July 26th, 2010 by Josh King, VP of Business Development and General Counsel

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I’ve been on Twitter for a couple of years – it’s great for temporal search, for tracking what people are saying about your company and getting esoteric news updates. But I’m amused by the gushing over Twitter’s marketing potential, particularly by lawyers and legal marketers. Twitter is not a billboard. It’s not a brilliant free substitute for paid advertising. The only way Twitter works for attorneys is by expanding sources of potential referrals. And guess what? Those endless litanies of the latest car accidents in your city, those monotone updates of recent court rulings – they’re not going to work for you on Twitter.

The way Twitter works is through the same diligent effort that makes all referral business go: making connections, being authentic and displaying one’s competence, professionalism and dedication to client service.

This post from Ben Kearney caught my eye today:

I don’t know Ben personally, but thanks to Twitter I know that he lives and practices in lovely Eugene, Oregon, enjoys wine and, like us here at Avvo, has a certain illogical affinity for Brian Tannebaum. But that post – and others like it that offer a glimpse into Ben’s practice and approach – make it certain that if someone came to me looking for a business lawyer in Eugene, I’d recommend that they give Ben a call.

But let’s not pretend this is easy. You’ve got to have the willingness to engage and the baseline of competence and professionalism, just as you would if you joined Rotary, Kiwanas or another local group in an effort to develop referral business. I follow hundreds of lawyers on Twitter (find me at @joshuamking and odds are I’ll follow you, too), and I still see too little of this. Let us know who you are, what you care about, and how you practice. Have a conversation.

Because if your only use of Twitter is as a billboard or a one-way push of legal updates, you might as well stop wasting your time now.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 26th, 2010 at 4:29 pm by Josh King, VP of Business Development and General Counsel and is filed under Josh King Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.