Attorneys not yet engaging in online social networking seem to be forfeiting a huge opportunity to attract new clients.

Lawyers and legal specialists who have strong online presences through such social networking sites as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn say those holdouts need to break free from the one-sided Web 1.0 form of 10 years ago.

“One of the biggest complaints I have about lawyer Web sites is that they’re all ‘brochure’ sites,” said Nicole C. Wipp, a Milford, Mich.-based business, family law and criminal defense attorney. “They don’t tell consumers anything. They’re not interesting. And they don’t provide enough about you and your firm or the topic [potential clients] are looking for to make you look like you have expertise in anything.”

But the progression of Web 2.0 — which, unlike Web 1.0, is more directly interactive with blogs, video-sharing and audio streams — has opened doors that give the business of law practice a more humanized approach.

Twitter: Content Plus Conversation

Take, for example, direct contact to users on Twitter

Here, “tweets,” or Twitter-delivered instant messages of no more than 140 characters, are posted to followers of a specific topic, be it U.S. Supreme Court rulings or folk art.

Add to that the capability of adding links to, say, recent news items or law journal stories, and all of a sudden, the tweeter is given credibility just for bringing up the subject.

Heather M. Milligan, director of marketing at Los Angeles-based Barger & Wolen LLP and founder of The Legal Watercooler blog (legalwatercooler.blogspot.com), said using Twitter breaks down the perception of lawyer-as-untouchable-figure and turns him or her into lawyer-as-person.

That’s because posts can include lawyers’ reflections on current events or breaking news or their contemporaneous accounts of day-to-day activities.

“I like to get that 360-degree view of people,” Milligan said. “To know all about them, from the business to their families, what’s going on with them, what their social interests are. Because we are identifying common interests. And with lawyers, clients hire people who they know, like and trust. And Twitter for me is an area where you can be known, liked and trusted very easily.”

That’s important, said Wipp, who, in addition to her law practice, helps small businesses market themselves through social media. She said that big business scandals over the years, and the bad press that accompanied them, have put distrust in the minds of the public.

Social networking, by its content-plus-conversation model, dispels distrust by revealing the real person behind the business card, she said.

“One of the biggest rules is listening first, and then sharing and disseminating information,” said Wipp, who has made tweeting a daily matter since joining Twitter a few months ago. “Social media is a conversation, not a sales pitch — or it should be, if it’s done right.”

LinkedIn: The ‘Relationship Initiator’

Nobody knows that better than David Barrett of Boston-based Hulien & Barrett LLC.
A civil litigator, Barrett is known as “the LinkedIn Lawyer,” as he has the most lawyer connections on the professional networking site www.linkedin.com.

More than 35 million registered users spanning 170 industries are registered at LinkedIn, which allows for profiles to be posted in a resumé-like way.

“I’ve had more success by being an open networker, by using LinkedIn as a relationship initiator,” Barrett said.

As an example, Barrett recalled a Pittsburgh attorney who contacted him recently through LinkedIn, asking if Barrett could recommend a litigator in Los Angeles. Because Barrett had set up specialty law groups within LinkedIn, he quickly made a match.

Forming such groups within the site, which can bring attorneys or followers together by area of practice, discipline or expertise, can add credibility, and thus, more referrals.

“By getting noncompeting lawyers from other parts of the U.S., or around the world in a lot of cases, to join those groups, … you’re the individual who people are looking to as being the head of that group,” said Steve Matthews, who runs Stem Legal Web Enterprises, a Mission, British Columbia-based consulting group for law firms. “That’s an authority-establishing strategy you’re going to put in place.”

Best of all, pages and profiles stemming from LinkedIn almost always are in the top 10 list returned from Google searches for law-practice fields.
Facebook: Remember Me?

Then there’s Facebook, which trails only MySpace in traffic for a social networking site.

Last August, online statistics group Hitwise found 20.56 percent of U.S. social networking traffic is at Facebook, with uses lasting an average of 20 minutes.

An iStrategyLabs report said that Facebook users between the ages of 35 and 54 grew from 1.85 million in June 2008 to 6.98 million in January 2009.

Setting up a profile includes adding high school and college names, graduation years and employment history. Then names of people an attorney may know will come up, and that’s where Milligan, of The Legal Watercooler blog, said the journey gets interesting.
“Just close your door and have some fun,” she said. “Just realize that, in the beginning, you’re going to start connecting with your friends from college and law school, past people … you’ve worked with.”

The next step, she added, is to identify where those people are now and determine how they can help your practice.

Matthews said sometimes that could mean thinking strategically by reaching further back.
“One of the things people don’t think about is your childhood contacts,” he said. “If you grew up in an affluent community — and a lot of lawyers have — it’s one of those situations where you may have a childhood friend who’s now in their forties or their fifties who’s in a very prominent, decision-making position.”

Wipp has been on Facebook for 1 1/2 years, and said through it, she gets at least one contact per week from someone she knew in the past, whether from high school or college. When her profession is brought up, she said it often times has led to her being hired on, or at least referred to someone else, simply because she has an instant connection with the acquaintance.

And, as attorneys know, referrals are just as good. Wipp said one of her neighbor’s employees just recently discovered Wipp when the neighbor had Wipp’s Facebook page up. It led to Wipp’s becoming the employee’s attorney.

A Matter of Time, Economics?

Yet, with all the advantages in social-media marketing and opportunities to become one with the public, what’s making attorneys hold back?

Barrett suggested a general refusal to look past the home page that the firm has used for years and face the din of Web users.

“I think a lot of lawyers are a bit skeptical about social media in general,” he said, “and really haven’t had a lot of opportunities to use a platform where open networking was something that could bring them business.”

But Wipp, the Michigan lawyer and marketing consultant, said because whole industries revolve around social media marketing, “The legal profession, by and large, is nowhere near any of this. So right now, there’s an amazing opportunity for lawyers to jump in. Because even though the market is saturated with other professions, it’s not saturated and done right by lawyers yet. So this is the time to learn how to do it, how to do it right, get on there and get the client. In this economy, there’s no choice anyway.”
Speaking of economics, there’s no cost to join Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, meaning the only investment is time.

Wipp said attorneys should not hesitate to put in the extra hours.

“If you don’t devote a portion of every single day to marketing, then you are losing opportunities every single day. It’s really about survive-and-thrive. You have to be disciplined and say, ‘I’m going to spend one half-hour every day to doing this,’ … whatever you have to do to continually engage your audience.”