Doug Cornelius .com

Dan Schawbel put together a compelling piece on signing up for social networks to claim your name or suffer. Wearing my real estate lawyer hat, it is all about three things: location, location, location.

Joining social networks does not cost you anything other than a few minutes to register and add your information. You may find it interesting. Even if you do not find it interesting today, you may find it interesting in the near future.

Claim you name on these social network sites. Even if you do not use them actively, you can generally point a lot of information at them from other collections.

Even if you have a fairly unique name like my name, there are still others out there with the same name. When I first became Doug 2.0 and started my online presence, “Doug Cornelius” was mostly about the Yuba College basketball coach. Since then, the top 20 search results in Google for Doug Cornelius all point to me. (At least as of this morning for my search).

The Bar Talk piece in the May 2008 edition of The American Lawyer is focused on Legal OnRamp. To toot my own horn, Brian Baxter, the author of the piece threw in a few quotes from me:

“Social networking costs are minimal-it’s not like sponsoring a table at an awards dinner or printing brochures-so your return on investment is astronomic,” says Douglas Cornelius, a senior real estate associate with Goodwin Procter in Boston. Cornelius says he favors Legal OnRamp over other business networking sites like LinkedIn and LawLink because it’s interactive and offers access to potential clients through its in-house contacts. Cornelius’s one gripe with the site so far is that it has too many Silicon Valley types.

The second half of my gripe (which did not make it into the story) was that there were few real estate and real estate investment management in-house contacts in Legal OnRamp. After all that is my client base.

As I have written about Metcalfe’s Law before, the power of a social network tool or communications tool is increased as more people use the tool. If my client base and peers are not using the tool, it is a less effective tool.

But wearing my knowledge management/enterprise 2.0 hat, Legal OnRamp is a tremendous tool. Even if your clients are not the “Silicon Valley types.”

Since the time of my interview by Brian Baxter, I have seen more and more real estate counsel come into Legal OnRamp. It is becoming more and more useful to me. I would bet that it will become more and more useful to my clients and potential clients.

I watched/listened to a webinar by Patti Anklam as part of the Community 2.0 Conference. Patti is the author of Net Work: A Practical Guide to Creating and Sustaining Networks at Work and in the World.

Patti started by thinking about whether there are sets of network properties. If so can we apply a taxonomy to them. All networks share certain properties. You can draw them and you can count the connections and map the connections. Patti pointed out that networks are not Facebook or LinkedIn. We have always had networks. Facebook and LinkedIn start exposing the network in a very visible way.

Every network has a purpose. Patti proposed five major group of purposes:

• mission – aid and support
• business – create economic gain
• idea – generate and collaborate in the developing ideas
• learning – communities of practice
• personal – nurture emotional relationships

Patti demonstrated a few different network structures. The visual representation of a social network can often show how the communication and therefore the decision-making in the enterprise do not follow the hierarchical organizational chart. It can also show that the departure or retirement of person who may not be a key person in the organizational chart, but is a central person in the network.

For leaders, your management can be re-thought if you think about the network you are leading. For the most, part law firms are networks.

• Network intentionally – create more connections, fill in gaps in the network, make it more collaborative and cooperative
• Practice network stewardship – you need to pay attention to change triggers, watch the network evolve
• Embrace and leverage technology – get the technology aligned with the network, enterprise 2.0 is aligned with a mesh network structure
• Create a capacity for net work – encourage outreach, encourage on-boarding and incorporation into the existing network within the firm
• Learn to use the network lens – map the idea network and see if there are artificial boundaries

Going from networking to net work, its not how many networks you participate in, its how many people you “connect” with. Think about quality and contribution. Don’t think about quantity.

In the spirit of the social network analysis I created a visualization of my Facebook friends and their relationships to each other. On the right side in green are my Facebook friends from The Firm. At the bottom in the blue and purple are my friends in the legal knowledge management and legal technology area. (Most of the Canadians got the purple label. I am not sure how it figured that out). At the left in the pink are my Facebook friends in the knowledge management area, but not in the legal industry.
The chart was generated by the TouchGraph Photos application in Facebook.

I watched a webinar on 2.0 communities. This was a preview of a presentation scheduled for the Community 2.0 Conference.

Speakers:
Sylvia Marino, Director of Community Operations
Edmunds.com Inc.

Kathleen Gilroy, CEO
Swift Media Networks

The speakers advocate the development and deployment of communities wrapped around user generated content.

Their pitch was to create a playbook for the community development. They set up a wiki on PBwiki to host the playbook: community20bootcamp.pbwiki.com (it was public).

Their first example was ravelry.com, a site for the knitting community. One interesting tactic of this site was to blend in other 2.0 sites. Instead having knitters post the pictures of their knitting on ravelry.com, they post them to flickr. Ravelry.com then uses the flickr API to pull the pictures into ravelry.com.

Their second example was the TheDailyPlate.com, a site for helping you to eat smarter. The site gives you functionality by tracking your eating and activity during the day. Users are contributing information on calories burned during exercise and the nutrition information for food. (I will have to check back to this site if I am ever going to lose by baby weight.)

They shared an interesting story about tags. Apparently one of the most popular tags in flickr is “me.” That is the way we think about the pictures and relationships.

The target of the webinar was clearly on public websites. I was hoping to pick up some ideas for creating communities inside the enterprise. I am interested about integrating some internal websites into our intranet to enrich the content. Now, I do have a few more ideas.

Kevin O’Keefe hosted a group of Boston Bloggers at Emmitt’s Pub last night. Kevin is in town for a presentation to the New England Chapter of the Legal Marketing Association on How to Work a Room in the Digital Age: Social Networking for Law Firms.

It was great to spend time with Kevin (Real Real Lawyers Have Blogs) Bob Ambrogi (Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites, Media Law, and Lawyer 2 Lawyer), David Hobbie (Caselines), Joshua Paulin (Boston Immigration and Nationality Blog), Jessica Foley (Massachusetts Driving Laws), Leanna Hamill (Massachusetts Estate Planning and Elder Law), Emmanuel Dokter (Family Law Solutions), Kysa Crusco (Her blog is coming soon from LexBlog) and Gerald May.

I had previously compiled a list of Massachusetts Blawgs (law blogs) over at my Real Estate Space blog on commercial real estate finance.

That after-work “meeting” was preceded by a great lunch with Dal Keldsen of AIIM International.

All of these real-life meetings were derived from on-line social networking. It is always better to hang out with people face-to-face. But the limits of space and time prevent me from being able to have face-to-face conversations with everyone I want to, as frequently as I want to. This blog, Twitter, Facebook, Legal OnRamp, and other social networking sites allow me to keep that conversation going and to to keep the connections fresh.

Over at the The Official Blog of Martindale-Hubbell, John Lipsey; VP Corporate Counsel Services, comments on Larry Bodine’s Crowded but Silent piece in Law Technology News: Corporate counsel and Online professional networking.

Larry is right to point out that the power of any social network site is derived from the number of people using it. That power to you is relative to the number of people you know that are using that social network site. That is Metcalfe’s law.

In the last few months, I have seen lawyers poring into LinkedIn (Doug’s profile in LinkedIn). As lawyers see more and more of their fellow attorneys joining LinkedIn, it becomes a more useful tool.

Lipsey misses the point of social networking sites. I do not expect anyone to contact me just because I have a listing on the site. That is not networking. That is just advertising. (Just like a listing in Martindale-Hubble.) The power of social networking sites is your ability to create a flow of information about yourself. Networking is about contributing useful information to the people you know and keeping your name in front of them.

I assume that Lipsey’s post was to try to proclaim the value of Martindale-Hubble, but in the end his description of what corporate counsel are looking for sounds a lot like Legal OnRamp:

[Corporate counsel would] be willing to use a professional networking site to make it easier to get to those referrals. But that network must be trusted, limited to other legal professionals, and protected from relationship “spammers” who litter strangers with relationship requests. . . . . What they would find valuable is a trusted professional community of lawyers, and a “safe place” that enables corporate counsel to find each other, and outside counsel. They want the tools develop their own communities within these sites to exchange information and collaborate – away from the watchful eye of would be vendors, competitors or hostile counsel.

And sounds like LinkedIn:

“If a professional network can allow a corporate counsel to get the lawyer information as well as connections linking him or her to that lawyer – voila.”

But does not sound like Martindale-Hubble.

Last week I presented to a gathering of law firm knowledge management leaders on social network sites. As I have been exploring various social network sites over the last year, I have also wondered if this was knowledge management? And if social network sites are not part of knowledge management what lessons can the knowledge management community learn from social network sites?

I explained my use of six social network sites: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Upcoming, Legal OnRamp and LawLink. There were a few common themes I tried to draw out.

The first theme was the power of the network and Metcalfe’s law. Any communications tool and any of these social network sites are only as powerful as the number of of people that use them. That first person with a fax machine was very bored until lots of other people also bought fax machines. I also pulled the lever on the way-back machine and made everyone think back ten years ago when email was just coming into law firms. Ten years ago, I clearly remember asking people if they had email and if I could send something to them by email instead of FedEx. My theory is that email has become ubiquitous, because it is ubiquitous. A social network site is popular because it is popular. The more people that use the medium, the more useful that medium becomes.

I was intrigued by Upcoming, a social network site focused on events. It became many times more useful as I connected with more people in Upcoming. Then I got the benefit of seeing the events that they were publicizing.

The second theme was connectivity. There is an incredible ability to connect with people and to jump into their stream of information. This ability on these external sites far exceeds anything that our law firms have inside our firewalls.

The next theme was the ability to communicate. On these sites, you are able to put more context around the communication. You can also communicate in a variety of different ways. Again, looking at our internal communication systems made our internal systems pale by comparison.

Another theme was the ability to share information across systems. For example, Twitter updates my Facebook status. The posts from this blog feed into my Facebook feed. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Upcoming all push out updates by RSS so they are pushed into my feedreader. I can also repackage the feeds into my friendfeed or lifestream.

One thing that jumps out at me is the ability identify and find expertise. Certainly one of the challenges of knowledge management is the ability to find and identify subject matter experts. These social network sites are chock full of ways to find expertise.

The final theme was cost. That is, these social network sites are free. So it is cheap and easy to experiment. You can see what things are useful to you and where the people you know are connecting.

Several people pointed out that they had resisted using these sites. But lately they have started joining and trying to figure out how to use them. I pointed back to Metcalfe’s law. These sites were becoming more interesting to them because more and more people that they know are using them. I also used Metcalfe’s law to explain my difference in interest between LawLink and Legal OnRamp. Both are social network sites targeted at lawyers. There are many more lawyers in LawLink. But more people I know are in Legal OnRamp. Therefore, Legal OnRamp is more useful to me.

I never reached an answer to the initial question. Because, of course, the answer depends on your definition of knowledge management. Since the group seemed to be interested in these social network sites, that is probably enough to indicate that at least some element of social network sites are associated with knowledge management.

My slides: (I am big believer in using slides to show what I mean, rather that what I am saying. So the slides are just pictures.)

| View | Upload your own

I recently signed up for Upcoming, “a community for discovering and sharing events. It can help you find stuff to do, discover what your friends are doing, or let you keep private events online for your own reference.”

LawyerKM mentioned the service in his Blog Buddies post. I am willing to try out new things (especially free things) and see if the are useful or potentially useful.

I created a profile (Doug Cornelius on Upcoming). I added some events and joined a group on knowledge management and one on enterprise 2.0. I also managed to add a few friends.

For example, the Enterprise 2.0 Conference was already added as event to Upcoming. I added the Knowledge Management 2.0 – Real or Hype? symposium being run by the Boston KM Forum.

The site is rich in RSS feeds. You can publish a list of upcoming events and you can subscribe to your friend’s upcoming events. I added my Upcoming events to Dougs’ Lifestream and Doug’s FriendFeed. I also subscribed to my friend’s events in my Google Reader. Upcoming is also leveraging the Yahoo Pipes tool to custom your RSS feeds.

Overall, Upcoming seems to be a great way to discover new and upcoming events. Upcoming is also a way to promote any of your upcoming events.

Of course, with any social media site the power of the site is based on the number of people and their activity.

The biggest problem I have with Upcoming is that it does not allow you to import a list of contacts to see who is already using it. I managed to find a few. But it is rather hit or miss. I threw in the names of few likely subjects and found a few. The site also defers to a user name rather than a real name so it hard to distinguish the person from a list of attendees to an event or those watching an event.

It looks like Yahoo recently acquired Upcoming so there may be some changes in store. I would recommend that you sign up for Upcoming and give it a try.

I co-authored an article with Jenn Steele of Leading Geeks entitled LinkedIn to My Facebook on My Blog. The article is on social media for lawyers and law firm staff.

The article appears in the March 2008 white paper from the International Legal Technology Association entitled Marketing Technologies – Putting Your Best Face Forward.

The article is reprinted here with permission.

For more information about ILTA, visit their website at www.iltanet.org.

I am recombining the feeds from several sites into one more comprehensive stream. Anyone who is interested can see a large swath of what I am writing about, what I am doing and what I am thinking about.

Now translate this to a use inside the enterprise. It is possible to pull disparate communication and authorship from a particular person and display that information in one place inside the enterprise. You can combine someone’s internal blog, external blog, internal postings, internal tagging, external tagging and other sources and create a dynamic profile of that person. If you then store that “story” as it grows, you are creating a searchable repository of experience, expertise and interest for that person.

Currently, my friendfeed and lifestream are both pulling together information I add from:

• KM Space
• Real Estate Space
• Twitter for dougcornelius
• Shared Items from Doug’s Google Reader
• Del.icio.us bookmarks for Doug Cornelius

Of course, like any good “2.0″ tool, my friendfeed and lifestream each have a separate RSS feed that you can subscribe to or easily publish.