Doug Cornelius .com

It was a great session this morning with the New England Chapter of the Professional Marketing Forum in Boston on Establishing the Digital Relationship.

Tim Parker of The Bloom Group started things off with a great overview of web 2.0 and its use by professional service firms. Tim is in the middle of a survey of the websites of the 80 largest professional services firms in the United States. This is a follow up to the The Bloom Group‘s 2006 report: From Electronic Brochure to Online Lead Generator: Powering Up the Professional Services Website.  Tim threw out some interesting numbers.

• In 2006 only 6% of the websites had blogs. 
• Now 20% have blogs.
• In 2006, only 15% had RSS feeds. 
• Now, 48% have RSS feeds.

Here are Tim’s slides:

I was up next, focusing on the use of blogs in professional service firms.  Largely, my pitch was that converting some of your existing activities and publications to a blog platform can yield great results.

This was my slidedeck:

Last up was Yuval Zukerman of Molecular Inc with his presentation So You Have a Blog. Now What?

Yuval focused on the viral nature of Web 2.0 and how it can quickly spread your message across collections and network. He called for the audience to move beyond the walled gardens of their own websites and into the social collections of information on the internet. Post your events in Upcoming. Post your photos in Flickr or Picassa. Display your presentation in SlideShare. Host your videos in YouTube.

This is Yuval’s slidedeck

Thanks to Bob Buday of The Bloom Group for inviting me to speak. I saw a few bobbing heads in the audience. I think some people got the message. I think I even saw light bulbs starting to glow over a few heads.

UPDATE: I added Tim’s slides after the original post.

I was poking around for a definition of Class A buildings and had a hard time finding a solid definition.

In BOMA’s Building Class Definitions, buildings are grouped into Class A, Class B and Class C. But BOMA does not recommend the publishing of a classification rating for individual properties.

Metropolitan Base Definitions

Class A. Most prestigious buildings competing for premier office users with rents above average for the area. Buildings have high quality standard finishes, state of the art systems, exceptional accessibility and a definite market presence.

Class B. Buildings competing for a wide range of users with rents in the average range for the area. Building finishes are fair to good for the area. Building finishes are fair to good for the area and systems are adequate, but the building does not compete with Class A at the same price.

Class C. Buildings competing for tenants requiring functional space at rents below the average for the area.

BOMA goes further with International definitions:

International Base Definitions

Investment. Investment quality properties are those that are unique in their location in the best metropolitan markets in the world, their design and construction quality, the solidity of the tenants and the tenant markets that they serve and the outstanding building management that is responsible for operating and maintaining them. These properties stand out as leaders not only within their own metropolitan areas but also within the international investment community. Investment properties usually contain state of the art mechanical, electrical, life safety, elevator and communications systems. Their finishes are of the highest standards and they often provide the occupants with a mix of amenities – in variety and quality – that is exceptional. Often they house a lead tenant for whom the property is named and usually they are located in a premier metropolitan area. Investment grade properties need not be considered to be “trophy” material but trophy properties are usually investment grade.

Institutional. Institutional grade properties are those of sufficient size and stature that they merit attention by large national or international investors, hence the name. These properties are of good design and construction, although they are rarely monumental in design or the use of construction materials. They are typically large. They may be located in secondary metropolitan areas, but invariably they will have a very stable tenant base.

Speculative. Speculative properties usually will conform to popular design conventions (at the time that they are constructed), but without the use of exceptional materials or construction methods. The design and construction of these properties emphasizes functionality, in contrast with aesthetics or image and the design rarely reflects the image of any particular tenant or occupant. To attract national or international attention, speculative properties must be relatively large, although minimum size requirements are lower for properties located in premier office markets. They are often occupied by multiple tenants.

Of course, Wikipedia has an entry: Wikipedia’s Class A Office Space

Although the US seems to be lacking objective classification of buildings, the Moscow office market has laid out some objective standards for classifying buildings: Office Building Classification. According to the Moscow Office of Jones Lang LaSalle:

The new classification aims to divide the office stock into three classes according to a number of objective criteria. The classification was developed with the participation of professionals from the Construction, Property Management and Office Service industries.  The principal difference of the new classification from the previous one is the division of stock into ?, ?+ and ?- classes. The major difference is also in giving a more structured criteria for modern office building classification. Leading real estate consultants: CB Richard Ellis Noble Gibbons, Colliers International, Cushman and Wakefield, Stiles and Riabokobylko and Jones Lang LaSalle have prepared a new classification of office buildings, dividing modern quality office stock  into 3 classes: A, B+ and B-.

Square Feet started this with his (or her) Guide to Office Building Classifications.

Disclaimers

Mary Abraham of Above and Beyond KM has been thinking about the concept of mandatory blogging for a while:

• What Have You Learned?
• Unsociable Uses of Social Media
• Knowledge Management Made Mandatory?
• Knowledge Management Made Easier

Mary seems to have moved beyond the concept of mandatory blogging to encouraged blogging.

Now that is a concept I can get behind.

Blogging is not for everyone. It is a new way of thinking and a new way of capturing information. The key is to show people the positive benefits of using this new way to communicate and capture knowledge.

We need to lead by example. We need to show the positive success stories of blog within an enterprise.

Here at The Firm, we just launched our third internal blog this week. I am already starting to see to some positive results.

In last week’s Wall Street Journal, there was an article on Developers Diversified Realty Corp.’s plan to expand into Russia: Mall Developer Targets Russia.

I found the statistic on retail space to be really interesting.

In Russia, the volume of shopping space per 1,000 inhabitants makes up about 420 square feet, according to Maxim Karbasnikoff, European Director, Russia, at brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle. In contrast, there is 25,758 square feet of shopping space available for every 1,000 people in the U.S.

 It makes me want to head out to the Chestnut Hill Mall and mark off my own 5 feet square of space in the courtyard.

Disclaimers

On Thursday morning I will be presenting to the New England Chapter of the Professional Marketing Forum in Boston on Web 2.0 as a marketing tool for professional service organizations. Here is more information:

Establishing The Digital Relationship

While other industries have been far more aggressive in using the latest Web technologies, professional services firms have not been sitting on the sidelines. As of this March, more than 25% of the 200 largest U.S. law firms had blogs, with the number of blogs growing by 49% since August 2007. Consulting firms such as Accenture are encouraging employees to blog. A number of management consulting firms have made their Websites more interactive and informative, using tools like RSS feeds to update clients and prospects on new articles and other information that they publish. Others have Facebook profiles that give job seekers and prospects information on a professional firm and allow people to talk to others about the firm. Accounting firms such as Deloitte has numerous webcasts and podcasts on different topics, and email subscriptions based on viewers’ preferences.

Despite all the excitement, convincing partners at many professional firms to experiment with and invest in such “Web 2.0” technologies is not easy. In this session, we’ll hear from two professional firms at the leading edge of using such technologies about their experiences – good, bad and ugly. We’ll also hear the interim results of a new study on the Web practices of the 80 largest consulting, law, accounting and IT services firms.

Featuring speakers from:

• Goodwin Procter – Attorney Douglas E. Cornelius, a senior attorney in the law firm’s real estate practice and a member of its Knowledge Management department. He will discuss how his blogs have helped this major law firm create client awareness and share knowledge internally.

• Molecular Inc. – Mr. Yuval Zukerman, a consultant at this large Boston-based interactive agency, who has worked with a number of firms including Ernst & Young, Sprite, PC Connection, Belo to develop highly engaging and interactive Web experiences. He will also discuss Molecular’s growing use of blogs to cultivate business.
• The Bloom Group – Mr. Tim Parker, a principal of this professional services marketing firm, who will discuss the interim results of the firm’s research on how the largest professional firms are using Web 2.0 and other online technologies to market and sell their services.

The College of Law Practice Management has announced the winners of the 2008 InnovAction Awards:

Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP 
ValueChain Outsourcing Methodology for Visual Contracting
Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP was selected for its ValueChain outsourcing methodology. ValueChain is a unique system that visually displays client objectives, capabilities, opportunities and risks to Pillsbury lawyers. This helps the lawyers better understand the impact on clients’ business of outsourcing business functions such as HR, customer service, and IT accounting, as well as how the outsourcing of such operations can best be designed and structured. Pillsbury was recently granted a business method patent for ValueChain by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO).

Mallesons Stephen Jaques
PeopleFinder

Mallesons Stephen Jaques of Sydney, Australia was honored for PeopleFinder, the technological spearhead of ClientFirst, a program of continuous improvements to the firm’s standards of client service. PeopleFinder gives individuals who contact Mallesons using a BlackBerry the ability to determine whether the person they’re calling is available, and if not, when and where they can be found. PeopleFinder has rerouted more than 10,000 phone calls per month from voice mail to a person who can provide assistance. Mallesons also won an InnovAction Award in 2007 for its TalnetNet initiative.

Novus Law, LLC
Document the E-Discovery Process from Collection to Production
For the first time in InnovAction’s history, an award was given to a non-law firm — in this case, a company that provides services to law firms. Novus Law, LLC, was selected for its documentation of the e-discovery process. Novus developed a program that documents and captures the e-discovery process (a significant cost in litigation) to give clients, attorneys and courts a reliable and predictable method for efficiently completing an important part of the litigation process

The 2008 InnovAction Awards will be presented on Saturday, September 13, 2008, at the Annual Meeting of the College of Law Practice Management in Chicago, Illinois.

Congratulations to the winners!

The Massachusetts Real Estate Bar Association sent me a notice that:

On July 13, 2008, Governor Patrick signed the FY 2009 budget which included outside sections amending Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 262, § 38 and Chapter 44B, § 8 to require additional recording fees for multifunctional documents. The Amendments provide that “when a document includes multiple references to a document or instrument intending or attempting to assign discharge, release, partially release, subordinate or notice any other document or instrument, each reference shall be separately indexed and separately assessed and additional recording fee.”

The intent of the Amendments is eliminate any confusion that may have arisen with respect to recording fees subsequent to the Patriots Resorts Corporation case [71 Mass. App. Ct. 114] and to codify the current practice of most Registries. The practical result is that if a single document discharges a Mortgage, an Assignment of Leases and Rents and a U.C.C., the recording fee will be $225.00, as if it were three separate discharges. The effect of the Amendments is retroactive to eliminate any potential claims for excess recording fees that may have been brought pursuant to the Patriots Resorts Case

 I previously posted on the Patriots Resorts Case [Recording Fees for Multiple Transactions in a Single Document]. After the case, the registries were still trying to charge multiple fees.  Now the legislature has sided with the Registrars.

Disclaimers

On Wednesday, I gave a presentation to the New York City regional group of International Legal Technology Association, on Knowledge Management and Web 2.0. It was a great crowd, full of questions and thoughts. You can see my slidedeck below. Like most of my presentations, the slides are mostly images. You can play slidedeck karaoke and try to follow along.

Last week I had a great time talking with Matt Moore of Innotecture and Engineers Without Fears & Stewart Mader, the author of Wikipatterns about all things Enterprise 2.0. Matt recorded the conversation and turned it into a podcast to share:

podcast – enterprise 2.0 – doug cornelius and stewart mader

00:00 – Doug visits the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston
02:45 – Many many vendors – they love E2.0!
04:00 – The CIA & Intellipedia
04:30 – Wachovia Bank
06:15 – Stewart goes Web Content 2008, Enterprise 2.0 in Italy, and 2008 WikiSym
07:45 – Social Network Analysis of Wikipatterns
08:15 – iPhone location-based social networking service and Stewart’s dog’s bladder
09:15 – Wikis cease to be a novelty – beyond Wikipedia
10:30 – CIA again
11:45 – My favourite Clay Shirky quote – are we boring yet?
12:30 – Training as a barrier to adoption – wikis are simple
13:20 – Email is not the zenith
14:45 – Wikis get out of the way
15:15 – Wikis as the iPod box
17:00 – What will happen in 2009?
19:00 – The steady curve rather than the tidal wave
21:00 – Wikis as a natural solution for unstructured information
22:10 – Writing the “wikipatterns” book on a wiki
23:30 – It’s not about shocking people
24:30 – Awe instead
25:00 – The Bush reference I can’t censor
25:15 – Giving and taking
27:45 – Wiki adoption happens at the lunch table
30:45 – The future of traditional blogs inside the enterprise
33:00 – The melting pot of tools
34:00 – The globalisation of everything

If you only have 2 minutes, we started off our discussion of enterprise 2.0 with a discussion about swearing and the social bonding of profanity. Matt posted this discussion as a separate podcast: podcast preview – salty language.

“Why is that I can search the billions of pages of the World Wide Web in seconds, but I can’t find the agreement I drafted last week in our own internal systems?”

The web has changed our views on how we should be able to find and interact with our information and knowledge.  Dan Keldsen and Carl Frappaolo of AIIM surveyed over 500 individuals on findability. They looked at how people search, navigate, discover and retrieve content.

Dan and Carls’s AIIM Market IQ on Findability is now freely available for download. It has over 65 pages and 70 charts/figures. A majority believe that Findability in their organization is “Worse” to “Much Worse” than their own organization’s consumer-facing web sites and 49% of respondents have “No Formal Goal” for Enterprise Findability within their organizations.

Key Findings:

• 49% of respondents Agreed or Strongly Agreed that Finding the Information I Need to Do My Job is Difficult and Time Consuming
• 69% of respondents believe that 50% of their organization’s information is searchable online
• 49% of respondents have No Formal Goal for Enterprise Findability within their organizations
• 50% of respondents believe that Findability in their organization is Worse to Much Worse than their own organization’s consumer-facing web sites

In my view, one of the goals of knowledge management is to make information findable. One of the issues with early knowledge management systems is that they merely created yet another separate place to try to find content using a unique search methodology.  One of the goals of knowledge management 2.0 is to capture that content as part of the workflow, in systems with integrated search and search methodology.

I am still reading through the report and hope to write more about it later this week.