Book Review: Social Media in the Legal Sector

Although I write about a variety of subjects, some of my recent posts are responding to pockets of social media illiteracy and are mostly aimed at those in the legal world.

Long before getting to grips with content, a new or prospective user needs to acquaint themselves with the technology and the appropriate platform. They need to be confident in their social media abilities, and comfortable that they are not going to destroy a hard won professional legal reputation by a misplaced tweet or a badly written blog post. Social media for business is a commitment of time and money so you need to know whether it is for you.

But if you’re not internet savvy, how do you take that first step? If I need to find out about a new product or unfamiliar social media network, I would search for a quality blog about it, read relevant trade press reviews, or ask my twitter or librarian network. This requires you to be able to identify trustworthy online sources. If you are unsure, then an expensive book published by a reputable legal publisher might be the answer for many lawyers.

Adding a LinkedIn Button to Outlook Signature

If you are a regular user of LinkedIn, you may want to encourage your clients and contacts to visit your profile. An easy way of doing this is to add a button to your email* so recipients can click straight through to it. In a meeting I was asked to outline how to do this, so thought I'd post it here too.

Only set up this feature if your profile is complete, up to date and regularly updated.

First find the web address for your LinkedIn public profile. This should be a link underneath your photo on your profile page. If in doubt click on it and it should take you to your page as seen by your contacts. It should look something like uk.linkedin.com/in/yournameinfullhere/.

Go to Outlook and open a new email. Click on the Signature button and then Signatures…

Your existing signature will come up. Take this opportunity to update, amend or make any necessary changes to the original text.

Copy and paste the image below into the signature box under your contact details.





Click once on the image to activate it and then click on the hypertext icon – the globe with chain link to the far right. Return to your public profile on LinkedIn and copy your [uk.linkedin.com/in/yournameinfullhere/] link, then paste it into the address box. Click ok. 

Click ok again and the signature box should disappear.

To test whether the link is active, create a new email and send to yourself. When you click on the image box, you should go straight to your LinkedIn public profile. 

Easy.

*I use Microsoft Outlook 2010.

Effective Networking: From the recycling pile

Useful Connections

It's that time of year. The sunshine is finally strong enough to reach into the farthest recesses of the dusty bankers boxes on my office bookshelves. Looking at them blinking in the sun I realised I hadn't touched them in years. Despite a few office moves they have followed me around, so this morning I called their bluff and sorted them out ferociously. For the most part they contained old budget figures, meeting minutes, course notes, and various suppliers catalogues which I can now view online so my recycle bin is now bulging.

I thought I'd recycle some of the course notes in a different way, with one set from 2004 striking me as still very relevant and interesting. This piece uses 'Top 10 tips for effective networking' which was presented by Lesley Robinson (Oct 2004). Amazingly I still vaguely remember the seminar, partly because of the anticipative terror I experienced by the thought of having to actually talk with a large number strangers. As I recall we listened to her talk, then put her ideas into practice and it worked really well.

CLIG Seminar: Employment law and socia media

These notes come out of a CLIG seminar I attended on 18 March 2014 - the excellent and extremely thorough speaker was Alexandra Mizzi. Apologies for any omissions or mistakes, which are entirely mine and certainly not her fault.

Social media is being tackled piecemeal in the courts and some of these interesting cases are discussed below. It is a tricky area due to increasingly blurred lines between personal and private lives. Creating a successful social media brand is personality driven, so a personal/professional clash is inevitable.

The seminar covered the following areas: the perils of online selection, screening and recruitment; employee misconduct online looking at both company reputation and employer liability; and finally the tricky issue of social media contacts ownership. 

Some More Social Media Sites

This blogpost came out of a work related article commission to examine recent developments and potential risks of various social media. I published my initial thoughts earlier in the month. They asked me to so the same sort of thing with the more popular sites so I briefly investigated Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Incidentally I found the DMR blog extremely useful in tracking the various stats.

Facebook

There can’t be many people who haven’t heard of Facebook. If you aren’t one of the 1.26 billion users worldwide, they are rarely out of the press. Even our language has assimilated Facebook-inspired changes in meaning; ‘to friend’ - to connect with another Facebook user, or ‘to poke’ - to get the electronic attention of a friend. 

Some Social Media Sites

Despite the media’s pronouncements regarding the imminent death of social media, I’m faintly optimistic that these sites will continue to exist. Just because the stock market announces Twitter or Facebook shares are down, people will keep using the service until another, more shiny one comes along.

As some of you may not be familiar with some of the existing social media sites, I’ve selected the popular ones and given a brief description of them, as well as personal observations as to risks and potential for misuse. I haven't included YouTube, blogging sites such as WordPress or Blogger, or others such as Reddit, MySpace - there are quite a few. I am not an expert, legal, psychological or otherwise, so please excuse any omissions.

I’ve assumed a reasonable knowledge of Facebook and Twitter because of the high profile harassment cases in which they have been involved, therefore they are not included. Although LinkedIn is well known, I include it because of recent blocking technology developments.