Posts tagged ‘Twitter’
Getting Past Twitter Inertia
Last week, JP Morgan Chase & Co. asked college students in advance of an upcoming forum with a senior company executive to send questions over Twitter with the hashtag “#AskJPM.” Less than six hours after the hashtag was introduced, the company tweeted this, “#Badidea! Back to the drawing board,” and cancelled the forum. This move was preceded by more than 6,000 tweets with users employing the hashtag often to paint the bank in a bad light.
For professional services firms, this brouhaha is instructive. There is a constant push-pull when discussing social media. One side tends to advocate using Twitter as a near total one-way broadcast medium, pushing information (such as press releases, articles and speaking engagements) out. The other side advocates for more interaction and personality. They want users to field questions and create personal accounts that identify the company and contain both personal and business-related information.
The major objections tend to boil down to this:
“Why are we creating a Twitter account where we aren’t interacting with anyone? Isn’t that the whole purpose of social media?” – Tech-savvy marketer to leadership.
“Who cares if I watched the finale of Breaking Bad? I have enough to do without creating all this minutia! It cheapens my professional image.” – Leadership member to tech-savvy marketer.
What happens more times than not, is that the two schools of thought tend to cancel each other out, leaving many professional services companies on the sidelines.
Finding Middle Ground
The top-down encouragement, creation and curation of hybrid personal/professional Twitter accounts is a time-intensive activity. For most concerns, identifying who has organically signed up and alerting them to potential issues with their content is sufficient.
However, from a global, corporate level the creation of a company account is a solid move that allows for repurposing of content and provides access to large, aggregated audiences engaged on mobile and tablet devices.
Companies can also interact by tagging publications they are mentioned in and conferences they are attending, retweeting pertinent content and following (when appropriate) clients and key strategic business partners. This balance should help keep both the senior leadership member and the tech-savvy marketer happy.
Metrics for Success
And now, for a brief FAQ:
- Q: No one follows us. Should this be a concern?
- A: Nope. Follows will build over time. Your company isn’t Justin Bieber.
- Q: A random person has started following us? Should I follow them?
- A: Totally up to you. There is no predefined etiquette that dictates whether you should or should not.
- Q: Can you tell me how we can generate business on Twitter?
- A: Nope. However, I can tell you that visibility matters and that being on someone’s feed when they are scrolling through at night is a good thing. Twitter also helps your search engine optimization efforts.
Twitter is an important medium and a key communications tool. By being strategic, companies can strengthen their brands and grow their audiences. It’s just smart business.
It’s time to go and grab those handles and get tweeting!
The Dos and Don’ts of Law Firms on Twitter
Since its inception, Twitter has experienced phenomenal growth in users; however, it is no longer just the playground for those relaying their activities, such as eating a sandwich, and celebrities promoting social causes. Increasingly, new outlets are joining Twitter, not only creating main feeds but also subdividing by news topics and, most importantly, reporters.
It is, of course, the natural evolution for the media. With increased news reporting on their websites and the never-ending news cycle, reporters are joining Twitter en mass not only to report the news but also to obtain information and develop relationships.
While it is a new form of communication with the media, the old rules of dealing with a reporter still stand. As such, law firms that only tweet self-serving news and don’t offer a benefit to reporters will not be followed.
Of course, entire books have been written about how to best use Twitter. But since most legal marketing departments currently have 20 other ball in the air, we did our own research and condensed the best practices for law firms using Twitter.
While some of the advice offered in the articles and blog postings is repetitious, we do recommend reading each for their own value. To assist busy legal marketers, we have also included an excerpt from each posting that encapsulates the best practices discussed.
Please feel free to share your own best practices in the comments section.
The Quick Guide for Legal Marketers
Twitter for Law Firms
- A good law firm Twitter feed keeps two things in mind: (1) it’s all about the clients, and (2) it’s not all about the firm. Updates deliver breaking news of interest to the firm’s clientele, or provide links to reports of interest and importance to clients’ industries or spread the word about upcoming events and opportunities that could deliver value to clients.
Law Firm Twitter Accounts
- If you are Tweeting for a law firm, let us know who the voice behind the brand is. It doesn’t matter if it’s not the chairman, CMO or founding partner. We don’t really care. We just want to know there is a face behind the voice. You’ve got 160 characters for the profile bio. Just add your names. See if it doesn’t make a difference and let us know!
How Am Law 100 Firms Use Twitter
- My question about law firm Twitter accounts has always been, “Who is your intended audience?” Corporate counsel? C-suite executives? Companies in urgent need of specialized complex litigation help? If the answer is all three, then most of your tweets will be irrelevant to a large part of your audience. People don’t want to have to sift through irrelevant information. By tweeting all of the firm’s content from a single account, you are forcing followers to do a fair amount of sifting.
Top 10 Twitter Tips for Law Firms
- Last, but certainly not least, connect as much as possible by commenting and retweeting but don’t just rely on an RSS feed from your firm’s website and don’t spam with media mentions or direct messages.
10 Twitter Tips for Law Firms (Marketing Departments included)
- Twitter is not 9-5. It’s 24/7, 365 days per week. You cannot expect to grow your presence and get meaningful results if you are not monitoring what is going on. Very often law firms don’t even bother to respond when they get a reasonable comment. Why? Probably because nobody is checking the stream regularly enough or they have been told not to engage. Engagement is key. Go and check out Starbucks and Ford and you will see what I mean. There are of course some excellent law firms who do respond but they are in the minority in my experience.
6 Twitter Tips for Lawyers & Legal Professionals
- Attribute Any Re-tweets – Attribution shows that you understand your profession and that your care about your audience. Whether it is a quote from your favorite book, a poem or retweet, always attribute borrowed information to the source author. Twitter is very specific about retweeting, and even makes the process simpler for retweets.
Twitter Tips for Lawyers
- Adding Substance. I’ll admit that I am guilty of not always following this tip. But we should all be better at adding a little commentary on our tweets and re-tweets. Include a brief statement of why you are sending the tweet out. It can be as simple as “Found this interesting:” followed by the title of the article or post. Too frequently, I see tweets (and send tweets) that have nothing more than the title of a post and a link. Take time to offer up a few words explaining why your followers should be interested in what you are sending.
- Repetition. When you publish a new blog post, article, or something similar, you most certainly will send notice of it to your Twitter followers. But remember that not all your followers are paying attention to their streams at the same time. Some may say it is bad form, but feel free to tweet about the post or article several times (at different times of the day) so that your followers won’t miss it.
Locking Down Key Online Real Estate
Online professional brands are incredibly important assets that you need to control. As the baseball playoffs continue today, fans will flock to www.MLB.com. However, many may now know that the website was once the property of law firm Morgan Lewis & Bockius.
While this particular situation was apparently resolved without any payout, it highlights the importance of locking down key online real estate, which no longer just includes domain names, but also involves Facebook pages and Twitter handles.
The dynamic nature of the Internet is such that even if you only post a simple website, you need to do some due diligence and anticipate both user behavior and future needs. Your website and online properties are increasingly the best conduits for conveying your company’s message. Bear in mind, 65 percent of U.S. adults are now using social media, so surely someone is searching for your company.
Cybersquatting and Typosquatting
Cybersquatting is the practice of registering domain names with the intent of forcing a payout from a party whose intellectual property or brand are directly or indirectly associated with the url. A related practice is typosquatting wherein a site is registered with a url address that is one or two letters off from another site in hopes of misdirecting users or again forcing an organization to purchase the domain.
Each and every business should register all potential deviations of their URL address. These are valuable properties that you need to control. You can then redirect users who make a typo or who guess an address that is not your company’s official url to the correct homepage.
For example, www.Coke.com redirects to www.Coca-Cola.com. As such, XXYlawyers.com or XYZlaw.com could redirect to XYZlawfirm.com. The cost in doing so is small and the process easy. Compare this to the cost of having a rogue individual redirecting clients to false or misleading information.
Suffixes!
While .com is the dominant suffix, .net and .org are the most prominent in a dizzying array of additional web suffixes. You may want to consider snapping up.net and .org and redirect them to your main website. The White House, which is http://www.whitehouse.gov, once had to deal with the pesky issue of http://www.whitehouse.com ,which for a number of years was a pornographic website. Yikes!
Social Media Squatters
The practice of cybersquatting is also occurring on social media websites. As rapid adoption of social media continues, more companies are planting their virtual flags on Twitter and Facebook. Even if your organization is not ready to make the jump to an active Twitter feed or Facebook page, it should reserve spaces on these social media networks.
Reserving multiple Twitter handles is free and a sound defensive strategy for both future branding entrees and for public relations efforts. The fictional XYZ law Firm could reserve handles such as @xyzlaw, @xyzlawyers, @xzylawfirm and even @xyzsucks. (It is always a good idea to protect against potential disgruntled individuals.)
The firm could also register Facebook pages of different names so as to own that real estate. However, be aware that you need 25 “likes” to secure a Facebook URL that is shortened, such as facebook.com/xyzlawfirm.
Even if you don’t populate these pages, it is good to own the real estate and the brand extensions.
Checklist
- Have you registered all website variations of your company’s name?
- Have you investigated purchasing .org or .net suffixes?
- Have you thought about and registered potential typos that could misdirect users?
- Have you registered domain names that could damage your brand? (i.e. XYZlawsucks.com)
- Have you registered Twitter handles for your company and brands?
- Have you registered a YouTube handle for your company?
- Have you considered creating a Facebook page and working to get a shortened URL?
Insurance
Insurance policies can’t cover everything, but they can provide you with peace of mind with respect to many potential disasters. Creating a well-thought out and strategic online plan, complete with strategic real estate buys, can help your business tremendously and provide you with similar peace of mind. Taking the time to be strategic in crafting branding and communications plans is critical.
Obtaining Return on Objectives with Social Media
Social media can be overwhelming and downright hard-to-understand. We get that. However, with 1.5 million lawyers on a site such as LinkedIn, it is clear that avoiding social media is simply not a tenable option.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to a Twitter Post….
Good thing the Delaware debate topped headline news because it certainly trumped this little gaffe by the Meg Whitman campaign. Perhaps, if the separation of church and state issue had not arisen between Coons and O’Donnell, this (what I think is humorous) post would have caught a bit more attention: Note: As of 4:46 yesterday, it still had not made it to the top of my Google news. I caught wind of it via Facebook.
While the mud is a slinging as we’re knee deep in the election, I hope both camps can call on their senses of humor and chuckle at this. Well, at least we know that one electric guitar playin’ hopeful is smiling. She just might be the next YouTube sensation – all in the name of one little typo.
P.S. Note to all: check your links before hitting send, tweet or post.
– Jen Klein
Twitter Influence on In-House Counsel Growing
As older attorneys retire, it’s predicted that Twitter’s influence could increase substantially in the coming years
Real Time PR – In the Know Means in the “NOW”
I have dinner plans tonight, which means I’ll miss the American Idol final results show. What are the odds I’ll find out who the winner is before I get to watch it? Pretty good if I pick up my handheld or get near a computer.
Tweet for the Home Team
Ozzie is the manager of the Chicago White Sox and an inappropriate sound bite waiting to happen. So, when he joined Twitter, it gained a lot of media attention. Ozzie’s response: “Too bad.”
New Technology, Newspaper Wars and a PR Junkie, Oh My!
With newspapers struggling so hard to stay afloat and magazine sales in the toilet, I felt a sense of nostalgia for the “olden days” of media when the daily paper arrived at your doorstop rather than your in-box, when you could open your morning paper and indeed it was the news of the day rather than the news of last night, and when the Sunday paper was the size of an encyclopedia rather than the size of well, Apple’s, sleek, new gadget.
Spring Cleaning Your Social Media Presence
Spring cleaning season is upon us! So, in addition to airing out the mattress, take some time to clean-up your social media presence.
Bringing Business to Business 