Opinions vary about the utility of social...utilities. It's no secret that online social media can…
New Spice for My Social World
The social media I travel in for my day job, the legal industry, has been buzzing for the last few days with a change that could be a fundamental shift in strategy for many of us. And I’m not talking about “Old Spice Guy“, although many have been across the blogsphere: here, here, here and here, for instance. BTW, congrats to Wieden and Kennedy for their creativity!
No, I’m referring to the introduction into LinkedIn.com of the JDSupra.com channel for “Legal Updates”, now available as a tool to any LinkedIn user. Here’s the news release. From my standpoint, it addresses almost all the issues I’ve had with other online publishers.
First, because of the prominence of LinkedIn and its growing membership in the legal business (an estimated one million lawyers among it’s 75 million members), activity in LinkedIn gets picked up by the main professional organization in the US, the American Bar Association. That distribution is additional to the large LinkedIn and JDSupra audiences notified of the news. And the channel we support in JDSupra gets all of its content carried in the sections of Legal Updates, thereby assisting me with distribution in LinkedIn, which was, until last week, restricted manual input previously to the groups and contacts for the lawyers in our firm.
Second, because it is a tool available to anyone in LinkedIn, we get around the subscription model of sites like Mondaq and their brethren. JDSupra makes the content more like passing a news article around the office, a contact or friend just shows up with it or emails it to you. In LinkedIn, you’ll get an updates message about your contacts every so often, and they will have subscribed to the Legal Updates. The tool makes it easy to distribute specific articles to specific contacts, but the whole stream is visible on your profile.
No need to describe the system, it’s pretty easy to use and my friend Jayne Navarre has a wonderful outline of its benefits and a case study on the Virtual Marketing Officer blog. But I think the social utility world has just changed permanently for the legal business.
Do you agree?
