If you’re responsible for business development in your law firm or your own practice, whether a lawyer, managing partner, marketing or business development professional, attending the Raindance Conference should be on your to do list, in my opinion.

What is Raindance? It is an annual educational conference presented by the Legal Sales and Service Organization. It is exclusively dedicated to all things business development and process improvement. I attended the LSSO Raindance Conference for the first time in 2008 and believe that it was probably two of the most valuable days in my professional development over the course of 15 years in the legal marketing industry. This year I’ll be attending the conference and will cover the content here on VMO and on Twitter.  (Disclosure: LSSO has graciously given me press pass privileges to attend. I’m not being paid. I’m covering all travel expenses.)

Here are the top five reasons why Raindance was valuable to me and may be valuable to you:

1. FOCUSED–Raindance does not serve a broad group with many agendas. It is a focused immersion into the components that make business developers and business development projects successful. The sessions are designed to build upon each other leaving you with a cohesive knowledge base.
2. EDUCATION–Raindance is not about parties. It is not a boondoggle. It’s about the business of professional development and business education.  Every session is a priority. The presenters are selected according to their distinct and valuable knowledge base. The presenters know why they were there–to teach, not just “share.” Many of the sessions are interactive and make learning more tangible. (I was able to remember what I was learning in a practical context and apply it to my business with specificity.) All sessions were high quality. The presenters are typically readily available after the sessions and during the luncheons and breaks. It is a holistic educational experience.
3. PEOPLE–Networking at Raindance is very manageable because the intimacy of a smaller setting puts you among people with similar professional development goals. It’s a good example of old fashioned community. Getting face time with colleagues as well as introductions to new people allow you to form meaningful new relationships that become valuable resources. Conversations are about what your are learning.  The connections you make at Raindance will stay with you all year long.
4. PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT–This is a sophisticated group of thought leaders; typically senior level people with responsibility for delivering real results in biz dev. Both attendees and presenters are the kind of people you want to surround yourself with if you’re seeking serious professional development. The conference may be especially valuable for professionals, both marketers and lawyers, who are new or junior to law firm biz dev. I wish I would have had this resource as I was coming up the ranks.

If you do decided to attend, make sure to touch base with me! If you can’t attend, follow along here on the VMO and Twitter #LSSO10 or @legalsalesorg. The conference is June 9-10 in Chicago at the Mid-America Club at 200 E. Randolph Street. More information can be found on the Website at www.legalsales.org or you can register at West Legal Ed.

Political topics are not my focus, however, I recently read with great interest a op-ed piece, Winds of Change? by The New York Times Op-Ed Columnist THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN that drew me in and so I’m sharing it with my blog readers for better or worse. He wrote on June 13th, 2009 that “something is going on in the Middle East today that is very new.” And …”four historical forces have come together to crack open this ossified region.”

Mr. Friedman lists as the first force: the diffusion of technology.

The Internet, blogs, YouTube and text messaging via cell phones, particularly among the young — 70 percent of Iranians are under 30 — is giving Middle Easterners cheap tools to communicate horizontally, to mobilize politically and to criticize their leaders acerbically, outside of state control. It is also enabling them to monitor vote-rigging by posting observers with cell phone cameras.

I knew something had changed when I sat down for coffee on Hamra Street in Beirut last week with my 80-year-old friend and mentor, Kemal Salibi, one of Lebanon’s greatest historians, and he told me about his Facebook group!

The evening of Lebanon’s election, I went to the Beirut home of Saad Hariri, the leader of the March 14 coalition, to interview him. In a big living room, he had a gigantic wall-size television broadcasting the results. And alongside the main TV were 16 smaller flat-screen TVs with electronic maps of Lebanon. Hariri’s own election experts were working on laptops and breaking down every vote from every religious community, village by village, and projecting them on the screens.

Wow. That’s powerful.

Daily photos, like these, posted on WordPress blog Tehran 24 show life in Tehran up close. These are not your ordinary media photos. They tell a story that only the independent photo journalist can tell. And the Internet is making it possible.

In addition to what is happening in the Middle East, here are a few more examples that I know of  where technology and the Internet are changing our world. (of course there are dozens more….)

It’s a small world after all.

I was told by a friend of mine after he returned from a writing assignment in a rural village in India that the country has invested in wireless towers everywhere; even poor cotton farmers were carrying cell phones. I imagine this technology is improving their quality of life by giving them access to services that would not otherwise reach them. Mobile cell technology is one step from Internet access.

The Internet is enabling free speech for those who have none, and despite extreme consequences, bloggers continue to publish.  As of April 2009, there were 21 online journalists in jail in Cuba.  Independent journalists in Cuba (or dissidents as they are often referred to by the government) using the Internet to disseminate their communications are apparently scaring the hell out of the dictatorship.

I think back to how the first televised presidential debate changed forever the way Americans view and elect our presidents. More recently, the Obama campaign used social media to push its message.  Although it was more of a substitute for a direct mail campaign (with some exceptions), I believe politicians can no longer run a campaign without it, at least not until the next thing comes along. Hopefully the next presidential election will use social media for more dialogue and debate, rather than just a medium to push a message.

The expansion of online social tools here in America and around the world is facilitating the renewal and extension of friendships on Facebook, establishing boundary less business relationships on Linkedin, and getting first on the scene news from Twitterers. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that that the Internet is also enabling criminal activity and other dubious enterprises, but over all, I look forward to hearing more stories of how technology and the Internet is empowering and connecting our world for good.

What’s in a name? A lot.

At least on June 13th starting at 12:01 a.m. (EDT).  Why?  Facebook is hosting a name claim extravaganza. That’s right, no more url addresses with Facebook.com and a random series of numbers and digits.  You will be able to select a username at http://www.facebook.com/username for your Facebook account to easily direct friends, family, and coworkers to your profile.

Law firms and the companies they counsel who are interested in getting found on Facebook will also be able to stake a claim such as http://www.facebook.com/yourcompanynamehere.

With one caveat, no Pizza or Flowers yet. At this time, generic words are not available as usernames. Facebook encourages all users and Page administrators to create a username that closely matches the true identity of their name or business.

Companies can (and should) preemptively protect their rights to their trademarks and block cyber-squatting by registering their mark with Facebook.  All you need to do is visit here. Provide your company’s name, the trademark and the federal trademark registration number, and subject to their review, Facebook will reserve the trademark and not let anyone else use it.

According to Brian Fergemann, a partner and intellectual property attorney at Chicago’s Winston & Strawn, quoted today in the National Law Journal,

“This is really a way for someone who has a distinct or famous trademark to let Facebook know that others should not be allowed to register that page. They can just say, ‘Please don’t let anyone use my registered trademark.’ “

I agree, and even if your law firm or company is not yet on Facebook you should register your mark, NOW.  The good news is, that even if you are not registered but  find that someone’s username infringes your rights, you can fill out an automated IP infringement form.

Now for the fun stuff!

Hold the presses! Your username url can be used in your marketing communications, company website and business cards e.g. http://www.facebook.com/yourname. Consider including it or at least your linkedin public url on the front or back of your card.

Usernames will be available in basic text forms, and you can only choose a single username for your profile and for each of the Pages that you administer; e.g. fan pages. If you have just signed up for Facebook since May 31, 2009 you’ll have to wait to claim your name. This is one way Facebook is hoping to deter cyber-squatting.

If you are an administrator of a Facebook Page (fan page, company page), you will be able to choose your username just like a user selecting a username for their profile. However, your Facebook Page must meet two requirements: it must be live on Facebook prior to the May 31, 2009 cut-off date and have a minimum 1,000 fans as of May 31, 2009.

Caution!!

Once you have claimed a username by clicking the “Set Username” button, it is not possible to edit it, or to transfer your username to a different account on Facebook. So be selective and, as always, think before hitting save or send. Additionally, when an account is removed from the site, its username will not be made available to other users for security reasons.

That’s it!

John Doe, Robert Smith and Susan Jones…. I’ll see you at http://www.facebook.com/username at 12:01 a.m. EDT, on Saturday, June 13, 2009.  The early bird gets the worm, I mean username.  For the rest of us, see you at 10 a.m.

A few posts ago I asked you to imagine…… Today I learned about the following campaign which I am summarizing for my readers in anticipation that great ideas will start flowing.

Procter & Gamble Co. paired 40 digital media and agency executives with 100 of its North American marketing directors in a contest to sell Tide T-shirts for charity, “Digital Hack Night.” The notion that this would be a sort of baptism by immersion into how social media works would not be lost on the participants. It was a crash course. The participants themselves added “Hack” to the event title.

140 media and marketing people leaned heavily on their social-media friends and followers, used big-name incentives and spent a total of about $4,000 on digital media to sell more than 2,000 T-shirts at $20 a pop for charity.

The contest, a four-hour event, was Web-cast in reality show style. Their buzz online hit the top 10 trending topics on Twitter in the process.

I love the idea. The team experience probably did more to expose P&G marketing directors to  digital media than had they learned by stumbling through on their own. It really takes a team.

Among the social media used was a YouTube video of the Global Marketing Officer offering an hour of his services advising a non-profit on cause-related marketing in exchange for a 100 shirt purchase. They blogged it, and spread the word via Twitter.  They used a few conventional tools such as digital coupons and blast emails to a lesser effect.

The effort raised about $50,000 directly for the charity Feeding America and another $50,000 in a match from the Tide brand.