Doug Cornelius .com

Last summer, I surveyed The Firm’s summer associates to see how they use some of the popular social networking sites: A Survey on the Use of Social Networks and Updated Social Network Site Survey. I ran the same survey this summer to see what changes have happened over the past year.

• 90% of the summer associates have a Facebook account. That is an increase over the 80% result from last year.
• 66% of those with Facebook accounts check it at least once a day. This is the same percentage as last year.
• Only 25% of those with Facebook accounts would use it for business purposes. This a big drop from last year, when 75% said they would use Facebook for business purposes.
• Only 13% had LinkedIn accounts and only 13% have a MySpace account. These are similar numbers to last year.

My take away is that the wave of Facebook users is continuing to roll into law firms and they use it frequently.  If your firm choses to block Facebook, you are cutting your junior lawyers off from their network of contacts.

These summer associates do yet seem to grasp the business purposes for Facebook, but may quickly realize that their Facebook “friends” will quickly become their colleagues, clients and potential clients.

You can download the raw survey data: SocialNetworkSurvey2008[.xls]

What is your take on Facebook for law firms?  Please leave a comment.

According to a recent survey, 83% of workers rate relationships with co-workers as a critical reason for joining and staying with their employer, and alternatively, one in four people quit a job due to feelings of isolation. Organizations that provide talent with tools to connect, build and manage their personal and professional networks, bond people to each other and to the organization. Moreover, organizations that offer employee social networking have an edge in attracting talent who thrives on these tools to exchange knowledge and ideas.

Mike Gotta, Principal Analyst at the Burton Group, presented this webinar, sponsored by SelectMinds.  The webinar was a production of the Human Capital Institute.

Social structures are influenced by team location:

1. Co-located teams interact primarily as face-to-face
2. Virtual teams interact primarily through electronic means with occasional face-to-face
3. Far flung teams rarely interaction face-to-face

In this world of electronic communication, is “where you are” still important?

Mike proposed that people are less likely to contribute to a centralized storage system without the personal positive recognition. Workers may feel they are giving away their value and may feel alienated due to physical location and lack of reciprocity.

You should humanize people.  A sparse photobook makes you look like a mere phone number.

How does technology affect the social interaction:

• Email – inbox is overloaded and conversations are fragmented
• Instant messaging is promising but the interruption issues need to be resolved
• Portals can work, but they suffer from poor navigation, there is a lack if interaction and there was little personalization
• Content management systems are difficult to use and poor user experience
• Discussion forums suffer from overload and clutter
• Virtual workspaces get cluttered but turn into a file dumping ground

Can Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 help?

• Blogs can help you to communicate
• Tagging and social bookmarking enable user-centric discovery and findability
• Micro-blogging (twitter) is the is the next-generation water cooler
• RSS feeds offer an opt-in information delivery to employees
• Wikis enable co-creation and co-ownership of information. You can build communities around shared interests
• Social networks allow for flows of communication, information and collaboration

A corporate “facebook” can act as a destination and social hub.  The enterprise should look to taking down artificial barriers to communication and collaboration.  By opening the lines of communication and collaboration you can tap into a bigger pool of talent and knowledge.

Points for the Business Case:

• Aging workplace pressures to transfer knowledge
• Establish better learning environments
• Better brainstorming
• Informal feedback can improve situational awareness and decision-making
• Employees as brand ambassadors

Use Case Scenarios:

• Professional support for returning employees
• Referral programs for alumni and employee referrals
• Retiree programs to continue contribution
• Improved travel information
• Expertise location

Law Technology Now put up podcast on how client relationship management and social networking tools will change the way we practice law: Almost Live from LegalTech West Coast: Tom Baldwin — Social Networking. (registration required).  The podcast was a recording of Tom Baldwin‘s presentation at Legal Tech West Coast. The podcast is about 12 minutes long.

One of the pillars of knowledge management is that who you know is as important as what you know. Tom surveyed broadcast emails and found that a huge portion of those email were asking for information about people.  Attorneys were looking for outside experts, internal experts, service providers, matchmaking clients, pitching clients and clearing conflicts.

Tom has found Client Relationship Management systems to be lacking.  CRM systems have grand ambitions of pulling the firm’s contacts into one place.  Tom has found that most CRM systems get relegated to managing external marketing lists.

Tom has become more of a fan of Enterprise Relationship Management systems like Contact Networks and Branch IT.   ERM systems mine external email traffic to identify relationships. [My post on Contact Networks: Contact Networks - Enterprise Relationship Management.]

Tom also sees some tools coming from entity extraction. In court filings, you should be able to extract the party names, the judge and the jurisdiction. That information is in fairly standard locations in a document.  Then when looking to see what experience the firm has with a particular judge or in a particular jurisdiction, the entity extraction system can help answer that question.

One warning about the podcast. I understand that Law Technology Now needs effective advertising to make money. But this is the first podcast that inserts an advertisement into the middle of the podcast. I found it very jarring to cut off in the middle of Tom Baldwin’s presentation to an ad for Blue Arc.

A new survey reveals that almost 50 percent of attorneys are members of online social networks and over 40 percent of attorneys believe professional networking has the potential to change the business and practice of law over the next five years.

The 2008 Networks for Counsel Survey was conducted by Leader Networks and sponsored by LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell. You can download the results from the Leader Networks’ site.

Of lawyers aged 25-35, 67% are members of a social networking site, while only 36% of lawyers aged 46 and older are members. Forty percent of lawyers want to join a social networking site just for lawyers. (This number is close to the same percentage of lawyers who are already members of an online social network.

The curious piece of the survey is that 48% of the survey respondents thought Martindale-Hubbell should sponsor a lawyer specific social networking site. (Of course, they were the sponsor of the survey.) Second up was 28% who thought it should be the American Bar Association. Only 1% thought it should be Legal OnRamp. But Legal OnRamp is a social networking site for lawyers. Perhaps the Martindale-Hubbell brand is still viable.

The survey was pointed out by Laxmi Stebbins Wordham on The Official Blog of Martindale-Hubbell: Martindale-Hubbell, LinkedIn and Online Networking. I also came across Carolyn Elefant’s take on this survey at the Legal Blog Watch: Survey Confirms That Social Networking Gains Traction With Lawyers.

The venerable Martindale-Hubbell directory of lawyers and law firms has teamed up with LinkedIn to provide a social networking function to the listings in LinkedIn.

When I go to the listing for Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in Martindale-Hubbell, I see the blue LinkedIn icon next to the name of the firm. If you click on the icon, it asks you to logon to LinkedIn to see who you know at the firm. After logging on I get a pop up that shows my two first level LinkedIn connections (Mary Abraham and Patrick DiDomenico) and a total of 131 connections through the second and third level.

Assuming clients are still using Martindale-Hubbell to find law firms and lawyers, this make the directory much more powerful. (Of course that is assuming that clients still use Martindale-Hubbell.) The interface is a bit kludgy, but the information is great. The LinkedIn connection also appears when you look at the listing for some individual lawyers.

As Kevin O’Keefe says, If you can’t beat’em, join them.

If you have not joined LinkedIn or have not figured out what it is all about, there is a new video out from the CommonCraft gang on what LinkedIn is all about:

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In Saturday’s post [I Freed Myself From Email's Grip] I pointed to a story about Luis Suarez trying to reduce his use of email by using platform communication tools. He is increasingly using web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 mainstays like blogs and wikis to answer the questions and host the answers to the questions.

Law firms and businesses operated for a long time with out email.  They were successful without email. There is no reason to think that email is either the zenith or the endpoint for business communications.  Email is an incredibly powerful tool. But it is a closed system where it is hard to find and very hard to reuse information.  Take a look at your email.  Wouldn’t you like to have the answers to a lot of those questions saved for later use? Are people trying to turn your email into a content repository?

Based on those propositions, Luis outlined what he was trying to do in I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip.  The unexpected consequence of the article was that he received a deluge of emails from people sending him the article or their thoughts on the article: Giving up on Work e-mail – Status Report on Weeks 15 to 20. (I am a true believer; I sent my message with Twitter and put up Saturday’s blog post.) 

The article about reducing email even ended up on the top ten list of most emailed articles on NYTimes.com.

Keep in mind that the goal is not eliminate email. It is a very powerful and very useful tool. But it is not appropriate for every communication.

“I am just saying that it needs to be re-purposed and used for what it was meant to be in the first place: A communication tool for one on one conversations of a sensitive, private or confidential nature. The rest should be going out there, in the open, in the public space(s), transparent and with an opportunity for everyone to contribute!”

I was in the audience for this presentation at the nGenera Enterprise 2.0 Conference. The panel consisted of:

• Daniel Palestrant of Sermo.com
• Avi Muchnick of Worth1000.com and a.viary.com
• Neel Sundaresan of eBay Research Labs
• Ben Heywood of Patients Like Me
• Paul Lippe of Legal OnRamp

The panel started (appropriately enough) on how to start an online community.  There was a general consensus that you need to start around a topic or an idea. They want to share ideas and relationships with people who have similar thoughts. One panelists thought is was good to plant contributors in the communities to sustain the flow of information and conversation, especially in the early days.

Social communities can provide a lens of information. For example Facebook is way to keep track of loose ties, even though there is a lot of noise.  Important topics will get discussed by multiple people in multiple ways.  (My personal experience was that I initial ignored the Clay Shirky presentation on cognitive surplus at the Web 2.0 Conference. But enough of the people in my online communities kept highlighting the presentation to make me realize I needed to watch it.)

One panelist believes that online communities that grow rapidly are likely to have a rapid demise. All of the panelists thought of their sites as knowledge platform focused on sharing knowledge with the social aspect as a by-product. This is a sharp distinction from Facebook that is focused on social aspect with the sharing of knowledge being merely a by-product (and a very small by-product).  It takes a while to accumulate the content in a community to keep people coming back.  (I see that in any knowledge management project. The blank page is a deterrent to contribution.) As more knowledge accumulates in the system, the more useful the system becomes.

The general consensus was that general social sites are hard to keep sustained.  You need to associate the community with a business purpose and allow the sharing of substantive content.

Unfortunately not me, but my pal Luis Suarez. There is a profile of Luis in the New York Times: I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip.  Luis describes how he started using platform communication tools like blogs and wikis instead of email. He managed to reduce his email traffic by 80% and still effectively communicate with his colleagues.

“Think about how to use social networking tools to eliminate spam and to avoid repeatedly answering the same question from many different people. These tools can also save you from an accumulation of online newsletters that never get read, and from those incessant project status reports that clutter many in-boxes.”

As readers, you realize that I am an avid consumer and tester of social media and new communication tools. An article in the MIT Sloan Management Review helped put the testing of these tools into focus for me: The Six Key Dimensions of Understanding Media. JoAnne Yates, Wanda J. Orlikowski and Anne Jackson propose a guide to understanding and evaluating the use of communication technologies in the workplace.

They propose the “Genre Model” which identifies elements of adoption and the change in patterns of communication as a tool for evaluating new technology. The model consists of six elements:

• Why – what is the purpose and expectation
• What – what content will be communicated
• Who – participants in the communication and their roles
• Where – location of the communication, physical or virtual, geographic dispersion
• When – temporal elements, like how quickly do you expect a response
• How – manner and form of communication, such as format and structure

The article traces some history and analysis from the business letter, to the paper memo to email. Then it moves on to a case study of Blog Central in IBM, Skype in MNI Partners, and an Electronic Bulletin Board in a large European Petroleum Company. It uses the six elements to for the initial expectation of each new communication tool and the actual use of each tool.

The method of the article is an interesting way to approach new social media platforms both externally and internally.

Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge started a new column in KM World magazine. Borrowing from Dave Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, he calls it Everything is Fragmented.

“I wanted to build on that by pointing to the shift during the life span of knowledge management from the “chunked” material of case studies and best-practice documents to the unstructured, fragmented and finely granular material that pervades the blogosphere. So when I was asked to contribute this column to KMWorld magazine, it seemed an appropriate title; it allows me to talk about not only trends in technology but also social issues, the scientific use of narrative, and to fire off the odd invective about over-constrained and over-controlled systems.”

Since I started following the Enterprise 2.0 movement, I have shifted my philosophy of knowledge management. I fall pretty close to Dave’s position.

“It’s not natural to chunk up material, to make it context specific; it is natural to share, blend and create fragmented material based on thoughts and reflections as we carry out tasks or engage in social interaction.”

Structured systems of knowledge and precedent are still useful. But, as Dave Weinberger points out in Everything is Miscellaneous, everyone has a different view on what the structure should be. Whatever taxonomy I create or a group decides upon, it will only be meaningful to some of the people some of the time. As the taxonomy gets more and more complex, the less useful it will be.

On many knowledge management projects, people ask for a very structured way of organizing content. Inevitably, they query the system for something that is outside the structure they requested.

The improved power of search, adding metadata and adding user comments have changed the way we should approach knowledge management.

If you are a KM practitioner I am sure you have received a request for matching the Google search. There is only one field to enter information; you just type in a few words. Obviously, the Google page rank algorithm is unique to the web and does not work well inside the enterprise.

We need a way to manipulate the search results inside the enterprise and add more context to our internal nodes of information. Google does this by interpreting links to the nodes of information (webpages). We KM practitioners need some way to replicate this ability to add metadata to our knowledge artifacts. We need to better describe them, attribute authorship, rate them and add notes to them.

That is one of the reasons that I am enthusiastic about products like Vivisimo’s social search. [Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration][The Four Types of Search and Vivisimo's Social Search].

Structured systems of knowledge and precedent are very useful for law firms. As law firms we need to highlight the better forms and precedents for reuse. I believe we need to rethink how they are highlighted, where they are stored and what people can do with them to keep them organized. Organized in a way that is meaningful to each individual.