A Reading List for the Novice Social Networking Lawyer
The other day, a lawyer pinged me out of the blue and asked if I would be willing to chat about social networking and share some tips. This has only happened two or three times before, but this is still enough to concern me (you want to be known for your lawyering skills and not your social networking skills). Anyway, I did what I usually do, which is to drink the coffee and chat for 15 or 20 minutes. It was enjoyable.
The person asked me if I had any interesting links or reading materials to pass on about social networking for lawyers. I didn't have any links off-hand, but I thought about it again over the next few days and came up with (sorry, 'curated') a few links. I don't think you have to read anything if you are thinking about dipping your foot in the social networking waters, and it may even be preferable to not go in with any preconceptions, but here are a few of the articles (among the many thousands) that I think are worth reading beforehand:
1. "Lawyers: You're Being Played by Twitter" (Keith Lee). This is an excellent post by Keith Lee that talks about 'gamification' and social networks. It's a simple enough concept but crazy when you think about it--the fact that the gaming instinct is what drives so much of behavior on social networks. You put something on Facebook and Twitter and the anticipation of seeing how people react to it is what makes you click over and over again. I can't say that reading this article affected my behavior much, but it provides some very helpful context. It's tough to deny that the process described here doesn't at least form a part of everyone's social networking drive. This is not something I would have realized naturally, even after having spent a significant amount of time on social networks.
2. "Why Digg's MrBabyMan is the King of All Social Media" (Farhad Manjoo). This article profiles Andrew Sorcini, a Los Angeles area film-editor, who Manjoo describes as the "Michael Phelps of Digg." You may not have heard of Digg. That's not really important. (See below.) What I really liked about the story is that it gave a human face to someone that spends a lot of time on social networks, and describes his process for scouring the internet for interesting stories and posting these links to a social network. I'm not sure what Mr. Sorcini is up to these days and whether he still posts in Digg, but that's neither here nor there. This is the profile of someone who is (or was) a "power social networker."
3. "The Great and Powerful Reddit" (Farhad Manjoo): This is another Manjoo article that talks about Reddit. He describes Reddit as once having been a "second-tier aggregator" (it was formerly a Digg competitor) but is now a driving force in online discussions. Reddit has become a barometer for what news is important online (and thus to the world at large). It was very influential in the anti-SOPA/PIPA debates. The big takeaway for me on this one is that networks live and die. They constantly change. No network lasts forever. For that matter, nothing lasts forever, but this is stating the obvious.
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Two bonus reads.
First, I would read anything by Brian Tannebaum. Tannebaum is one of my favorite social networking lawyers (of those that I've come across). Why? He seems to share my almost irrational dislike for legal marketing. I just have an instinctive aversion for how it plays out, particularly online. (This probably says more about me than about legal marketing, but again, that's neither here nor there.) Tannebaum is a die-hard skeptic about marketing over the internet. That's not entirely true. He writes a blog and sends out a fair amount of tweets, but let's just say he calls a lot of BS on what's going on out there. When it comes to online marketing, this is an extremely healthy trait.
The final read isn't an article, it's a book. A book by a former Rolling Stone reporter turned pickup artist, called "the Game". I'm happy in a long-term relationship and don't have much practical use for a book about getting dates, but it is a compelling read. A good friend of mine who was a lawyer mentioned it to me about ten years ago and told me that a mutual friend of ours who was a geeky lawyer read this book and achieved some success with it. I dismissed the whole story as typical pub chatter, although I was sort of curious about it. A couple of years ago, another friend actually sent me a copy of the book. It appeared to me that he had downloaded the copy from a torrent site and for some reason one morning I was feeling paranoid (maybe somewhat guilty) and decided to buy the book on Amazon. I never thought about it or read the book until I was sitting on a long plane ride and ran out of books to read on the Kindle. I started in on The Game and ended up blazing through it over the course of the next four or five days. The Game ended up providing some good insight into a topic I have forever been curious about: self help subculture. The book was marginally interesting for its treatment of the tricks of the pickup artist but what was more intriguing about the book was how it delved into the self-help world. This is something that is prevalent in social networks. Whether you talk about the "gratitude economy" or the "like economy," a very very interesting social phenomenon you will inevitably come across online is people building little communities that they then impart knowledge to, often for a small fee. (I haven't read Seth Godin but I think this is what his "Tribes" concept is all about.)
Anyway, here is my list of the key reads on social networking. Enjoy.
I'll second a vote for The Game; I bought it about 2 years ago and spent some time convincing my wife it wasn't for personal use picking up women. Though there's not much of a how-to in terms of making meaningful human relationships, it does quite a bit to make you realize how psychological triggers move people in the real world.
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