After Kevin O’Keefe did his keynote speech on social media, a panel of five social media users answered questions on social media presented by the moderator. This panel consisted of three marketing individuals and two attorneys (including Kevin O’Keefe). Several things that were brought up include looking at your marketing strategy to determine how social media fits in, how one law firm regulates social media, and the evolution of social media.
The first area of interest was how social media fit into a law firm’s strategy. One marketing expert said the first question they ask clients who want a Facebook page is why do you want one? The reason is that you need to look at your whole marketing strategy and determine if social media is right for you. Are your clients on it? Can you engage them with it?
Another panelist was the marketing expert at a larger law firm and believed that most attorneys at the firm who were using Facebook were using it for personal and not so much professional reasons. Another interesting thing was that the firm has guidelines in place for social media use by attorneys but not a set policy.
In the last few minutes, the panel briefly discussed the evolution of social media. One panelist mentioned that in 10 years we can’t know where it will be – for those of you that have been using social media for a while, it probably isn’t that distant of a memory when Myspace was king of the social media world. However, everyone seemed to agree that while things will evolve, you still need face-to-ace interactions.
Finally, I was surprised that it was only in the last five minutes that privacy concerns were raised. With all the uproar about Facebook’s privacy policies recently, I thought it would be first and foremost, but it wasn’t.
Next up will be the panel on social media ethics – another topic I am interested in since I presented a CLE on it several months ago. I hope the information I gave out at it was correct!!!
