Gerry Riskin, the Canadian lawyer and business school graduate, with a global reputation as an author, management consultant and pioneer in the field of professional firm says:
If Social Media matters, then it matters to law firms because everything that matters to society in general must matter to law firms sooner or later. Watch this and make your own decision.[1]
Below are some telling numbers on the growth and prevalence of social media:
- Social Media has overtaken porn as the number one Internet activity[2]
- One out of eight couples who married last year [2008] met via social media[3]
- Facebook has more than 400 million active users. 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day[4]
- Twitter.com had 90.2 million unique visitors worldwide in May, up from 83.8 million in April and 37.3 million in May of last year. Over 65 million Twitter posts are made each day (and presumably some are not about what people had for lunch!)[5]
Social media is a primary means of communication for Generation Y. Generation Yers will make a large number of your clients in coming years.
Social media matters for marketing and branding a law practice. There is an opinion among some attorneys, particular more experienced ones, that Twitter is about sharing what you had for breakfast, Facebook is teenagers spreading rumors about each other and YouTube is for watching dancing cats. These attorneys are correct: all these activities happen on these services. However, there is also so much more happening that is valuable to someone trying to build and extend a brand.
[1] http://www.gerryriskin.com/cat-social.html visited July 17, 2010, 2:26 pm CST.
[2] http://www.gerryriskin.com/cat-social.html visited July 17, 2010, 2:26 pm CST.
[3] http://www.gerryriskin.com/cat-social.html visited July 17, 2010, 2:26 pm CST.
[4] http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
[5] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/sports-fans-break-records-on-twitter/
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