Google+ is a collection of online tools to help people connect with each other.  Google has studied Facebook, Twitter, and other social media tools and has cherry-picked some of the best attributes of each of them.  Google+ lets you categorize your contacts (friends, family, co-workers, followers) into various “circles” and then communicate with these smaller groups.  Google+ creates a feed for you to follow your friends and others as with Facebook and Twitter.  You can follow the latest on topics of interest by creating “sparks.”  And, in what I think is the “killer” feature of Google+, you can easily create videoconference “hangouts” with multiple users.

Yet, two months later the hoopla about Google+ has died down.  It’s hard to figure out where things stand with the service.  Some reports in August suggested that the number of weekly users was decreasing. But with Google flinging the doors wide open to the world, Google+ may once again be quickly building momentum.  Given the uncertainty about where Google+ is going, is it worth making an investment of time to build your Google+ presence?  After all, Google+ is still officially in “beta” and Google has been known to kill projects that fail to gain a foothold in the market.  (How many of you had a Google Wave account?  I did – but then I remember New Coke as well.)

Why you should think about Google+ for your practice

I think the answer to whether you should try Google+ is a qualified “yes” – particularly if you are a sole practitioner. Here’s my thinking:

1)  It’s easy to kick the tires.  It doesn’t take too much time or energy to set up a Google profile and check it out. Google will help you to find friends and colleagues.  See how they may be using it.  (It’s also possible to move your Facebook friends to G+ through a workaround.  The process described here works.)

In addition, G+ is another platform to get your name out to new people.  As you start to participate in Google +, you may find a new audience who will add you to their circles and have your name for the future. These people may be new referral sources for you.

2) Hangouts – quick videoconferencing for your practice?  The Hangout feature allows you to quickly set up spontaneous video conferences.  If you have a camera built into your computer or tablet, or some smartphones, starting a videoconference is as easy as pressing a button.  You will be able to quickly communicate with clients and others – either individually or in a group – with this feature.

3) It’s Google – Part 1. Google watches its users’ movements like a hawk.  Before Google rolled out Google+, it started to add “+1″ buttons on it’s website in other places sprinkled around the web.  (Google+?  +1?  Yes it gets confusing… Apparently Google couldn’t have spent a sliver of the bazillion it’s got on hand to try to come up with two different names.) These buttons are Google’s equivalent to the blue “Like” button found on Facebook.

The search provider has been watching what its users like and is using +1 information to inform its search results. With all of the social media tracking that it gets through its Google+ users, it’s hard to believe that Google won’t use G+ info in its search algorithms.  So what does this mean for you?  If your clients are reading and responding to your G+ posts, you may get a boost in Google ranking.  At this point, this is all speculation, but it’s not a stretch to see a link between G+ and SEO.

Plus, you’ll have a jump on things as a sole practitioner.  Right now, Google+ is only open to individuals, not companies.  So you’ll have a head start on the mega-firm down the block.

4) It’s Google – Part 2.  Google is the proverbial 800 lb. gorilla on the Internet, but it is fighting a battle with Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets to maintain its relevancy.  It has tried to fight its way in to the social media arena with various products such as Wave, Buzz, Dodgeball, Jaiku and others. With everything that it has thrown against the wall, something is bound to stick.  The fact that Google has recently opened Google+ to “public beta” suggests that Google thinks this service will be around for a while.

For more information, attend a roundtable discussion hosted by MSBA’s Computer and Technology Law Section titled
“Google+ Puts Facebook in Check and Facebook Moves its King” on October 10. (1 hour CLE credit applied for)

And go ahead.  Log on to Google+ and take a look around.  50 million users can’t all be wrong.

© Bob for Practice Blawg, 2011. | Permalink | No comments yet | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Google, SEO, Social Media

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LinkedIn is an online professional networking site that boasts 120 million+ members worldwide. Like I told the attendees at last week’s MSBA Practice Management Section CLE, you can make good use of the site by spending only minutes per day.

First things first… Is it worth any of your time?

Yes. LinkedIn allows you to stay in touch with large groups of people quickly and cheaply. Of course it isn’t the same connection you’d get by meeting for coffee or lunch. But I’m not talking either/or. By all means take time to meet in person, but given the time and cost of in-person meetings, you are wise to use other methods to stay connected. LinkedIn is a free and fast method.

What can you do in five minutes?

1. Respond to invitations and messages. No point in having a profile to market yourself and then ignore people who want to network with you.

2. Comment on other people’s status updates. Encourage, congratulate, or offer suggestions. People will appreciate and remember those who do.

3. Update your own status. For example, have you written an article? Provide the link. Have you won a case, volunteered, taught a CLE? Let others know. Keep your profile current. Have you moved your office? Let people know.

4. Invite one new person to your network. LinkedIn makes it easy by providing suggestions of people you might know. Use a personal message to invite them and keep your network alive and growing

What if you have more than five minutes?

Some tasks on LinkedIn take more than five minutes, but are great ideas, so if you have some down time, participate in a LinkedIn Group, ask and answer questions, set up or promote events, ask and give recommendations.

Get networking!

© Shaun G. Jamison for Practice Blawg, 2011. | Permalink | No comments yet | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: LinkedIn

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Somewhere in my math past I remember if A = B and B = C, then A = C. (I don’t remember it as the transitive property of equality but a Google search tells me so.) Based on this property, here is some solid reasoning:

• lawyers and judges can be poets (See this for lawyer poetry and this for poetry in judicial opinions)
• poets use Twitter (See PoetryTweets. Or this application for information on writing Haiku on Twitter. Twitter Limericks? There’s an app for that, too.
• thus lawyers can write poetry using twitter

If my rehashed, mangled math hasn’t convinced you, then take it from essayist Og Mandino:

“Never again clutter your days or nights with so many menial and unimportant things that you have no time to accept a real challenge when it comes along. This applies to play as well as work. A day merely survived is no cause for celebration. You are not here to fritter away your precious hours when you have the ability to accomplish so much by making a slight change in your routine. No more busy work. No more hiding from success. Leave time, leave space, to grow. Now. Now! Not tomorrow!”

There you go. Accept this challenge and stop frittering away all your precious hours practicing law. No more hiding from success. You might be the first Twitter Poet Laureate. Add a Twitter poem below in the comments or try our automated way of adding it directly to Twitter with the following form (it’s not added to Twitter or anywhere else until you actually post it to your Twitter account).

© Nancy Hupp for Practice Blawg, 2011. | Permalink | No comments yet | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Blogging, Legal Blogs

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Read your newsletters. You get a lot of them.  Whether electronic or paper, voluntary or involuntary, these are good sources for recent changes in the law or upcoming CLEs and networking events.  You don’t have to read everything, but glance through them before recycling or hitting delete.  Having a hard time managing the influx of information?  Rather than unsubscribing to everything, learn how to to filter your emails so you can go through this non-urgent category once a day or week.  (I use tags and filters in my Google Apps and Gmail accounts to keep things under control.)

Buy a season pass. One of the best things I did when I started my practice was buying a season pass.  I bought mine with Minnesota CLE, which offers a few different levels of passes, and some of the county bar associations offer them too (RCBA and HCBA).  Take into account how many CLEs you might want to attend and compare the cost of buying a pass to the cost of individual courses.  You might find yourself attending many more than you’d otherwise attend without the added cost.

Last year I attended the Probate & Trust Law Section Conference, Strategic Solutions for Solo & Small Firms in Duluth, Real Estate Institute, Tax Institute, plus a handful of one-day courses. I recently attended the Family Law Institute to stay up-to-date for practicelaw, and am looking forward to attending most of the others again this year, especially the Solo Small Conference again in August. (I hope to see you there!)

Join bar associations and sections. Shameless plug, I know.  But your membership gets you discounts  on CLEs plus access to other free services, such as practicelaw.org, Fastcase, and Court Opinions.  Depending on your needs, the cost of membership might be cheaper than paying full price or using other services.

Look for free CLEs. Many MSBA sections, county bar associations, and law schools also frequently offer free CLEs.  Find these by keeping up with the other sources listed here.

Use social networking. Not only for connecting with your colleagues, social networking sites are also a great way to stay updated.  On LinkedIn, join groups related to your practice area and read articles posted by the groups or your connections.  On Facebook, become a fan of your favorite organizations or law firms.  These might overlap with each other or any blogs you follow, so pick and choose what methods you prefer.  Many of my lawyer friends also post interesting legal stories on Facebook and LinkedIn, and keeping up with your connections is a great way to stay in touch with people who might be a good referral or resource.

Join groups and listservs. MSBA section members can sign up for e-mail listservs where subscribers can ask and respond to questions.

Also ask around to other attorneys in your practice area if they know of any study groups.  I belong to an estate planning study group and I know there are a handful of others out there.  Can’t find one that fits your needs or schedule?  Start one yourself.  Find a few other attorneys with similar interests.  The key is to do it regularly, preferably once a month on a set day, and make sure you’re comfortable asking questions to the group.

Subscribe to blogs. Google Reader is one of my favorite tools. While many people know it as a way to keep up with blogs, it aggregates any site with RSS, making it easy to add news sites and even Twitter feeds. If you’ve never seen it in action, check out this quick explanation of the basic concept, and another for an example of how to set it up. I like it so much because it only shows me the items I haven’t read, so I don’t have to scroll down pages on blogs I haven’t visited for a while, plus I only have to go to one site to see everything. It’s much easier to check Google Reader once a day than to check 20 or 30 blogs every day (or even every week). You also have much more control over what you see than from getting your news on Twitter or other real-time sites since you can decide what to follow, how to view it (expanded or list, new or all), and you can easily mark them all as “read” if you’ve had your fill for the day.

You can also organize your feeds by tags. For me, I have tags for Minnesota, Estate Planning & Probate, National Legal News, Solo-Small, Marketing/Practice Management, Ethics, Legal Writing, Funny, General Business, Opinion, and Technology. I don’t use Twitter, so I also added the mnbar and mypractice feeds to Google Reader. You can view all your feeds at once, by tag, or individually.

Don’t like Google Reader? There are many other feed readers like Feedly or Firefox add-ons. My final tip? Don’t get bogged down by blogs. Either use the “mark all as read” button liberally, or weed out your feeds periodically to keep just the really good ones. Looking for more? Most of my favorites are on the practicelaw blogroll.

© Andrea for Practice Blawg, 2010. | Permalink | No comments yet | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, MSBA Sections, RSS, Social Media, Solo

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Follow the MSBA on Twitter. (updated less frequently in January while Greg is in Italy.)

Join the MSBA group on Linkedin. Network, discuss, and connect with other Minnesota attorneys. We’re up to 661 members as of this posting.

Become a MSBA fan on Facebook. Stay up-to-date with events and news.

Sign up for mypractice. Mypractice is similar to other social and professional networking sites, but focuses solely on the Minnesota legal profession. Membership is limited to Minnesota law students, Minnesota attorneys, and members of the MSBA. Take a tour.

But as with almost everything a lawyer touches, social media use brings up plenty of gray areas. Avoid social media at your peril, but use it at your peril. What’s a lawyer to do? (...)
Read the rest of Social Media v. Professional Responsibility? (479 words)

© Andrea for Practice Blawg, 2010. | Permalink | No comments yet | Add to del.icio.us
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