On May 9, 2013, IPWatchdog’s very own Gene Quinn will be attending and presenting at the Business Development Institute’s Social Media Marketing Summit for Law Firms in NY.  When they first reached out to IPWatchdog to ask Gene to present at this event, I offered to speak as the Social Media Diva, but given that the program specifically targets Law Firms, they declined my offer expressing their desire to have an attorney who not only knows and understand the importance of social media but one who also utilizes social media on a regular basis as part of the work he does each day!   So Gene is definitely their guy!

The summit was put together as a result of increased awareness of social media by law firms and how these platforms can be used to attract new clients and to expand business with existing clients.  According to the Summit’s Event Summary, “Most lawyers use social media networking tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter and most firms have at least one blog.   Many firms now recognize that blogging and social networking have helped produce new client leads.” Gene himself gets all of his client work as a result of his blogging and other social media efforts.  So BDI recognized that he is the perfect person to present at the Summit.

Whether you are just getting your feet wet in the wild world of inventions and patents, or you already have your business up and running, social media can help expand your business. Everywhere you look, there are Facebook “Like” buttons, LinkedIn “Share” buttons and Twitter “Tweet” buttons. Even Google has entered the social sharing game with Google+ allowing you to “+1” content. Social media can help catapult your business into overdrive – if you know how to use it effectively.

Here are some tips to using social media to expand business.

1. Choose which social platforms you want to use

There are many social networks out there – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, the list seems to be constantly growing. You want to channel your hard work into a select amount of platforms, and make sure that they are the right ones for your business. But with so many choices, how can you be sure which is right for you? Well that depends on what your goal is. Twitter is very up-to-the-minute, a place that provides short blurbs about news, insights and just about anything else. Facebook will allow you to post pictures, talk about events and what’s new with your business. LinkedIn caters to the professional crowd and will allow you to highlight your business credentials, but there is a social side to it that is beneficial for businesses.

On Sunday March 25 and Monday March 26, 2012, I attended the Second Annual Women’s Entrepreneurship Symposium (WES) in Shreveport, LA.  The event was hosted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in Honor of Women’s History Month and was put together in collaboration with U.S. Senator Mary L. Landrieu (D-LA) and the city of Shreveport, Louisiana.  WES was held at the Shreveport Convention Center and focused primarily on women entrepreneurs, innovation and the importance of intellectual property to business.  I was honored to accept an invitation to present at this year’s event on social media and the importance of developing and leveraging online business relationships.

The program featured Senator Landrieu, who is chair of the Senate’s Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship as the symposium’s keynote speaker as well as the Mayor of Shreveport, Mayor Cedric B Glover who gave the welcoming remarks on day 1 of the event. The program additionally included the Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Deputy Director of the USPTO Teresa (Terry) Stanek Rea, Director of Inventor Education, Outreach and Recognition (USPTO) Elizabeth Dougherty, Director of Research and Policy at the National Women’s Business Council (NWBC) Julia Kurnik as well as successful entrepreneurs and other experts in the field of intellectual property law and small business.

Having a brand is not just for big corporations and well-known products. Big businesses, small businesses, law firms, entrepreneurs and anyone else wanting to make a name for themselves can do so by building a brand. The way you portray your business, your products and yourself; in other words your image, is your brand.

Thanks to social media everyone has the ability to connect with like-minded individuals all over the world. But if you want to exploit social media you need to have an effective strategy. It does not take an enormous amount of time each day. In fact with only 15 minutes per day, you can really make quite an impact.  Like everything you hope to succeed with in life, it does take planning and forethought.

Here are suggestions on how you might be able to use social media to develop your brand, monitor quality, engage customers, expand upon ideas and connect with others within your industry.

There’s only one thing more disheartening to an online retailer than knowing that a lot of customers are going to abandon their shopping carts before completing a purchase. And that’s the discovery that a whopping three out of four of them will actually turn around and leave the website rather than endure the hassle of registering a new account.

A new technology called “social login,” however, can alleviate both problems. Offered by multiple vendors  (including Facebook) or custom built in-house, social login allows website visitors to log in using their Facebook, Twitter, or other social media identity and avoid registration and password hassles entirely.

This is no small matter. A friend of mine was in a Cost Plus World Market retail location recently and spotted a coffee table he liked. A salesman noted that if he signed up for their online World Explorer rewards program, he could get the table for 25 percent off. So he tried signing up via his iPhone while in the store, but found it too frustrating to awkwardly thumb-type all his personal data — let alone create a unique 10 digit reward program ID — on the iPhone’s tiny virtual keyboard. So he left the store without completing the purchase.

Last week I was on the Road in Western Pennsylvania, with a quick road-trip north to visit Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, visiting Duquesne University School of Law on Wednesday for a lunch and learn presentation and then the University of Pittsburgh School of Law on Thursday for another lunch and learn presentation.  In between, on Wednesday evening, I drove out to Dubois, Pennsylvania to give a presentation to the Entrepreneurs Club that is associated with the Small Business Development Center of Clarion University.

As with most presentations to inventor or entrepreneur groups things quickly moved into answering questions from the audience, who then dictate where we spend our time.  On the other hand, my presentation to the law students at Duquesne and Pitt were remarkably predictable.  Whenever I travel to speak at law schools I inevitably get asked questions about what students should be doing to (1) set themselves up in a position to be hired; and (2) how to ultimately land a job.  With that in mind I thought it might make sense to do a primer on steps that can be taken in order to find a legal job.

Those of you who follow IPWatchdog, know that my passion is Brand Development, Brand Building, and Online Marketing using social media.  I try to educate our readers on how they can use social media for their businesses regardless of size.  However, I decided to take a different approach and compare the social media campaigns of Apple, Inc, Coca Cola, Nike and Dell Computers.  Let’s take a look at how these four industry giants use social media today and how you can incorporate similar tactics into your social media strategies.

The digital age is upon us and there is no turning back. People all over the world are becoming increasingly connected via the global telecommunications network that we call the Internet. Perhaps the best, and certainly the most cited, definition of the Internet can be found in the now famous district court decision in American Civil Liberties Union v. Reno, 929 F.Supp. 824, 830-31 (E.D. Pa. 1996), which defines the Internet as follows: “The Internet is not a physical or tangible entity, but rather a giant network which interconnects innumerable smaller groups of linked computer networks. It is thus a network of networks.”

This network of networks connects people from far away places as if they are in the next room. The Internet has revolutionized communications and the way we live, making virtual friends online that we are likely to never even meet; namely, those from far away locations that we share similar interests with and connect with via LinkedIn, befriend on Facebook or those we play fantasy sports in the same ESPN league. But for all the good and enjoyable that comes from the Internet there are ever present downsides. Loss of privacy, being constantly tethered to a machine or device and, of course, the crimes that become so much easier to perpetrate.

With social media, You Are Your Brand. But what exactly does that mean? If you are part of a larger firm or business, you may be using social media to promote the products and services your company/firm offers, but you are doing so as an individual. Social media is about sharing content and building relationships. The general voice of your company/firm would not work in social media, nor in face to face networking for that matter, without each individual representative of the company displaying their own personalities and adding unique insight which ultimately is what attracts new, potential clients.

What’s in a name? Well likely far more than most businesses realize.  Your business name is how people will identify with your goods and services, so  you want to have one identity that is all your own.  Simple enough really, at least in concept, but making a mistake at the selection stage will prove costly.

Back in the day, not so many years ago actually, attorneys would recommend that businesses conduct a trademark search before selecting a name.  Then as the Internet became more a part of our business and personal lives you had to make sure that you could obtain an appropriate domain name to host your website.  Now we are at the point where merely selecting a good name that gives you the opportunity for a good domain name is not enough.  You really need to make sure that you can control not only the domain name associated with the business name you choose, but also the Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn account names associated with your business name.

Last week LinkedIn soared to unexpected heights as it debuted as a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange.  Priced at $45, LinkedIn shares more than doubled by the end of its first day as a public company, spiking close to triple the $45 offering price before sliding back.  On Friday the stock closed over $93, but on Monday the stock opened at $86.45, and at mid-day it was bouncing around slightly north of $85 per share, and by mid-afternoon it started to climb once again toward $92.  See NYSE: LNKD.

It is still early to know whether this is irrational exuberance or whether this is a meaningful event for the companies that follow LinkedIn to IPO.  In all likelihood it is a little of both, namely a meaningful event that demonstrates at least some irrational exuberance.  With the economy and the IPO market having been in the tank for so long a little zeal never hurt anyone, right?  In any event, regardless of what LinkedIn does from here on out the fury of trading and interest suggests that good things are on the horizon for the economy and perhaps for job creation as well.

LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) announced this week that the professional social networking giant is now valued at $8.79 Billion, roughly 38 times sales figures reported in 2010, after it’s first day as a publicly traded company on May 18.  This may be hard to believe by many because LinkedIn has never reported being profitable, nor have they ever made more than $250 million in any one year.  However, within minutes of LinkedIn’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) of 7.84 million shares priced at $45, the shares doubled in price and at one point in the day LinkedIn stock peaked in excess of $122 per share.  In fact when the stock market closed on day one, shares last traded at $96 per share and on day two shares last traded at $93.09 per share.

Social media has taken the world by storm.  Everyone from college students, to politicians, news media outlets, to business professionals, small and big businesses, to musicians, artists and other individual people both young and old have jumped on the social media bandwagon.   When creating a marketing campaign, no matter what the business is, social media is an obvious choice for those who wish to expand their reach beyond that of the local phone book.  Given that social media is still quite new to the business arena, there are many opportunities missed because of common yet avoidable mistakes.  On February 18^th I wrote an article on the Top 10 Mistakes Businesses Make with Social Media.  Since then I have written several articles on Attorney Marketing and Brand Building and Common Marketing Mistakes Attorneys Make  Part one and Part two.  However, today I would like to speak specifically to the use of social media by attorneys and the common yet avoidable mistakes attorneys often make.

Now of course, because I am not an attorney I will not speak to the ethical implications of using social media.  However, since social media has become so widespread amongst attorneys, the American Bar Association is now addressing the ethical implications of social media as part of the ABA Commission on Ethics.  Even those who follow ethical standards to the letter are not immune to making some of the biggest mistakes attorneys can make when using social media, which not only may result in missed opportunities, but will also result in your time and efforts being wasted.

On tap this afternoon at the BIO IP Counsel Meeting is ethics. There are two separate panels schedule, the first which will address the ethical issues associated with joint inventorship and joint representation. The second panel dealing with ethical issues as they present particularly for in-house IP counsel.

The moderator of the first panel is Donald Ware of Foley Hoag, who is leading a discussion of pitfalls that may arise from prosecuting joint inventions conceived in the course of research collaborations among multiple institutions, including companies, universities and hospitals. On the panel is Irene Pleasure, Associate General Counsel and Director of Patent Law at Genentech, who discussed the in-house perspective on managing patent issues in research collaborations. Rounding out this first panel discussion of the afternoon will be David Hricik, Professor of Law at Mercer University School of Law and co-author of two patent ethics treatises, namely Patent Ethics – Prosecution (2009) and Patent Ethics – Litigation (2010). Hricik, who is also on the second panel, addressed the professional responsibilities of patent attorneys involved in the prosecution of jointly-owned patent applications.

Social Media has quickly become the fastest growing online phenomenon.  Originally Social networking was for college students and artists and musicians, but increasingly businesses of all sizes have jumped on the Social Media bus.  Small, medium and large sized business, retail store owners, politicians, journalistic publications, law firms, chain stores, restaurants and businesses from nearly every industry have chimed in.  Whether you have a brick and mortar retail location or are solely online, Social Media can help.  But as with any business strategy one can partake in, all of your efforts including, time and money are wasted if you do not know what mistakes you should avoid in order to get the most out of your online efforts.