When I first heard about Twitter, I thought it was a silly way to waste more time than I had to waste. I was late to the Facebook game because it too seemed to be an enormous time-suck although I am now fully engaged in the addiction that is Facebook! Eventually, I was drawn in by the Twitter craze and am now in the not enviable position of trying to convince the attorneys in the firm where I work that Twitter is not a waste of their time either.
In Kevin O'Keefe's January 5th post in Real Lawyers Have Blogs, he discusses the value in law firms utilizing Twitter. Probably the most important point he makes is this: Twitter is not about how many followers you have nor is it just about distributing content. Twitter is about establishing relationships and engaging with people. I thought of how the firm where I work utilizes Twitter and I realized that all we are doing is posting links to e-alerts and events. As a firm, we are not engaging with our audience. As O'Keefe states in his post, "Sure you need to share content on Twitter to get the opportunity to build relationships with your Twitter followers, but the end goal ought to be engagement with real people, not a lot of followers." We are not engaging anyone.
It is hard to convince a group of extremely cautious people that social media is a great way to engage people and build relationships. The ironic thing is that lawyers typically embrace word-of-mouth referrals and face-to-face networking. When attorneys were first allowed to dip their toes into the pool of television advertising, one of comments that I heard most was that they didn't need to advertise on TV, or in anything for that matter, other than the yellow pages. They insisted they engaged the majority of their clients via word-of-mouth referrals and through networking.
What is amusing about this is this is exactly what social media, including Twitter, is about: networking and word-of-mouth referrals, except it is not done face-to-face. Networking involves listening to what people have to say about their needs and their issues. Or networking is about getting to know people you may not already know so that they know about you! Therein lies the beauty of Twitter (or other social media avenues): your potential network just got larger because of the sheer numbers of participants that may be interested in you and your contributions.
Now I just have to convince the attorneys and other powers that be!
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