On Friday I concluded my 2009 Kentucky Law Update presentations with Stuart Adams on Social Media in the Law. I spent the 3 days prior to the presentation updating the work done for the first presentation delivered in early September. As I told each of the audiences in 9 cities, social media changes constantly and rapidly.
Since I began this “project” new developments have emerged. Some key items include:
- GA case where Federal Judge ruled that Rule 53 prohibited tweeting in the courtroom.
- Several mistrials have occurred due to juror activities in the social media landscape. (See some coverage here.)
- Microsoft Bing, Yahoo! and Google have announced plans to make social media content searchable. Google is developing their search application in the Google Labs currently. (See a discussion here on the Google and Bing drawdown.)
In Friday’s presentation I told the audience that the opportunities abound but that they must be strategic and employ best practices when using Social Media. This begged the question of what are the best practices.
That depends upon your purpose in participating in the social media landscape.
- Is it purely investigative?
- Are you marketing services?
- Are you advising clients about how they should govern or participate in this new media?
Once you have determined what you want to accomplish it is then time to set your strategy.
For me the best practice overall it to formulate your strategic social media plan. All else will follow.
Constance Ard December 6, 2009
Constance,
What amazes me is just how far this has come between the time we started preparing the material for the Kentucky Bar Association program in the early summer months, and the time we gave the final presentation last week. There was not much law on the impact of social media and social networking, at the time we started. In fact, there were not even that many articles about it.
Now, there is an avalanche of articles, studies, white papers, seminars, podcasts, etc., and there is a rapidly growing number of LinkedIn and Facebook groups devoted to subsets of this, in addition to the usual SEO folks and instant experts who pop up with any apparent gold rush.
The law is typically very slow to catch up with such social changes and it will be an even greater challenge now, since the legislative and judicial systems have not substantially changed over the last few decades, while the rest of society rapidly slips from the Web 2.0 world into Web 3.0 and beyond. What was science fiction just a year or so ago is now actually in beta or on eBay.