Businesses have been using social media (Web 2.0 services) such as blogs, podcasts, virtual worlds and professional networking sites for quite some years as part of their marketing and communications efforts. No business has been able to ignore the implications of these new forms of expression and interaction; just because you’re not writing or talking about yourself doesn’t mean that others will not use social media to talk about you. Law firms are by no means excluded from this. To date, there have been some startling and high-profile instances of businesses making a complete pig’s ear of both using social media and reacting to others’ use of social media. In this article, I’ve selected the examples of getting it wrong that seem most relevant to lawyers and law firms. By looking at these mistakes, lawyers using social media can hopefully avoid repeating them.

Launching a high-profile social media venture and then promptly dropping it

Compared with other types of business, the legal profession has by and large been slow to engage with social media. This means that there have been, and will be, plenty of opportunities for firms to launch innovative new services or uses of social media, and reap the rewards. However, if you’re going to launch a new social media venture to promote your legal practice, you’ve got to be committed to that venture for the long term. As the example below shows, if you stop actively pushing the venture after the initial fanfare has died down, the bad PR that may result could far outweigh the good PR that resulted from launching the venture.

The best example of this comes from outside the legal profession. Charles Dunstone, Chief Executive of the Carphone Warehouse, launched a blog in April 2006 when blogging was the next big thing. The launch resulted in a huge amount of positive publicity for Dunstone and Carphone Warehouse. After regularly posting on the blog for a short period, the postings became less and less frequent until months could go by without there being any new content. This led to Dunstone being panned by the same people who had previously praised him. In February 2008, the blog disappeared from the net altogether, leading to more negative publicity. You can read more about this episode at tinyurl.com/5tn23s.

One lawyer/law firm that launched a highly innovative use of social media and stuck with it is David Naylor and his firm Field Fisher Waterhouse. In April 2007, the firm became the first major UK law firm to open an “office’” in virtual world Second Life (tinyurl.com/6lgsul). Naylor was the driving force behind this move, and is the main figurehead of the firm within Second Life. The launch generated a huge amount of publicity for Naylor and Field Fisher, including news reports in the legal, technology and business press, and coverage of the story by law and technology blogs. A number of legal bloggers and commentators (myself included) were critical of the venture, wondering just what business benefits a Second Life presence could have for a law firm and whether this was all just a publicity stunt. So far, Field Fisher has proved the doubters wrong. Naylor, using his Second Life name Solomon Cortes, is President of the Second Life Bar Association, an informal law society for the virtual world, which had just short of 300 members as of April 2008. Minutes published on the Association’s website shows that Naylor continues to actively contribute, chairing the Association’s May meeting.

Nothing as it seems

If you use social media to promote your legal practice, chances are that most clients and others that interact with you through that venture will be reasonably technically skilled, or at least able to tell a genuine blog from a fake one or an online networker from someone who never goes online. Therefore, if you are going to launch a social media venture, make sure it’s a genuine one or you’ll be found out and publicly criticised before you know it.

Into this category falls a couple of law firms “blogs” that weren’t blogs at all. First up is the infamous Watson Farley Williams trainee “blog” (in its present form at tinyurl.com/58xgwt). In September 2006, the blog launched, and was the subject of a lot of hype in the legal press. Swiftly after the initial praise, the criticism began. Justin Patten on his Human Law blog commented “I do wonder if this actually is a blog.” (tinyurl.com/6nqpuc) He went on: “Effectively it is about a set of trainees putting their views about the firm on a pdf which goes on a static webpage. There is no blog functionality and in my view it will lack credibility with would be recruits.” Other commentators agreed. Legal website RollonFriday thought it seemed a little one-sided. Nick Holmes, editor of this ebook, wrote on Binary Law that WFW’s effort was “not a blog ”¦ This was misguided spin: blogs are hip, so let’s call our initiative a blog” he said (tinyurl.com/5jzlk7). Charon QC went as far as to produce a parody of the WFW blog. The WFW “blog” is still running to this day, though WFW have taken the criticism onboard and now call the document collection for what it is ”” a “Trainee Journal” (tinyurl.com/62qp83).

The “trainee blog” of law firm Winckworth Shepherd (tinyurl.com/6jyvej) was launched at around the same time as the WFW blog, but is no longer with us. Again, it received positive publicity in the legal press before people began to realise that the “blog” was just a single web page, not a blog at all. Nick Holmes and others questioned the wisdom of this endeavour: “It is, frankly, embarrassing that well-paid marketing people should suggest to the firm that such a page be called a blog; it is even more embarrassing that the firm should go along with this” (tinyurl.com/6hosmp).

The moral of these stories? If it doesn’t look like a blog or act like a blog, don’t call your latest marketing wheeze a blog. The same goes for any other form of social media, of course.

Using other people’s content without adding anything

I spotted this one on Kevin O’Keefe’s ever useful Lexblog. Apparently some personal injury law blogs have been caught out using the content from other online sources, without adding anything to the original content (tinyurl.com/5rcfzd). As Kevin says in his blog post:

“Maybe the guy is a decent lawyer, but the only thing we know he can do is hit the CTRL+C for copy and CTRL+V for paste on his keyboard. Am I the only one sickened by this type of marketing?”

Using other people’s work isn’t up there with the best methods of improving reputation and credibility. In addition, unless you have obtained permission from the creator of the content, you risk being accused and sued for copyright infringement: not a good thing to happen to a lawyer.

Look before you leap

Martindale-Hubble, part of business information empire LexisNexis, launched a blog in January 2008. Ralph Calistri, Martindale’s CEO, introduced the blog with some inspiring goals:

“The primary purpose of this blog is communication ”” a place for legal professionals to share ideas, express opinions, to get advice from each other, find links to helpful sites or blogs and stay current on the latest trends. Importantly, however, it will also be a place for us to listen and learn ”” to your opinions, to your concerns and to your ideas so we can serve you better.”

Despite these positive sentiments, it’s safe to say that the blog wasn’t well received by its audience. Steve Matthews of the Vancouver Law Librarian Blog commented: “No blogroll, no trackbacks, required login to post a comment, no photos, no about page, no categories, and no blogger profiles.” “Worst corporate blog ever?” he asked. “Go look and honestly tell me you’re thinking any different.” This view looks to be fairly representative of how other commentators viewed Martindale’s blog.

Was this another Watson Farley Williams non-blog? It turned out that it was not; the blog had just been poorly implemented. Jonathan Lin of Martindale responded to these criticisms on the blog with an apology and some explanation:

“I made the call to get something out there quickly to begin 2008, even with known limitations, so we could at least start the conversation with you all and then make improvements as we go based on real-time feedback. That’s the Web 2.0 way right?”

He promised that Martindale were looking at all the feedback received about the blog. To Martindale’s great credit, the business has fulfilled this promise, and reacted constructively to the flood of criticism it had received. The business implemented some of the main suggestions for improvements, including adding RSS feeds, information about the blog’s writers, and allowing people to comment on posts. The blog’s writers read the comments made by other bloggers and even replied to those comments. Today, the blog is still going. Having made a mess of the blog at the outset, Martindale-Hubble has cleared up the mess and won a lot of respect in doing so.

What lessons can we draw from the Martindale-Hubble blog? My suggestion: prepare well before launching into social media. A businesses’ use of social media is a public representation of that business, just like each time you go and meet a client, and just like your website or any newspaper advert that you take out for your business. Just like any other public representation, social media can either improve your reputation or damage it. To help ensure that your social media venture achieves the former rather than the latter, careful planning is needed before you announce your grand plans to the world.

Producing embarrassing content and then trying to stop its spread

So far, I’ve looked at examples of how businesses have actively used social media and made a hash of it. The final two examples are to do with how businesses have reacted to other people using social media to communicate about them, or to distribute content about them.

US law firm Nixon Peabody takes the prize in this category for the way in which it managed to turn a joke amongst a small number of lawyers into a joke amongst the wider legal community. “Everyone’s a winner at Nixon Peabody” is the starting line of the firm’s corporate song, which we now know to have been intended for “internal use only”. “It’s all about the team, it’s all about respect, it’s all about integrity. Yeah!”, they sing, accompanied by a suitably cheesy 1980s-sounding power-rock soundtrack. In August 2007 the song spread like wildfire across the US legal community, distributed at first by email and then by other means such as YouTube, and publicised by blogs such as Above the Law, who declared “The horror! The horror!”

The song would have probably been forgotten about fairly quickly at this stage. However, Nixon Peabody didn’t take the joke very well. In fact, it took it very badly indeed. Presumably seeing YouTube as the main source of exposure for the song, the firm issued a (US law) DCMA take-down notice against YouTube and managed to get YouTube to remove the song from its site. Whilst it succeeded with YouTube, this merely added fuel to the fire. One person, seeking to rely on the “fair use” exemption in US copyright law, uploaded another video to YouTube, using the song as the soundtrack, with text and graphics telling the story behind the song and how Nixon Peabody got the YouTube video removed. News sites with wider readerships, such as RollonFriday, picked up on and reported the story of the song. Last but not least, the original song was still out there, available on many blogs and sites; the horse had already bolted. If you want to hear it, follow the link on tinyurl.com/5uqhnl.

Two important points arise out of the above example. Firstly, don’t produce content or materials that are likely to embarrass you or your firm if they end up finding their way outside the confines of your business. Did it not occur to anyone at Nixon Peabody that people would find their song funny, or that in the age of digital communication, it would travel outside the firm? Secondly, if your embarrassing content has found its way outside the firm, it may be better just to let people have their laugh at the joke rather than try to stop them. In my view, if it wasn’t for Nixon Peabody’s heavy-handed attempt to stop the song’s distribution, the song would only have been known about by the readership of the Above the Law and a few other US law blogs; instead, the song and Nixon Peabody’s censorship efforts were reported by far more news sources and so were heard of by a much wider audience, and not just in the USA.

Taking online criticism badly

In March 2008, journalist Sarah Lacy got the chance to interview Mark Zuckerberg at the South by South West Interactive festival. Zuckerberg is CEO of Facebook, at the time the most talked about website and so this was a very high-profile event. The room was packed to capacity.

It’s safe to say that Lacy’s interview technique didn’t go down very well with the audience, who were openly critical. This being an audience at the cutting-edge of social media, criticism spread fast and wide, using blogs, Twitter, and other means of communication. Reporters present at the event promptly published highly negative reviews of the interview (eg tinyurl.com/5awp6c)

Lacy didn’t take this criticism very well at all. On her Twitter feed, she told readers “seriously screw all you guys”. In an interview, published on YouTube, Lacy goes on at length about her experience and refused to accept any criticism. This annoyed people even more, helping keep the Lacy story alive.

The interview took place not long after the Martindale Hubble blog events discussed earlier. If Lacy had responded to the criticism of her interview as well as Martindale Hubble responded to criticism of its blog, she would perhaps have come out of looking better and with her reputation less damaged. The lesson is clear for any business that faces online criticism from others.

Conclusions

These examples of social media usage gone wrong do not give us any hard and fast rules for how to use social media use for your business without error. Sadly, it’s not that easy. Whilst hindsight means that we can now regard some of the above examples as obvious mistakes, some events cannot be predicted or anticipated and so any of us could find ourselves making, or about to make, similar mistakes. However, we can perhaps draw two lessons from the above examples which may help avoid getting it wrong:

If you are going to use social media to promote your business, take time to prepare for what you’re going to be doing. If there’s development work to be done (eg as there will be with a blog), take the time to ensure that development is complete before you launch. Look at what others are doing with the type of social media that you are going to use, and learn the etiquette for that type of social media.

If someone uses social media so say or distribute things that you regard as damaging your business, don’t just storm in without thinking. Whilst a defamatory comment may necessitate a legal response, other types of damaging content may be best managed by either simply ignoring it or engaging the writer in discussion.

Thanks to Kevin O’Keefe, Nick Holmes, and Justin Patten, whose blogs brought most of the above examples to my attention.

Alex Newson is a solicitor with the IT law team at Shoosmiths. Whilst at his previous firm, Freeth Cartwright, Alex was co-founder and lead writer for IMPACT, the IT/IP law blog.

Email alex.newson@yahoo.co.uk.