Something to Twitter About…
♫ Tell me something good
Tell me that you like it …
What I got to give will sho nuff do you good.. ♫
Lyrics and Music by Stevie Wonder, recorded by Rufus and Chaka Khan, “Tell me Something Good“.
While Simon Chester may be leading the discussion on the application of Twitter for lawyers, there is no question that Twitter has proven its value for legal technology conferences.
There were many new and exciting aspects about ABA TECHSHOW 2009 including Richard Susskind’s keynote address on the end of lawyers. But to me, in looking back at ABA TECHSHOW, it was the influence and power of Twitter that is leaving the biggest impression.
What effect did Twitter have? I think it drew together a vast group of individuals and made them feel part of a ‘happening’. By subscribing to, reading and posting to #TECHSHOW, everyone with a laptop, Blackberry or other smart phone could tie into the collective experience of ABA TECHSHOW. If you had Twitter, you were part of the group. Not only could you listen to Richard Susskind’s keynote, you could tune in and read the thoughts and impressions of: @jordan_law21 (Jordan Furlong) or @TomMighell or @bobambrogi or @stevematthews or @allisonshields or (you get the picture). Moreover, you could gain insights into sessions that you were not even attending by just following the Twitter stream.
So what, do you say? One of the necessary components of any self-organizing system is the requirement to have a feedback loop. Twitter provided that feedback loop. Twitter acted as the central nervous system of the Conference. It allowed people to come together and not only share experiences, it allowed them to assemble in groups – witness how @kevinokeefe organized his Beer for Bloggers event Friday evening after the last session by simply blogging and tweeting about it – which was then virally picked up and spread like wildfire at the Conference.
It also allowed those who were not present to gain knowledge and spread the word. @rkodner (Ross Kodner) couldn’t be there this year, but that didn’t stop him from RT (re-tweeting) to his twitter network the tweets that he found most useful. This could only have raised awareness of ABA TECHSHOW and increased the odds that more people will come to ABA TECHSHOW next year, as Twitter has amply shown the value of the education programs to lawyers and others in the legal delivery process.
There were other (*positive*) effects. For one, seeing someone’s twitterpic meant that identifying people in the crowd became easier (I think this is an important effect of Twitter and those individuals who use a graphic rather than their picture may want to rethink that decision…). Conversations were easier to strike up, as you were not speaking to a stranger – you were speaking to a Twitter friend. Embedded in tweets, you received links to blogs and other web pages that contained useful content that were created right at the conference.
Twitter wasn’t finished after the conference was over. Courtesy of the #TECHSHOW hashname, blog posts and after-event details were Tweeted and noted. By my anecdotal impression only, #TECHSHOW generated far more tweets than #LMA that was happening at the same time (well, not just anecdotal – at the height of the conference, #TECHSHOW showed up on the top Twitter Tending Topics).
So when you next attend ABA TECHSHOW, certainly subscribe to the Twitter feed – what they have to give will sho nuff do you good…
I’m hesitant to voice dissent here, specially since I wasn’t able to be at Techshow, but I still have trouble with Twitter and, moreso, with some of the ways it’s used. Clearly it is now a phenom and, so, unstoppable until the next phenom comes along; and I’d hate to be seen as some benighted Canute ordering the waves to stay still.
The good is obviously the interconnectivity: with this microblogging all can have tiny websites that are a cinch to update and to which any may get the feeds (to put it in terms that are so last year). Nothing compares to this for ease and speed. In the right context — in the right circles of writers — this can be very powerful, no doubt about it. And if I’ve learned anything over the last decade or so it’s that our appetite for connection, even (or maybe especially) wan, attenuated connection, is insatiable.
But the ease leads to wretched excess sometimes, where, whether at conferences or not, people follow (or purport to) literally thousands of these tiny websites, so that the flow of incoming data would challenge the best speed reader. And, too, there is the silly business of the numbers — who has more followers– as though one’s 140 characters were pearls that thousands could and should value. This is the greed side of connection, I suppose, and it will sort itself out over time, because greed bubbles burst, as we’ve come to know.
Which points to what might be called the wretched poverty of Twitter: 140 characters, which cashes out to, what, 25 words? Talk about measuring out your life in coffee spoons. Of course if you’re laconic by nature this is less of a problem — or if you’re dealing in simple bits of information. Here, as David points out, Twitter shines: where’s the pub meetup? look at this website! I’m feeling drowsy! do you like Susskind? But let’s not get too carried away with the power of minimalism: this is no substitute for, well, longer expressions of thought — and serial tweeting, where you are really blogging but do it in ten or twenty successive tweets, is a misuse of the tool, cheating in effect.
I wonder, too, whether the urge to communicate all of the time (which all of us have) doesn’t lead to sub rosa tweeting, where thumbs fly under the table as you give the conference speaker the benefit of your best “continuous partial attention,” as the expression has it. Odd, in a way, that in a roomful of actual people, one might want to reach out to a correspondent.
Then there’s the content of the actual tweets. Take a look at what went back and forth at Techshow. You can, thanks to the true marvel of hashtags, as David explained, (one of a number of extrinsic tools “necessary” to shape the Twitter stream into something useful): http://hashtags.org/tag/techshow. For many or most of the tweets, perhaps, “you had to be there.”And you had to be following the same people that most of the people you were following were following, if you see what I mean: the number of @ signs that don’t point to a conversation you’re privy to is a measure of irrelevance and maybe annoyance.
But the fact is that people are doing it, people are straining out the signal from the noise (or simply surfing on the stream), and people are proselytizing. So I reckon that no amount of skepticism on my — or anyone’s — part will check the march. Indeed, looked at from above, so to speak, Twitter has now become the producer of a sufficient mass of data of a sufficiently varied nature that the tweets en masse are like the web itself: a corpus that must be, and is being, searched for kernels of value. Our attention will soon be off the production and squarely on to the business of searching and filtering the flow.
Still, before things shift entirely to the meta level and the presence of all those monkeys with typewriters, the skilled and the daft, is simply assumed, we should see if we can’t rescue some of the best aspects of microblogging for lawyers from the homogenizing effects of the craze. And it’s the experienced tweeters among us — David, Dominic, Steve, Connie et al. — who can help by talking about… if not “best practices,” then, at least, practices that work for lawyers.
Some useful commentary on this phenomenon from the ABA, and from Jim Calloway and Morgan Estes in Oklahoma.
The ABA column ends with some cautionary advice from Jim:
— Be careful about overuse of Twitter, lest followers start to wonder whether you have nothing better to do.
— If you’re using Twitter for practice development, watch how often you stray from your primary topic. “We all have limited time and you don’t want your signal to noise ratio to drift too much over into noise. I’m a bit old fashioned and still think it may be good to keep some professional distance in the attorney-client relationship.
— Don’t expect your tweets to be kept private. The only safe way for a lawyer to operate is to assume there is [no security] and you are Tweeting to the front page of your newspaper or website.
Part of the success factor is to manage expectations. You won’t read all of the tweets from all of your followers. It’s a true “river”. I always recommend that people jump in-stream, participate, and then get out. And NEVER worry about what they’ve missed.
As an example, friends won’t see me on twitter for days, and then suddenly I have several conversations (off & on) over a couple of hours. Erik Mazzone at the NC Bar calls me a streaky twitter user. I not only think that’s ok, but wouldn’t participate in any other way. I simply don’t have time.
You’ve got it right Simon that short discourse like this isn’t the place for substantive thought. That’s why I am still a big fan of blogging. Blogging also makes proper disclaimers available, and allows lawyers to maintain ownership of their IP, and lever their ideas & thoughts as online assets.
For me, twitter is more about human reaction, alternate perspectives, and as Dave says ‘the feedback loop’.
Best practices? It’s a tool that can vary greatly in terms of approach, but I understand the need. Maybe we should all go away & come back next week with our thoughts? Make it Twitter Best Practices Week or something? :)
Simon Chester said:
“Don’t expect your tweets to be kept private. The only safe way for a lawyer to operate is to assume there is [no security] and you are Tweeting to the front page of your newspaper or website.”
I agree with this. There was a website (dmfail.com, no longer in operation) that featured tweets that were meant to be private but were made public due to user error.
Naturally, any site like this would probably focus on messages that are racy or scandalous. They probably wouldn’t bother with exposing confidential information, or that someone destroyed or altered or back-dated some documents (not that anyone would ever do such a thing). But you never know.
but if you want to see how Twitter is being used right now (Wednesday 4 p.m. EDT) to organize the demonstrations in Moldavia, see this. Stepping into the stream, as Steven says, is just what you want…
Whether the authorities will be able to review the tweets when order is restored (by whichever side) and come calling, is a separate question. (Will tweets blow the whistle…?)
Stepping into the stream — or surfing the stream, as I called it — is indeed about the only way to handle the flow from a large flock (?) of tweeters. But notice that this comes at it from the passive or receptive side. It’s a little like flipping channels with the TV clicker. It assumes that someone else is doing the programming, writing the content. The question for most lawyers might be “Should I tweet?” rather than should I dip into the flow. Is there likely enough return on investment if I send my morsels into the torrent? Or do we simply assume that there are so many feet in the stream that your offering is bound to stub someone’s toe, someone important to you?
John’s example of Moldavian moblogging is interesting — what I could read of it. Not sure I’d want to plan a revolution this way though. Getting a “mob” out, okay.
Greetings:
To Tweet or not To Tweet? i wonder what Shakespeare’s plays would be like if they were written in the days of Twitter? But I digress. There is another aspect of Twitter that addresses this question – if you have a blog or web page and use it to market your practice – then this question should be answered in the affirmative. Google picks up on Tweets and uses them in your rankings. If you want to ‘bubble up’ to the first page of Google – there is no better – or easier – way to blog + Twitter.
I offer this humble example which I stumbled upon by accident last night. I googled “ABA TECHSHOW 2009” looking for current info. Out of all the people who were writing/blogging/tweeting about TECHSHOW – two of my Blog posts on ABA TECHSHOW are now listed in 3rd and 4th positions on the Google search. That kind of bubble-up effect is amazing – and it made the case for individuals using Twitter. I Tweeted and therefor I am.
The marketers out there in the larger firms should be paying attention…
Cheers,
Dave
http://www.thoughtfullaw.com
This is very interesting, David. Good find. How does that work, do you know? Does the fact that you will have tweeted about your blog post (once?) give your blog post greater Google relevance than it would have all on its own? If so, then constant tweets referring back to your blog will raise the blog’s ranking, quite apart from that of any one post — which is a kind of leveraging Google, no? I wonder if they’ll cotton on.
Good points about the positives of Twitter Dave. The gains by lawyers and the legal profession as a whole using Twitter far, far outweigh any risks. Learning, sharing, camaraderie, and networking. It’s now happening at lightening speed for those willing to relax a bit.
As a net consumer of the Twitterverse, I have to say that my favourite tweets are the ones which provide a link to blog content. As much as I enjoyed (and envied) those tweeting from Techshow, the most learning came from the blog posts which follow up from a particularly good session. Then you get the benefit of the blogger’s own reflections. Watching the Twitter stream is more like seeing the rough notes of that post as it develops.