{"id":228,"date":"2010-07-06T00:17:01","date_gmt":"2010-07-06T00:17:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.infolaw.co.uk\/newsletter\/?p=228"},"modified":"2016-01-11T15:39:25","modified_gmt":"2016-01-11T15:39:25","slug":"linkedin-for-law-firms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.infolaw.co.uk\/newsletter\/2010\/07\/linkedin-for-law-firms\/","title":{"rendered":"LinkedIn for law firms"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.infolaw.co.uk\/images\/INL\/linkedinlogo.jpg\" align=\"right\" width=\"180\"\/>Speaking generally, I\u2019m much less bullish on what <a href=\"http:\/\/www.linkedin.com\">LinkedIn<\/a> can do for law firms than what either Facebook or Twitter can offer. I\u2019ve come to view those as dynamic platforms that offer interesting and even exciting possibilities for law firms to tell their stories and shape their online personas. LinkedIn, by contrast, is more a place where your firm should have a presence, in order to cover off all your online networking bases and to support your individual lawyers who are generating contacts. But it\u2019s more limited in its scope and in the benefits it can deliver. LinkedIn is a place you need to be; Facebook and Twitter are places where you want to be.<\/p>\n<p>LinkedIn\u2019s enterprise vehicle, how corporations and organisations appear on the site, is the Company Profile. Take a couple of examples: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/companies\/british-airways\">British Airways<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/companies\/6980\">Simmons &amp; Simmons<\/a>. Click through to view them, and the first thing you\u2019re likely to notice is that they look pretty much exactly the same. LinkedIn doesn\u2019t provide the ability to customise the appearance or even, from what I can tell, the functionality of each Profile: they\u2019re all very slight variations on a single template. That probably has its advantages, but saying something interesting or differentiating your firm isn\u2019t one of them.<\/p>\n<p>Moreover, the features that the Company Profile does offer won\u2019t provide a great deal of value to law firms in terms of generating client interest. Once you get past the Overview tab at the top (which in most cases reproduces or summarises the \u201cAbout Us\u201d page of the firm\u2019s website), the Company Profile splits into two columns, one focused on individuals within the firm and the other focused on the firm itself. Leaving aside the former for a moment, the latter provides information like number of offices, headquarters location, industry (\u201claw practice\u201d \u2013 who\u2019d have guessed?), number of employees, and year of founding, data that qualifies more as trivia than actionable knowledge. \u201cCommon job titles\u201d hardly varies from firm to firm, \u201ctop schools\u201d matters not even slightly to clients, and \u201cmedian age\u201d is not only useless but also misleading \u2013 is the median age at ABC &amp; Co really 29? That illustrates a fundamental drawback: these aren\u2019t statistics about the firm itself, but rather about those members of the firm with LinkedIn accounts.<\/p>\n<p>Turn back to the first column, where the focus is on individuals, and you do get some more interesting information \u2013 although not necessarily the kind the firms will enjoy. \u201cCurrent Employees\u201d is helpful for finding out which members of the firm are in your LinkedIn network (and it can be amusing, in a Six Degrees of Separation way, to see how many different people connect you to a given law firm). \u201cNew Hires\u201d is nice-to-know information, nothing more \u2013 any really important talent acquisition will have been trumpeted elsewhere. \u201cFormer Employees\u201d can be more illuminating \u2013 in our highly mobile profession, it\u2019s interesting to see who used to work where \u2013 but it also serves as a public display of Who\u2019s Left The Firm, and that may not be something a firm likes having advertised. (The \u201cActivity\u201d tab at the top of the page is even more problematic: I saw one firm\u2019s \u201cActivity\u201d page that consisted entirely of people who\u2019d left the firm, sometimes for rivals.)<\/p>\n<p>These differences bring out an important point: LinkedIn is a social network built primarily for individuals, not businesses. The focus, the connections, and the interesting facts are about specific lawyers and other professionals within a firm, not the firm itself. The firm is noteworthy only as the common denominator that these particular LinkedIn members share for the moment. Now, that might in fact reflect reality to an uncomfortable degree in many firms, but it doesn\u2019t serve any organisational interest to emphasise it. As with blogs, LinkedIn is first and foremost an individual vehicle, not an enterprise one. It\u2019s hard to use LinkedIn to advance your firm\u2019s profile or to engage your clients \u2013 to communicate as a \u201cfirm qua firm\u201d \u2013 in a substantial way.<\/p>\n<p>LinkedIn\u2019s real problem, in this sense, is that it doesn\u2019t offer companies much more functionality than they can get from their own web page or, increasingly, from Facebook. A firm\u2019s home page communicates far more information about the firm in a much more engaging, unique format \u2013 most law firm LinkedIn pages feature excerpts from the firm\u2019s home page. A greater challenge is coming from Facebook, which as I\u2019ve noted before, is taking business users far more seriously these days. There\u2019s not much that a company can do on LinkedIn that it can\u2019t do on Facebook, and there are a growing number of things it can do on Facebook that LinkedIn just isn\u2019t built for. It reminds me of Homer Simpson\u2019s complaint when he learned he had to travel to Canada: \u201cWe already live in America. Why do we have to go to America Junior?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Despite all my foregoing issues with LinkedIn and law firms, I still do counsel firms to create a Company Profile on LinkedIn \u2013 but I do so with the caveat that they\u2019re covering off a potential liability rather more than opening up intriguing new frontiers. I can almost guarantee that, no matter what size your firm, at least some of your employees have LinkedIn accounts (one million lawyers populate the network, at last count). If the firm for which they work doesn\u2019t also have a LinkedIn account connected to their pages, then they\u2019re essentially orphans, and that\u2019s a problem. Your firm isn\u2019t getting any of the network benefit of having its employees build profiles and make connections \u2013 all the potential clients and recruits and recommenders that they\u2019re acquiring aren\u2019t able to link through to your firm and learn more about it. Not only that, these connections, all of whom are themselves evidently adept at social media, draw adverse conclusions about your firm from its absence on LinkedIn, and could well transfer some of those inferences to your employees.<\/p>\n<p>Certain benefits can be gleaned from maintaining and paying attention to a Company Profile for your firm: inter alia, using the new \u201cFollow\u201d feature to monitor what your corporate clients are up to; using the \u201cAnswers\u201d feature to promote your firm\u2019s expertise and find potential lateral recruits; using the \u201cBuzz\u201d feature to see what people are saying about your firm. Adrian Lurssen at JD Scoop links to several useful articles about <a href=\"http:\/\/http:\/\/bit.ly\/bb0Xj4\">how lawyers can maximise LinkedIn\u2019s potential<\/a>. And it\u2019s true that while Facebook is coming on strong, many are still very uncomfortable using the same platform both to conduct business and to check in on their teenagers.<\/p>\n<p>So LinkedIn is useful for law firms (and very useful, I still think, for individual lawyers). But overall, I\u2019d still place it third behind Facebook and Twitter as a social media platform with the potential to power up your firm\u2019s online presence and tell an effective and unique story. The irony is that the conventional wisdom describes Facebook as the frivolous personal site and LinkedIn as the serious business one. But Facebook is figuring out ways to let companies and organisations carve out their own identities and communicate as stand-alone entities, whereas LinkedIn still appears to be the sum of its individual member parts and not too much more. Both platforms are still evolving, of course, and this battle is far from over, but I think LinkedIn has some work to do.<\/p>\n<p><i>Jordan Furlong is an award-winning blogger who chronicles the extraordinary changes under way in the practice of law at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.law21.ca\">Law21<\/a>. He is a partner with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edge.ai\">Edge International<\/a>, providing consulting services to law firms on strategic planning and tactical matters and a Senior Consultant with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stemlegal.com\">Stem Legal<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><i>Email <a href=\"mailto:jordan@law21.ca\">jordan@law21.ca<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaking generally, I\u2019m much less bullish on what LinkedIn can do for law firms than what either Facebook or Twitter can offer. I\u2019ve come to view those as dynamic platforms that offer interesting and even exciting possibilities for law firms to tell their stories and shape their online personas. LinkedIn, by contrast, is more a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linkedin"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\r\n<title>LinkedIn for law firms - Internet for Lawyers Newsletter<\/title>\r\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Speaking generally, I\u2019m much less bullish on what LinkedIn can do for law firms than what either Facebook or Twitter can offer. 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