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Searching for a lawyer can be a daunting prospect, especially for individual clients, who are often under stress or duress when seeking legal assistance. The best way to calm those feelings of fear and overwhelm is to meet the prospective lawyer in person. Web video makes this possible on a grand scale, enabling you to easily add that face-to-face element to your site.

Through video, lawyers can now speak directly to their audiences and showcase their personalities and areas of expertise. It’s an ideal icebreaker and an efficient means of generating the interest and trust needed to compel potential clients to make an appointment.

here are 10 tips to help you get the most out of your online video marketing efforts

1. Make sure your video is professionally done.

2. Embed your video on the front page of your site

3. Submit your video to as many outlets as possible

4. Link back to your site.

5. Put potential clients’ search terms in the title.

6. Make your tags and descriptions search engine-friendly, too.

7. Don’t forget your thumbnail.

8. Interact with your viewers.

9. Consider a pay-per-click campaign

10. Add new video content often

Let’s explore some of the best ones for the “big three” social networking sites for lawyers: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Taming Twitter

is a great way to network with other lawyers and potential clients interested in a given practice area.

an enormous number of tools have grown up around Twitter to augment and improve the user’s experience. Here are four ways to augment your use of Twitter, along with tools to get you there.

Once you start following more than a few people on Twitter, it can quickly become chaotic.

Organize your streams into groups

you need a way to organize your Twitter stream.

Third-party applications that allow users to create groups make quick work of imprinting order on the chaos. These applications let you organize your stream by your relationship to the Twitterer (e.g., family, friends, work colleagues) or by subject (e.g., law practice management, New York Yankees). You can even create a small VIP group for the people whose tweets you never want to miss.

Go multimedia.

the ability to send photos and videos change the way you can use Twitter.

TwitPic, which is free and easy to use, is our choice for photo sharing on Twitter.

to allow you to send videos to Twitter

TwitVid

Use Twitter to publicize your blog

Twitter can be an excellent avenue for publicizing your blog. Posting a short, simple tweet that says “New blog post at [insert blog name here]” followed by a link to the blog post is all that’s required. The authors are both bloggers who track our respective blog stats somewhat obsessively, and Twitter is often one of the biggest sources of traffic to our blogs.

There are several third-party applications that automate the process offeeding these short updates, including the blog URL, to Twitter.

Twitterfeed

Carry it in your pocket.

For many busy professionals, the number one objection to Twitter is “I just don't have time for it!”

There are many hyperbusy and productive people who use Twitter. The key is realizing that Twitter isn't something you make time for—it’s something that you fit into time slots that become available.

To capitalize on the small windows of time that become available in life

you must have Twitter available in your pocket. Which means the solution is to get a tool that lets you access it from your smartphone.

The options depend on your model of phone.

Figuring Out Facebook

Facebook (www.facebook.com) is a more complex social media site

it provides a means to extend your brand and demonstrate your ability to produce a deliverable service through relationship building.

Achieving that aim, however, requires using the correct tools on the site to focus the right content on the right people. Here are some tips and tricks to get the most out of Facebook.

Control where the information flows

Unlike Twitter, Facebook will open up your life (and your family and your old college friends) to the world unless you seize control. Consequently, you need to distinguish between people that get to share your life and those that don't. You do this by creating a “list” under the News Feed column on the left-hand side of your Facebook home page. For example, you can create one list for “Friends and Family” and a separate one for “Professional” contacts. Once you've created a list, you can then restrict the list members' access to certain types of information.

Test your restrictions by going to the top of the Privacy Profile page, where you can use the “See how a friend sees your profile” button. Very enlightening.

Monitor your Wall.

Go to Settings, Account Settings and then Notifications, where you tell Facebook to notify you (by e-mail or SMS) about what, when and where things are added to your Wall. Also, make sure that you know when you have been tagged in a photo, just in case you don’t like the view.

Remember Google in your privacy shield

At the Search menu, you can set your Facebook search visibility, which determines what content may be searched internally and, separately, you can choose whether to allow search engines to see your Wall.

Feed your blog post to your profile.

Facebook also allows you to extend the reach of your blog

by feeding your blog posts to your profile page.

You can do the same thing for your Twitter posts.

Try a more business-centric focus if you like.

If you believe your Facebook presence should be more about your law practice as an entity than about you personally, you should use the Business Page feature.

An alternative to a Facebook Business Page is the Facebook Groups option.

Living with LinkedIn

networking community that is targeted specifically to professional users

It offers excellent integrated applications for building your brand name and promoting your expertise, including the ability to create your own communities within the community. Here are the keys to using it successfully.

Develop a great profile.

profile that emphasizes your strengths and minimizes your weaknesses.

Be bold but truthful

Spread your message using the integrated applications.

The applications give you a number of opportunities to demonstrate your interests and your expertise

Get and give recommendations on the site

Actively participate in groups.

Using Your Time Slots to the Best Advantage

Last but not least, remember that social networking never stops. So, to stay in the game from wherever you are, you should go mobile with Facebook and LinkedIn. Based for your phone mode

There you have it—a whole list of great tactics for improving your social networking projects to get the most out of your online business development efforts. As they say, if you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Use the tips and tools covered here and you’ll see a whole lot more in the social networking world.

WebStorm

is an Idea Collection and Ranking Portal that facilitates the innovation process by allowing organizations to: Collect ideas and feedback from employees about new work processes, cost cutting and new product / service ideas. Solicit feedback & suggestions from customers about product features, new products, marketing and more. Run open innovation contests and competitions - open to the public or existing users.

Corporate "Social Networks" for Innovation & Idea Management

Businesses have only recently started to realize the potential that Web 2.0 technologies present to the workplace.

Incorporating the social networking paradigm in a business environment has many benefits: Increases participation by orders of magnitude over traditional methods. Drastically shortens timeframes of idea collection and evaluation. Promotes collaboration on the creation and refinement of new ideas. Fosters a sense of shared involvement in customers and employees. No end-user training is required.

Senior leaders of all types of corporations are pointing to innovation as being critical to the growth and survival of their firms. Yet all too often, internal processes for fostering innovation are lacking.

open innovation social network

a powerful tool for accessing the creativity and experience of your customers and employees. It can be configured for internal company use or opened up to customers and partners.

include: Idea Collection User Voting and Commenting Real-Time Duplicate Checker Microsoft Office Integration Video Uploads (automatic conversion to Flash Video) Single Sign-On (enhanced support for SAML 1.1) Configurable Micro-Site (landing page with company branding) Dashboard reports User Profiles Blogging Capability

WebStorm can be configured as the front-end interface to Brightidea’s Platform. Platform is a comprehensive suite of tools used to manage ideas from conception to reality, with modules for research collaboration, cost estimation and revenue forecasting, and more.

such as the images posted above. Artifacts can include a blog post, an image, a video, a podcast, a live performance

These artifacts serve two roles

how he came to understand the relationship between different entities

When learners are transparent in their learning through the production and sharing of artifacts, they teach others

Textbooks? Libraries? Or would it look more like the internet?

on the learner:

requiring both educators and institutions to rethink what they do for her and what she can do for herself

learners can self-organize and guide each other, rather than simply walking established knowledge paths created by educators and designers

In this regard,

Several web tools can be used to develop critical thinking skills; the foundation of PKM:

Wirearchy as the organizational framework, coupled with active personal knowledge management processes, is a step in that direction

how important an open source framework is as we move more of our computing to the cloud

issues on how Ning treats its customers, users and their data.

While Ning may be free, it is not open source, and the company can make changes at will, just like Facebook, Google or Twitter may do.

I advise my clients that they should consider how important their data is to them before using software as a service (SaaS). Can the data be easily exported? With social bookmarks, it is easy to export and import OPML files from one platform to another. It is also simple to export from WordPress.com SaaS to your own open source hosted version

With Ning, Facebook and many others, there is no such export function

So what is the alternative to Ning?

For large enterprise projects I have used Drupal as a community management platform and it works well, though it requires solid technical support.

Elgg, an open source social networking platform that attracted me because of its unique underlying mode

The key differentiator of Elgg is that the individual is the centre of all the action

This is real user control

The Elgg platform has matured in the past six years and has a strong community and a solid product (v. 1.7).

One major advantage of Elgg will be the ability to take your data and have it hosted elsewhere.

Supporting communities like Elgg and Drupal means that we can have more control over our use of web technologies. As business and education move to the web and the cloud, open-source platforms will help to ensure that some corporate board doesn’t decide our future for us.

blogs, mash-ups (a Web application that combines multiple sources of data into a single tool), microblogging, peer to peer, podcasts, prediction markets, rating, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), social networking, tagging, video sharing, and wikis.

Our survey examines the business use of 12 technologies and tools

to evaluate their use of and satisfaction with Web 2.0.