Laura Bergus

Is your school planning anything for orientation this year about building or hiding an online identity? Are you advising professors on whether or not to friend students on Facebook? Do you know if your dean has guidelines for herself or her staff on using social media?

Over 65 people from law schools around the world (mostly US but a few Canadians and at least one Brit) have joined the new network at socialmediabestpractices.org to discuss questions like these. If you are a law student, librarian, professor, counselor, administrator or anyone affiliated with a law school or legal education in general, you’re invited to sign up.

If you haven’t already, review the information for law school students, staff/administrators and employers (of law students and law grads, that is) at smbp.laurabergus.com.

You’re also invited to take this 5-minute survey about social media at your law school, offered by CALI.

I want this project to be useful, so please tell me what you think!

For all of my drum-beating about the glories of online social networking, the CALI annual conference last week was a welcome reminder of how nice it is to actually *meet* people. It was great to match real faces to Twitter avatars, and I made a point of getting to know several folks I’d never met in cyberspace. Face-to-face human interaction is good stuff.

I had the opportunity of moderating part of a group discussion of social media best practices for law schools. More than 50 law librarians, administrators and techies attended this session on behalf of their school, and not a single one of them reported having policy in place to guide them in using social media. Co-moderators John Palfrey, Sarah Glassmeyer, Denise Grey, Susanna Leers, Meg Kribble and Gene Koo collected input on how institutions are using and would like to use social media for everything from recruiting new students to publishing scholarly works.

We collected contact information from nearly 40 people who said they would like to work together in collecting data and crafting guidelines for law schools’ social media use. Preliminary suggestions for students, staff and employers of law students/grads are collected at http://smbp.laurabergus.com. Next steps include building an online community where the best-practices discussion can play out and coordinating schools’ leadership in drafting working documents. Stay tuned!

While at the conference, I also had the chance to go to two of Boulder’s fine restaurants, Cork (where we had a most entertaining French waiter who gave us no crap for ordering Australian wine) and Flagstaff House (where we sat on a covered and heated porch and marveled at a thunderstorm sweeping through the valley). We also wandered around Pearl Street (very reminiscient of Iowa City’s own pedestrian mall) and drove out into the Flatiron mountains. Beautiful part of the country.

In preparation for CALICON09 (and an awesome session with John Palfrey), I’m creating a website to share the Social Media Best Practices document I’ve been working on between classes and finals over the past few months. The document will include recommendations for students, law school staff/administrators and employers on using social media (with advice for staff and employers primarily focused on relating to students and graduates by using social media). To mix it up a bit, I’ve included short video clips for each of the sections. A special sneak preview of the students section is here for your enjoyment/ridicule. I’m really interested to hear responses to my advocacy of social media for positive use by students. Note I don’t say anything about the risks. What do you think?

My adventures in helping my law school get real about social media are now being chronicled on socialmedialawstudent.com, a site by third-year law student Rex Gradeless (which is kind of an amazing name for a law student, no?). Rex is known on Twitter as Rex7 and has thousands and thousands of followers, topping mine by a factor of, um, over 100. So, here I’ll keep posting on other interesting minutia of school, and there you’ll find from me (hopefully) what will amount to a replicable model for a tiny gem of bureaucratic progress.

Once again, the career placement office at my law school is there for me. This time, it’s to remind me how bad the internet is when you are looking for a job. Their weekly email newsletter sent to all students included a “REMINDER RE USE OF FACEBOOK AND OTHER SITES WHILE JOB SEEKING.” Ah-ha! I thought: perhaps they are catching on to the value of fb as a professional tool. Maybe they now see that 150,000,000 people can’t all be wrong.

If only. Here’s what they had to say:

For those students seeking employment, please remember that it is now a common practice for employers to check Facebook, MySpace and blogs when considering prospective hires. Remember it may not even be your entry, but that you appear somewhere else in what an employer may feel is a “lack of good judgment” situation. Make any deletions/corrections now…..it is not always as easy as one may think to delete something or have it taken down. We have in the past two years had students lose offers because of the above and have heard from employers last fall that in searching several of our students, they found information that entered into their hiring decisions. Please be cautious. What you post should be professional.

This narrow view does nothing more than illustrate how little the people espousing it know about the internet, let alone about the power of social media. They forget that most students have grown up using online tools to meet people and share information. Students today have far and away a better understanding than administrators and faculty of what it means to put themselves online. We know who might be looking, from our grandparents to federal agents. We know that once something is online, it never goes away. We know how easy and assumed it is that our name will be googled the instant a potential employer finds us even remotely interesting or hirable.

And most of all, we know that things we post on facebook in an album entitled “Let’s pretend it’s undergrad!!” or “Never again: New Year’s Ughhhh” will for the most part be taken for what they are: windows into the real lives of real adults. If a potential employer can’t deal with pictures of beer bongs and lingerie, they probably shouldn’t be conducting research about recent college grads on, well, facebook.

Imagine how dull the world would be if all you could gleam about someone from the internet was “professional.” No pictures of grandkids, no sharing recipes or hobbies. Just where you’ve worked, your GPA and a laundry list of carefully sanitized “interests.” That’s not the world I want to participate in. I trust someone who finds me on LinkedIn to know its purpose, and the same of facebook or twitter.

Let’s have a conversation about the value of getting to know people, and the internet as a vehicle to meet. Career services should understand this: they’re willing to send me off to BigLaw cocktail parties to network, but shudder to think if the photos therefrom ever see the light of day…