Short Sale: Small Content is the Future Present

I’ve chosen to broadcast my one really good idea for the month of January through Attorney at Work. Yup, there’s only one . . . and they have it.

This month, I write about the importance of shortening content, to match the shortening attention span of our society, as well as suggesting some of the best methods for broadcasting such content. Since it’s 2012, and people tell us that the Mayans tell us that the world is about to end, I figured that now would also be a good time to make my prediction for what I think will be the best short content marketing platform for the coming year.

Read more here.

A Matter of Trust: Attorney Funds May Be Deposited Into IOLTA Account to Cover Bank Charges

This week’s Massachusetts Bar Association Lawyers E-Journal Law Practice Management Section Featured Practice Tip comes from LOMAP. This week's Tip runs down the ethics rules and advisories related to depositing attorney funds into trust accounts for the purpose of covering bank charges.

Read the Tip here.

Guest Post: Review of TrialPad 2.1 for the iPad

A couple months back, I flipped a coin with friend of the LOMAP Blog, Gabriel Cheong, to see which one of us would write a product review of the TrialPad app for iPad. I lost. But, then, I became otherwise engaged. And, Gabriel was kind enough to draft the review himself. (Well, that’s not exactly how it went down; I’m taking some poetic license here, for the sake of the story.) Gabriel, who has appeared as a guest poster here previously, is the principal of Infinity Law Group, the composer of tweets, the producer of InfinityLawTV, the herder of house rabbits and more--generally, a true renaissance man.

You can read Gabriel’s complete review, as it originally appeared on Starting Out Solo’s Blog, here.

(I was going to re-post it in full to this blog; but, Did you see how many screenshots there are in that damn thing?)

--Thanks to Aubrey Swanson, for scoring us a license to TrialPad, which made this review possible.--

UnScrooged: It’s Not All About the Money

My monthly contribution to Clio’s (award-winning) Small Firm Innovation group blog (on the December theme of ‘end of the year financial lesson(s)’) sees me channeling my inner George Bailey (--George, Why must you torture the children?--) to say that, maybe, just maybe, there’s more to all of this than making that paper.

You can read more, here.

(That’s right, I can’t leave Christmas behind quite yet . . . Merry Christmas, You wonderful old Building & Loan! (Yes, you could say my obsession with ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ is disturbing. And, then, I could say that I don’t care.))

While the Gettin’s Good: Mapping Tools for Lawyers

This week’s Massachusetts Bar Association Lawyers E-Journal Law Practice Management Section Featured Practice Tip comes from LOMAP. This week's Tip relays some of the best free mapping tools for getting around in our mobile society, with practical applications for attorneys.

Read the Tip here.

Power Tagging: Tales from the World Wild Web

Twitter represents a potentially explosive marketing opportunity for lawyers and law firms; but, even in small bursts of 140 characters each, you must be careful to appropriately tag your tweets, in order to get the maximum effect for what you publish.

. . .

The Scenario: Back in 2009, when Coca-Cola decided to change the formula for Powerade so that it would taste awful, I engaged in a (very) small campaign to make Powerade Ion 4 the new Coke of sugar-loaded sports drinks. Given Ricky Bobby’s proclivity for the beverage (and my wife’s, which was my real motivation for the project), I decided to try to enlist the help of Will Ferrell; so, I sent a reply message to Will Ferrell’s Twitter account (at least I thought it was Will Ferrell’s Twitter account) saying something more clever than, ‘Help Destroy New Powerade!’. Well, Will Ferrell didn’t help; but, I got a ton of new followers, who seemed to think that I knew Will Ferrell, which I did not.

The Lesson, as always: It’s good to get more followers; but, at what cost? You want people following you who are going to use, purchase or promote your products or services, not, as in my case, celebrity hounds. Not that it’s the worst thing in the world to show up in the ‘Mentions’ field of a popular account (people do search those); and, the way that Twitter works, you are in complete control of your insertions into that dialogue.

. . .

The Scenario: This summer, we had our intern draft this post on Microsoft Office resources. The post was well-done; but, short, and intentionally generic. I always construct a series of variously-worded tweets to promote our blog posts; and, in this case, I included the @Microsoft tag, so that we would, at least, appear in Microsoft’s ‘Mentions’ feed (the potentially effective strategy alluded to above). Better still, Microsoft retweeted our post, and we got a rash of hits, in short order. That publication is our #3 most popular blog post of all-time; and, it is the latest-dated post included in our all-time top ten.

The Lesson: You link out of your blogs, so why wouldn’t you link out of your Twitter posts publicizing your blogs? @ references serve as relevant links to people, companies, products and services that you’ve covered. Plus, Twitter’s mentions feed serves as a built-in alert to those profile owners/administrators. The more retweets you can get, the better, because that’s how you get your ‘stuff’ into other people’s channels--and, from there, who knows how far your voice will carry. (Despite my numerous mentions of @BradPaisley, I have not yet been retweeted by his feed; but, One Day! Not that that guy needs any help selling records, though.) So, when you’re crafting your tweets, you should always keep in mind potential profile references you can make. If you don’t know whether a person or a company has a Twitter account, it takes very little time to look them up, and to relate the post to them; if they retweet you, because they’ve noticed your mentioning them, it was all well worth the effort.

. . .

Dicta: (1) To a lesser extent, hashtags work the same way that mentions do; but, they’re not so obvious a reference, because tweets including hashtags do not automatically show up in an account feed--instead, someone has to know about the hashtag, or be looking for it, such that there is some publication work to be done respecting popularizing the hashtag; or, you can piggyback off of an already popular hashtag. But, generally, the value of the hashtag is that it places your tweet into an aggregate collection of other tweets on the same subject; in other words: you’re getting yourself and your message into more channels. (2) Twitter, and social media marketing generally, being relatively new phenomena, means that not everyone is leveraging these tools effectively, or that persons and companies with established offline, or elsewhere online, brands don’t have the same kind of reach that they do on-social media that they do off-social media. You may have more followers than your favorite food truck, let’s say. This being the case, a reference to a burgeoning Twitter brand can get you a retweet into a separate channel of influence, or maybe some free stuff, food preferably. (3) The cc: function, overutilized in email communications, is underutilized in Twitter. If I tweet something that I think may be of interest or relevance to another person/account (read: I’d like you to retweet this, even though I am not going to come right out and say it), I cc: them. There is probably some shorterhand method for indicating cc: on Twitter; but, I’m not one of those people who’s going to look that up, so I wouldn’t know.

. . .

Of course, these sorts of curiosities are not limited to the use of Twitter; and thus, this piece begs a further instruction, an example beyond--if not mostly (merely) for purposes of keeping close to its titled objective.

An Other Scenario: I write this law practice management blog that doubles as my personal soapbox for the promotion of music that I like (more and more often country music) through a segment at the end of most of my posts tabbed as “Liner Notes”. For a recent example, see here . . . oh, and below. Now, don’t get me wrong . . . I love law practice management--really I do; it’s just that writing about music gives me a chance to talk about something that I like just as well.

An Other Lesson: Of the three top search hits for this blog, one is not like the others; see if you can pick out the one: “lomap”; “lomap blog”; “julia roberts ex husband”. For those of you who are unaware, Lyle Lovett is the answer (and you know that, for sure). In addition to being Julia Roberts’ ex-husband, Lyle Lovett was also generously referenced in a post of mine, in which I created what I thought Lyle Lovett’s elevator speech would sound like, including links out to some of my favorite songs of his. This was enough, it seems, to draw a goodly number of those seekers of information about the estimable Ms. Roberts’ ex. (Suitors?) Silly? Perhaps. But, if I had a boat for every time a unique mention of mine drew an unexpected hit to this blog, well . . . I’d have at least a couple of boats. The lesson here is that: the more unique your voice, the more attention you can expect to bring yourself (good or bad, so be good); and, it’s not a terrible idea to allow your outside interests to pervade your legal content, since it’s more likely that you’ll be able to infiltrate interest channels you had no idea you could effect--and, from there, and again, there’s no telling how far your voice will travel.

Postscript: (1) @jaredcorreia Top search keywords @MassLOMAP's Blog today: "beatles with beards", "how to organize a legal file" + "eating chips". Perhaps I lack focus :) (2) Another fun thing to do is to perform a Google Images search for “LOMAP Blog”, to see all of the wack pictures I’ve linked to over the years here; but, that’s probably another blog post unto itself.

. . .

How do I know all this? I use the free stats tools available with Hootsuite (for Twitter and social media account management) and Google’s Blogger; and, you should, too--or your equivalents.

. . .

Liner Not

And, this has been a Wild Tales of the Internet. Thank you.

. . .

Guest Liner Notes

Speaking of linking in order to increase one’s popularity, here’s my Linkedin profile--or whatever Jared agrees isn’t too offensive to link out from his blog. (LinkedIn profile is fine.--ed.) Hello, to those of you who don’t know me, which is most of you. I’m Jared’s younger, handsomer, and talenteder brother. Me amo Patrick, and I will do my best to uphold Liner Notes’ tradition of excellence.

Jared and I developed different musical tastes as he entered into his autumn years. (Autumn years? Screw you!--ed.) I’m more of the punk rock persuasion. I listen to the Stiff Little Fingers, The Clash (I listen to The Clash, too, dude.--ed.), and the Have Nots.

I don’t think many of my Boston punk songs are safe for work. (I maintain a large collection of Boston-related songs, because I mostly hang in and around Allston. I am not much of a traveler; I want my own reality show called “Culture Shock”, where I would travel the world and be surprised by the things I see: “By Zeus’ beard! Is that two different cheeses in the same sandwich! Who can handle that? Get me a potato to eat raw!”) So, let’s go with something fun. Get out your flannel and lace up your beat-up Chucks. Are you limber enough to skank? We’re going with some SKA!:

“Here’s To Life” by Streetlife Manifesto

-It’s moderately obscure; but, it’s got some really good orchestration.

“Take Warning” by Operation Ivy

-Try not to mumble “take warning” while you walk down the street. People look at you with crippled terror.

“Beer” by Reel Big Fish

-Umm, this song is amazing?

“Superman” by Goldfinger

--Do you expect me to talk?
--No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.

“C’mon Eileen” by Save Ferris

-There are tons of ska covers, and this one has a nice, fun feel. Yeah, that’s why. Sure. (Cover of Dexys Midnight Runners’ original version.--ed..)

“2-Tone Army” by The Toasters

-This is the theme song to KaBlam!. It was one of those Nickelodeon shows that shaped the intensely weird sense of humor my generation has.

I hope I’ve brightened up your day a bit . . . and mine: see, I haven’t really been all that excited about anything since I found out my favorite burrito place was replaced by a bubble tea shop. I don’t even understand the concept of bubble tea.

I miss you El Pollo Loco.

Love,

Patrick (Actual photo, ladies.--ed.)

Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot, Season 2: The Best of the Guests (2011)

Before Christmas, I took what I thought was the easy way out of 2011, by offering a month-by-month recap of some of the LOMAP Blog’s best posts of this year. This allowed me to complete my Christmas shopping, just under the wire. And, while there is no New Year’s shopping requirement ( at least that I know of), the fact that I ate too many of these awesome chocolate-cheesecake-coconut contraptions that my aunt made, means that I have only traded ailments, and am now suffering from a post-Christmas, pre-New Year food hangover. The only cure: more cowbell. Or, eating less . . . or, more, I suppose: getting back on the horse that threw you, and all . . .

Of course, the shading of last week’s recap post may have offered the impression that this operation exists in a vacuum, in which the LOMAP staff works feverishly, day and evening and morning, producing only the finest law practice management-related blog postings. . . . Well, that’s only partially true. We have been, and continue to be, graced by the presence of some fantastic guest bloggers, whose posts we publish from time to time. So, this year, as last, it is my distinct pleasure to recap some of my favorite guest blog posts from the 2011 season:

-In February, Jim Bolan covered important changes to the Massachusetts Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 1.5, respecting fees and fee agreements.

-In April, Max Perlman revisited the Massachusetts data protection rules, one year post implementation.

-In June, Daryl Rinaldi offered some technology applications to help law firms respond to fee pressure.

-In July, Howard Lenow shared the full range of hardware and software that he uses to trick out his iPad.

-In September, Ken Reich relayed his top ten list of effective behaviors for the establishment and maintaining of a solo law practice.

-In November, Ken Leeser helped to define the three legs of the modern technology platform for small law firms: cloud, mobile, social.

If you’re interested in joining this esteemed collection of authors, and wish to write a guest post for the LOMAP Blog, email me at jared@masslomap.org.

. . .

Liner Notes

There isn’t much New Year’s music, despite what you’d think. So, the only possible thing to do here is to return to the Christmas season, which is virtually fine, to my mind, since we have not yet reached the Epiphany, when the lighted trees come down.

So, the other day, I was talking with various people about what they thought was the most-recorded Christmas song; nobody had a definitive answer; and, I didn’t feel like Googling it, either--because of being all unplugged for the Christmas season, and whatnot. Now, I have no factual basis for saying so: but, I have to believe it’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”. I mean, you hear so many versions of that song; and, it’s sort of an easy thing to manage: if you’re going to do it, you only have to sing just the half of the song, and you get to make somebody happy by offering a duet. Usually, the way this goes down is that there is some one primary artist, who is releasing a Christmas album; he or she decides to do the song; he or she acquires a duet partner; and, from there: it’s practically in the groove. This is sort of the way we run the LOMAP Blog: we chiefly publish original content, and occasionally seek out effective collaborators to work with. Ain’t life beaut-iful . . .

So, here are a variety of versions of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”:

-Dean Martin was pretty much born to pimp, so it was a fait accompli that he would cover this song, with a bevy (harem?) of female singers accompanying him.

-Rod Stewart and Dolly Parton rasp through the entire thing.

-“Glee” is in the act.

-In a sort of creepy version, Willie Nelson pitches woo to the much junior Norah Jones.

-Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey offer up one of the cheesier versions of this song ever produced--and, that’s saying something. How did that work out? Not so well, eh.

-Selma Blair and Dwight Schrute attempt a reversal of the traditional ‘mouse’ and ‘wolf’ roles for a Gap commercial. Certainly makes me want to buy a sweater. . . . No, wait . . . it does not.

-James Taylor attempts to waylay Natalie Cole in an alternately goofy (JT, of course) and sultry (JT, again) play on the original.

-Ben Folds and Sara Bareilles do a whole thing around the song, which ends up having a sort of lounge act vibe to it.

-Homer and Jethro (not Tull), with June Carter, do a country send-up (that probably seemed much less dirty in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s than it really does seem now), on The Johnny Cash Show.

-Betty Garrett and Red Skelton act out what must be one of the first 'reversal' versions of the song, in the 1949 film, “Neptune’s Daughter”.

. . .

Now, while it hasn’t been very cold yet this winter, January and February hold some promise for snow. It will be then that you can get your swerve on in this manner. So, gentle men and gentle ladies with an agenda: Prepare thy hot toddies.