Today, Costa DeVault presented “Making the Case: Social Media for Attorneys,” to the Volusia/Flagler Association for Women Lawyers. The program covers the basics of social media, and how to market oneself using this modern medium. Special thanks to Christopher G. Hill from Construction Law Musings, Susan Cartier Libel from Solo Practice University, Scott E. Greenfield from Simple Justice and Carolyn Elefant from MyShingle for their input and expertise. We hope you find this information useful, and welcome any suggestions for our next program.

While the actual “rules” of social media are debatable, experts generally agree that it should be looked at as two-way communication and treated as a conversation – not a forum for pushing content.

A prime example of a failure to understand this concept occurred earlier this week on the news aggregate site Reddit. Reddit users (called “redditors”) submit content from around the web, and then rank and discuss the submitted links.

It came to the attention of one redditor that another user, “SoCalSurferGrrl,” was only submitting links to pro-pharmaceutical articles and web sites – and that she had submitted more than 30 of these links in the last seven days. Additionally, SoCalSurferGirl had contributed minimally in Reddit discussions (all of these things are monitored on a user’s Reddit profile).

The redditor submitted a link to SoCalSurferGrrl’s profile, accusing her of being in PR for pharmaceutical companies … and it quickly became one of the highest-rated links on the site. The discussion board lit up, and hundreds of users contributed comments similar to these:

“You let me down, SoCalSurferGrrl! Here, I thought you were a totally down, cool surfer chick in Redondo, and instead you’ve posted 50 positive appearances in the press of drug companies in the last 3 days!”

“They aren’t trying very hard: 1 karma, 0 comment karma. User for 10 months. Not a lot of posted content or comments.”

Even worse, several spirited discussions ensued about corruption in the pharmaceutical industry – an opportunity for SoCalSurferGrrl to actively participate – yet she was nowhere to be seen.

What can we learn from this? To be effective, companies incorporating social media into marketing efforts must understand the “rules of the road” and then operate within those community norms. If companies fail to conduct the necessary research to understand the online culture and to lay the initial groundwork, they will be outed – like SoCalSurferGrrl. On the other hand, those companies that do it right position themselves to reap a variety of benefits, such as improved brand perception and increased customer loyalty, among others.