February 7, 2010

Seth Godin’s Linchpin and Mastering the Art of Social Media Policy

Daniel A. Schwartz, author of the Connecticut Employment Law Blog posted about one of the presentations from Legal Tech last week.  His post, Social Media Policies and Practices Developing as Companies Begin to Embrace It, gave some details from the panel discussion by the following in-house lawyers: Lesley Rosenthal (Lincoln Center), Ted Banks (former in-house at Kraft), and Mark Bisard (American Express).  Check out Daniels post here.
The panelists basically discussed how social media policy is becoming a more recognized form of policy for a company to have.  Ted Banks spoke up as say that employees can become disheartened and resentful of too restrictive a policy.  I left this comment in response:
I am most in agreement with Ted about social media presenting an opportunity to companies to engage their creative employees and let them flourish.  This requires clear guidelines that are flexible enough to allow for employees to be artists in what they do.
Seth Godin describes this really well in his new book Linchpin (if you haven’t checked it out yet, it is a must read).  His general point is that corporate work trains obedience, being just good enough, and waiting for orders.  To thrive in today’s world we need employees who are artists.  They contribute value, connect to customers in ways that are human, and can make a real impact that propels the company.  These people are linchpins.
Rigid guidelines choke the life out of such employees.  Demanding metrics over artistry mechanizes the processes, makes it sub par, and outsourceable.  It’s why companies like Apple and Google, the leaders in business, thrive and are adored.  Other companies say they want to be like Apple or Google, but this just means they want to be loved while producing mediocre results.
Any social media policy should be a guideline.  Your employees are smart enough to know what they should and shouldn’t do (if not – get new employees).  A good legal department balances the need of the company to have a policy in place they can point to if something goes wrong, with the need for employees to be free enough to create without fear of censorship, backlash, or worse.  It is a risky game, but one with great rewards if done right.

A social media policy is not some revolutionary mysterious thing.  It is a policy.  Likely a policy no one will read anyway.  Where companies experience mastery is when they do things that are risky, things that ordinary policy making would cry “NO! Don’t do that!”

Notice I said risky.  Not stupid.  As a member of the  legal department it is your job to protect the company, but realize that your employees are likely smarter than you think they are.  Also, they are more creative than most of us realize.

If your management creates a linchpin culture where employees take risk, reach for greatness, and share their gifts then your policies at best should be guidelines to help amplify that.  If you have an assembly line amassing Twitter followers than perhaps you want something more rigid that will meet the CYA standard.  All I’m saying is that in a world where everybody is on Facebook, the winners are those who can connect with customers in ways that automation cannot.

February 4, 2010

Lexis Microsoft Office: Legal Tech Man on the Street

It has been a long four days since I left the Holy Land for New York City to attend Legal Tech.  The big news of the conference for my company was the introduction of Lexis Microsoft Elmo (or “LMO” as we fondly call it while picturing a fuzzy little red monster).  This is an integration of LexisNexis tools to Microsoft programs like Outlook and Word that allows lawyers to search in the context of their documents with the push of a button.  Check out my post from the Martindale Blog that was written the day we announced LMO.

One of the main things I did a Legal Tech was capture the “man on the street” perspective about what we were doing.  Here are some videos posted on our LexisNexis YouTube page with me interviewing conference goers, keynote speakers, and our own CEO:

Interview with Bruce MacEwan, partner at Adam Smith Esq.

Interview with Mike Walsh, CEO of LexisNexis US Legal Markets

Interview with Jonathan Silverman, Service Executive at Microsoft

Interview with Alex Dilessio, Innovation Lead at LexisNexis

Interview with John Alber, Partner at Bryan Cave

Check out the LexisNexis YouTube channel for all of the videos from Legal Tech.

January 28, 2010

Want an iPad?

The hype finally fizzled to reality yesterday when Steve Jobs revealed the iPad to the world.

Check out Howard Greenstein’s prediction, which came the closest I’ve seen in sizing up what this device would be.  There were many reactions:

But none as emotionally charged as this one.

As for me, the iPad seems enticing.  Read this post from my blog last year and you will see it comes nowhere close to what I envisioned Apple doing.   I have heard a range of reasons why people will buy it, my favorite of which is “it’s slick, cool, and sexy.”  A sexy iPad.  Sounds like a reason to drop $500+ on a device that does less than my iPhone.  And yet, like a car crash or an MTV reality show, I just can’t look away.

What about you?  Will you buy an iPad?  Why?

January 22, 2010

Building An Employee Community

Employee communities, internal social media platforms built for employee engagement by the employer, can be a wild success and source of innovation or an incredible flop. I have seen examples of both first hand. So how do you make your employee community an engaging place that workers will care about?

There are three primary tactics for building a powerful employee community:

1. Usefulness and relevance to day to day work, and a genuine value placed on engagement by senior leadership

2. Incentives

3. Passion for community and real opportunities to make a difference through it

Usefulness, Relevance, and Value

Leaders must make participation in the community useful to achieve the day-to-day work of the employee.  This may mean diverting conversations away from email and onto message boards.  Really progressive companies may want to get rid of email ENTIRELY and use only their internal social networking platform for messaging.  To do this of course, your system would need to have the functionality to tag, sort, and archive in-mail messages, but the key to abandoning email for community discussion platforms is changing the behavior of employees to have primary discussions on public or private threads rather than on fragmented email chains.

Expectations in business today are not always reasonable.  We’ve all heard that “build it and they will come” doesn’t apply to online communities.  Fostering true engagement and participation means making what goes on in the community relevant.  To be relevant, the conversations, content, and other activity within the community need to translate to real-world objectives, action, and results.  Any community platform you build for your workers is a tool – just like putting in a phone system didn’t start making employees innovate, putting in a community with fancy tools is just the first step; it will not cure your innovation problem.  What a community platform can do, however, is level the playing field for ideas to be heard.  That is what we mean by relevance.

Beyond the day-to-day behaviors moving to new tools, is the work product on your system valued?  When people put out ideas on the community who champions them?  Do you have a way of measuring the best contributions (not just the most)?  All these questions hint at the value placed on what goes up in the community and the value extracted from it.  Again, these are just tools.  Let me say that one more time: these are just tools.  They have the potential to change the way we work and add incredible value, but only if we first see how our old tools can be replaced.

Incentives

Money is one of the last on this list.  The most powerful incentive is when someone believes what they are doing is important.  Without this our efforts in a community or the very work we do just seems aimless.  How can you make what is going on in your community important?  This is the million dollar question, but a good place to start, what is important about the work you are doing now?  What are the goals of your company?  How you better reach them by using your community to communicate the mission, objectives, steps, and progress?  These questions all go to making the work you do on your community focused and important.

Beyond this, the community is a place where senior leaders can become real to employees, much the way celebrities have used social media to interact with fans.  Try having an executive write a regular blog where he solicits feedback and responds to comments received.  Another tactic is to create an innovation lab forum, where employees are invited to submit ideas for new directions the company can take the business in.  The highest rated ideas can be green lighted and those individuals or teams chosen to work directly with top level people to make them happen.  These are just some examples of non-tangible incentives that resonate with employees.  Give them a stage.

Passion and Making a Difference

Find your cheerleaders early.  Even better if they are people others in the company already respect.  Create a team of superusers, not just in name.  Make it part of their work to meet regularly, grow the group, and lay out a clear path for others to join their ranks (this is not so much an exclusive club as it is a milestone).  These users are the ones along with senior leadership who should be listening and fostering engagement in the community.  Hiring a dedicated community manager is also a good idea.

Passion that doesn’t translate to change is just enthusiasm.  An organization needs to commit to the new course that the group conscience of the company begins to plot.  Your community is worthless if it can’t change things in your company.  If you are “the decider” ask yourself: am I just going to do what I want anyway?  If so, your community exists to give the illusion of progress.  And what a shame, because it will be a missed opportunity to take your business to the next level that you know it needs to hit.

January 14, 2010

Kippa Man: Making Me the First Custom Apple Logo Kippa in Israel

Skullcaps, lids, yarlmakes, or kippas, whatever you call the head covering we observant Jews wear, one thing is for certain: if custom, knitted ones (“sroogies”) are your thing there is no better place than Kippa Man to get yours made. Located conveniently in the Shuk in Jerusalem, they have tons of pre-made designs to choose from including sports teams, cartoon characters, and company logos like Nike, Coke, and Pepsi. But as I walked into the shop today I noticed something was missing.

The iPhone hit Israel in December of 2009, and we have been experiencing the slow yet enthusiastic adoption typical of Apple launches. As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am an Apple nut, a customer evangelist if you will, who takes pride in his affiliation. What better way to display that pride than with a custom kippa made by the best?

The lady at Kippa Man (didn’t catch her name today) was pretty excited about this one. “Do you think other people will want it?” she asked in a light Israeli accent. I told her that people would go crazy over it, and she’d be able to say she was the first to do it in Israel because I had looked and not found it anywhere else. I also told her that I’d proudly wear it at Legal Tech in two weeks, a major technology conference in NYC for legal professionals. This made her more excited an she promised to have it ready by next week.  What happened next was interesting.

She quoted a price which I thought was high for a custom kippa.  “You wear big ones,” she said.  “The are more expensive than the little ones.”  She was right.  I do like my kippas on the big side.  They are more comfortable, stay on your head better, don’t require clips, and cover my disappearing hair.  Knowing that Wonder Woman would kill me if I paid that much for a kippa the inner business man in me came out.  “Tell you what,” I said, “I’m so excited about this kippa that I want to blog about it.  I want to show it to everyone I know who loves Apple and have them come to you for one.  With the iPhone blowing up in Israel there is sure to be interest.  We brand this as a Kippa Man original and I think you’ve got a winner.”  Through my entire speech I could feel her excitement, and it was true; I meant every word.  It surprised me not to see more kippas with logos from passion brands like Apple, Windows, Nokia (Israelis LOVE their Nokias), and others.

In any case we came to an acceptable price range (she couldn’t give me exact b/c she won’t know until they make it), and I walked outside the store.  I posted a check in at Kippa Man on Gowalla (location based service) citing my forthcoming kippa, snapped a shot of the store front (see above), and headed home to start work.  Not sure how the kippa will come out, but if it looks anything like the other work I’ve seen Kippa Man do I’m sure it will be awesome.  Look for me at Legal Tech.

January 13, 2010

Tech Talk With Tom Mighell from Inter-Alia

This is a video from my chat with Tom Mighell, award winning legal blogger of Inter-Alia.

January 8, 2010

Do You Buy From Social Brands?

Take a look at Mashable’s 100 most social brands.  See any logic here?  Among the top ten were: “iPhone, Disney, CNN, MTV, NBA, iTunes, Wii, Apple, Xbox and Nike rounded out the top 10 in 2009, respectively.”  On lower rungs we saw premium fashion brands and food, but the take away here for business is that tech, news, and entertainment have taken the biggest lead in becoming “social.”  The payoff will be converting social to profitable.  What correlation have we seen that a more social brand is a more profitable brand?  Is it just that the more profitable brands tend to be more social?  Chicken and the Egg … online.

January 6, 2010

Tech Talks (New Video Series): Social Media Governance

Check out this new video series I started on our Martindale-Hubbell YouTube channel.  Tech Talks (working title) are video chats with some of the top names in law, social media, and technology.  We have a laid back, 20-minute video chat over Skype discussing your work and anything you want to highlight about what you are doing now.  Future plans include creating two versions of the video: an unedited, basic version posted on YouTube and a premium, directors cut (edited, with music, chapter navigation, and other features), which will only be available in Connected.

If anyone reading this is interested in participating in Tech Talks, please comment below or email my work address at michael.mintz@lexisnexis.com.

Here is the first video I did with Chris Boudreaux from Social Media Governance.  Chris is an interesting guy.  A non-lawyer, he developed a site that houses over 130 social media policies from different companies, a report analyzing the trends in these policies, and a forth-coming publication on the subject.  We spoke about his work, and are going to be working together to get it seen by more lawyers, who I’m sure will benefit from what he has been doing.  Here’s the unedited video:

January 4, 2010

Going Green: How Your Facebook Profile Saves the World

Cartoon by Thomas A. Boldt "Tab"

You probably didn’t know that Facebook, Linkedin, and Martindale-Hubbell Connected are saving the world.  Think about it.  You used to go places to network.  Now you do it in your pajamas.  Going to those places used gas, jet fuel, created additional trash (travel size bottles and food wrappers galore), and excess (don’t we all take longer showers at hotels and indulge in liberties like leaving the lights on?).

But it’s not just conferences.  I used to print out photos for relatives and send them to everyone (okay, maybe I didn’t exactly do this – but people do).  Now you share those same photos on Facebook or Flickr.  If people want to print them out they can choose which ones they like and do so.  Printing at home saves a drive to Target, which saves on exhaust used.  This same rule applies to birthday greetings, announcements, and other one-to-many items that used to be shared via mail or phone call (think of the energy you save posting it once rather than calling each person when something happens).

Now you might be saying to yourself, “but Mike, isn’t it impersonal to do everything via Facebook broadcast?  No cards, no phone calls?”

I say to you, “do you hate the environment?  Are your trying to kill your planet? 2010 must be the year where we all wake up and start doing everything digital because it is a matter of life and death for our earth!”  Okay, I’m kidding about this last part, but think about it – the more we can consolidate the means for doing something while reaching broader audiences the less energy we will need to consume, which results in conservation of resources.  And not just environmental resources, but perhaps the most precious resource of all: time.

As for me, I am going to join Brighter Planet’s 350 Challenge. For every blogger who signs up and displays their badge  they will remove 350 lbs of CO2 from the air (don’t ask me how they are doing this).  From their site:

To join in, post the badge to your site, let us know, and we’ll offset 350 pounds of carbon in your name. That’s like flicking off 100 lightbulbs for a day. Or going two full weeks without your car!

So that explains the badge to the right.  Also, you may notice that the design of Mintz’s Wordz has always been simple, with a white background, and thin layout.  This helps with server bandwidth and usage which conserves energy also.  So just by reading this blog you are helping the environment.  Mashable has a great article with 10-ways to green your website.  Tell me how you’re cutting down on your carbon footprint using technology?  How are you using social media to foster relationships and conserve?

December 31, 2009

From Social Pollination: 3 Goals and 3 Words for 2010

Monica O’brien has some exciting things going for 2010.  As the newly minted author of the book Social Pollination: Escape the Hype of Social Media and Join the Companies Winning at It, and the regular author of her blog, Social Pollination: Small Biz.  Big Buzz,  she delivers a fresh take to online.  As a new reader of her blog, I left my first comment today and wanted to share it with any readers here.  Please feel free to continue the thread, commenting on your 3 Goals for 2010, either here on Monica’s blog.

Monica: great post.  I recently discovered your work through Joseph Yi (editor’s note: author of a great blog Welcome to LA and author of one of the funniest posts I ever read on Brazen Careerist) who I connected with on Brazen Careerist.  You laid out three very important goals for yourself that I can identify with (1) home/job, (2) creating, and (3) ways to challenge the status quo.  Here’s my take:

(1) Home/job: sounds like you and your husband are ready for a change.  My wife and I made a huge leap in 2009, moving our family from New Jersey to Jerusalem, Israel.  It has been a lifelong dream for her and a recent obsession of mine to move here.  The ideal of raising our children in the Holy Land and connecting with our spiritual roots still persists despite the difficulty of uprooting your entire life across an ocean to an alien culture.  We’ve taken our knocks and are adjusting.  For 2010 I’m resolved to view Israel like the Wild West.  Businesses here are just starting to integrate some of the more established online behaviors we are used to in the US and I’m seeing more opportunities here for an English speaking lawyer who works in this space (I am the lead community manager for a network of 25K lawyers and growing – another thing to do in 2010 is find a better term for “community manager” … I’ve been thinking either “janitor” or “party host” not sure though ; D).  As for home, we have a lease in the city for 2 years which gives us time to find a neighborhood and buy a house.  By the end of this year we want a neighborhood picked out.

(2) Creating – awesome to see you are writing fiction.  I wrote a novel 4 years ago, think if Harry Potter did kung fu, but quickly grew to hate it over the years.  My creative project for 2010 is to write my blog to book called Lurkers Anonymous: Strategies for Dealing with Invisibility on the Web.  My first post went up today so I guess I am already started (http://lurking101.com)!

(3) Ways to Challenge the Status Quo – this is an interesting one.  I wish you luck on the job search (your blog is proof enough that you would kick a**), and have found that being a “purple cow” in the corporate creameries is a fun way to love what you do.  I work for a major corporation in the legal world (if we were in the beverage industry think Coke v. Pepsi) and LOVE my work.  Just this year I moved into Web Strategy and find I can make a real difference by challenging the company to do things a bit differently.  Pursuing disruptive strategies like getting to know our detractors better and finding out why they hate us, giving away lots more for free, and starting a revolution in the way we communicate are just a few of the general categories of things I am hoping to do.  On the concrete side of things, I am starting a series on You Tube called Tech Talks where I interview different people in the tech, social media, and legal worlds to get unique perspectives on a host of topics.  We do everything via Skype video and I just did my first piece with Chris Boudreaux from SocialMediaGovernance.com.  It should be posting in the next week, and I already have some more calls planned.

Thanks for the great topic, and I’m looking forward to reading more from you in 2010.  Happy New Year!

I boiled down Monica’s 3-words to 3-categories.  Not sure this is what she was looking for (I think she wanted 3 NEW words), but it worked for me.  So what about you?  Where are your goals in 2010?  What would you like to see change?  Who do you want to agitate in the New Year?