You can follow blogs via RSS

If you use the Google homepage method, then on your Google homepage will be blocks for each of the blogs you follow with a list of the most recent three blog posts.  You can run your eye over them every day to see if there is anything you want to click through to and read.  If you follow lots of blogs then you can have separate home pages for each which you naviagte by clicking tabs.  Its fairly straightforward, but you need to register with Google first (worth doing as there are lots of other benefits).  To follow blogs click the orange square with the white curvy lines on it.  I have found it easiest to do using Firefox.

You can sign up to get blog posts by email

Not all blogs offer this, but if they do, and if it is a blog you are particularly interested in, it is worth doing.  You will then get sent an email of all their posts, which you can read quickly and easily in your email in box.  if you decide you don’t want them any more it is generally easy to unsubscribe.  (Note, if you want to get posts of this blog by email, there is a link to do this at the top of the side bar).

You can become fans of facebook pages

You will then see their updates on your facebook wall.  If you use facebook a lot this is a good way to keep up with what they are doing.  Again it is easy to block them or stop being a fan if you get fed up with it.

You can follow people and do searches on twitter

Many lawyers think twitter is stupid solely because of the name.  This is a mistake, twitter is a serious business application now.  You can follow people and organisations you are interested in and keep tabs on what they are doing and thinking.  There is also a very useful search function where you can search on words, to find out what people are saying about them.  Try a search on your firm’s name!

You can sign up for Google alerts

This is another benefit you get from registering with Google.  You  give Google the relevant words and every day they will send you an email summarising search results.  Use this for key words in your professional work niche, and also for your own name and the name of your business to find out what people are saying about you.  I have found out loads of interesting things from Google alerts.

You can keep any eye on updates on your LinkedIn home page

The LinkedIn home page is similar to the facebook wall, and you can often pick up what people are doing and writing about by scanning this once a day.

Thats all I can think of just now.  Do you know any other good ways of keeping in touch using social media?

I have therefore started an experimental new service for lodger landlords. My existing service, Landlord Law,  does cater for people renting a room to a lodger, but lodger landlords and regular landlords do not really have the same needs, and a specialist site will be better (and more affordable) for the lodger landlords.

The new site, www.logerlandlord.co.uk, (a wordpress site) was launched yesterday  by a blog post on my Landlord Law Blog, and I will be running a twitter campaign for the next month, using #lodgerlandlord.

On 1 February I will start a 21 day blog series, simultaneously in the Landlord Law Blog and on Lodger Landlord – Tessa’s 21 tips for Lodger Landlords – effectively giving away the ‘crown jewels’.  Hopefully this will encourage lodger landlords to comment and tell me what they need by way of legal services.  The Lodger Landlord site will then provide those services.

I have spent much of the Christmas and New Year period working on this.  The site design is powered by the wonderful Headway Theme (I have finally got version 1.56 and the visual editor to work, which is fabulous).  My web designer has come up with two stonking designs for the 21 tips logo and the site header.  Other than that the site has been created by me.

As regards the design, some time ago my web designer Gill gave me the numbers for five colours, which are the colours used in the Landlord Law site, and which I have subsequently used for this site.  This Lodger Landlord web site uses the same colours in a different way, plus a new paler blue, which is the colour used for the ‘wrapper’ – the bit between the sidebar, the header and the post areas and also the non active navigation areas, which are white in my other Headway blogs.  I had great fun working it all out.

The other expense (apart from Gill’s fee) is a subscription to Aweber mailing service.  Lodger Landlords are being encouraged to sign up to a new mailing list.  I use Constant Contact for my Landlord Law mailing list, but as I want to keep this service completely separate, I decided that Aweber (highly recommended by high profile bloggers such as Problogger) would be better.  You will see a banner for them in the side bar.  I have had three sign up for the new mailing list so far, which is not bad as the site was only launched yesterday afternoon.

It has been a lot of work but enjoyable work.  I have done most of it on my wonderful macbook in the sitting room, with my son (playing computer games on his laptop) and husband (reading Arthur Conan Doyle).  I am currently up to day 17 on the 21 tips and have done about 1/2 of the twitter posts.  The twitter tips are being scheduled in my twitter client program Hootsuite.

By the way, the XX days of tips idea is not wholly original.  I am following in the footsteps of Problogger and Blog for Profit who had similar campaigns.  I think I am the first person to use the technique for a law related service however.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

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I have been ‘twittering’ for a few months now. In many ways it is a bit of a timewaster. However I have discovered the following ways it can be usefully used:

• to make announcements about new services being launched
• to keep clients up to date with other firm news
• to make announcements about new legal developments
• to make announcements when you post a new item on your blog (NB there are ways of doing this automatically)

With twitter, you follow other ‘twitterers’ and are followed by others in turn. Often they are the same people, but not necessarily. One way you can make yourself known to other people is to ‘follow’ them (you do this by visiting their profile and clicking the follow button). They then get an email telling them that you are now following them. The hope is that they will then be prompted to visit your profile, and follow you in turn. They will then read your tweets and may end up being a client!

This could happen. However many people seem only concerned to get as many followers as possible. If you are following several thousand people you probably won’t have much time to read everything (or perhaps anything). Also if someone follows you, there is no guarantee that they will always follow you. It is very easy to ‘unfollow’ someone by re-visiting their profile and clicking the follow button again.

Twitter is also a very ‘in the moment’ service. If you log in to your twitter account at 5.50 pm you are unlikely to scroll back as far as to read the tweets published in the morning (unless you only follow a handful of people in which case there may not be many tweets to read). Therefore if you make an announcement about, say, a new service, it will only be read by those who are online at or shortly after the time it is published. One way around this is to ‘tweet’ it again later. However you don’t want to do this too often or you will start to annoy people.

Twitter can also be useful in keeping you informed. Virtually all the newspapers now have twitter accounts and you can subscribe to those which interest you. For example I follow a number of twitter accounts from the Times and the Guardian and a number of legal information services. You can also follow people who write blogs you admire, so you will be informed when they write a new post.

However although my twitter experience has been mainly a positive one, Larry Bodine, a legal marketing blogger in the USA, believes that it is not an effective marketing tool for law firms. He points out that it generates a lot of leads but little sales, can get lawyers and firms in a lot of trouble in the event of litigation, and is a distraction to getting real marketing work done. He goes on to say:

“After months of using Twitter, I’ve learned that it is a shouting post for relentless self-promoters, a dumping ground for press releases and advertising, an ego-driven competition to amass followers, and a target for computer-automated Tweets.  It’s always been a good place to learn what sandwich someone had for lunch and when someone changed a baby’s diapers.  But Twitter is supposed to be “all about the conversation,” and I see few conversations that lead to new business.”

I have to say that there is a lot of truth in this, and personally cannot put my hand on my heart (at the time of writing this) and point to any new client who has specifically come to me via twitter (although a number of existing clients have joined twitter just so they can follow my tweets).

Although I accept that there is a lot of truth in what Larry Bodine says, I still think that twitter is worth persevering with. However, it is for each firm to make their own decision.

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