International Bar Association Survey on the Impact of Social Networking on the Legal Profession

The IBA has published the results of a major survey into attitudes towards various aspects of social media. It surveyed member bar organisations around the globe, and reports the findings here. My thanks to Randy Perkins for bringing this to my attention.

Most of the findings are in fact in line with what one might expect, and indeed are similar to opinions expressed in other professions, however the following findings from the summary are of note:

Photo by James Cridland

Over 85 per cent of respondents deemed it acceptable for lawyers to access and use the information found on the online social networking profiles of the parties in a case, which forms part of the public domain, as evidence in proceedings.

73% felt it is acceptable for legal employers to consider the information found on online social networking profiles in evaluating potential work candidates.

These opinons agree with those generally held, i.e. that if you make information about yourself freely available via the web and social media, you shouldn't be surprised if someone uses it to find out more about you - for any reason.

Nearly 95 per cent of respondents from jurisdictions containing a jury system thought that, in addition to routine instructions, jurors should receive specific instructions limiting their online communications and use of online social networking sites.

There have been some high profile cases recently where jurors have used social media and other online tools inappropriately.

85 per cent of respondents thought that law students should be informed by their law schools as to the potential risks and disadvantages associated with the use of online social networking within the legal profession.

80 per cent of respondents stated that there is a need for ethical/professional codes and standards to be adapted to online social interactions affecting the legal profession and practice, as they cannot be adequately applied in their current form.

I can't help but feel that this approach will be increasingly adopted by many professions with regards to their attitudes towards social media, i.e. being a standard aspect of professional training and also forming part of professional codes of conduct.

Over 75 per cent of respondents considered the advantages of online social networking to outweigh its disadvantages.

The IBA plans to launch a follow-up project in March 2012.
 

Why Checking your Profile is Important

Don't let poor spelling, grammar or unexpected text truncation damage your social media presence.

"Dave and I worked together on implementing a new system, Dave on the customer tea...". This turned out to be an unfortunate summary, as Dave actually worked on the "customer team and was hugely instrumental in the success of the project".

I saw this recently on LinkedIn. We use our web sites, blogs and profiles on social media sites to promote ourselves, our businesses and the things we do. Yet the number one problem I see in all these things - poor accuracy of textual information - can be both the most damaging and the easiest to fix.

Spelling seems to be a problem, which is hugely surprising as pretty much all the content entered on the web is via a browser, and spell checking should be pretty much the norm. I'm typing this using Firefox, and anything with dubious spelling is underlined in red, as it would be if I were typing a letter in Word. So there really is no excuse for poor spelling on your LinkedIn profile, or that latest marketing Tweet.

Grammar can be dealt with similarly, but there is of course a much harder issue of using the wrong words in the wrong places - my favourites being "there" and "their" and of course "your" and "you're". You can only get round these by taking the time after you've completed your typing to review what you've entered, and make sure it's correct. If you've any doubts, or the content is really important, perhaps a new product launch page on your web site, get it proofread, either by a professional or by a colleague with a keen eye.

Reviewing your work is important for another reason, it gives you a chance to put yourself in the position of the reader and make sure that the message appears in the way that you intended. This is especially important for those sites which take long pieces of text and truncate them to create a summary, with a hyperlink to "click for more". That truncation can appear in exactly the wrong place, not only reducing the impact of the text, but sometimes reversing it completely, as in the example above.

Here are some other examples I've seen recently:

A profile of a marketing professional where the summary stressed their focus on brand management, consistency and attention to detail, before ending with "you're cup is always full".

There was also the profile written by the "apllication developer".

I also recently saw a competition web site where the names of two brand products - which were the prizes - were spelt incorrectly.

Why is this important? Well, our presence on the web shows our potential clients what we can do for them, and the precision with which we can do it. They will expect us to produce work which represents their brand and business objectives accurately and consistently. If we can't do that for our own brand, then why will they trust us with theirs?

Increasing Interest in Pinterest

Yesterday I linked to an article about using Pinterest to promote your business. This was the latest in a series of references I'd seen on social media web sites and blogs. Today there are more. When you see one person writing about a social media web site it's usually interesting in itself. When you see more than one writing about the same site, it becomes more significant. When you see more than one writing about the same site on the same day it's probably time to sit up and take notice.

Pinterest is, in its own words, "an online pinboard. Organize and share things you love." Go to the home page now. Find something interesting. Click on it. You'll see quickly how it works. The image appears, with comments, along with information about who pinned it, where they got it from (for example, I clicked on a recipe photograph and it took me to the recipe page on the author's blog), and what board it was pinned to. Other users can also "like" and "repin" to other boards.

Further Reading

For more information, read these blog posts from ViralBlog and Jeff Bullas. There are lots of statistics and research results in this post on SocialMouths.

Extract Data from your LinkedIn Network

Some data extraction experiments with LinkedIn reveal the vast majority of my network is not very active.

As part of this investigation, I wrote some code to retrieve and process network updates from the LinkedIn database, which can be retrieved in totality or by type. I concentrated on "shares" as these are a good indicator of someone's activity - the other options I'll investigate later.

I chose to write the results to CSV files - but an obvious improvement is to write them to a database - and then imported into OpenOffice.org to produce the following summary graphic:

Only 9% of my network shared an update in January 2012, something which we might regard as "active", as opposed to adding new connections, which we might regard as "passive". A breakdown of those 9% shows that as ever, there are a small number of "leaders" who are regularly active, and quite a large "tail" who update very infrequently.

Which of these approaches stands more chance of reaching out to your existing and potential customers within your network?

Technical Notes

The LinkedIn API restricts the volume of information returned and the number of calls which can be made for performance reasons. The next step is to read more data, but more frequently, and accumulate it for further analysis.

I used LinkedIn-J, a Java library for accessing the LinkedIn API, to extract data from my LinkedIn network. I won't cover the specifics of using the API, as these are covered much better elsewhere but the basic steps are as follows:

• Register your application with LinkedIn, and get your API keys
• Log in to LinkedIn and obtain authentication tokens for your application to allow it to access your data
• Write some Java code to call the API, read and process the results

Privacy Options

Note you will be unable to retrieve full details for any of your connections who have elected not to share  their data with third party applications.

Get More from LinkedIn Connections with LinkedIn Maps

What is it?

InMaps is a tool provided by the team at LinkedIn Analytics which produces a map of your connections on LinkedIn - see here for more detailed information on what it is and how to use it.

How do you use it?

Just follow the instructions provided - you'll need to login to LinkedIn and give access to the InMaps application to access your LinkedIn data. Once the map has been built, you can zoom and pan to inspect your connections, and also assign labels to the colour coded groups. Click on any connection to highlight your shared connections.

Note that if you have a secure scripting environment, you'll need to allow scripts from both linkedinlabs.com and yahooapis.com

Why is it Useful?

Suppose you are looking for connections which might allow you to reach out to a company as a potential client. You can use LinkedIn to show you people within that company who are second or third level connections, which is very useful. However, if you have the fortunate situation where there are several routes in, it pays to know who is connected to who.

For example, looking at AliceCo, you see that there are two employees there who are second level connections, Bob and Claire. You are connected to Bob through David, and to Claire through Ellie and Frank.

Hence you might try to approach Bob via David, or Claire via Ellie or Frank. However, if you know that Ellie and Frank used to work together, that would be your preferred route in, as it has more "weight".

Mapping out your connections allows you to see these useful interconnections, most of which you'll know about, some of which you won't and these are the ones which can be useful. Looking at my map, three of the interconnections are surprises - I had no idea that the people concerned knew each other.

Caveats

LinkedIn has an option to disallow access to your data from third party applications, however so far as I am aware, InMaps does not count as a third party application and so this setting should not cause any problems.

LinkedIn will always show shared connections, so setting your account to not show connections to anyone other than yourself also should not cause a problem.

The InMaps FAQ points out that the data used to prepare maps is only updated on Sundays, so you'll need to wait to see your new connections appear, I normally look at mine on Mondays to catch up.

Search Minus Your World?

There's been a lot of press, blog and Twitter coverage this week about the changes Google has made to its search offering - Search Plus Your World.

I spotted something recently on a Google search, annoying and perplexing, and which might affect the way in which I use Google search in the future. It could be that I've missed something really obvious, so someone please do let me know if I have. If I go to Google and search for "LinkedIn Updates" (as I did recently) I get a page of search results, as you might expect:

Now I might be quite pleased about this, as two of my blog posts show up on the first page of results. However, this is actually only happening because Google knows who I am. If I log out and repeat the search, my search results disappear:

Fair enough. However, why do I actually want to know that two posts on my own blog are relevant to the search query "LinkedIn Updates"? I did, after all, write them both, so it's a fair bet I know about them. My search doesn't really return 10 useful links, only 8, as I already know about the other two. Is there a limit on this - if not, I might get to a stage where half the results shown aren't news to me, which kind of defeats the object.

Looking at the Google search options, this doesn't appear related to the social search. I think. There seem to be more and more options to set up on Google these days.

Let's remember the reason why Google became so popular in the first place - it was quick, uncluttered, and allowed you to find out stuff you didn't know.

Somehow we need to get back to that. So it may be that Google Search becomes more useful when you're logged out. A kind of "Search Minus Your World".

Keeping Control of your Inbox

For some time now I've implemented a very basic form of email management. The core component of this was a simple configuration change I made several years ago - I reduced the frequency at which my email client checks for new messages on the server. I did this because I found that I'd be in the middle of dealing with one email, when others would turn up, creating an inevitable distraction.

I found that a polling interval of around 15 minutes worked well, especially in a very busy environment. These days at my (more relaxed) home office I have it set to 5 minutes, but I've found a problem recently.

It's been caused by my phone. Having finally upgraded to a smart phone, I now get email notifications almost immediately, which has the effect of undoing my basic management. So every now and then, I'll consider switching off the phone email notifications, and rely on the PC. Like in the old days.

Here are some other ideas that can, either individually or in combination, help you to manage that inbox:

Filter by Receiving User Name

If you have your own domain, set up individual email addresses for each mailing list that you subscribe to. This allows you to do two things. Firstly, you can easily write incoming mail rules to process these messages - depending on how busy you are, you might want to route them immediately to another folder to look at later. Secondly, if one of the services you subscribe to has its mailing list hacked (as if that would ever happen) you'll know immediately which one it is - and can act accordingly by updating your filter rules to accept the message only if it is FROM who it is supposed to be from (get this information from a legitimate message).

This approach also comes in handy for dealing with messages from Twitter, or LinkedIn. If you've set your Twitter email address to be, for example, twitter@myco.com, you can write filter rules to process these directly into a folder to skim through later when you have more time. You might want to make an exception for direct messages though - just check the message subject for "has sent you a direct message on Twitter".

Filter by Sending User Name

You can filter either by the person sending, or the company they work for, based on your current priorities - for example, if you have a client project nearing a critical milestone, you could flag all incoming emails from that company as soon as they come in, so that they stand out on your screen.

Filter by Topic

This works in a similar way, but you do have to write rules based mainly on the subject line - which can be notoriously variable due to differing uses of wording, abbreviations, spelling, and mistypes.

Maintain Multiple "Outstanding" Folders for Different Projects

This is something I've been doing for quite some time, especially as I am often involved in voluntary projects for not-for-profit organisations - when emails come in relating to these whilst I'm in the middle of fee-paying work, it makes sense to defer them and store them all up for reading and acting on in one single session.
A dedicated folder is ideal for this, and naming them "0utstanding" rather than "Outstanding" i.e. with a zero rather than the letter O, keeps them at the top of my folder list.

Limit Your Use of the "Reply All" Button

As Eileen Brown points out in a recent blog post, Reply All emails make you less productive, so it's worth asking yourself each time you go to click that button if it's really something you want to do - how much will you be adding to your inbox by doing so?