There is one piece of news this week that may have finally brought home to those in business how important social media is, the Joe McElderry v Rage Against the Machine story. It’s one that all lawyers and law firm marketing depts will hopefully be taking note of.
Before you stop reading let me say this isn’t going to be a blog post campaigning to get us all go web 2.0 and set up internal facebook systems. No, this is simply to raise awareness. As I’ve mentioned before Legal IT’ers need to be educating their lawyers (and perhaps some of their colleagues) about social media. It isn’t just generation Z posting pictures of themselves and their friends in uncompromising positions on open facebook accounts or posting about what you had for breakfast on twitter. No, this is about helping your firm and your clients to understand how social media could see their services or products destroyed in a tsunami of negative online comment!
It only took just two people and a facebook group to wreck Simon Cowell’s hold on the Christmas #1, a zero cost campaign against weeks of million viewer pulling X Factor “adverts”.
But still it’s amazing at how few businesses really “get” social media and prefer to just ignore it, rather than engage with it. Even in the IT industry! There are few Legal IT vendors that really “get it”. But they all need to, it’s no longer about good press releases and a good website, it’s about comment, engaging with your customers through interactive online content.
So I’m going to sign off with a challenge to the Legal IT vendors. If you read blogs for comment on your firm, how about letting us know that you’re a step ahead of most IT companies and post a simple comment on this post? Go on, given the time of year ow about just a simple “Happy Christmas from xyz plc”!
Happy Christmas from Esselar! Some good points here Jason, it often amazes me how companies continue to ignore social media completely, let alone contribute to it.
Hopefully you will hear more from @esselar in the future.
Hi Jason!
*** MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM CONNECTEGRITY ***
Delighted to be first one here! 🙂
We are Connectegrity, and we are just launching – recession or no recession!
You can read more about us here: http://www.connectegrity.com/about/ and we would love you to come and subscribe to our blog too: http://www.connectegrity.com/category/blog/
If you are on twitter you can follow me @markbower and my business partner @lindacheunguk
Look forward to many good discussions with you.
Mark.
Happy Holidays from DocAuto!
This is a good illustration of the power of social media, but these kind of campaigns have been succesful in the past without the aid of social media.
Sports Personality of the Year has been hit by several email campaigns and in 1991 by a campaign run by Angling Times which saw angler Bob Nudd get the most votes (although I understand this was actually overruled by the BBC!)
I have seen quite a few social media agencies / gurus posting about how this is some new dawn in marketing, but I think the reality is that it will be very hard to harness this kind of grassroots activism for commercial purposes.
@Peninsulawyer – You make good points, however I would there are some key differences that social media bring:
1. looking at your Angling Times example, in the far past you had to be some kind of institution to be able to start an effective campaign. Today social media makes it possible for _anybody_ to start an effective campaign.
2. A key difference from your email example is that with email campaign, people have to make a an active decision to support the campaign by thinking about who in their network might be interested, perhaps adding a little intro the the email, and forwarding on. Today social media reduces that effort to almost zero. Just click the link and immediatley _everyone_ in my social network knows about my support.
This is why social media is different, and why (marketing) agencies are so interested.
Mark.