Social Media: Ethics & Best Practices for Attorneys
Like financial professionals, attorneys bear the burden of using good sense and propriety online. Would that everyone bore a similar burden! (but I digress).
Friday morning I co-facilitated a continuing education seminar for the Mecklenburg County Bar on social media with Andy Ciordia and Ted Claypoole . The attorneys asked great questions and the three of us presenting enjoyed the lively discussion.
Peppering his ethics guidance with jaw-dropping anecdotes of ethical lapses by legal professionals, Ted boiled everything down to four categories of concern:
- Talking too loosely
- Improper investigation (pretexting)
- Sites that don’t provide room for proper disclaimers (think: Twitter)
- Advertising Rules
I’m unqualified to say anything about legal ethics, but from a middle-aged lay person’s vantage point, much of what Ted said seemed like common sense and good manners: don’t say anything about someone behind their back that you wouldn’t say to their face; don’t misrepresent yourself or your behavior; and don’t tell a judge you need a continuance because your father died if your Facebook page shows you were getting smashed at your college roommate’s wedding!
Advice for blogging, Facebook and Twitter
Andy and I showed several examples of what to do and not to do on the big three social media platforms:
Blogging: We didn’t need to dwell on the oft-repeated advice to publish frequently — they’d all heard it. We took it further to show how you can subscribe to content feeds to supplement your own articles but also warned to keep non-pertinent content off your site. We showed an example of an otherwise-good blogsite by a divorce lawyer who inexplicably featured an article on SEO and Google.
Huh? Stick to your knitting.
Facebook: We see lots of lawyers using their personal FB profile as a professional site. Some even call it “The Family Law Firm of Jane Doe” or similar appellations — a big no-no and a violation of FB’s terms of service. FB created “Pages” for commercial use. Go to my AUTHOR PAGE of FB and you’ll see how it differs from the personal.
Twitter: The main concern Andy and I expressed here is lack of engagement. Most of what we saw lawyers do is BROADCAST new blog posts or news of the firm. Blech. If you’re not engaging people on Twitter, don’t waste your time with it.
If you’re unsure where to take your social media marketing efforts, reach out. If I don’t have the answers, Andy or Ted will.
Presentation Note Taking
This morning I co-presented a workshop on social media for real estate agents with Andy Ciordia and Beth Griffiths. The Broker In Charge asked us to provide the presentation in advance so that she could print it out for everyone to take notes on.
This is what people ask you to do because they’re accustomed to death by PowerPoint. In such a death, the speaker lards the presentation with bullet points and basically reads them to the audience (like a first grade teacher at story time).
We don’t subject people to so-called presentations of this ilk.
Our presentations lend visual interest to what’s being said and reinforce the points.
Responding to the request
What did we do? We devised a handout for “guided note taking” that gave our audience questions and prompts to go with the slides. For example, Stop thinking about “creating” traffic. With social media, it’s about “getting in front” of it. What are you doing to use web-based sites and tools to get people to notice you?
Try this technique next time and be sure to wind it down with a solid question like these:
- How many homes would I have to sell each month to pay for this service?
- How many more homes could I list/sell if I were doing this?
In case you’ve never seen this video on the proper use of PowerPoint (or any multimedia during a presentation) be sure to watch it here.
March Book Lust
Big news: I’m writing a book with Matt Davio called Tradeoffs: Leveraging the Longs & Shorts of Life. We’ll use the language and practices of those who trade for a living to frame life’s tradeoffs: time for money, freedom for convention, risk for reward, and money for goods and services.
In a post-meltdown world where so many people feel the stakes are higher and the margin for error more narrow than ever before, Tradeoffs will introduce a general interest reader to how traders view “scalp,” “swing,” “directional,” “fade” or “breakout” trading setups, how they mitigate risk, and how they live with the outcomes of their trades.
We have a book agent who’s excited about the project and will help us get the proposal in tip-top shape by the end of April so he can hit the road with it. Stay tuned!
Trading From Your Gut: How To Use Right Brain Instinct & Left Brain Smarts To Become a Master Trader
by Curtis Faith
Reviewed by Dasan: Legendary trader Richard Dennis believed that trading was so simple that anyone with the right training and psychology could do it successfully. After making millions for himself in the commodity, stock, and FOREX markets, he trained complete novices how to trade in 2 weeks. He called them the “turtles.” He was right – a large number of the “turtles” went on to become very successful traders in their own right. Curtis Faith, the author of this book, was one of best of the turtles.
In “Trading From Your Gut” Curtis Faith’s discusses a central aspect of trading success: Intuition. While most mediocre traders let emotions drive their trading, better traders use primarily rational thought. The best traders of all, the master traders, use a balance of intuition and rational thought. Like the experienced poker player that just knows what the other player has, these master traders can identify trend reversals simply by “gut feel” which comes from a combination of experience and underlying rational thought.
This is an excellent book for the intermediate level investor. The author does give a basic explanation of a rudimentary swing trade system, but it is just enough knowledge to be dangerous. I would not recommend this book for a rank novice. However, if you have some experience trading stocks or commodities already, this book is extremely valuable. For me as an experienced hedge fund investor, I found his concepts mainly affirmed in a concise way what has taken me years to learn. In this way, this book could make a moderately experienced trader more successful very quickly.
The main thesis of the book is the importance of intuition in trading, especially by experienced traders who already have mastered their emotions. He says it like this: “A balance between left-brain analysis and right-brain intuition is critical for optimal trading.” He quotes many experts in this book, which adds a lot of value; for example, he quotes Barry Ritholz’s idea that “wisdom is the capability to have `strong opinions, weakly held.’” Faith emphasizes the importance for a master trader to think independently. He writes “If you want to be a master trader, you need to develop your own reasons for making trades.” He illustrates the concept of waiting for the right trade by comparing it to surfing at the beach, waiting for the right wave. The book is full of detailed examples like this, which illustrate his trading concepts. Faith wraps up the book with a discussion on ways to limit risk by being flexible, having a plan “B” and sizing positions properly to avoid overcommitment of your capital.
This book is valuable to any serious trader or investor looking to raise the level of their game. Novice investors have other volumes to read first.
Here’s my co-author Matt interviewing author Curtis Faith:
The Back Channel: How Audiences are Using Twitter and Social Media and Changing Presentations Forever
by Cliff Atkinson
Reviewed by yours truly: This book caught my eye because it grasped a phenomenon I’ve observed at events where the audience gives more eyeball time to their netbooks and smart phones than to the presenter. I figured someday I’d figure out how to harness the power of this behavior, and author Cliff Atkinson beat me to it. Mr Atkinson is THE authority to write on the matter. In addition to writing Beyond Bullet Points, he designed the presentations that helped persuade a jury to award a $253 million verdict in the nation’s first Vioxx trial in 2005. Fortune magazine called the presentations “frighteningly powerful.”
For those new to the back channel and the ways of Twitter, never fear. The book starts there, not with boring exposition, but with a real-life event where panelist Guy Kawasaki noticed a critical tweet (Twitter update) about him and asked the tweep (person who tweeted) to step up and explain the remark. After setting the context for Twitter and the back channel with this case study, Mr Atkinson goes into the mechanics of Twitter and other technological means for sustaining an official back channel.
The part of the book that everyone presenting can use (with or without a back channel) describes how to be an editor, curator and taste-maker to your audience. Thinking of yourself in these ways makes it 100% easier to craft a presentation.
Mr Atkinson outlines a strategy for JOINING the back channel’s conversation, including how to manage a “conversational presentation.” Presenters with and without a back channel should follow this advice
You can no longer get away with putting up a slide that lists Agenda or Introduction at the start of your presentation. Nor can you get away with kicking off your presentation with too many details or a list of your accomplishments. In a world in which your audience is accustomed to high-quality media at their fingertips, you need to capture their attention out of the gate. You must engage your audience within the first five slides or at least the first five minutes of your presentation.
The book offers a chapter on how to handle the positive and negative feedback from the back channel. Particularly helpful is the advice that speakers should practice scenarios that put them in a range of difficult situations. He gives five scenarios to practice: “You’re not listening to us;” Your Facts are wrong or misleading;” “Your material is a mismatch for us;” “Your material is boring;” and “You made me mad.”
Finally, relying on an excellent case study from a conference gone snarky via the backchannel, Mr Atkinson shows how Chris Brogan (author of Trust Agents) turned the situation around. Here’s the 10-point checklist for managing an unruly back channel:
- Establish a reputation
- Listen and collect stories
- Dispense with pretense
- Talk to the elephant in the room (if there is one)
- Make it you, you, you instead of me, me, me
- Check in with the audience early and often
- Improvise
- Stay grounded
- Ignore the small stuff
- Keep things in perspective
This slim volume is worth the $34.99 list price and includes a free 45-day searchable online edition. Both of my thumbs are way up.
Why We Make Mistakes: How we look without seeing, forget things in seconds, and are all pretty sure we are way above average
by Joseph T. Hallinan
Publishers Weekly review: Pulitzer winner for his stories on Indiana’s medical malpractice system, Hallinan has made himself an expert on the snafus of human psychology and perception used regularly (by politicians, marketers, and our own subconscious) to confuse, misinform, manipulate and equivocate. In breezy chapters, Hallinan examines 13 pitfalls that make us vulnerable to mistakes: “we look but don’t always see,” “we like things tidy” and “we don’t constrain ourselves” among them. Each chapter takes on a different drawback, packing in an impressive range of intriguing and practical real-world examples; the chapter on overconfidence looks at horse-racing handicappers, Warren Buffet’s worst deal and the secret weapon of credit card companies. He also looks at the serious consequences of multitasking and data overload on what is at best a two- or three-track mind, from deciding the best course of cancer treatment to ignoring the real factors of our unhappiness (often by focusing on minor but more easily understood details). Quizzes and puzzles give readers a sense of their own capacity for self-deception and/or delusion. A lesson in humility as much as human behavior, Hallinan’s study should help readers understand their limitations and how to work with them.
Genius on the Edge : The Bizarre Double Life of Dr. William Stewart Halsted
by Gerald Imber
Intro to a Fresh Air interview with the author: In the second half of the 19th century, New York City’s population swelled from several hundred thousand to just over 2 million people. Conditions were not pleasant: Sewers were virtually nonexistent; piles of manure sat several inches high on sidewalks; and the city was overrun by disease.
Medical practices of the time were crude, at best: If surgical procedures were performed, they were done without sterilizing the equipment or the operating room, and typically ended with the patient losing an entire limb, if not his life.
It was in this environment that Dr. William Halsted began his surgical career. Halsted, who began the nation’s first residency program, pioneered techniques ranging from blood transfusions to sterilizing operating rooms. He also developed the radical mastectomy — also known as the Halsted mastectomy — reducing the local recurrence of breast cancer in patients nearly 50 percent. When Johns Hopkins Hospital opened its Department of Surgery in 1889, Halsted was named its first supervisor.
Though his legacy suggests a medical pioneer who made surgery safer and more precise, Halsted’s life was frequently messy.
That dual life is examined in Gerald Imber’s new biography of the doctor, Genius on the Edge: The Bizarre Double Life of Dr. William Stewart Halsted.
Imber traces Halsted’s journey from a young Columbia-trained medical student to a successful surgeon who secretly suffered from several narcotic addictions. Imber, himself a plastic surgeon, says that while Halsted was a “rigid perfectionist in some portions of his life, [he was] totally negligent and forgetful in others. He could leave a patient in a hospital bed for weeks on end and forget to operate on them.”
Imber talks to Fresh Air about Halsted’s dual lives and about 19th century American medicine. Imber is an internationally known plastic surgeon who specializes in facial rejuvenation and noninvasive surgical techniques.
Please tell me if you have a book to recommend or review for April’s post.
Nuke the Bullets!
Great advice in this video on SUPPORTING your talk with a presentation (Powerpoint, Keynote, etc), not leaning on it.
SPAM Tweetup
Looking forward to seeing anyone who wants to talk about SPAM in Charlotte Weds, November 11 at 11:30 :
- Who decides when spam is officially SPAM
- Making sure you’re not mistaken for a spammer
- Best practices for email marketing (including newsletters)
- How to handle spammers
By nature, a tweetup is informal, so drop in at Mama Ricotta’s and meet some great tweeple. Not tweeting yet? This group might convince you to give it a twhirl.
Spamhaus: Cyber Crime Fighter
In September I had the pleasure of being a Twitter panelist on how to avoid the spam filters when emailing. This is the third time I’ve spoken formally on the subject (if you consider tweeting “formal”). By this third presentation, it struck me that spam is like porn, everyone thinks they know it when they see it, but few can define it in their own words.*
Looking for the most succinct explanation, I turned to the Spamhaus Project, an international non-profit organization whose mission is to track the Internet’s spam operations, to provide dependable realtime anti-spam protection for internet networks, to work with law enforcement agencies to identify and pursue spammers worldwide, and to lobby governments for effective anti-spam legislation.
The word “spam” as applied to email means “unsolicited bulk email”
The two most important words there are UNSOLICITED and BULK.
Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent.
Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.
A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.
Unsolicited email is normal email, for example first contact inquiries, job inquiries and sales inquiries.
Bulk email is normal email, for example, subscriber newsletters, customer communications, discussion lists.
Point of clarification: The CAN-SPAM Act goes beyond the technical definition of spam; it applies to commercial email sent to recipients in the US and originated in the States. Download this CAN-SPAM Quick Guide.
*Wow your friends with your command of factoids
Justice Stewart
I’m not the first to use the phrase ” everyone thinks they know it when they see it.” The origin is in a US Supreme Court case that helped define the legal standards for determining obscenity. Here’s a bit about the case.
In 1964, movie theater manager Nico Jacobellis was convicted of exhibiting an obscene movie, Louis Malle’s Les Amants, “The Lovers.” The ads were hyperbolic.
“When all conventions explode . . . in the most daring love story ever filmed!”
“As close to authentic amour as is possible on the screen.”
“The frankest love scenes yet seen on film.” “Contains one of the longest and most sensuous love scenes to be seen in this country.”
In the words of the Supreme Court decision: “‘The Lovers’ involves a woman bored with her life and marriage who abandons her husband and family for a young archaeologist with whom she has suddenly fallen in love. There is an explicit love scene in the last reel of the film, and the State’s objections are based almost entirely upon that scene. The film was favorably reviewed in a number of national publications, although disparaged in others, and was rated by at least two critics of national stature among the best films of the year in which it was produced.”
Although the film was shown in some 100 U.S. cities, including Columbus and Toledo, Ohio, Jacobellis was prosecuted for showing it in Cleveland Heights, a middle-class suburb of Cleveland. In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court decided that Jacobellis had been wrongly convicted.
The most famous opinion in the case came from Justice Potter Stewart, who said that the only unprotected material in his opinion was “hard-core pornography.” Stewart expressed his concern that such material was impossible to define. “But I know it when I see it.”
| The word “Spam” as applied to Email means Unsolicited Bulk Email (“UBE”). Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent. Bulk means that the | |||||||
A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.
|
Me, the Twitter Panelist
I find Twitter to be an efficient and effective way to grow professionally and personally.
My friends at Understanding Marketing facilitate a weekly discussion on marketing and PR topics of interest to small business owners on TweetGrid and asked me to be the expert on call Tuesday 9/22/09 8-9om EST.
We’ll be discussing CAN-SPAM and how to write email marketing campaigns and e-newsletters so they won’t be scraped into the “junk” or “bulk” or “spam” filters of recipient mailboxes.
Since it’s a Twitter-based discussion, anyone can chime in with questions and answers — and it’s free.
If you have anything specific to ask and can’t attend next week, leave me a comment below and I’ll get it in. Have a study or resource on the topic you’d like to share? Again, leave a note below.
“I loved the way he used PowerPoint”
The anti-PPT bandwagon doesn’t have room for another rider. My only addition to the chorus is that a bad PPT-based presentation is like a bad dog — blame the owner!
PPT isn’t inherently bad, but, like a Rotweiller, can be placed in the wrong hands and do real damage.
I generally agree with the authors of Real Leaders Don’t do PowerPoint: How to sell yourself and your ideas, “You are the message. Who you are–your character, experience, values–shapes the message your listeners hear.”
Dan Ariely, PowerPoint master
Last year I heard Dan Ariely, bestselling author and professor at my B-school (Fuqua — Duke) speak on behavioral economics and his first book Predictably Irrational.
In staccato diction, he regaled us with tales of our irrational behavior — like why we won’t pay $3000 for a leather couch in the family room while we will pay the same amount for a leather interior in our family car — and he did it with the delivery skills of any comedian’s aspiration.
If he’d been a rock star we’d have whipped out our cigarette lighters and stomped our feet until he gave an encore.
And yes, he used PPT, including a slide with an x-ray of Homer Simpson’s brain. See? I remembered that one.
In defense of PowerPoint
Recall a time when someone gave a terrific, memorable, actionable presentation WITH PPT, as Professor Ariely did.
I’ll wait.
OK, I can’t wait all day.
If you did have the good fortune of attending such an event, you’ll recall that PPT didn’t make it great — it was great because the speaker had something to say and said it with conviction; they knew their stuff cold, engaged the audience, told stories and stayed ON POINT. Did the PPT help? Maybe, after all, who knows how it would have gone without the screen?
Reasons for PPT:
- Leave-behind for those who couldn’t make it to the live event
- Guided handout for taking notes
- Satisfies the need for visual stimulation
- Illustrate points graphically
Bottom line: No one says “I loved the way he used PowerPoint;” but if you’re a good presenter they’ll say “I’d go see him speak again.”
Malcolm Gladwell speaks
A friend of mine had the good fortune of attending The Foundation for the Carolinas’ annual meeting. You can hardly drag me to one of those, but I wish I’d gone to this one. Why? Bestselling author and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell did the keynote.
According to my friend, Gladwell took a wireless mike and roved the audience, telling stories about a town in (I believe) Pennsylvania and how and why it prospered and failed. My friend, a public relations pro who is not easily impressed, was awed.
Just the opposite of Ariely, Gladwell is soft spoken. Where Ariely is irreverent, Gladwell is earnest. Both can bring the house down.
I’m not a qualified speaking coach — my specialty is the content — but to me this is the bottom line: You don’t have to be “dynamic” to get your message across. The book mentioned earlier, Real Leaders Don’t do PowerPoint: How to sell yourself and your ideas, got good reviews and the website and book Presentation Zen is chock full of great stuff. And I’m always here to help.
It’s easy to bash PPT, and you’re welcome to bash away in the comments section. I’d really like to hear from you about a presentation that thrived WITH the visual support.
Beware the Fart Joke
We are a collection of "selves"
Catching up on reading this week at the beach, including past issues of my favorite magazine, The Atlantic.
The November 2008 edition carried a fascinating article that touched on neuroeconomics, or the neurophysiology of economic decisions. I love this stuff.
According to Yale professor of psychology, Paul Bloom, “…remembering something is easiest while you are in the same state in which you originally experienced it. Students do better when they are tested in the room in which they learned the material; someone who learned something while he was angry is better at remembering that information when he is angry again; the experience of one’s drunken self is more accessible to the drunk self than to the sober self. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”
Bloom’s research underscores why effective business communications need to take people to an emotional place in order to cement the message. Warren Buffett did this well in his 2009 annual letter to shareholders when he drew a parallel between derivatives and venereal disease: “Participants seeking to dodge troubles face the same problem as someone seeking to avoid venereal disease: It’s not just whom you sleep with, but also whom they are sleeping with.”
If that gives you a creepy feeling, the Oracle from Omaha met his objective; he hates derivatives.
More Buffett bon mots:
- Tony and I feel like two hungry mosquitoes in a nudist camp. Juicy targets are everywhere.
- By year end 2007, the half dozen or so companies that had been the major players in this business had all fallen into big trouble. The cause of their problems was captured long ago by Mae West: “I was Snow White,but I drifted.”
- If merely looking up past financial data would tell you what the future holds,the Forbes 400 would consist of librarians.
- The tennis crowd would call my mistakes “unforced errors.”
- Upon leaving, our feelings about the business mirrored a line in a country song: “I liked you better before I got to know you so well.”
- Investors should be skeptical of history-based models. Constructed by a nerdy-sounding priesthood using esoteric terms such as beta, gamma, sigma and the like, these models tend to look impressive. Too often, though, investors forget to examine the assumptions behind the symbols. Our advice: Beware of geeks bearing formulas.
Advice for speakers
Back to Paul Bloom in The Atlantic story, “Good smells, such as fresh bread, make people kinder and more likely to help a stranger; bad smells, like farts (the experimenters used fart spray from a novelty store), make people more judgmental. If you ask people to unscramble sentences, they tend to be more polite, minutes later, if the sentences contain positive words like honor rather than negative words like bluntly. .. All of these studies support the view that each of us contains many selves-some violent, some submissive, some thoughtful-and that different selves can be brought to the fore by different situations.“
Next time you’re delivering a presentation, keep this in mind. The oft-repeated advice to open with a joke should be tempered by what you just learned about neurophysiology — don’t make it a fart joke.
Next Q: Online/Offline
I’m having a good time responding to questions from my 6/18/09 presentation to CPSE. Thanks, ladies.
Q: With so much moving online, what do you bother to print?
If a tree falls and no one hears it...
A: I’m not qualified to answer questions about e-commerce and web-based customer self-service. I’ll answer this from the perspective of the solo-preneur who asked the question.
What goes online and in print varies from a person to person and must align with industry norms. For example, when I ran an environmental contracting business my market was general contractors with public-bid jobs. Contractors are low-tech, and expect bids to be FAXED, not emailed. Most of them have Yahoo or Hotmail accounts and a LIGHT web presence if any. I could have senselessly spent a fortune on multimedia that would have been like the proverbial tree falling in the woods with no one to hear it. Instead, I hired a telemarketer who made personal contact with the estimators and then followed up with a customized packet that spoke to our expertise on the kinds of jobs the contractor bid.
On the other hand, when I ran a software and services consulting firm we had to demonstrate our tech chops — everything was online.
Answer these questions:
- Where do the people you most want for customers turn when they’re looking for your products and services? Referrals from people they know or from independent raters like Angie’s List? Straight to the Google search page?
- When you’re at a business mixer, how often do people ask you to send them a packet of information?
- When you present your qualifications/proposal to a new prospect, what materials do they spend time REALLY looking at? What do they repeatedly ask for that you don’t often bring?
- Why do your competitors do what they do? They may have best practices or they may be laggards, but it’s always prudent to check them out.
- Do you represent a product or offer a service that requires buyers to hunker down and study to make a decision? Offer that online for sure — also in print if you’ve got lots of money to spend. When I meet a new client I find it helpful to simply sit with them at a computer screen and go through pages on my site and elsewhere. This assures that they’ve seen my site and gives them a constant place to go if a printed piece goes astray.
Business cards & postcards
Business cards are, in my view, still a must. There’s an ongoing and lively discussion on whether you should include your social media “handles” on the card (for example, you can follow me on Twitter @TamelaRich). I can see all points of view.
I also carry 4.25″ x 5.5″ double sided postcards that act as a mini home page. Most people, when given the choice, will take a p-card instead of a b-card. Given the nature of my work, that’s all the print collateral I need, b-cards and p-cards. Your mileage may vary.
How ’bout it, experts? What else should entrepreneurs/small business owners consider?
