 Ever since Adrian Lurssen over on the JD Scoop blog from JD Supra posted the suprising list 145 Lawyers (and Legal Professionals) to Follow on Twitter last week, I have had a dramatic increase in lawyer, law student, and law librarian followers to my own Twitter account. I was surprised to be placed at #2 on the list, only behind our own Steve Matthews in the #1 position. Wow! Well, Steve gets special Twitter link love for having created Legal Voices, a website pulling together a number of key legal Twitter feeds.
I was asked by a friend in communications whether the lawyers (mostly U.S. attorneys) are using pseudonyms or their real names. Interestingly, most are using what are presumably their real names, and are indicating city, practice area specialties, and law firms in their brief bios. The majority are also using their professional photos for their avatars. Very smart personal branding!
A few conclusions I draw from the number of lawyers now on Twitter:
I bet being able to easily post from a Blackberry doesn't hurt, either. Since that list was posted last week, it has already grown to 259 lawyers and legal professionals. Adrian Lurssen has also written a follow-up post Lawyers (and Legal Professionals) to Follow Online: An Update including some follow-up discussion about "connecting the dots" on how and why to use Twitter.
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More: in Practice of Law or Technology | from Connie Crosby
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Connie:
Oh no – the *final* definitive argument to get a Blackberry! I can twitter from anywhere, anytime!
Congrats on the #2 spot next to Steve, who bears special mention for moving to the head of the pack!
I wonder if this should be called social networking or rather, social experimenting. I think we are all trying to determine the impact of Twitter and other such tools from the inside out…I would love to see a study that tracks some metrics regarding the tie-in between the business case and Twitter. Perhaps it all depends on how you define your goals, as per Steven Covey…
Cheers,
Dave Bilinsky
http://www.thoughtfullaw.com
I agree, Connie, that the BlackBerry is the key here: Twitter is nearly email in many respects, so it bids fair to be adopted by lawyers perhaps. But you do have to say that 145 — or 260, the number now on the list — is not a big number for all of the lawyers in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. True, it's only about a year and a half old (we blogged about it back in January of 2007), but my guess is that the take-up rate among lawyers is way smaller than it is among many other groups.
Dave, at this point all online social networks are in many ways an experiment and have yet to mature. There are those of us who have been using them for years, but they are really only just starting to become mainstream.
Simon, I would argue that lawyers are only just starting to discover Twitter so, even though it has been around for a couple years at least, the lawyer adoption rate is just starting to pick up. I think we are seeing some good momentum from various articles (such as those Steve has put together) and the JD Supra list.
Last week when I was teaching a course on social networking to contact professionals (call centre managers) most of whom were not on Facebook, most had heard of Twitter. I think it is just starting to hit the mainstream and the real impact has yet to be felt.
First to be clear, I'm following Connie's lead when it comes to twitter. Look at her post count, # of followers, and the uproar when her account got accidentally yanked a while back.
One interesting comparison though… how many legal bloggers are producing content on a daily basis? I have the Justia firehose of all blog updates running into my RSS reader. I never have the time to read them, but I do have a sense that about 200-400 posts a day are being produced.
So I'm thinking, perhaps 2-300 twitter users isn't all that bad, and the threshold to participation is a lot lower than blogging(?). Also, blogs & twitter go really well together. It's very cool to hit the publish button on your blog post, and then run over to twitter to see the questions and kudos. Same kind of instant gratification we used to get when other bloggers picked up our posts and relayed to their readers.
And in terms of adoption, when CNN is pulling quotes out of twitter and relaying them to prime time news? I would expect that adoption rate to increase. Lawyers included.
I'm a lawyer, too, and I'm completely excited about these recent developments! Granted, I work in web marketing, but I'm a lawyer by training. I commend the attorneys using Twitter today; very forward-thinking of them! Pretty proud of my trade as a result!
While I readily accept that I abuse Twitter and use it only for communicating nonsense with friends – with very occasional uploads about a podcast or a post – I can't really see Twitter being used by professional lawyers in the UK on a large scale – simply because (a) UK lawyers are not the most techno minded of people (b) what are they actually going to say? and (c) it is highly unlikely a lawyer's client would actually want to read his / her lawyer's Twitters.
Just a thought – maybe things are different in the US and Canada. We can barely get lawyers to blog in the UK – so I really don't see them Twittering.
Being honest – I am finding it increasingly difficult to actually use Twitter – (a) It is slow, (b) It is often offline, albeit only for minutes (c) It is fairly lumpy in use on a Mac (maybe different for PC) and (d) I am not sure I need to know all that I read on Twitter.
Not being negative, overly,…. after all I can simply block those I do not wish to read.
Information is crucial to a lawyer – I would, for my part, far prefer to read a detailed analysis in a blog than a short pithy comment on Twitter – and I certainly don't need Twitter to keep me abreast of what is happening on blogs – I have several hundred blogs bookmarked on a private Pageflakes page – and I have made the collection of UK Blogs available on my online magazine for all to use should they wish to.
Also – there is a ridiculous number of spammers on twitter – I am getting a lot of emails saying 'X' is following me. I am now reluctrant to actually read any of these emails because it takes time to discover that "Pammie-Jo is following 400,000 people, has no followers and only one update.'…. so… for the moment, the serious people aren't getting clicked on by me, simply because I don't have the time.
The Spam issue is a very serious issue for Twitter. I cannot believe US or Canadian lawyers are tolerant about wasting billable time clicking on a follower email only to discover that it is a spammer?
Perhaps I am doing something wrong or missing the point – it is not unknown for both these phenomena to be part of my life
But… that said – it is free and I get some pleasure from abusing Twitter….. but, then again, I don't exactly toe any party lines… nor do I care to or plan to :-)
To me it seems like it's just the natural progression that everything in media takes. I can't see why anyone wouldn't want to take advantage of the type of opportunities that Twitter presents. Especially when it's really at no cost to the user.