Legal Ease Blog

NEW - LinkedIn Essentials Online Course

I am excited to announce that after many years of teaching and training and writing about LinkedIn, Dennis Kennedy (my co-author on Make LinkedIn Work for You, A Practical Handbook for Lawyers and other Legal Professionals) and I have officially launched our online course - LinkedIn Essentials.

This course will take you step-by-step through the three main building blocks of LinkedIn - Profiles, Connections, and Participation - and show you easy ways for you to improve your LinkedIn presence and maximize your use of the platform.

But perhaps the most useful part of the course is that we teach you how to think strategically about how you use LinkedIn to get the most value out of the platform and out of your LinkedIn network as possible.

The course includes not only hours of video, broken down into 9 important lessons, but also provides you with "homework" in the form of worksheets to complete at the end of each lesson to reinforce what you've learned and to help you customize your LinkedIn strategy for you. The course also includes a complete LinkedIn action plan for you to use to plan the next three months of LinkedIn activity.

Complete the course at your own pace, and hop over to LinkedIn after each lesson to implement what you've learned right away.

Is 2021 the year you want to finally make good use of LinkedIn - now that you know virtual networking isn't going anywhere anytime soon? If so, this course will be well worth the investment.

Check out LinkedIn Essentials here.

47 Tips to Improve Your LinkedIn Results in 2020

In honor of our new book, Make LinkedIn Work for You, A Practical Handbook for Lawyers and Other Legal Professionals, my co-author, Dennis Kennedy and I have put together this list of tips to help you with how you use LinkedIn in this new decade.

We've organized these tips into three categories, along the lines of what we call the three "building blocks" of LinkedIn: Profiles, Connections and Participation.

The tips are pulled straight from the book - please let us know in the comments if you've implemented any of these tips and how they are working for you!

LinkedIn Tips: Profiles

1. Add a banner/header photo to your Profile to highlight a skill, achievement or area of focus.
2. Look at the Profiles of some power users to see how they’re maximizing their LinkedIn presence.
3. Use stories or examples in your About section to illustrate what you do for clients or to provide additional insight.
4. Include keywords that your target audience is looking for in your Profile, including in your headline.
5. Use LinkedIn analytics to help you to refine your keywords.
6. Name your target audience in your Profile and speak their language.
7. Demonstrate your message; show, don’t tell.
8. Add relevant, appropriate video, audio, presentations, or other extras to showcase your work and what you do for clients.
9. Keep your Profile fresh – don’t forget to update on a regular basis (at least quarterly) and put time for updating on your calendar.
10. Add your bar admissions information to your About, Experience or Licenses and Certifications sections of your Profile to make it clear where you practice.
11. Add an explicit call to action to your About section (download a PDF, subscribe to your email newsletter, schedule appointment).
12. Make your Profile stand out and make it easier to read with short paragraphs and bullet points.
13. Compose your entries in a word processing program, then copy and paste into LinkedIn.
14. Review your Profile on both the desktop and mobile app versions of LinkedIn to see what information appears before the “see more” link; put your most important information first.
15. Click on “Add Profile Section” periodically to see if LinkedIn has added new sections that might be relevant to you.

LinkedIn Tips: Connections

1. Use the “People Also Viewed” results on your Connections’ Profile pages (and your own) to find people who might be good Connections for you.
2. Convert the business cards you receive into LinkedIn invitations while the memory of the in-person meeting is still fresh.
3. Accepting more of the invitations you receive is an easy way to build your number of Connections. If you are unsure about the inviter, send them a message in LinkedIn to start a conversation before you accept the invitation to connect.
4. In meetings or other events, consider suggesting that people use the “Find Nearby” feature in the mobile app to let everyone easily find and connect to others who are there.
5. Don’t forget that you can cultivate Connections over time: remove, block, ignore or remove invitations, and otherwise manage your Connections to make your Connections list more tailored to your goals.
6. Because many people have premium accounts, they will see that you have viewed their Profiles. Simply viewing Profiles can be a way to see if someone who you don’t know well will invite you to connect with them.
7. Invite people to connect with you when you speak, in your communications, and even on your business card.
8. Don’t forget that premium account options have additional features that can help you find and add Connections. You can take advantage of a free 30-day trial and, if you purchase a premium account, you can turn it off at any time.
9. If you use Twitter, a great technique is to see who follows you on Twitter and, if it makes sense, send them LinkedIn invitations.
10. Send invitations to second-degree Connections who like or comment on your Posts.
11. If you sincerely like a presentation or article, let the speaker or author know and ask them to connect.
12. Look at your Connections’ connections – if you see someone you’d like to meet, ask if they will make an introduction for you. The introduction doesn’t have to occur on LinkedIn. Or, simply ask your Connection if you can use their name in your LinkedIn invitation to your desired contact.
13. Be creative. We are always finding new ways to use LinkedIn to identify potential Connections.

LinkedIn Tips: Participation

1. Create posts for LinkedIn in batches so all you need to do is post something you have in your queue.
2. Use a scheduling tool to schedule some posts in advance.
3. Create a LinkedIn SlideShare account and upload presentations to your Profile.
4. Take your LinkedIn relationships offline by scheduling lunch, coffee or phone calls.
5. Schedule regular weekly or monthly time for LinkedIn participation activities.
6. Follow companies, individuals and influencers whose content is valuable to you and your network.
7. Use self-promotion sparingly, self-deprecatingly, and subtly on LinkedIn, but do not be afraid to promote yourself.
8. Consider whether you want to sync your blog and Twitter accounts to LinkedIn to allow for cross-posting.
9. Use “Congratulate” options LinkedIn gives you to acknowledge new jobs and other changes for your Connections.
10. Use Groups as a way to meet new people and make Connections.
11. “Follow” individuals of interest to you within a Group to receive their Posts.
12. Use LinkedIn’s analytics tools to see who is engaging with your content and engage back with them.
13. Tag LinkedIn users with whom you would like to establish or continue a relationship to help them to engage with your Posts.
14. Watch how LinkedIn power users participate on the platform and see what ideas you can steal from them.
15. Vary the types of posts you make and the format of your posts and learn from these experiments.
16. Repurpose articles you’ve written into shorter LinkedIn posts or republish as a LinkedIn article.
17. Try to always use images with your content, especially photos of you with others.
18. Post short videos.
19. Share documents on your Profile and in other places on LinkedIn.

If you want even more great practical tips like these, you can find them in our book, Make LinkedIn Work for You: A Practical Handbook for Lawyers and Other Legal Professionals, available on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback versions. Get your copy today - or better yet, buy copies for your whole firm or organization!

Stay tuned for more articles, webinars, presentations, and online courses on LinkedIn topics from both Dennis and me in 2020.

Happy New Decade!

5 Ways to Be a Better LinkedIn Networker

LinkedIn can be a powerful networking tool, but so few people (including lawyers) take advantage of the power of LinkedIn or leverage it to build their networks and their businesses.

If you're just starting out or if you want to build your network quickly, take a look at my two-part post on LinkedIn co-written with Dennis Kennedy, Six Ways to Jumpstart Your LinkedIn Network - Part 1 and Part 2. But don't stop there! Here are 5 more ways to build a healthy, effective LinkedIn network:

1. Seek out experts and industry leaders to follow or connect with

With 500 million users, LinkedIn is a great place to find experts and industry leaders. Search by name or use LinkedIn's fresh perspectives page to identify leaders who could be good connections or whose content and perspectives you might be interested in. You might be surprised to find out how many leaders or industry superstars are actually in your network - and if they're a second level connection, you can send them an invitation to connect right away if you wish - even with a free LinkedIn account.

Not a second-level connection? Not to worry - click on the "More" button at the top of their Profile, and then click on +Follow. When they post an update, you'll see it in your feed.

By connecting with and following experts and industry leaders, you can expand your network and your visibility. Connecting directly gives you access to that industry leader's connections - simply click on the number of connections on their Profile, and you'll get a list of their connections - a great way to identify more people to follow or connect with. You'll also increase your visibility if your new industry leader connection comments, shares, or likes your posts or other activity on LinkedIn.

But even just following an industry leader can help you. Not only will you be able to see their posts in your feed - a potential source of ideas for your own content - but you can also interact with that industry leader by liking, commenting on or sharing their posts. These interactions can be seen by their network and followers - which may lead to more connections. And if that industry leader sees your engagement with their content, they may decide to reach out to connect with you directly or to engage with your content in return.

2. Search for companies in your niche on LinkedIn

Finding companies on Linkedin that are in your niche or in the industry that you serve (or in related industries) gives you the opportunity to follow those companies to find out what they're doing on LinkedIn. This can provide valuable insights into what their legal needs might be, how you can reach these companies or companies like them, how you might refer business to them or work with them to build your referral network. It can also provide you with ideas for your own content.

Looking at companies on LinkedIn also allows you to identify and view the LinkedIn Profiles of the individuals that work for that company. You can get information about who holds what positions within the company, and you can follow or connect with them, building out your network. 

3. Engage with your target audience

Where else can you directly engage with your dream clients, referral sources, or thought leaders? And it doesn't have to be time-consuming. If you take the two tips above to heart, your LinkedIn feed should be filled with updates and activity from these three groups of people. Now all you have to do is engage: like or comment on their posts; share relevant posts that would provide value to your own network or in your LinkedIn Groups.

When you engage with other LinkedIn users, they'll be notified of your engagement. This is how you begin to build relationships and to increase your visibility. As noted above, when you engage with others' posts, their networks can also see that engagement. And the person who made the original post may increase their engagement with you as a result, too - maybe they'll take a closer look at your Profile, send you a message on LinkedIn, or share your content.

4. Create your own content

If all you're doing is consuming others' content on LinkedIn and not creating your own content, you're missing a huge opportunity. Creating content makes you more visible on LinkedIn because it gets you in front of your network in their feed. This drives engagement, which also drives connections and followers. After all, why would someone follow or engage with you on LinkedIn if you don't participate and there's nothing there to engage with?

Creating content for LinkedIn doesn't have to be a time or labor-intensive process. Re-purpose what you already have - take the first few paragraphs or a few key take-aways from an article you've written for your website or for another publication and post them as an article on LinkedIn (you can post a link to the full article at the end, driving traffic to your site); pull quotes from your articles and post text updates; share images from your firm's events; post links to articles written by others with your own commentary; share slides of your most recent presentation.

5. Join and leverage Groups

Want to get in front of even more referral sources, potential clients, master networkers and thought leaders? Don't ignore LinkedIn Groups. Join Groups on LinkedIn that you already belong to in real life - many offline groups have LinkedIn Groups associated with them. This might include your local bar association, alumni groups, networking groups, and more.

Look at your connections and those of thought leaders, experts or people in your target market to see what Groups they belong to (you can find this information under Interests on their Profile) - many of these Groups may well include more people like them - and more potential connections.

Once you've joined a Group, you have access to its members - you can post discussion to Groups or message Group members individually. Since many Groups on LinkedIn have more members than are in your own network, and include people you wouldn't have access to otherwise on LinkedIn, the potential to expand your visibility, your engagement, and your network by being active in the right Groups on LinkedIn could be huge.

(To learn more about using LinkedIn Groups, read this post).

Of course, you don't want to forget that a good Profile is the foundation of your LinkedIn presence, and it will help LinkedIn users get to know you and make an informed decision about whether to invite you to connect, accept your connection invitation, or engage with your content, so it's important to have an informative, compelling and complete LinkedIn Profile.

For some advice on improving your LinkedIn profile, check out these posts and articles:

Do Something! Power Up Your LinkedIn Headline

Four Ways to Give Clients What They Want on Your LinkedIn Profile

Supercharge Your Summary

Add Multi-Media Elements to Your Profile

Make Your Profile Complete

5 Ways to Improve Your LinkedIn Summary

The Summary is one of the most overlooked areas of most lawyers’ LinkedIn Profiles, but it can be a great way to add value to your Profile and convey important information to your audience. LinkedIn calls the Summary “your media-enhanced elevator pitch.”

Here are five ways to improve your LinkedIn Summary:

Write in a conversational tone

LinkedIn is a professional networking site. What you do on LinkedIn is an extension of what you do and how you network in real life. Your LinkedIn Profile stands in for you to connect with others – colleagues, potential clients, referral sources, the media, etc. It represents you.

When you introduce yourself to people in real life and talk about what you do and who you do it for, you introduce yourself in the first person: “Hi, I’m Jim. I represent entrepreneurs and small business owners who want to protect their brands.” You wouldn’t say, “Jim is an intellectual property lawyer representing small business.”

Although your firm bio is usually written in the third person and much of the information from your law firm website bio can be used in your LinkedIn Profile, you’ll want to change it and make it more conversational for LinkedIn.

In my view, on your firm website, the bio is written in the third person as if the law firm were introducing you to web visitors, while on LinkedIn you’re introducing yourself. (Although solo lawyers may choose to write their website bio in the first person on occasion).

Don’t use legal jargon unless you are sure that your audience (clients, potential clients, referral sources) understands and expects it. Use the language your clients use to describe their needs and the services you provide.

Create a blockbuster first sentence

The Summary can be found in the bottom-most portion of what LinkedIn calls your “introduction card” at the top of your Profile.

As you can see from the image above, when LinkedIn users look at your Profile within LinkedIn, they’ll see only the first 3 lines, usually about one or two sentences. To see the entire Summary, users have to click the “Show more” link. As a result, those introductory lines are extremely important. They should contain the information that is most significant to your audience.

The beginning of your Summary should serve to entice readers to click on the “Show more” link to see the rest of your Summary.

Tell your story

While the first sentence of your Summary should pack a punch, the rest of your Summary is also important. You have plenty of room, since the current character limit for the Summary is 2000 characters.

Although only the first portion of your Summary initially appears to LinkedIn users, when users who are not logged on to LinkedIn click on your Profile, they will see what LinkedIn calls your public profile.

On your public profile, if you choose to show your Summary, viewers will see your entire Summary without any extra clicks required. (Although the public profile does not show any media you’ve added to your Profile.)

When I talk to lawyers about LinkedIn, I equate the Summary to the cover letter that accompanies your resume. The rest of LinkedIn is in a format which is similar to a resume, with categories for your work experience, education, honors and awards, recommendations, etc. In those sections, you don’t have much opportunity to control the format. But the Summary is unique. It is a free-form field that is less constraining than the rest of your Profile. You have much more flexibility here.

Take advantage of the opportunity within the Summary to tell your story – tie all of your experience together. Let your audience know why you became a lawyer, what your professional goals are, who you help, and why your experience and the rest of the information contained in your Profile is important to them.

Break it up

LinkedIn is an online platform, and more and more users are engaging with LinkedIn on a mobile device rather than a desktop or laptop computer. Even relatively short paragraphs can look like huge, intimidating blocks of text online, and especially on a mobile device.

Keep paragraphs short in your Summary to make them easy to read and skim, even on a small screen. Use bullet points to break up the text.

You can copy and paste bullets from another program (like MS Word), or you can use your keyboard to create them right in LinkedIn (get instructions here).

Add media

The Summary, Experience, and Education sections are the only places on your LinkedIn Profile where you can add what LinkedIn calls “rich media.” This includes images, video, articles, presentations, links, and more. When you add rich media to your Summary, it will display below the Summary text, but above the “show more” link.

In today’s visual world, adding media to your Summary can help you stand out from others in your field. When a user clicks on rich media content in your Summary, they can view the content without leaving your LinkedIn Profile. For example, if you add a PowerPoint presentation or video, LinkedIn will open a window on top of your Profile that allows the LinkedIn user to view the complete presentation or video without taking them away from your Profile.

Bonus tip

Here’s one bonus tip that is especially important for lawyers. LinkedIn doesn’t always have an obvious place to include information that might be required by your jurisdiction’s ethical rules, like disclaimers, “Attorney Advertising” notices, or your office address. Your Summary is a place you can include that information. Your Summary could also include information such as the jurisdictions and courts where you are admitted to practice law.

Do you have questions about how to get more out of LinkedIn? Let me know in the comments below!

For more tips on your LinkedIn Summary, see my post, LinkedIn Tip #4: Supercharge Your Summary.

Want more LinkedIn info? Check out my post, Power Up Your LinkedIn Headline (includes my FREE downloadable headline worksheet).

Do Something! Power Up Your LinkedIn Headline

Your Professional Headline is the line that appears under your name on LinkedIn. When users first encounter you on LinkedIn, they may not be looking at your Profile; they may see you as a suggestion in People You May Know on their Network page, in search results, in a list of connections, or in a LinkedIn Group. In many of those cases, all they will see is your photo, name, and your Professional Headline, like this:

Think of your Headline as your LinkedIn elevator speech or your virtual introduction. It should be short and to the point, but it should communicate enough information about you to entice people to want to know more. In the case of LinkedIn, you want your Headline to convince users to click on your name and view your full Profile or to connect with you.

Know your audience

Think about what is most important to your audience or the people you want to connect with on LinkedIn. Your Professional Headline is a valuable tool that can communicate your area of practice, your knowledge and experience and to distinguish yourself from other lawyers. It should be a differentiator that helps you to stand out in search results and it should be descriptive so that when people see your Professional Headline they immediately know what you do.

Be descriptive

Don’t make the common mistake made by many lawyers by limiting your Headline to just your title (Associate, Partner, etc.). Include your practice areas or the types of work you do for clients. Consider including the name of your firm as well – it won’t always be obvious to LinkedIn users if they’re not looking at your full Profile when they encounter your name.

But don’t stop there. Even your title and firm name (“Partner at Flintstone and Rubble, P.C”) are not enough. If a user is not familiar with your firm, this information may not be enough even to communicate that you are a lawyer (Flintstone and Rubble could be an accounting firm, for example).

Add a description of your practice areas or clients, keeping your audience in mind. Use keywords that your audience might use to search for a lawyer in your practice area. Utilize all 120 characters that LinkedIn makes available for your Headline.

Compare these Headline examples:

Partner -or- Partner at Scooby and Shaggy, LLP, Management-side Labor and Employment Law Trial Attorney

Associate at Lane & Kent, P.C -or- Elder Law and Estate Planning Associate Attorney at Seinfeld & Costanza

Trial Partner at Florrick, Agos -or- Partner, Scott, Schrute, Halpert, Beesly & Howard, PC, Risk Management and Legal Malpractice Attorney

If these headlines appeared in search results, which one in each pair would you be more likely to select?

Revising your Headline

Certain key events (getting a job, losing a job, promotions, etc.) will trigger the need to revise your Headline (along with the rest of your Profile). There’s no hard and fast rule, and much depends on your purpose and audience, and how fast those things change.

Revise your Headline as often as you need to. But keep in mind that when you revise your Headline, LinkedIn may send your connections a notification that you have a new job. If that isn’t the case and you’re just tweaking your Headline, you may want to turn off those notifications before you make your Headline changes.

If nothing significant has changed, you may want to look at your Profile and your Headline every 6 months to a year to see if there’s any updates that need to be made, any changes in language or new ways of phrasing that you might want to incorporate based on what’s happening in your practice and in the marketplace.

Job seekers: Include your desired position?

If you have a specific kind of job in mind, you can certainly make it clear in your Headline. But be aware that if you are currently employed, your employer or other colleagues may be able to see this information. If you do not want them to know that you are job hunting, you might want to keep that information out of your Headline.

If you don’t want your employer to know you’re jobhunting, you can still use LinkedIn’s job search and apply for jobs listed on LinkedIn, and you can make sure that your Professional Headline and your summary reflect the knowledge, skills and experience that would be attractive to a new potential employer or for the new position that you are seeking.

What you include in your Headline depends upon what you’re looking for, what you think your audience will respond to, and how much attention you want to call to it. If you want to let as many people as possible know that you’re seeking a specific kind of position, putting it right up front in your Headline is likely to attract attention.

For example, your Headline might read, “Recent New York Law Grad Seeking Associate Position in Commercial Real Estate.”

The benefit-driven Headline

Lawyers who want to really stand out on LinkedIn might want to consider writing a benefit-driven Headline.

What is a benefit-driven Headline? It is a Headline that focuses on the benefits that you offer to your clients, rather than your title or what you do.

For example, instead of, “Elder Law and Estate Planning Associate Attorney at Seinfeld & Costanza,” you might want to focus your Headline on the benefits that you provide to your clients, saying something like, “Helping families protect their aging loved ones and their legacy.” You might even try creatively combining these, using all the available 120 characters.

The Professional Headline is one of the most important elements of your LinkedIn Profile – take some time today to sit down and think about how you can be more creative with your Headline to attract clients, referral sources, hiring partners, or even the media.

If you want help with your LinkedIn Headline or other aspects of your LinkedIn Profile, contact me to see how I can help.

UPDATE: If you're more of a DIY type, you might be interested in this FREE printable LinkedIn Headline worksheet.

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How Lawyers Can Get the Most out of Writing Articles

You may have heard the advice that creating content can help you build your practice and the saying, “content is king,” so if you’ve written an article – excellent! But don’t stop there. Now is not the time to take a break.

Whether your article was published on your own website or blog, in another online location, or in a print publication, that article is valuable content that can be leveraged to reach even more readers, potential clients, influencers, referral sources, or even the media.

 If you create great content and nobody knows about it or sees it, it won’t do much for your marketing or business development efforts. The more people who see your article, the more it will help build your reputation, establish you as an expert, boost your credibility and grow your network – all of which can help you build your practice and bring in business.

Get more mileage out of every article you write

Use social media to your advantage

If the article is already online, you’ll want to post the link to all of your social media accounts. These may include: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and even Pinterest or Instagram (good reasons to include images in your article).

LinkedIn

There are several ways that you can get more visibility for your content using LinkedIn. Post an update on your personal Profile and on your firm’s LinkedIn Company Page. Look at the LinkedIn Groups you belong to and use the article as a jumping-off point for a Group discussion (your Groups will likely contain many more – and different- contacts than you will reach by posting an update alone), and don’t forget to include a link to the article in each of these.

You can also add the article to your Profile under the Publications section (now part of Accomplishments on LinkedIn), or as a link or attachment under your Summary, Experience or Education sections on your Profile.

If the article is not already online, you may want to pull one or two points from the article and create a blog post or mini-article from your original article to post online, either on your own site or, if you don’t have one, on LinkedIn, using LinkedIn Publisher. You can also take articles that are already online (for example, an article that is on your firm’s website) and re-purpose that into a LinkedIn article using the Publisher platform, and then link back to the full article on your site.

For example, let’s say you’ve written an article on the five most important things to know before you prepare your estate plan. Pull out the five points – perhaps a sentence or two about each one, write an introductory sentence, a conclusory sentence with a link to the full article on your site, and publish it on LinkedIn Publisher. Or choose just one or two points to include in your LinkedIn article and link to the full article for the remaining points with a read more link (don’t forget to include images here too).

Other social media platforms

In addition to LinkedIn, think about the other social media platforms you participate in or have accounts with. Some of these may be “strictly” personal, and others you may use for mixed business and personal reasons. You may even have separate personal and business accounts on many of these platforms.

As you can see, using social media for this purpose provides a substantial amount of options to help get your article seen by a wide variety of people. Every article may not be appropriate for every platform or for both business and personal accounts, but don’t rule out the possibility of sharing your posts on personal accounts, particularly if the article contains information that is written specifically for the kinds of people who follow your accounts on these platforms and contains information that could be valuable or helpful to them.

Keep in mind that even if you are using a platform mostly for personal reasons and not for business reasons, it makes sense every once in a while to remind friends, family and followers what you do for a living, and posting a link to an article that contains helpful information is a great way to do that – it promotes you without being “promotional.”

Schedule posts wisely

Remember that your social media followers don’t see everything you post all of the time. Post the same link more than once on same social channel; try posting at different times of the day and emphasize different points from the article in your posts to reach different audiences.

If your article content will be relevant for a period of time, while you are creating those initial social media posts immediately after the article’s publication, use a scheduling tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule social media posts into the future. Consider scheduling several posts about your article in the first week or two after publication, and then schedule additional posts for at least several months thereafter.

Use email

If your article is especially relevant to specific clients, referral sources, or to a certain segment of your contact list, send the article link or a PDF of the article in an email. Or include the article in a firm newsletter that goes to your clients or prospects. You may also wish to include links to articles or other related content on your site.

Other ways to re-purpose articles

You can get even more mileage out of articles by taking the content and converting it into other formats. Some ideas for doing this include:

• Create an infographic using the main points in your article – post the infographic on social media sites with a link back to the original article
• Design a slide presentation from your article content
• Animate the slide presentation to create a video (add audio for even more impact)
• Develop a live presentation based on the article to use for speaking engagements or to present to clients
• Turn the article into a script for a podcast

Even if you don't do all of the things suggested here, taking just a few of these suggestions should help to improve the visibility of articles you write in the future - and if you've got some articles that you have already written that didn't get the exposure you wanted, try some of these to breathe new life into old (but still relevant) content.

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LinkedIn's New Interface: A Brief Overview

You may not have seen it yet, but LinkedIn has revamped its user interface recently, in part to make desktop and mobile versions of LinkedIn more consistent. If the new interface hasn't come to your LinkedIn account yet, it will soon. Here's a brief overview of the changes, many of which users apparently don't find positive, based on feedback I've seen on LinkedIn and elsewhere.

Navigation

The navigation bar at the top of every page on LinkedIn has changed; instead of just using words for navigation, LinkedIn has added some icons and has moved some things around, which might make some of your favorite LikedIn features a bit hard to find. In addition, all of the icons now appear to the right of the search box, rather than some appearing below the search box, as in the old interface. 

 

The new basic navigation buttons/menu items are:

• Home
• My Network
• Jobs
• Messaging 
• Notifications
• Me
• There is a bit of a separation, and then a new item, More (Update: 5/17: this item is now "Work")

Only the Me and More menu (which actually says Business in my LinkedIn account, although others have advised that theirs is called Tools) Work menu items have dropdowns that contain sub-items.

Under Me, you'll find your Profile (there are no longer separate links to view and edit your Profile), your account and privacy settings, Manage links to manage your Company Pages and job postings on LinkedIn if you have them, and the sign-out link, as well as the link to the LinkedIn Help Center. 

The More  Work drop-down (which has an icon that looks like a square made up of nine squares) includes items that used to be found under the Interests tab in the old LinkedIn interface, including Groups, Learning (lynda.com courses), Slideshare, Groups, LinkedIn Profinder, Advertising, Post a Job, and LinkedIn Lookup. (More about some of these items in future posts).

Profile

In addition to the design changes noted below, LinkedIn has made several other changes to your Profile. Some of these changes are unwelcome in my opinion, including:

1. Now those viewing your Profile can only see the first few lines (approx. 200 characters) of your Profile Summary, rather than the entire Summary - that means it's even more important than ever to make sure that your Summary provides valuable information right up front so that visitors click on the See More link to see the rest of your Summary.
2. LinkedIn has implemented the "see more" concept on other aspects of your Profile as well; the descriptions under each of your positions other than your current position in the Experience section won't show unless the visitor clicks the view more link, and only three "featured" skills and endorsements show on your Profile without clicking on a similar link. Recommendations are treated similarly.
3. Several of the customized sections that help your Profile stand out, including Honors and Awards, Organizations, and Publications have now been grouped together under Accomplishments, and the new layout places less emphasis on these items.
4. LinkedIn has removed the ability to customize your Profile by rearranging the order of sections.

Home Page

LinkedIn's Home page has also gotten a makeover. A mini-snapshot of your Profile on the left, including your name, photo, professional headline and statistics for Who's Viewed Your Profile and Views of posts. The look of the network update (share an article, photo, or update) and Publisher (write an article) boxes has also been modified.

Design changes 

When you view your LinkedIn Profile now, you'll see that LinkedIn has made a number of design changes to the Profile. These include a change in the dimensions of your header image (if you were using one), and a switch from a square Profile photo to a round one. 

LinkedIn has added a header to some pages (such as Groups, for example), which appears under the black navigation bar. That header, which varies in size depending on the page, still incorporates LinkedIn blue, but appears to have an hombre effect, beginning with the dark blue toward the left of the screen, and moving to more of a teal color to the right of the screen.

Features eliminated

Along with these changes, LinkedIn has eliminated some features, including some features that I found extremely helpful. One of those features was tagging; you no longer have the ability to 'tag' your contacts in order to filter or to send targeted messages with a free account. Now the only options you have for your contacts are to send them a message or to remove them. The elimination of tagging also restricts your ability to easily sort through your contacts; the only remaining options are to sort by first name, last name or recently added.

The How You Rank feature is also no longer available, as is the View Profile As feature, which would allow you to see how your Profile looks to others on LinkedIn. You are also now unable to customize the web links you add to your Profile the way you did in the past - if you had customized them before, visitors to your Profile will now see long URLs with your customized name in parentheses.

Perhaps most disconcerting for power users of LinkedIn is the loss of Advanced Search features, and the Alumni search is no longer there (although you can still find alumni, just not quite as easily).

Temporarily unavailable

As of this writing, some LinkedIn features are listed as "temporarily unavailable," which seems to imply that they'll be returning. These include the ability to export your resume, sort updates in your feed on your Home page, and the Profile Strength feature. (Update, May 2017: Profile Strength is back, but somewhat different now - you can find it under the "top card" information on your Profile (below your Summary). It will walk you through the completion steps until LinkedIn deems your Profile complete, and then you'll receive an "All Star" rating).

Additional Changes
LinkedIn has also made changes to the My Network tab, the Inbox, Notifications, and Company Pages. Stay tuned for future posts that will go into more detail about these and other changes.

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Choosing Ghostwriters, Blogging and Social Media Service Providers

In my last post,I talked about delegating or outsourcing some blogging and social media tasks to others to reduce the burden of managing these activities, while still gaining many of the benefits.

But using outside services to write or post for you does raise some potential issues, including loss of engagement, style that is inconsistent with the individual lawyer or firm, and potential ethical issues. (For more on blogs and ghostwriting, see my posts Should You Use a Ghostwriter for Your Blog and Ghostwriting and Legal Blogs or my post on the Lawyerist blog, Outsourcing Blogs and Social Media). 

My last post talked a bit about choosing a writer or service (or an employee or associate in your firm) that understands and can convey the correct style, but there's more to consider than that.

The safest (and most effective) course of action, rather than outsourcing the entire endeavor, is to delegate or outsource only part of the process, while maintaining control over your content, voice and interactions. Lawyers often use paralegals or younger associates to draft pleadings, motions or other court papers in the lawyer’s name, and a similar practice for blogging and social media posting is not inherently unethical if the lawyer is also providing input into the work, supervising, reviewing content for accuracy, ensuring that no ethics issues exist, and signing off on it before it is posted online.

Tips for choosing a ghostwriter, outside service or employee for blog or social media activities:

• Use a service that understands the difference between promotion and providing value to your audience
• Use someone who has worked with lawyers and understands that ethical rules may prohibit some activities, words, phrases or posts.
• Thoroughly investigate the company or individual, their philosophy, writing style, and approach to blogging and social media. Ask for examples that demonstrate how they use these tools themselves or on behalf of other clients.
• Require that all content be original, and provided only to you, rather than generic content provided to many other attorneys who practice in your area of law (even if those other attorneys are outside of your geographic area)
• Insist on a work for hire agreement stating that the work created for you and your blog or social media accounts belongs to you and not to the writer or their company
• Develop a written agreement that states that nothing may be posted on your behalf without your prior approval, whether the posts are made on your accounts or are comments on others’ accounts or sites
• Review all content – you are ultimately responsible for the accuracy of all content posted on your behalf and for ensuring that it complies with the ethical rules. You’ll also want to be familiar with what is being posted so that you can speak intelligently about it if you receive inquiries or comments about it, and to confirm that it presents you and your firm in the best light possible
• Check that the legal information is correct and that you agree with and support any opinions expressed, and that those opinions will not offend or otherwise upset or create conflicts with your clients and referral sources
• Establish a good mix of posts that provide value and link to other sources in addition to providing your own content and links to your own content, and make sure that promotional posts are kept to a minimum

Finally, remember that social media is meant to be social. To be the most effective, you should be the one engaging with your readers and followers. Respond to comments and communicate one on one. Take online relationships offline into the real world; set up meetings and phone calls. Make introductions and connections between people in your network. Share others’ content; it not only reduces the amount of original content you need to post, but it builds your networks and your relationships with those whose content you share.

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Delegation Tips for Lawyer Blogs and Social Media Accounts

Marketing experts recommend that to gain visibility and get traffic to your firm’s website, you should maintain a blog and participate in social media. But for attorneys in firms of all sizes, especially small firms and solo practices, it can be a challenge to find the time to properly manage these activities and develop professional quality content that provides value to readers and followers while at the same time managing your clients, your cases, and your practice.

Personally engaging in these activities is the gold standard; writing your own posts creates a greater connection with your audience because the audience feels as if you are speaking directly to them. But it requires a regular commitment of time. However, there are ways that you can delegate or outsource some of the work of creating an active and engaged blog and social media presence to reduce some of the burden on you, while still gaining the benefits of participation.

Ways to Delegate Blogging and Social Media Tasks

For example, you could hire a writer to do some repurposing for you – taking some of your existing materials or writing and developing blog posts and social media posts or campaigns around them. If you have written a legal brief, a writer may be able to turn the writing you’ve done for a legal audience (the court) into writing on the same topic for a different audience – potential clients or referral sources – by explaining the legal concepts to a lay audience and breaking down your brief into a series of blog posts.

Or you could also ask someone to interview you about a timely topic or a story in the news. That interview could become a podcast or audio posted to your website, and the transcript of the interview could be transcribed into text as a blog post. You could also have a writer expand a bit on some of what you discuss in the interview.

You can also ask others to write guest posts for your blog. They can be other lawyers, clients, experts, or other service providers. Guest posts are a win- win: they provide the guest poster with increased visibility and access to your audience, and give your audience a different perspective or new information that you might not be able to provide on your own, while reducing the frequency with which you have to create your own content. (You may want to include a disclaimer on these posts and make it clear they are written by third parties and represent their views, and not necessarily yours.)

Other Blogging and Social Media Tasks to Delegate or Outsource

Other tasks you can delegate or outsource include:

• Conducting basic research
• Identifying of story ideas or news items as the basis for posts
• Maintaining an editorial calendar
• Developing a first draft of a post based on some bullet points or a topic idea you provide
• Suggesting other blogs to follow or link to
• Setting up a blogs or social media accounts
• Proofreading and editing
• Reviewing analytics and post performance
• Posting links to articles, blog posts or to your website on social media

For those that don’t have the time or don’t want to actually write themselves, but still want to maintain a blog or social media accounts, using a ghostwriter or subscribing to a blogging service may solve the problem. But you’ll want to be sure that their writing fits with your firm’s style, voice, and the image you’re trying to project.

Checking on Style

If you decide to hire others to write for your blog or post to your social media accounts, do a trial run and check their writing style:

• Does the writer’s style match yours?
• Does it convey the impression you want to convey?
• Does their language reflect the language you use with clients?
• Does their writing reflect your philosophy and values as a lawyer?
• Does it reflect your personality? Is it more or less formal, conversational, lighthearted, humorous, etc. than you usually are?
• Are posts written specifically to connect with your target audience?

Using outside services to write or post for you may raise some additional issues you should be aware of, including potential ethical issues. For example, having someone else writing blog posts in the lawyer’s name could be potentially misleading. And posting about clients or cases could run afoul of confidentiality rules. In my next post, I'll give you some tips and things to think about when choosing a ghostwriter, outside service or employee to run your blog or social media activities. (Hint: you'll still need to be involved).

For more on blogs and ghostwriting, see my posts Should You Use a Ghostwriter for Your Blog and Ghostwriting and Legal Blogs or my post on the Lawyerist blog, Outsourcing Blogs and Social Media. 

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New York Social Media Ethics Guidelines

Last Wednesday, the ABA Journal reported that the New York State Bar Association's House of Delegates would be considering social media ethics guides for lawyers on Saturday during the State Bar's meeting. The story was picked up by several people, including noted blogger and social media expert, Kevin O'Keefe, in his post, "New York Social Media Ethics Guidelines a roadmap or a rabbit hole?" in which O'Keefe questions the necessity for a specific set of guidelines specifically addressing social media and opines that the general rules should suffice to cover these new technologies.

The guidelines being considered appear to be the most recent version of guidelines put together by the New York State Bar Association's Commercial and Federal Litigation Section, but these guidelines are not new (here's a version from 2014). Nor are they particularly surprising. They were developed based on the New York Rules of Professional Conduct and various ethics opinions which have interpreted those rules. While most of the ethics opinions cited in the guidelines are from New York, there are opinions cited from other states where no New York ethics opinions could be found and another jurisdiction's rule was similar.

As O'Keefe says in his post, 

Rather than providing an onramp to social media for lawyers as intended, won’t these guidelines scare the heck out of lawyers? Lawyers don’t understand social media to start with and now we layer on ethics guidelines the relevance of which to particular situations could only be determined by a lawyer with practical knowledge of social media?

Blogging, social media, social networking and the like are learned through trial and error. A lawyers common sense, good judgment and a working understanding of existing ethics rules guide them.

Lawyers have been doing exactly this for the last twenty plus years, beginning with online bulletin board systems, message boards, newsgroups, listservs and virtual communities. Lawyers participated and did not drum up ethics sanctions along the way.

Now it’s blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more. And still lawyers are not going down in ethics’ flames.

But the fact is that attorneys have been inquiring about the rules that govern social media, as evidenced by opinions such as NYSBA Committee on Professional Ethics Opinion 1009, issued in May of 2014, discussing whether tweets in a specific circumstance require a disclaimer under the New York rules, or Formal Opinion 748 of the New York County Lawyers Association Professional Ethics Committee issued in March of 2015 addressing LinkedIn ethics with respect to skills, endorsements and recommendations.

"Should" lawyers be able to use common sense and apply the existing ethics rules to new technologies like social media the same way they have with previous technologies?  Probably. Have most attorneys been able to do so? So far, it seems that way. Will the guidelines scare some attorneys away? Perhaps, but the fact is that the attorneys who are able to use "common sense" to apply the rules to social media, should be able to do the same with regard to the guidelines and still use social media effectively. Indeed, since the guidelines suggest that attorneys should have at least a basic knowledge of social media (since their clients may use it, even if they don't), the guidelines may have the opposite affect - once attorneys learn about these tools, they may be less afraid to use them.

Are specific guidelines necessary? Probably not. Will they be helpful to many attorneys? That remains to be seen; I haven't seen any reports about the action taken by the House of Delegates last weekend, and a link on the Home page of the NYSBA website that purports to lead to a recent report on Social Media Ethics Guidelines appears to lead to an unavailable page. But New York isn't the first or only state to issue similar guidelines about social media use for attorneys - take, for example, Pennsylvania.

In New York, even if adopted, the guidelines would be just that - guidelines - just as the ethics opinions are advisory and only issued based on the specific circumstance in the inquiry presented. Whether an attorney can or will be disciplined as a result of social media use (or misuse) remains to be seen, but the disciplinary authority often relies upon guidelines and ethics opinions such as these, so like it or not, New York attorneys need to take heed.

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