At Sam Glover’s behest, I have been experimenting with social networking sites such as Linked In and Facebook. Both sites urge you to find your “friends” and “connections” so that you can expand your network and uncover untold riches (they really are untold).

So you dutifully go about searching for people you know, inviting them to be your friends, and then in turn look at their friends to see who you may know in common. It’s much easier to find friends by looking at other people’s lists than it is to just randomly type in names of people you know (like your buddy Jane Johnson).  If you stick with these sites for a while, you’ll periodically get waves of e-mails of people you know who have just joined and are themselves trying to expand their networks.

For lawyers, creating these on-line friendship circles raises some interesting questions about who should be your friends. For example, do lawyers want their clients to be their “friends?”

From a networking perspective, this could be a great boon to a lawyer’s practice. Become “friends” with your clients (with their permission, of course, because the client may prefer that you keep his or her identify confidential under Rule 1.6 of the Rules of Professional Conduct), and then all of the client’s friends can see who the client’s lawyer is, or provide a prospective client with yet another means of checking you out. Your social network page may even drive clients to your website through a convenient link on the social networking site.

Wait a second. Your clients are going to be your “friends?”

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Time seems to be one of the most-common reasons why attorneys who do not use social networks do not start. In the world of hourly billing, all time has a value, and many attorneys seem to believe that (1) networking online will take a lot of time and (2) may not be worthwhile in the end.

The second belief may or may not be true, just like having lunch with a potential client or colleague may not result in a new client or referral to the firm. The first belief is a misconception, at least partially.

Networking takes time, whether that networking takes the form of a bar association event, a happy hour with colleagues, or online social networking. Just like “regular,” offline networking, time spent networking online is up to the person doing the networking online. Networking online is “real” marketing. It should be a necessary part of your job, not just frivolous web surfing. But you do not need to spend more than 15-20 minutes a day to benefit from networking online.

So let’s take a look at three major online social networking tools—LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter—and how much time you will probably have to spend to see some benefit.

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For quite a while now, I have been using Plaxo to manage my contacts. The great advantage of Plaxo is that it syncs with a variety of software—I use it with Outlook (two different copies), Thunderbird (ditto), and Gmail. The mobile version of Plaxo is also fast enough that you can access it even from an older smartphone instead of your local contacts.

With Plaxo, you can also sync your Outlook calendar(s), tasks, and notes.

LinkedIn does much the same thing, along with the social networking aspect. Both LinkedIn and Plaxo will automatically update contact information for any of your contacts who are also members, which is a handy feature.

Enter a new player, Keepm, which focuses solely on contact management. It will import from Gmail, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, etc. For someone who just needs a central contacts repository and does not want to muck about with all the social networking that comes with Plaxo and LinkedIn, Keepm looks like a simple, lightweight, and central contact manager.

[via Lifehacker]

Hosting provider? Check. Website? Check. Advertising plan? Check. Now it is time to talk more advanced online marketing: blogs and social networking.

Starting a blog or participating in an online social network is more advanced in the sense that both require more time and a bit more comfort with online interaction. But blogging and social networking also offer new, more direct ways to reach potential clients.

A static website is just a fancy billboard or calling card. But a blog or a social network profile allow you to meet your clients before they pick up the phone to call or walk into your office. You can establish your ethos with people you have not yet met, so that when they have a legal problem, they are not calling a stranger, but someone they already know.

Many lawyers, however, seem afraid to say anything online (or in public) for fear that it will come back to haunt them. To this I have two pieces of advice: (1) stop saying things that might come back to haunt you; and (2) get over it. If you cannot get over it, then blogs and social networking are not for you.

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Update: ILS Attorneys responds below; Mr. Akinwole is apparently real, and his friends are unhappy that I posted this without first visiting Nigeria and looking him up to make sure he existed before posting.

I have started to notice a few LinkedIn users recently who say they are attorneys from Nigeria or other African countries. Mr. Abayomi Akinwole, for example. I do now know whether Mr. Akinwole is real, but a search for “ILS Attorneys Nigeria”, the firm and country he purports to be from, turns up nothing but his LinkedIn profile.

So is this a clever ploy to draw in people willing to send off retainer checks, or is it evidence that the internet is finally allowing the global networking we have been hoping for?

I don’t know, but it does surprise me that someone who is “hip” enough to be on LinkedIn would not also have a website for the law firm at which he is a partner, so I am suspicious. And curious.