If you’re looking for Social Media Best Practices…

Several people have asked me how I happened to end up in a national magazine, so here’s the story:

In February I got an email and follow-up call from Jessica Rettig, US News reporter, who had found me online through Legal Geekery (go Josh!). She and I talked twice, at length, about how law students can use social media to connect with experts in their interest areas, present themselves as intelligent humans, and maybe even discover a meaningful career. Obviously that story won’t sell as many magazines as the “OMG law school is ’spensive and there are no jobs!!!!1″ story that I ended up being quoted in, but such is the media business.

In March US News flew a photographer out from Maryland. To my house. In Iowa. The photographer was Jeffrey MacMillan, a first-class news veteran (note the pictures of presidents, senators, etc. on his website…) who’s now focusing on helping colleges and universities visually promote themselves. (So, any law schools out there who might want alumni coverage in the DC area, drop him a line.) He spent the day with my daughter and me, taking pictures for about five hours. Being a good photojournalist, he’d done some research on me and had even watched some of the video I directed about homelessness in Iowa, and was impressed with the quality of my video work. That little tidbit made my day. He also had great stories of campaign coverage and politics in Washington. When we went to Iowa City’s famous Hamburg Inn for lunch, he pointed to Bill Clinton’s official presidential portrait on the wall and said, “I had lunch with the guy that took that just the other day.” Very cool.

This is a social media success story. (Thanks to my Twitter friend Omar Ha-Redeye for pointing that out, clichéd as it may be.) If nothing else, it’s evidence of the point that most journalists start with Google, and if you’ve made any kind of SEOed name for yourself in a particular field, they can, and will, find you online.

Here are two recent Twitter experiences that made my life easier and, most importantly, made me realize that there are people out there, and they are listening:

• Bluebooking nightmare. After complaining about some inexcusably lame Bluebooking problem I was having, a few lawbrarians (@richards1000, @stephdavidson, @hmorrell) immediately jumped to my rescue on Twitter. That led to a conversation about my love for law librarians (more on that in the recent Legal Geekery podcast, episode 2), and accolades for one of my school’s key librarians, who I then emailed and encouraged to join Twitter. If you want to follow what more law librarians are doing, find links here.
• Babysitting assistance. Last night my niece and nephew spent the night, visiting my daughter. After putting the little ones to bed, I was up with the 11 year-old and a promise that she could use my computer for some online flash games. Problem with that was that I never play online games (although that may change now…). I quickly Googled “circle the cat,” a game my husband is fond of. That entertained for a few minutes, but then I tweeted for help. In just a few minutes, shortened links were pouring in. Here are a few we enjoyed:
  • Chronotron
  • Double Wires
  • Cow Maze
  • Yeti Sports
  • Boomshine

I appreciate what Twitter does for me, and I know I’m not alone.

The hope is to leave the conference with a working model for a social media plan that can be implemented for incoming students this fall. The best case will be schools setting up students, instructors and employers with meaningful advice and tutorials for productive social media use. The worst case, short of outright rejection by nostalgic administrators, will hopefully be careful and introspective critiques of the pros and cons of social media use by students, administrators and employers.

Thanks to Austin Groothuis at CALI for noticing Iowa Law’s project and to Gene Koo for connecting us with Berkman in this process.

If you’re going to CALI, I would love to see you there! Check out the CALICON whiteboard for details about a tweetup on the Friday evening of the conference.

In case you missed my earlier posts on Social Media Law Student about this project, please check out Part 1 and Part 2 there.

It’s clear from what Wuest says that he’s not a blogger (although he did have an out-of-date anonymous blog (for which his profile has been hidden since I first looked on 3/17 and where he identified himself as pscyho, all in good fun)) and doesn’t use social media very often. In fact, he sounds like an average, relatively passive user, citing only a handful of Twitter followers and noting that the “game” of Facebook is to friend anyone who you might recognize, just to see who can get the most. He also said the blogs he reads are “joke blogs,” with animals doing funny things or people in strange situations. My heart broke a little for him a little knowing that saying “Oh, nothing related to the case, it’s just FAILblog and I can has Cheezburger!” would get him nowhere with the crowd in the judge’s chambers.

In the end, luckily, justice prevailed. Wuest was escorted out of the room after defending his innocuous posts and the judge and attorneys debated Wuest’s credibility as well as the probability of mistrail-level risks involved with such internet use by a deliberating juror. For the record, the state’s attorney advised, “[Using Facebook like this is] a new thing for us older people, but it’s what everyone is doing.” In response the judge said, “And they’re doing it to a ridiculous extreme…No doubt this is a very important issue.” Speaking to the nature of Wuest’s answers during the discussion, the judge said Wuest was “Just like any other witness. Some of the answers might not be totally accurate…[But to warrant a mistrial] there has to be a prejudicial aspect to this.” He continued to say that Wuest was just the kind of juror you want: one conscientious guy, “more aware of [his duties] than I would ever imagine a juror being” and trying to do the right thing. The judge denied the defense’s motion to remove Wuest from the jury and Wuest continued in the deliberations.