Finding the Needle in the Social Media Haystack

Likewise, social media content can also be mined to collect evidence that could prove valuable in making a case. One recent example ' Trayvon Martin's alleged killer George Zimmerman's MySpace account revealed negative attitudes toward people of certain ethnicities.

“I get a wide variety of research requests, generally from our attorneys,” Katy Vaninger, client relations coordinator at Armstrong Teasdale in St. Louis, says. “Sometimes it's one a week, sometimes five a day. It can be anything from 'I heard about this potential lead from my brother-in-law, can you look into it?' to 'Can you find out who's general counsel at such and such company?' I also do research on existing clients in preparation for client feedback interviews. There are a number of tools that I use to gather this information, including Hoovers, Monitor Suite, LinkedIn, Twitter, ContactNet, MissouriCase.net and Google Alerts. These tools often work well to gather information, but there's so much information that it requires intensive review. If the attorney's request was general, it's hard to determine what information should be sent along and what should be edited out.”

The abundance of information that firms need to monitor can be overwhelming. In a larger firm, there are many clients and many industry groups to track. There's no shortage of information from external resources; the challenge is differentiating data that's really relevant from data that seems relevant, and then putting it into a context that can be easily disseminated.

Elizabeth Bevins, a business development manager in the client relations department at Perkins Coie in Seattle, recounts a recent project: “I was working on a report, researching a new general counsel at a prospective client. I looked at LinkedIn and the company's website, trying to get a sense of what he'd done in his career.

“I then did searches on what law firms he'd retained at past employers, including law firms that were hired to handle litigation that had been filed against one of his past employers while he was there. I also tried to review any news I could locate on his new company regarding new business initiatives or potential lawsuits.

“After reviewing as many sources that seemed relevant, I condensed relevant information into a report. A busy attorney can't wade through 500 pages of research, so I aim to keep reports to five pages or less. Even with Google Alerts, there are still many searches I must conduct manually on a given client or competitive intelligence topic ' not to mention a vast amount of search results I have to review to find salient information.”

Legal-Profession Specificity

Listening platforms (sometimes called “listening tools”) pose a solution for business development professionals trying to make sense of client developments and competitive intelligence. Listening platforms, as defined in a 2009 Forrester white paper, are “technology and analytics infrastructures that mine and analyze social media (and other informational sources) to deliver insights essential to making informed marketing and business decisions.” See, The Forrester Wave': Listening Platforms, Q1 2009 (http://bit.ly/MbETHw).

Several tools, such as Nielsen Net Ratings or Radian6, have emerged to serve corporate America's social intelligence needs. While quite adequate for consumer-facing brands, these platforms are not well-suited for the very specific needs of the legal profession.

The good news is that several tools developed specifically for law firms have emerged in the last year. These listening platforms help legal professionals to stay updated on client practice and industry developments while keeping abreast of competitive intelligence. Users set up parameters about what clients, industries and practice areas they want to follow; the application searches and analyzes legal and industry-specific news sources, blogs, Twitter feeds and other social media, and delivers categorized results that are relevant to the legal and business professional. Where marketing and business development staff once needed to track down important and relevant information proactively, the information now essentially finds them. A number of firms are now using listening platforms to generate:

• Client insight. Uncovering important information about existing and prospective clients, revealing opportunities and risks;
• Competitive analysis. Helping benchmark competition at the firm, practice and attorney level;
• Brand intelligence. Giving attorneys, practice groups and firms visibility into their online presence and share of voice; and
• Practice and industry perspective. Helping legal professionals to understand topics, trends and developments within their practice and industry sectors.

More Than A News Feed

Listening platforms pose a new product category for the legal marketplace, and have generated a great deal of interest.

“Before this category emerged, my previous firm (Faegre Baker Daniels) had been using a variety of products to provide trending information,” says Adam Severson, chief marketing and business development officer at Baker Donelson. “These services provide lots of historical information going back three to five years. If you dig in, there's good data there, but there's less about what's happening right now.”

Listening platforms give you many ways to filter content that shows up in search results, and to cull out the information that matters in its proper context. Consider this example: a firm does work for a large corporation that's affiliated with a branded event venue. Every day there are communications going out regarding concerts or sport events at the venue that have nothing to do with the corporation's business activities. It's very easy to set up the listening
platform to ignore mentions concerning the event center and instead hone in on mentions regarding the client's business units that are relevant to firm activities. Staff can quickly review this client intelligence and forward key items along to lawyers in salient practice groups.

Stories circulate of firms using listening platform in a number of ways. Business development staff use it to monitor news about current clients, track media mentions, research prospects and stay up-to-speed on news and developments for various practice areas.

“It's nice to come into the office in the morning, click into my dashboard and see news highlights for all of my various areas of focus and quickly drill down to the details about issues of particular interest,” Kate Stoddard, practice development manager at Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, says. “The attorneys appreciate when I e-mail them with a nugget of information gleaned from the platform that may impact their clients.”

Case from the Trenches

Stoddard provided a recent example.

“We began representing a new client in a product safety claims investigation by a government regulator, and we set up the listening platform to track the company. A few weeks later, the platform alerted us of a press release issued by a plaintiff law firm announcing [its] investigation of our client and other companies in its industry, in preparation for bringing a consumer class action lawsuit. Within moments, it was in the lead attorney's inbox. I can say with some certainty that I would not have seen that news had it not been for the listening platform.”

Perkins Coie's Bevins believes that the listening platform has already improved her team's efficiency in preparing competitive intelligence.

“One of its great appeals is that it aggregates all the salient information about both clients and competitors in one place,” she says. “I no longer have to do 10 different searches to find the intelligence I'm trying to gather. I can sort and view it according to client or industry group. It's made it much easier to monitor clients on a daily basis ' both what's being said about them in the news and what individuals are writing in blogs, on Twitter and in other social media.”

Big Advantage

Before the advent of listening platforms, most business development teams simply didn't have the resources to do the sort of client analysis they can do with such an application. It was too time-consuming. As the competitive landscape is ever-increasing, finding new ways to stay up-to-date on developments that might have an impact on clients ' such as uncovering that data with listening platforms ' will become a mainstay, and necessary. It's a case of applicable economies and efficiencies of scale with huge potential; listening platforms allow firms to do more with less.

With the abundance of information available on the Web about your clients, your firm, your competitors and developments in sectors that have an impact on your firm's practice groups, the challenge of keeping up with ' and making good use of ' that information is greater than ever.

The explosion of social media ' LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. ' has only amplified the challenge. One layer of the challenge is that much of the information posted in such venues is dross. But there are also the occasional invaluable kernels ' needles in the cyber haystack, as it were ' that provide opportunities for expanding your portfolio of work with existing or new clients.

Finding That Needle

Likewise, social media content can also be mined to collect evidence that could prove valuable in making a case. One recent example ' Trayvon Martin's alleged killer George Zimmerman's MySpace account revealed negative attitudes toward people of certain ethnicities.

“I get a wide variety of research requests, generally from our attorneys,” Katy Vaninger, client relations coordinator at Armstrong Teasdale in St. Louis, says. “Sometimes it's one a week, sometimes five a day. It can be anything from 'I heard about this potential lead from my brother-in-law, can you look into it?' to 'Can you find out who's general counsel at such and such company?' I also do research on existing clients in preparation for client feedback interviews. There are a number of tools that I use to gather this information, including Hoovers, Monitor Suite, LinkedIn, Twitter, ContactNet, MissouriCase.net and Google Alerts. These tools often work well to gather information, but there's so much information that it requires intensive review. If the attorney's request was general, it's hard to determine what information should be sent along and what should be edited out.”

The abundance of information that firms need to monitor can be overwhelming. In a larger firm, there are many clients and many industry groups to track. There's no shortage of information from external resources; the challenge is differentiating data that's really relevant from data that seems relevant, and then putting it into a context that can be easily disseminated.

Elizabeth Bevins, a business development manager in the client relations department at Perkins Coie in Seattle, recounts a recent project: “I was working on a report, researching a new general counsel at a prospective client. I looked at LinkedIn and the company's website, trying to get a sense of what he'd done in his career.

“I then did searches on what law firms he'd retained at past employers, including law firms that were hired to handle litigation that had been filed against one of his past employers while he was there. I also tried to review any news I could locate on his new company regarding new business initiatives or potential lawsuits.

“After reviewing as many sources that seemed relevant, I condensed relevant information into a report. A busy attorney can't wade through 500 pages of research, so I aim to keep reports to five pages or less. Even with Google Alerts, there are still many searches I must conduct manually on a given client or competitive intelligence topic ' not to mention a vast amount of search results I have to review to find salient information.”

Legal-Profession Specificity

Listening platforms (sometimes called “listening tools”) pose a solution for business development professionals trying to make sense of client developments and competitive intelligence. Listening platforms, as defined in a 2009 Forrester white paper, are “technology and analytics infrastructures that mine and analyze social media (and other informational sources) to deliver insights essential to making informed marketing and business decisions.” See, The Forrester Wave': Listening Platforms, Q1 2009 (http://bit.ly/MbETHw).

Several tools, such as Nielsen Net Ratings or Radian6, have emerged to serve corporate America's social intelligence needs. While quite adequate for consumer-facing brands, these platforms are not well-suited for the very specific needs of the legal profession.

The good news is that several tools developed specifically for law firms have emerged in the last year. These listening platforms help legal professionals to stay updated on client practice and industry developments while keeping abreast of competitive intelligence. Users set up parameters about what clients, industries and practice areas they want to follow; the application searches and analyzes legal and industry-specific news sources, blogs, Twitter feeds and other social media, and delivers categorized results that are relevant to the legal and business professional. Where marketing and business development staff once needed to track down important and relevant information proactively, the information now essentially finds them. A number of firms are now using listening platforms to generate:

• Client insight. Uncovering important information about existing and prospective clients, revealing opportunities and risks;
• Competitive analysis. Helping benchmark competition at the firm, practice and attorney level;
• Brand intelligence. Giving attorneys, practice groups and firms visibility into their online presence and share of voice; and
• Practice and industry perspective. Helping legal professionals to understand topics, trends and developments within their practice and industry sectors.

More Than A News Feed

Listening platforms pose a new product category for the legal marketplace, and have generated a great deal of interest.

“Before this category emerged, my previous firm (Faegre Baker Daniels) had been using a variety of products to provide trending information,” says Adam Severson, chief marketing and business development officer at Baker Donelson. “These services provide lots of historical information going back three to five years. If you dig in, there's good data there, but there's less about what's happening right now.”

Listening platforms give you many ways to filter content that shows up in search results, and to cull out the information that matters in its proper context. Consider this example: a firm does work for a large corporation that's affiliated with a branded event venue. Every day there are communications going out regarding concerts or sport events at the venue that have nothing to do with the corporation's business activities. It's very easy to set up the listening
platform to ignore mentions concerning the event center and instead hone in on mentions regarding the client's business units that are relevant to firm activities. Staff can quickly review this client intelligence and forward key items along to lawyers in salient practice groups.

Stories circulate of firms using listening platform in a number of ways. Business development staff use it to monitor news about current clients, track media mentions, research prospects and stay up-to-speed on news and developments for various practice areas.

“It's nice to come into the office in the morning, click into my dashboard and see news highlights for all of my various areas of focus and quickly drill down to the details about issues of particular interest,” Kate Stoddard, practice development manager at Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, says. “The attorneys appreciate when I e-mail them with a nugget of information gleaned from the platform that may impact their clients.”

Case from the Trenches

Stoddard provided a recent example.

“We began representing a new client in a product safety claims investigation by a government regulator, and we set up the listening platform to track the company. A few weeks later, the platform alerted us of a press release issued by a plaintiff law firm announcing [its] investigation of our client and other companies in its industry, in preparation for bringing a consumer class action lawsuit. Within moments, it was in the lead attorney's inbox. I can say with some certainty that I would not have seen that news had it not been for the listening platform.”

Perkins Coie's Bevins believes that the listening platform has already improved her team's efficiency in preparing competitive intelligence.

“One of its great appeals is that it aggregates all the salient information about both clients and competitors in one place,” she says. “I no longer have to do 10 different searches to find the intelligence I'm trying to gather. I can sort and view it according to client or industry group. It's made it much easier to monitor clients on a daily basis ' both what's being said about them in the news and what individuals are writing in blogs, on Twitter and in other social media.”

Big Advantage

Before the advent of listening platforms, most business development teams simply didn't have the resources to do the sort of client analysis they can do with such an application. It was too time-consuming. As the competitive landscape is ever-increasing, finding new ways to stay up-to-date on developments that might have an impact on clients ' such as uncovering that data with listening platforms ' will become a mainstay, and necessary. It's a case of applicable economies and efficiencies of scale with huge potential; listening platforms allow firms to do more with less.