.

Your law firm or employer has its own Web site. You routinely research matters not only using Fastcase through ISBA, but also by Googling names and other search terms. Sometimes you even post questions or comments on ISBA's Internet discussion groups. All in all, you're satisfied that you're using technology effectively as part of your 21st Century law practice.

Guess what? Somebody moved your cheese.

Voicemail is becoming passé, and Google searches and e-mail, fast and efficient though they are, are no longer the latest and hottest developments on the Internet. Social networking media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter - also known as Web 2.0 - are now what everybody's talking about. And all are free to use.

Though both Facebook and Twitter have been the butts of Internet humor (see, for example, a March 2009 story line involving reporter Roland Burton Hedley in Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic), those sites, along with LinkedIn, Weblogs, and online discussion groups, can be supremely useful to lawyers and others looking to enhance their practices, businesses, careers, job searches, or public profiles.

This isn't news to law students and newly admitted lawyers, and early tech adopters have been Facebooking for years. But social networking is part of the broad mainstream now, encompassing nearly every demographic group. If you've been waiting for the critical mass to build before learning more about it, wait no longer.

Networking is nothing new

Networking is nothing new. The Internet simply presents us with more opportunities to interact with more people more efficiently than in person or over the phone. "In cyberspace, you're attending the world's largest cocktail party. Everyone is there," comments Chicago lawyer Sonya Olds Som. And even though the connecting may occur through electronic media, at its heart are the same human-to-human interactions that occur at in-person social functions.

New Zealand writer, storyteller, and social media con sultant Simon Young explains social networking in a December 23, 2008, entry on Denver career coach Carol Ross's Weblog "A Bigger Voice" (http://www.abiggervoiceblog.com/2008/12/virtual-vs-real-world.html), "There's a myth around that the 'virtual world' is somehow a different place from the real world we all live in.

"Interestingly, it's a myth found only among those who haven't tried out social media and social networks. Once you dip your toe in the online conversation, you find that blogs, Facebook, Twitter - and on and on - are all elaborations on (not replacements of) the art of one human relating to another."

Som, Ross, Young, and others have embraced social networking applications and are using them to make connections that benefit their law practices, their businesses, and their careers. Fastcase, which provides ISBA members with free online legal research, joins Starbucks, Borders, and other companies who have Facebook pages and tweet away to their followers through their Twitter accounts.

Nonprofits and educational institutions, as well as those espousing political and other causes, use Facebook and LinkedIn for providing news and facilitating discussions and networking among their alumni and fans. Indeed, ISBA itself has a group on LinkedIn, moderated by Board of Governors member and John Marshall Law School Professor Mark Wojcik, that all members may join.

How do these media work? LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are three social networking sites particularly popular with lawyers. All three prominently invite users to write notes for public consumption, but each has its own distinctive personality and features. Together they provide good illustrations of how lawyers, among others, can use them to benefit professionally as well as personally.

LinkedIn - the "professional" option

The most purely professional of the three applications, LinkedIn provides users with the ability to post a resume-like profile and invite others to become "connections." Register for free at LinkedIn.com, and LinkedIn prompts you to post a virtual CV using its template. It's easy to use; assuming that you already have a resume in electronic format, you can simply copy and paste portions of it into the template.

In addition to the usual background information any CV contains, the LinkedIn template asks you to categorize your position by industry and geographical area. At the bottom of the template, you may list your goals by checking boxes. Career opportunities, getting back in touch, consulting offers, expertise requests, and new ventures are some of the goal options offered. There's also a spot to add a professionally taken photo to your profile.

LinkedIn offers various free applications to add some pizzazz to your profile. You can upload a slide show from PowerPoint, Google Presentation, or SlideShare Presentations to showcase an example of your work.

Other applications will enable you to synchronize your blog, if you have one, with your LinkedIn profile. Com pany Buzz will provide you with any Twitter activity related to your firm or business. My Travel allows you to share your current whereabouts and travel plans with LinkedIn colleagues, facilitating in-person meetings for coffee or a meal.

Having created your profile, you'll probably want to find out who else you know is on LinkedIn, let them know you've joined, and invite them to be contacts. The site makes it easy to find people en masse by allowing it to access your e-mail address book. (The site promises not to retain your password or your address book information and won't send you or your contacts spam.) It also enables quick searches for former colleagues and classmates, based on the information in your profile. You can then send contact invitations to the people you know who already have LinkedIn profiles.

Like other social networking sites, LinkedIn offers users various levels of privacy. You can decide whether you want your profile to be visible to everyone or only to your contacts. You can also decide whether you want your contacts to be able to view your contacts. Chicago lawyer Susan Glatter Kamman chooses to keep hers private, since they include clients and, she says, "I don't want other lawyers to poach them."

Another privacy setting permits you to decide whether you want your connections to be notified when you update your profile or change your status by, for example, changing jobs. And before you start browsing other people's profiles, you may appreciate knowing that they'll be able to find out that you did - and that you can find information about who has viewed your profile - unless you adjust that privacy setting.

Concerns such as client poaching notwithstanding, most LinkedIn users allow their connections to view the identities of their other connections. That's part of the site's attraction and power: when you can see whom the people you know know, you understand whom you can ask for an introduction to someone with whom you're not yet connected.

You can also ask your connections to write recommendations for you, which become part of your profile - and you can offer to write recommendations for those you know. The site also allows you to find groups you might like to join, including bar and alumni associations. You can post public messages to those groups concerning projects you're working on, job opportunities or availability, or anything else of a career-related nature that's on your mind. LinkedIn also enables you to send private messages to others.

Facebook for fun and profit

Used by more than 200 million members, Facebook provides many of the same capabilities and services as Linked-In, but with a distinctly more informal interface. Sign up, and you'll be prompted to create your own profile with the identifying information you choose. (The site requires users to submit their names, birthdays, and e-mail addresses, and restricts users to one page.)

The Facebook template inquires as to distinctly personal information, including relationship status, political and religious affiliations, interests, activities, favorite books, music, movies, TV shows, and quotations; you may provide all, some, or none of that information, as you prefer. It also permits you to write a short paragraph "About Me" and to include an identifying photo.

Your site within Facebook includes not only your profile page but also your own "Wall" on which you and your Facebook friends can post messages, links, or photos. You'll see a box at the top of your own page encouraging you to do so with the question "What's on your mind?" Navigate to someone else's page, and you'll see the same box, but with the instruction "Write something."

Facebook also gives you a separate page with any photos you may post. You can add applications to configure your page to include such matters as listings of books you've read or want to read, favorite links, and other media or information.

Like LinkedIn, Facebook offers you the option of allowing the site to search your address book so you can find people you know who already have Facebook pages more easily. If you choose, you can have the site send e-mails to friends who have not yet joined Facebook to do so.

If you've included your educational information in your profile, Facebook will make it easy for you to find high school and college alumni groups with their own Facebook pages that you may join, if you wish. You can do your own searches to find other interest groups that you may like to join. Some businesses, institutions, political candidates, elected officials, and others have pages inviting Facebook members to become fans. Click on the button to become a fan, and that information will show up on your own Facebook page.

Facebook also offers different levels of privacy settings. Only members may view other members' pages. You may adjust your account settings so that your profile is visible to all members or only to your friends. You can also limit yourfriends' access to portions of your information, such as being able to see who's written on your wall. And Facebook also allows you to create different groups of friends, with each group able to access your profile differently.

For example, you might group your closest personal friends or family members together and allow them access to all portions of your profile. If you're not comfortable allowing your colleagues and clients to view all of the information about yourself that you've posted, or all public posts from your friends, or, for that matter, the identities of your friends, you might group them separately, restricting their access to portions of your profile.

Twitter - not for twits only

Media stories referring to Facebook and LinkedIn are now common. But the social media application that may be getting the most buzz these days is Twitter. Registered users may submit a picture, a short biography, and a website if they have one. Upon doing so, you'll have your own page with an empty box at the top, captioned "What are you doing?"

You can write anything you please in that box, from noting that you're en joying a cup of coffee, to musing upon a knotty question of civil procedure, to posting an interesting link, to asking a question, to sending a message directly to another Twitter user. Whatever you write, though, has to be limited to 140 characters. Any more, and Twitter will truncate your tweet.

Finish your 140-character tweet and click the button, and your message will appear in Twitter's real time stream of all tweets as well as on your page. It will also show up on the pages of your followers.

Followers? That's Twitter's term, analogous to "friends" on Facebook or "connections" on LinkedIn. Each Twitter user's page has a "Follow" button at the top. When you've created an account with Twitter, you may choose to follow other Twitter users by clicking the buttons under their pictures. They, in turn, may choose to follow you. Once you're following another Twitter user, that person's tweets will show up on your page.

If you don't "get" Twitter on reading about it, or even upon registering, you're in good company. An active and avid Twitter user now, Carol Ross says her reaction to the application after registering for and using it briefly in 2007 was "140 characters, why bother?"

Earlier this year, she gave Twitter another try and stuck with it. Now, she says Twitter has expanded her social and professional network and has given her insights she otherwise might not have gotten. "If you're on Twitter and you start to talk a lot about some insightful things about some hot topic in your field, people who need your help will naturally start to pay attention."

Spending all day tweeting and watching your Twitter stream to see who else has tweeted about what, is neither feasible nor enticing, of course. Madison County lawyer and blogger Evan Schaeffer explains one way that he makes effective use of Twitter. "You can use it to find people who are interested in the same things as you are. Then, when you start following those people, you have created a group of editors who are constantly searching the Internet for information that you'll be likely to find of interest. Twitter becomes like an RSS feeder on steroids, where other people are doing the work for you of looking through the Internet for interesting information."

Noting that Twitter is searchable, Schaeffer says that when a recent su preme court case of interest to him came down, he used Twitter's search function to find up-to-the-minute tweets about it. Many of those tweets, he says, contained links to the latest news and analysis.

And, since the search engine yields the identities of the tweeters along with the tweets, you may end up deciding to follow some additional people and thereby obtaining even more interesting or useful information. "For searching certain kinds of information, Twitter is more useful than Google," Schaeffer said.

Hundreds of free downloadable applications exist to enable users to use Twitter more effectively. The popular TweetDeck, for example, facilitates Twitter searches and enables you to create subgroups of the persons you're following to make it easier to keep track of tweets you're likely to find of particular interest, among other things. Twitter itself offers integration with its users' Facebook pages and blogs, so you can configure your Twitter settings to update both automatically.

Other Twitter applications include Twubble, which aids users in finding others with similar interests, Twellow, a Twitter directory sorted by occupation, and TweetBeep, enabling you to find out who's tweeting about you, your products, your company, or your website.

Part of a multi-pronged communication approach

Certainly, social media applications enable the user to both find out and disseminate an enormous amount of information. Can businesses really use them effectively?

Fastcase CEO Ed Walters says his company does. One of his aims is to let other lawyers know what his company has to offer them. To do so, Walters says, he has to find the best way of getting his message to them. "We're dealing with lawyers who are very busy. If you want to tell people about something, it's really hard to get through. People are in court, they don't have any time, they're working really hard, they're on the phone. For some lawyers, social networks are by far the best way of reaching them."

Walters cites Fastcase's launches of its partnerships with state bar associations as a prime example. "In the past, we did just an article in a bar journal. That can be very effective. But it turns out that not everybody has time to read their bar journals. They're busy. We began to realize that the bar journal is a good way to get to some people, but other people might need different channels."

E-mail, Walters continues, is an alternative form of communication that also works well for some lawyers. "But we have the same problem: because lawyers are busy, they can't read everything in their inboxes." To reach as many potential customers as effectively as possible, then, Walters says, his company has adopted a multi-pronged communication approach.

"We have a page on Facebook. When we launch new features, we announce them on our Facebook page" as well as on Walters' and other Fastcase colleagues' individual Facebook pages. "We also have a blog and a weekly newsletter where we make those announcements." And both Fastcase and Walters tweet about the company on Twitter.

Time sinkhole or timesaver?

Might they not be more of a drain on already-busy lawyers' schedules than they're worth? Sonya Olds Som agrees that all users should impose some discipline on the amount of time they spend using these media. But, like Walters, Som believes that using at least one social networking application can save a busy lawyer's time.

"If you're looking to expand your professional or personal network, and you have a far-reaching range of people from law school, college, high school, grade school, and former employers that you might be able to get back into contact with, it's a timesaver to use at least one of these methods. Otherwise you're going to have to go person-to-person, by phone or e-mail, to get back into touch."

Observes Ross, "We network in a lot of different ways. You go to a networking event, you have to spend time getting dressed up, you have to spend time going in the car, and so on." Ross recommends deciding how much total time you want to spend networking, whether in person or on line, and reallocating some of that time to online media.

"If you aren't spending any time networking, you're doing something wrong. You're missing out. If you're only focused on doing your job, you're really shooting yourself in the foot." And Ross agrees that online social networking can make it far easier for lawyers in smaller communities, or lawyers who are temporarily inactive, perhaps staying home with small children, or lawyers who are introverted, to keep up with professional life.

Som adds that social networks can also be highly effective for expanding anyone's set of contacts. "You can never be entirely certain who might be a good person to be in contact with. The wider you cast your net, the more potential good fish you can catch, so to speak."

Furthermore, she says, "As someone who's trying to generate business, I think it's a very valuable way to stay out in front of your clients and customers without looking like you're constantly trying to call them and ask them for something."

Be careful what you share

Som, Walters, and Ross also urge users to impose some discipline on the quality of their usage. "Be yourself, but be the best public representation of yourself," counsels Som.

Likening social networks on the Internet to a never-ending cocktail party, she asks, "What is the version of yourself that you'd like to present at that cocktail party?" The answer: "A careful mingling of personal and professional information, which is no different than what you would do if you were talking to someone at a high school reunion or a cocktail party. You don't want to overshare in this public forum which can craft the opinion of people who you want to have a business relationship with."

Mark Wojcik says he maintains a Facebook page in part to remind his students that employers will check out their pages. "Pages are not 'private,' and what you post the entire world can see....You might think this is unfair, but Web pages are not private."

Walters tells a tale that illustrates Wojcik's warning. A young person applied with his company a few years ago, and a fairly routine online due diligence check revealed that the applicant had made disparaging comments about his interview process with Fastcase on his Facebook page. "I ended up having a conversation with him and telling him he needed to be careful about this stuff," Walters said.

Comments Ross, "Online is no different than offline in how would you conduct yourself with friends, with colleagues, with clients. The difference is there's a public record when you're online. How do you conduct yourself in every day life? If you conduct yourself with poor judgment in everyday life and you go online, it will be magnified, and it will be there forever."

But, Ross and Som continue, that's not to say lawyers should shy away from online social networking. To the contrary, both advocate embracing social networking and taking ownership of your public profile. Believes Som, "That's the reality of how we live today. Google anyone and it doesn't take long to find a trace of what they're doing. Nothing is a secret for very long anymore."

The virtual handshake

Ross believes you'll get out of social media what you put into it. "Whatever you put out there is going to naturally attract what it should. If you put drivel out there, people who like drivel will be attracted to it. If you put really good stuff out there, people who like really good stuff will be attracted to that. With all these tools, you get the whole mix of humanity out there. You get everything from infantile conversations to some pretty heady stuff, and everything in between. How you choose to use it is up to you."

Along with Som and Walters, Ross emphasizes her view of proper social networking etiquette. "The first rule is always, 'Give first.' That's something that people in professional services fields should already know, that it's about forming a relationship and not about a transaction first, but it's a good reminder for everybody."

Comments Som, "You shouldn't just be the recipient of recommendations on LinkedIn, and you shouldn't post only when you're looking for a job or to provide a service. There needs to be give and take and back and forth. To the extent that you can, stop and think of ways you can comment on what other people are doing. Interact with them. Provide advice, feedback, assistance, and positive reinforcement to others. Live by the Golden Rule."

Adds Walters, "When people extend the virtual hand to you, you shake that hand. When people issue a friend request to you, it's a very good idea to accept it."

As moderator of ISBA's LinkedIn group, Wojcik adds his own plug. "If you are a member of the Illinois State Bar Association, you should be in the ISBA group on LinkedIn. It is another way for clients and colleagues to find you. When economic times are difficult, no one can afford to write off an important free resource. Social networking over the Internet will never replace the face-to-face meetings in Chicago, Springfield, or Lake Geneva, but they are a fantastic way to stay in touch."

Helen W. Gunnarsson, a lawyer in Highland Park, is an Illinois Bar Journal contributing writer.