Brian Tannebaum twitted that he was putting the finishing touches on his presentation about online ethics. This is the twitter version of a firebomb, as he’s neither inclined toward subtlety nor tolerance for deception. It was only a few days after a full day program by the Practicing Law Institute in Manhattan, the mood set by Steve Rubel, described by the program’s moderator, Kevin O’Keefe :
Steve is a true digital media thought leader, having blogged actively since 2004 at Micropersuasion and now at The Steve Rubel Lifestream. He joined Edelman, one of the world’s most respected public relations firms, as EVP/Global Strategy and Insights in 2006 to help the firm use blogs more effectively, and works with clients to unify their communications strategies across traditional and new forms of media.
Having never met a “true digital media thought leader,” I considered going to the free beer for bloggers that Kevin was throwing. Not because of the free beer, but because of the potential for CLE credit for heavy drinking. There was no CLE credit to be had from the full day program.
The list of participants for the PLI CLE did not include Brian. Nor a laundry list of others who have stood unpleasantly firm against the cheers and choruses of lawyer marketing in the ethics free zone. Each will absolutely assure you, or anyone else who asks, that they would never contribute to the ethical dilution of the legal profession. The best they have is the sin of omission, enjoying the beauty of puffery without the angst of messy detail. Don’t blame them, for there isn’t much else to sell.
That Brian was busy completing a presentation came as a shock. What entity could possibly have the guts to put Brian Tannebaum in front of a microphone to tell the world that their baby is butt ugly? Who is so bold as to face the truth?
Avvo. Yes, Avvo.
I’m neither friend nor foe to Avvo, per se. I truly like the guys involved, even if I think some of their initiatives are just awful. Most of the time, they don’t hate me for being honest.
Avvo is putting on one of its dog and pony shows in Orlando. They call it Avvocating. It’s a cute name, and there’s nothing wrong with a cute name. But it will not be a cute dog and pony show. In fact, much to my amazement, it’s no dog and pony show at all.
Sure, there will be the usual assortment of snake oil salesman and the women in short shorts. After all, that’s what brings in the lonely lawyers. But there will also be this:
Ethics and Online Marketing – Brian Tannebaum, Lawyer – (1hr CLE)I’ve heard Brian speak. He’s an excellent speaker, substantive yet humorous. Comprehensive and detailed. Most of all, he holds no punches.
Social media and online marketing have brought a variety of ethics concerns into question for lawyers. This Ethics of Online Marketing session is designed to help lawyers and legal marketers understand the professional ethics rules and state bar regulations governing online advertising, websites and social media.
What is most impressive is that a few guys, Mark Britton, Josh King, Conrad Saam, have enough faith in their own integrity, and that of their company, to put Brian Tannebaum on stage. They don’t fear balance. They don’t fear a different of opinion. They don’t fear Brian.
Whenever news of a new program on social media or legal marketing comes in, I take a quick scan to see who will be telling lawyers about the “future of the law.” Half the time, it’s people I’ve never heard of and who have no apparent connection to social media in any of its myriad forms. Have you ever wondered why you paid to listen to a one hour lecture about blogging from some lawyer who has no blog? The idea of matching of speaking gigs to qualifications eludes many bar associations.
The other half of the time has speakers who have a horse in the race, a product or agenda to promote, trying to pass themselves off as the honest broker of the internet. This wouldn’t trouble me greatly, noting that any lawyer who chooses to pay good money to listen to someone trying to sell them something gets what he deserves, except that it’s like putting a loaded gun in the hands of a child. There is so much harm to be done, to themselves and the profession, and there is no one to tell them not to stare down the barrel as they pull the trigger.
Since two halves make a whole, that means there isn’t any room for balance, for the speaker who will urge caution, who will remind them that lying, and even mere misleading, on the internet is still wrong. Who will say that sometimes the internet bites back, and sometimes it crashes down on them and destroys them? It comes as a terrible surprise when things don’t go as planned.
Avvo has done what PLI lacked the guts to do. Avvo has taken a shocking risk by giving the floor to Brian. Knowing that neither Mark, Josh nor Conrad are fools, they do so with the foreknowledge that they not only have a business they want to succeed, but they have a business they want to be recognized as having the integrity to air both the things that make them money as well as the things that serve the profession. And as it happens, Brian’s session carries 1 hour of CLE credit. Go figure.
Well done, Avvo.
I hope they videotape Tannebaum’s presentation. And send me a copy.
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I like Avvo. They tell me I’m a 6.8, but I heard I can increase it if I use Enzyte.
Avvo tells me I’m a 10. That means that every person who wants a question answered about a shoplifting charge anywhere in the country is entitled to call me for a free telephone discussion. I feel very important.
Maybe one of those shoplifters will be a high- powered CEO. You know, stealing lipgloss or chewing tobacco.
“Thought leader”: a phrase which, when heard by a person of above-room-temperature intelligence and more than tween-level judgment, fills the hearer with suspicion and contempt for both the speaker and the person spoken of. See also: “interface” or “office” when used as verbs.
I would be happy with Winona Ryder.
I think I despise the phrase more than you do. It’s like nails on a blackboard.
For the record, regardless of the heat, I will NOT be wearing short shorts in Orlando.
That actually sounds like an interesting CLE.
If they do start sending out copies, I’ll take one as well.
Orlando will be the poorer for it.
Did I give you the impression that I’m the distributor of Avvo CLE materials?
What’s the point Scott? PLI has done programs on the pitfalls and perils of social media before. They chose not to cover the ethics and liability issues in this program. What’s the problem with that. If the plaintiff’s bar does a program on trying a case as a plaintiff’s trial lawyer, would their program lack integrity if they didn’t have a defense lawyer there to present a session for defending a case?
Tannebaum’s views are sound. I follow his blog to get insight/commentary on ethics/liability issues. But PLI lacks integrity because they don’t invite him or someone with his views?
I’ve paid attention to the “pitfall” sessions of these programs. They’re beyond lame, and bear no resemblence to anything that offers meaningful information. Offering up some internet nobody, clueless as to what really happens online, to give a sanitized pseudo-ethics lecture is a joke. On the one side, you have the dozen cheerleaders singing the praises of the blogosphere and talking about how they became rich and famous online. On the other side, there’s somebody who has a blog nobody ever heard of, saying “don’t lie” when you’re on your way to becoming rich and famous. Right, that’s integrity.
As for your comparison between a plaintiff’s trial program and a one-sided marketing program is absurd. It’s too obvious to require further explanation, and you know it as well as anyone else.
Orthogonally . . . I was looking at some WordPress plugins the other day, and just looked at a “SEO” one. Nothing wrong with a lot of them; they do things like regularizing keywords and headers and such. (This has just about all the negative ethical connotations of using a spellchecker.) But one of them also promises to create a whole bunch of phony blogs pointing to yours. My perhaps overly-cynical opinion is that what stops a lot of clueless bloggers from using that option for that plugin is that that feature actually costs (a distressingly small) amount of money.
You miss a significant point. The lawyers don’t look at plug ins. They have SEO guys and marketers to handle such matters. Technical words like plug ins give lawyers hives, and they can’t afford to get hives as they have no health insurance because they spent all their money on SEO and marketing.
Yup, and when they outsource their IT/SEO, etc…
On the other hand, if a lawyer (or writer, or farrier) says to his/her SEO/marketer/IT guy/guyette: “Look, I want you to increase my blog’s/website’s visibility, using whatever tools you can — but, while I don’t know anything about this stuff, I do know there are wrong ways to do it that will get me talked about, and not in a nice way” if the SEO/IT guy goes and and does the okay stuff (inserting the sensible, content-related headers that the search engines like, for example) and not the “black” SEO stuff (spammitry, for example) it’s not a bad thing. (How important it is is another matter; I simply dunno, and have followed the discussion enough to believe that online visibility isn’t really important to lawyers — or farriers — who get good word of mouth by doing well for their clients/horses.)
From this remove, it’s on all fours with the lawyer who hires an IT guy to set up a wireless access point. If the IT guy leaves it open, so that anybody with a laptop next door can read all the juicy client data that flows across the local network, it’s the lawyer’s fault, too; outsource your tech, outsource your reputation.
Naturally, there is that small group of highly competent, highly ethical and deeply concerned SEO/marketers who would never bring shame upon a lawyer/farrier. Just ask whoever send you the next catchy email, and I’m sure they’ll let you know whether their the good guys or the bad guys. And if they say so, you can rely on it as if your professional license depended on it.
Folks engaged in ethically doing stuff to make a blog more visible (for fun or profit) don’t spam about it, for roughly the same reasons that ethical farriers don’t sneak into the barn at night and yank shoes off of horses as a way to improve their businesses.
The “white” SEO (stuff like making sure categories and tags and headers refer to what’s in the writing, and giving a multipage website the sort of well-structured directory that Google likes) is relatively easy, but requires both some geek points and some time. (It’s also not the supposedly “good stuff” that the SEO marketers sell at big bucks.) I’m sure that there’s some folks, somewhere, who do that for (probably not much) money, just as a lot of folks do it for free, but it’s very much not the sort thing that somebody who gets the hives at the thought of plugins either ought to try to do by hand, or get a (free) plugin to do for him or her.
The problem does go back to Turk’s Law, after all. Somebody who outsources his or her marketing does outsource the ethics, and the only way to know that the Acme Free SEO Plugin for WordPress (or whatever the good ones are) does only the okay stuff and not the bad stuff is to be able to look at the guts of it and understand what it’s doing.
I’ll be on the lookout for those white hat guys. And shoeless horses in the morning.
“Women in short shorts?” Women with law degrees or models? Maybe I should go that bar conference.
Of all the crap marketing, it seems like Avvo is the site least likely for a person to use to hire a lawyer.
Contrast with “Josh King in short shorts.” I thought it needed saying.
I used to get a lot of calls defendant who came to me via Avvo, most of which were for free questions because they never had a dime to their name. Not much lately. I have no idea why that is.