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Lawyer Tweets Departure From Twitter

And so, the Twitter wars continue. At the beginning of the month, Larry Bodine took the first shot across the bow, denouncing Twitter as an ineffective tool for lawyer marketing. But Adrian Dayton, hosting yesterday's Blawg Review #218, sees it differently, recounting his own "I found a client on Twitter" story and referencing other similar successes at LexBlog.

Today lawyer Tom McLain, of Chorey, Taylor & Feil, weighs in, offering his reasons for departing from Twitter (which we learned of, ironically, via McLain's own tweet). McLain reports that like Dayton, he too has experienced what many observers might view as a Twitter marketing success: His Twitter presence has earned him online interviews and features in blog posts. Still, after two months, McLain is backing off from his Twitter use, largely due to time constraints and other priorities. He writes:

Of the Web 2.0 tools, my personal preference is LinkedIn, followed by Twitter. A fair assessment of my own marketing practices is that my priorities have been wrong and I was spending too much time on Twitter and not enough on higher ranking methods. In short, my balance was off or, in the words of Larry Bodine, I had allowed Twitter to become a "powerful distraction from getting real marketing work done." I simply need to create more time to focus on face-to-face marketing and blogging. In the words of my dear friend Chris Kimbel, sales director at Womble Carlyle, my marketing plan lacked proper balance and was skewed in an unhealthy degree in the direction of the least productive marketing methods.

I agree with McLain that Twitter can become a time sink. In order to make it an effective marketing tool (and I do concede its potential), a user needs to "work it," sending out tweets regularly, monitoring and re-tweeting others as useful and following up with contacts. At the same time, because it's much easier -- not to mention more addictive -- to post or read tweets than to hunker down and write a full-blown blog post or a legal article, it can readily become a distraction from real marketing work.

Having been on Twitter for nearly a year now, I've noticed that it's lost some of its shine. Many of those whom I follow regularly don't post as often and some of the banter between different groups I follow is gone. Of course, I've been busier myself so perhaps I've missed those conversations in my absence. But one of the best things about Twitter is that it's easy enough to fly the coop for a while and jump right back in.

Posted by Carolyn Elefant on June 30, 2009 at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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