Why do you need to use Social Media tools to leverage your legal career

In the past few months we here at Martindale have been focusing  on delivering more targeted and useful webinars to our audience to develop a conversation around how to benefit from social media.  Last month saw ‘Social Media Policy’ webinar (with James Wong, Howard Greenstein and Melanie Green), a month before we had the very successful ‘Social Media for Lawyers‘ and 2 months before, we hosted ‘Twitter Basics‘ webinar.

Last week Mike Mintz and myself presented a webinar titled “Building Your Career Using Social Media Tools”  focusing on the three layers that make up your online professional activity:

• Profile: how do you build your profile to maximize the benefits it can give you
• Network: how to build a solid network of connections – your community
• Brand: how do you differentiate yourself from others to build a unique brand name for yourself

This was the first time we heard mixed responses on the webinar. Along with great feedback on the content of the presentation,  some of the feedback pointed out that for some users the presentation was too much focused on the next step of  ‘how to’s‘ rather than the initial ‘why should I’. This reminded me that the question of why using social media at all is still relevant, and we as participants, fans, advocates, users and educators need to constantly state the value of social media: the question of whether social media is a fad is still there.

Why should you have an online profile and why would you move some of your networking and brand activity to the online world? Instead of quoting stats, I am curious to hear from you – what are your top 3 reasons for using social media tools to enhance your legal career?

Related Posts

1. Building Your Legal Career with Online Professional Networking Tools
2. Social Media: what every legal professional needs to know
3. Building Your Legal Career with Online Professional Networking Tools (August 1 through August 15)
4. Social Media Policy week in Connected
5. Social Media Policy Webinar: Trick or Tweet: How to Say What You Want to Say Without Saying What You Shouldn’t Say

Tagged as: blog, Brand, Facebook, howard greenstein, james wong, LinkedIn, On the Web, Online Communities, social media, Social network, Twitter, user generated content