What Lawyers Want from Social Media

Over the weekend, I presented “Social Media for Lawyers” with colleagues Mark Ressa and Brett Burlison at the State Bar of California Annual Meeting.

I estimate that we had approximately 60 attendees. (Pretty good, considering that there were prior presentations on social media at the four-day conference!)

Attendees’ area of greatest interest was search engine optimization (SEO) – how to show up on the first page (preferably, high on the first page) of relevant Google searches.

Their standard question / concern was how much money and time is required for an effective (i.e., business-generating) social-media presence. (Our consensus: Money can vary greatly among lawyers and firms. The time requirement will be measured in hours, rather than minutes, per week.)

Their greatest fear was negative online reviews. This is not a concern on one’s own blog, where comments can be reviewed and filtered, but is a real risk on sites that actively invite client reviews, such as Yelp and Avvo.

One attendee – who doesn’t even have an active social media presence – explained that a service contacted her about a negative online review that an anonymous person had posted somewhere. Based on the facts that were stated, the lawyer could tell that it was not a review by a real client. I opined that the negative review probably was not a random event – it probably was planted by the service that contacted her about removing it!

The slides from our presentation (all 73 of them!) are available as a Free Download on the Downloads page under the title “Social Media for Lawyers – State Bar of California 09-25-2010”.

Dana H. Shultz, Attorney at Law  +1 510-547-0545  dana [at] danashultz [dot] com
This blog does not provide legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. If you need legal advice, please contact a lawyer directly.