The Social Web Revolution and Law Firm Marketing Professionals

While no longer a novelty to Tweet a conference in social media circles, (see #SWSX), for the legal industry it is ground breaking. Just a short year ago we only had a handful of people experimenting with the tools during the Legal Marketing Association’s annual conference. This year we had an amazing group of social webbites taking it to the extreme. Every session was covered on Twitter via an army of volunteers. The transcript of the three day conference can be found here. #LMA10.

A year ago at the 2009 LMA Conference, I presented a very basic, very general  session on  social media and social networking. What a difference a year makes.  This year I had the opportunity to share a breakout session with two senior legal marketers, Heather Milligan and Russell Lawson, on how to integrate STRATEGY into social law firm marketing.  We had only a short 45 minutes to cover all the exciting ways we’re adding the social web to the marketing mix and so we decided to limit questions and discussion from attendees during the session. That, of course, didn’t matter to this group. Twitter was in the audience.  The questions AND insights offered via Twitterverse expanded and enriched the experience remarkably.

Lindsay Griffith wrote a very thorough recap of the session on the social web for small and mid-sized firms on her blog Zen and the Art of Legal Networking. Take minute to read it, and let us know if you have comments. Her recap includes excerpts of Tweets. It’s a great recap and shout out to Lindsay for taking the time to pull it together. So, even if you didn’t get to attend the conference, head on over to Lindsay’s blog where she also has recaps of other session.

Nancy Myrland at Myrland Marketing Minutes put together a cool Vimeo of the Tweet-up during the conference. Others have added post conference insight on their blogs, which I’ll try to dig out and add to this post. Meanwhile, if you have one, please feel free to add it to the comments here.

Bottom line. The legal industry is waking up to Twitter and it’s a brand new day. Now, if marketers can be of any inspiration to lawyers, I encourage everyone to join the party. If lawyers started tweeting substantive law conferences – we’d all be smarter and they’d be famous just like folks over at Russell’s law firm, Sands Anderson.