When you get right down to it, continuing legal education is about relationships. It’s about the relationships between providers and speakers; the relationships between providers and their legal communities; the relationships between speakers and attendees; and the relationships among attendees.

And, of course, it’s about education, but the best way to ensure a quality educational experience is to enlist the right speakers, attract the right attendees, and provide a forum for them to exchange information and ideas.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some CLE providers are looking to social media not as a marketing tool, but as a way to enrich and expand the reach of the relationships they have always fostered.

If those providers look to other industries for guidance, they might come to the conclusion they need something like a community manager. Community managers are becoming common, especially in large corporations. They have a role to play in those organizations. But in CLE organizations, where relationships and community have always been a part of our model, I wonder if their role might be a little different.

I’m thinking the most important role for a person who is well-versed in online communication is to empower others in the organization to use social media to enhance their existing communication tools. This is no small task, when you consider that each person in the organization has a different role and different objectives–not to mention varying levels of online competence and comfort.

Program attorneys, coordinators, editors and customer service representatives should all be as comfortable communicating with speakers and lawyers in various online communities as they are with phone and email. These are the people who have always played a role in managing their CLE community and, ideally, that doesn’t change when the community goes digital.

Or so I’ve been thinking–what do you think?

I don’t have time to be writing this post right now. I should be packing up for my trip to the ACLEA (Association of Continuing Legal Education Administrators) Conference in Orlando tomorrow.

But yesterday I set our conference hashtag (#ACLEA) on the recently relaunched EventVue platform (if you’re going to or interested in the conference, be sure to check it out). And this reminded me of how great Twitter can be at events, which reminded me of a post I wrote in 2008 claiming that Twitter really hits its stride at events and conferences. I can’t find that post to save my life, but I did find this one, which happens to be even more relevant.

First, it’s the first write-up I ever did of EventVue (a company just down the road from me in Boulder) and I highlighted its Chatter function, which is now the focus of the relaunch I just mentioned.

Second, I talked about Twitter for legal conferences and yearned for the day we might get to put it to use:

I love the new features. Focusing on legal conferences, my first thought was that this would be a ways off for me. But then this from Kevin O’Keefe. If lawyers, perhaps the latest of the late-adopting crowd, are already starting to look to twitter as a serious business tool, we might not be as far off as I thought.

Finally (and this is the kicker), I got a comment from Kevin O’Keefe on lawyers and Twitter.  From Kevin:

Thanks for mentioning my take on Twitter Alli.
Though I think it’s going to take some time for a app like Twitter to make significant inroads in the legal field, I am seeing Twitter discussed more and more. Just this week at a Law Firm PR Conference in Chicago, Twitter came up on a number of occasions.

Why is all this relevant? Because Kevin will be the keynote speaker of a plenary topic on social media at the conference. And I’ll be part of the follow-up panel discussing this very topic with him.

Twitter is almost nothing like it was in May 2008 when I wrote this post. Sure, the interface has changed only slightly, but its population has exploded, which has made it harder to manage and build relationships–at least for me. But its massive growth and popularity is also the reason we’ll be talking about it this week and I can’t complain about that.

To those heading to Orlando, I’ll tweet (and see) you soon.

I have a confession to make. I don’t like “virtual events.”

I don’t know quite why I call it a confession. I just have a feeling I’m supposed to like them. People I meet who know that I have blogged about conferences, and often about how technology is reshaping them, are always surprised–perhaps even suspicious–to learn that I don’t care for their “virtual” counterpart.

First, let me say what I don’t mean by “virtual event.” I don’t mean the grassroots virtual event that sprouts thanks to engaged attendees. That type of virtual event is something to aspire to.

Nor do I include online education, like webcasting, etc., and its integration with various online social tools to improve engagement. That’s all great, too.

When I say “virtual event,” I’m talking about this:

You might recognize this as one of the booths at the Virtual LegalTech Show on November 19.

I’m not picking on LegalTech. In fact, I think LegalTech has been an industry leader when integrating the use of online tools with its legal events. Its New York conference last year was one of the first legal conferences to really take off on Twitter and it seems to always be working on new ways to engage its tech-savvy attorney market.

What I’m picking on is the “virtual” platform and its effort to simply recreate the live event in an online format. LegalTech didn’t come up with this, of course. It’s simply another online tool they’re trying out. A variety of companies offer the virtual platform, and I’ve had my eye on some of them for the last year or so, but so far I’m not buying it.

See those people milling about in the picture? I think they’re supposed to make me feel connected. Instead, they make me feel like I’m playing the Sims, only the Sims is more interactive. How about the chat box you can see on the right? When I “went to the booth,” I received some type of welcome message in a long list of other welcome messages (with occasional responses) that went something like: ‘Hi, Alli. Thanks for stopping by. Let me know if you have any questions.” This exchange might take place in real life, but here it feels like I’m back in an AOL chatroom, circa 1995. And why do I need to hear loud background noise–mimicking the sound you might hear when you walk into a bustling auditorium–to let me know when I’m in the exhibit hall? It doesn’t make me forget that I’m actually just staring at my computer.

Maybe I simply lack imagination, but I think we can educate, engage and [in the case of sponsors] market online without needing to simulate the real-life experience with features that only remind us of the limitations of online events. In many ways, the online experience isn’t inferior and when we let its form develop and stand on its own, we might even see that some things are better online.

What do you think?

Image by James Cridland via Flickr

When I was in college, I worked at Barnes & Noble. The place was busy open to close. I have vivid memories of heated exchanges with women who came to buy Princess Di memorabilia books only to learn we were sold out.

I have even better memories of customers looking for a certain story, but unable to put a title to it.

When I would reply, "You must be talking about Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," the customer acted as if I was a genius, even though it was now sitting on our bestseller shelf thanks to the recent release of a hugely successful Hollywood movie.

There were customers searching for far more obscure titles. One that sticks out was my geology professor. He was searching for a book for his wife called Ham Hocks and Poppycock. I was searching for a way to make up for a recent and embarrassing incident during which I had complimented the rock in my professor's office only to find out it was a "mineral." Thankfully, we both found what we were looking for.

There were the customers who came in multiple times a week to browse and see what was new. There were customers who came in every Sunday at a set time. There were people who came to find a quick gift ten minutes before they were heading to the party. And there were the customers who came to study and [sometimes] drink coffee (often their own from home) at the tables sprinkled throughout the store.

You don't have to be a bookstore executive to get a general idea of the industry's customer base:

1. People who know what they're looking for
2. People with relatively easy queries
3. People with more advanced queries
4. People who browse and often buy
5. People who have last-minute buys that can't wait for shipping
6. People who don't buy anything now but we cater to them because we want to be the go-to place in the event they ever decide to buy something.

I went to college in the nascent stages of grand-scale e-commerce, so the industry probably should have been a little more concerned about this customer line-up than it was (or, preferably, should have seen the great opportunity of the emerging medium). Using Borders as an example, it dabbled in e-commerce, then decided to hand the reigns over to Amazon in 2001, then took it back last year, and, finally, effectively gave up on it this year.

In doing so, it effectively gives up customers 1, 2, 3, which I would guess were a substantial piece of its business. The browsers might love books and the bookstore more, but the people who knew what they were looking for or had searches (all of which can now be performed online) must have been a significant piece of the foundation of the business. While there is definitely a great business that can be built for browsers and booklovers, I doubt it was the kind of business that mega-stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble were envisioning a decade ago.

I haven't even mentioned conferences yet, but I think the analogy that can be drawn is pretty clear. There are all different types of attendees. While I am a big proponent of the live event, not all of our attendees come for the live benefits (networking, community, etc). Many attendees come primarily for the content, most of which can now be effectively delivered online.

So as I see it, you have a few options. You can shun the online medium and focus on creating fantastic live events. This is a great option, as long as you recognize and embrace your market and realize that content-only attendees will stop coming as competitors make online content available. If you're the bookstore that focuses its entire business on booklovers, you happily watch them go.

Of course, you can also do online-only programs, but you do so
understanding that you alienate some of the most engaged people in your
industry because these are some of the same people who love live events.

Or you can take a hybrid approach, offering both options to reach a larger audience. In some ways, this is the obvious option, but I also think it is the hardest option (which may be why massively successful corporations have struggled with it). You are now dealing with two very different customers and two very different products.

What do you think? Can we learn something from the book industry? Are there other courses we can take? How can we successfully implement the hybrid approach, if that's the path we choose?

ASAE has posted a video recap of a session about online education from its recent Great Ideas Conference. In the recap, Howard Horwitz of the American College of Healthcare Executives talked about things to do when rolling out online education that has been repurposed from live content.

Some of the ideas he mentioned:

1. Start with a market awareness campaign to get people familiar with the new medium.
2. Offer giveaways or deals to help generate interest.
3. Solicit feedback from your market by sending a free program and offering education credit to those who respond with feedback on the medium.
4. Look at products with most appeal and lead with those to enable immediate success.
5. Stress the benefits and counter resistance.
6. Consider a blended platform. For example, offer the "hard content" as a typical online program, but then provide an opportunity to particiate in interactive exercises online with other attendees and speakers.

Side note: ASAE has come under recent attack about the ways it has chosen to interact (or, more accurately, not interact with its attendees on social media), and while it may have some things to learn from its members about Twitter, I continue to believe it is doing a great job of using tools like YouTube to inform and educate those who can't attend its conferences. This is especially critical in this economy for organizations like ASAE, which are seeing their members' budgets slashed (often to $0). The more people ASAE can reach during this tough time, the more members it will see when budgets start loosening up.

Just a quick post to point you to the Eventprofs Twitter Chat, an initiative started by Ready2Spark. She's started a weekly chat (Mondays, 9pm EST), the agenda will be driven by you, and it's shaping up to be great.

Instructions for participating are here.

I've been preparing to moderate a panel on virtual technology for the Green Meeting Industry Council's annual conference at the end of this month, so I've been thinking a lot about virtual events. Watching a couple of conferences online over the last couple of weeks (MeetDifferent and Legal Tech NY) got me thinking about a very basic question: What is a virtual event?

At first glance, the answer is obvious. There are any number of virtual event providers we can look to. Companies like Unisfair and ON24 give us the platforms that house the events we've come to know as virtual events. They give us modern day chat rooms and online exhibit halls in an attempt to replicate the experience of a live conference or tradeshow.

But as more and more individuals begin building their own online communities through blogs, Twitter, and other tools, we're also seeing the creation of informal virtual events. Attendees are tweeting, blogging, and engaging each other and non-attendees in a new way. They're meeting fellow attendees before the conference, spreading the word and talking amongst themselves during the conference, and continuing to share information long after the conference ends. Things they only had time to Twitter during the conference become blog posts. Those blog posts are shared and commented on and act as catalysts for new posts.

This raises challenges for organizers (from what I've seen, people are far more willing to tweet or blog discontent than to voice it in the conference room), but it also opens up a lot of opportunities.

And don't think it's not coming your way. I work in an industry known for its late adopters, but we have an ever-growing group of exceptionally savvy lawyers leading the charge. The recent Legal Tech conference I mentioned above was all over Twitter and has inspired countless blog posts and videos. It's not the norm yet, but I did meet up with a fellow Twitterer at a recent in-house family law conference we did (he sent out a tweet that he was at the conference so I tweeted back that he should stop by my office if he had a moment). It's coming.

What do you think? Are these informal, events-focused online communities that are cropping up around live events becoming "virtual events" in their own right?

There are still ways to keep real-time pace with the discussions they'll be having this year.

1. Tune in to the opening general session today at 10:00 am EST (information on Meet Different's website).
2. Follow it on Twitter. Several attendees are talking about it and you can easily track their comments because they mark them #meetdifferent (take a look at the screen shot below). If you're on Twitter, consider following people like @mcallen and @jkhewett who are really pumping out the updates.

If I come across other ways I'm tracking the event as it proceeds, I'll be sure to update you.

Meetings and Conventions Magazine has a great article this month on online reputation management for event planners. Most of the experts interviewed agreed that you should both be monitoring and responding to online conversations (whether glowing or scathing) about your event or organization.

By doing so, you get the obvious benefit of having your response right there in the conversation–this can be especially helpful in the case of criticism. But even more importantly, you get the opportunity to elicit more constructive feedback from attendees and potential attendees that you can use to make the event better. Not to mention that you also get a unique opportunity to build closer relationships with the very people you hope will come next year.

I think the term "online reputation management" falls far too short of the actual benefits you can reap from responding to and learning from the feedback that is out there. The term implies to me an almost obsessive need to control the message and bring it back to the corporate brand you penned in an office of executives during an all-day branding meeting.

Guess what? You can't control that message anymore–at least not in the traditional sense. Maybe you did once, back when information was a one-way street. (Remember those days? When public opinion was limited to a few opinion letters that were chosen by the editorial boards of newspapers and magazines?). Maybe you even had control for the eight hours you spent in your branding meeting. Now it's out there and you've lost it, but you've gained something far more powerful.

At least that's my "Podunk" opinion.

And that leads me to the other notable portion of this article. "Podunk" isn't my word. It came from the director of communications for the American Society for Microbiology who says her staff monitors for mentions of the organization's events online, but notes:

People, and especially directors of communication, who view blogs with this type of disdain seem to have their heads in the sand.

For one thing, your event is probably not going to be mentioned in the New York Times. Your group may be cited in the Times frequently as the leading group with expertise on your topic (and the American Society for Microbiology, the leading society on germs, definitely gets some well-deserved coverage), but you're unlikely to get New York Times exposure for your upcoming conference.

And even if you did, you're not reaching your specialized, target audience. I read the Times, but I won't be going to a microbiology conference just because the Times mentions it.

Who can reach that specialized audience? Trade publications, certainly. And blogs. Your members are reading niche blogs in their areas of focus. If you're not building relationships with those bloggers (and monitoring and responding to what is being said about your event and your organization), you are squandering great opportunity to promote your event and make it better.

Image by kevindooley

Last Friday, I started a new position with the continuing legal education arm of our state bar association (more on this to come but, generally, I'll be working on online strategy for CLE programming). When I saw this post from Seth Godin today, it was a reminder–not that I've needed one–about why I chose to take on this position. From the post:

"Our business will never work online."

And they're right.

My new organization knew that taking things online was a whole new game. But they also knew they had to (and wanted to) do it. The combination makes it a pretty good place to be.