Posted on

Personal Branding and Social Media: Cultivating Relational Connections

Attorney-client relationships are just that – relationships. How can you build relationships using social media? I suppose this is what the people who know much more about social media than I do are talking about when the discuss “engagement.” In some contexts, this is a straight forward proposition. If you build your brand by showing you have expertise in an area, you may get questions or comments from readers of your blog. Other people will follow and retweet you.

Unfortunately for lawyers and other professional service providers, our potential clients may be less likely to be active in social media in these ways. Many people are loathe to discuss their legal issues on a public blog, and they should be. Also, in-house counsel appear to be voracious, if passive, consumers of social media content relevant to their work. If an in-house counsel reads a blog post relevant to a lawsuit they are thinking of filing, they aren’t going to tweet about it. This presents multiple challenges.

One issue is that it may be difficult to use the traditional measures of engagement to measure the reach of your social media efforts. That doesn’t mean that your social media efforts are not important. However, digging into your website statistics may give you a better idea of which topics your readers find interesting than looking to see how many people tweet your blog post.

Another issue is that it is very difficult to build a relationship without the benefit of two-way communication. You want great content, but you also need readers to associate that content with you. One way to do this is to personalize your blog. I post about intellectual property issues that interest me, not just because of the legal aspects, but because the subject may be related to a hobby or other interest of mine. When I do, I want to make reference to the personal connection I have to the issue. This humanizes me as a writer so I am not just a conduit of information.

Prototype logo for my personal brand: ConnollyIP

I chose which cases to write about partly based on the breadth of their appeal, but also because of my personal interest in the outcome or reasoning. I blog about intellectual property issues related to outdoor activities, and I regularly tweet about internet startups and food. The reason is because these are areas of interest for me. This post isn’t being written just to show I have a rudimentary grasp of some social media topics, but also because the way lawyers use social media and blogging genuinely interests me. I want my blog posts to not only show me as a reliable source of information and well reasoned opinions but also as the type of person others would want to do business with.

In the process of writing these three posts I’ve started to crystallize in my own mind what my social media strategy is. I want to provide interesting content that differentiates me and demonstrates my expertise. That, I hope, will generate more readers. I also want to create a sense of relational connectedness with the people who read my tweets and blog posts, even if we don’t directly interact. That, if I’m lucky, will help convert consumers of content into clients when they have a need I can satisfy. If it doesn’t work, at least I get to spend the time writing about what I want to write about, not what I think I have to write about.

I don’t think this is anything new and is really what a lot of people are doing, especially consultants, and tech types. However, I don’t see many attorneys using a strategy like this. I would love to read others comments on this, and while I’m a lawyer and write from that perspective, I think this applies to many types of service providers. What works for you?

Posted on

Personal Branding and Social Media for Attorneys: Establishing Expertise

Lawyers and other professional service providers are looked to as experts in their fields and clients have to trust that we are doing a good job for them. That means they must believe we are competent. In short, our reputations are our most important asset.

Social media can help an attorney build a favorable reputation with current and prospective clients. However, many attorneys seem reluctant to differentiate themselves via social media. While there are some wonderfully insightful blogs out there, many blogs run by practicing attorneys appear to serve more as news digests and simply post links to recent cases or provide summaries of practice developments. Though useful, these blogs don’t provide a distinct voice or feature one skill that is important to an attorney – critical, strategic thinking.

These practice area news blogs can be great for targeting other attorneys as a source of referrals, and if that is your strategy, more power to you.  However, if you want to directly reach out to potential clients, be they entrepreneurs or in-house counsel, I think the best pitch you can make via social media is one based on your expertise.

Of course, within a firm, taking a position on legal issues can be difficult. Other attorneys may not share your opinion, or clients may need to argue a contrary position in the future. The result has often been to avoid providing personal opinions about the merits of a decision or proposed statutory change. My solution has been to take my blogging out of my firm and put it on my own website. The views here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any other attorney in the firm. I am also cognizant to avoid positions that may be contrary to the position a client of the firm may need to argue. When writing on legal issues, I mostly comment on decided cases and provide my opinion of what the law should be, not an argument about what the law is.

I strongly believe that the best way to show you have expertise in an area of law is to put forward strong, cogent opinions. Blogs aren’t the place for full law review articles, but you can articulate an opinion and provide some support for it. You can also link to other sources easily to let your readers view other opinions on the issue. What this does is give your readers a sense that you have a command of the subject matter and can be relied on as a knowledgeable source of information and, potentially, counsel.

In the next post, I’ll share my thoughts on how we can use the social media to personalize our message and create relationships with the members of our networks.

Posted on

Personal Branding and Social Media for Attorneys

Prototype logo for my personal brand: ConnollyIP

I’m a patent attorney, and I work in a law firm. like many mid-level attorneys I’m trying more and more to transition away from doing work for other attorneys’ clients and doing more for my own. Not only is it more financially rewarding for an attorney when they have their own clients, but it is also more emotionally rewarding to be an active participant in a client relationship.

Of course, this begs the question, “how do you get clients?” I know there has been a lot written on the subject, and I am clearly not an expert. While it’s clearly not the whole story, I think social media can play an important role.

Social media isn’t really a whole new world. It has just given us ways to scale the types of interactions we had before the internet age. There are still crucial aspects to the relationships we develop by using social media that have always been needed in any relationship. In the context of a professional trying to market there are still two major needs.

First, you have to cultivate a sense of expertise. The reader must feel that the professional who is providing content is knowledgeable and reliable in the fields for which they provide original content. A big part of any professional relationship is the trust that the service provider knows what they are doing.

Second, you have to develop a relational connection. At the end of the day we are all replaceable by people with similar skill sets and experience. It’s the relationships that we develop that make the difference.

In the next two posts, I’m going to lay out my personal thoughts on how I hope to cultivate a sense of expertise and relational connections with current and prospective clients through blogging. There are unique challenges to doing both of these things in the context of social media, especially for lawyers.

I’m definitely not an expert on social media but I’ve put some thought into this and would love to read comments from others on this road.

Posted on

Leap Motion’s Finger Gesture Control Device

This has to be one of the coolest peripheral devices I’ve seen in a while. Leap Motion is planning on launching a new, 3D gesture control system around the end of the year. The device monitors an eight cubic foot space and can, purportedly, monitor finger motions 200 times more accurately than anything else on the market at any price point. All of that for $70.

Leap Motion describes the Leap as:

…an entirely new way to interact with your computers. It’s more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard and more sensitive than a touchscreen.  For the first time, you can control a computer in three dimensions with your natural hand and finger movements.

They also take a not so subtle dig at Microsoft’s Kinect:

This isn’t a game system that roughly maps your hand movements.

If it can live up to the claims, this will be a very cool and useful device. I jumped in and pre-ordered one.  In seven or eight months, I might get to see how it works with my mac.

It will be interesting to see if this works as well as advertised, and if any notebook manufacturers incorporate the Leap into their products.

Posted on

WildTangent v. Ultramercial and Patentable Subject Matter Under Section 101

The Supreme Court again GVRed (Grant, Vacate, Remand) a Federal Circuit case related to patentable subject matter in light of Mayo v. Prometheus.  Earlier, they had done the same with the Myriad decision.  The procedure sends the case back to the Federal Circuit to be re-decided in light of the Supreme Court’s other opinion.

What separates the WildTangent GVR from the Myriad one is the subject matter involved.  Myriad’s patent, like Prometheus’, related to medical diagnostics so the review of the claims would be, at least in some part, analogous.  However, Ultramercial patent claims relate to a computer system for distributing copyrighted material over the internet.

Clearly, the Supreme Court would extend its holding related to medical diagnostics to other areas of art and possibly reign in patentable subject matter as it applies to software.  The results could be interesting as the language of the Mayo decision may be difficult to apply in this context. While the Mayo decision focuses on the “Law of Nature” exception to patent eligibility under §101, the analysis in this case will revolve around what is an “Abstract Idea.” It’s not entirely clear how the Court’s analysis regarding “Laws of Nature” would apply. The crux of the issue will be the determination of what portions of the Ultramercial claims are merely “Abstract Ideas” and does the rest of the claim sufficiently carve out a patentable method.

Claim 1 of the Ultramercial patent reads:

1. A method for distribution of products over the Internet via a facilitator, said method comprising the steps of:

a first step of receiving, from a content provider, media products that are covered by intellectual-property rights protection and are available for purchase, wherein each said media product being comprised of at least one of text data, music data, and video data;

a second step of selecting a sponsor message to be associated with the media product, said sponsor message being selected from a plurality of sponsor messages, said second step including accessing an activity log to verify that the total number of times which the sponsor message has been previously presented is less than the number of transaction cycles contracted by the sponsor of the sponsor message;

a third step of providing the media product for sale at an Internet website;

a fourth step of restricting general public access to said media product;

a fifth step of offering to a consumer access to the media product without charge to the consumer on the precondition that the consumer views the sponsor message;

a sixth step of receiving from the consumer a request to view the sponsor message, wherein the consumer submits said request in response to being offered access to the media product;

a seventh step of, in response to receiving the request from the consumer, facilitating the display of a sponsor message to the consumer;

an eighth step of, if the sponsor message is not an interactive message, allowing said consumer access to said media product after said step of facilitating the display of said sponsor message;

a ninth step of, if the sponsor message is an interactive message, presenting at least one query to the consumer and allowing said consumer access to said media product after receiving a response to said at least one query;

a tenth step of recording the transaction event to the activity log, said tenth step including updating the total number of times the sponsor message has been presented; and

an eleventh step of receiving payment from the sponsor of the sponsor message displayed.

Under Mayo, the Federal Circuit will likely have to carve out those parts of the claims that are “abstract ideas” and then determine if what is left constitutes an otherwise patentable invention. It is unclear to me how this will be done, but it is quite possible that the Federal Circuit will arrive at the same conclusion as before but this time using language from the Mayo decision. The result will be another appeal to the Supreme Court (unless the case settles) that puts everything in the same position a year from now.