Couple of weeks back, Twitter started looking for a news chief. The job description? Figure out how to maximize the relationship between the world’s real-time information tool and the mainstream media. Now comes news of Twitter Amplify that secures Twitter’s ascendancy as a source of news to major media sites. Deals have been announced with Time Inc, Bloomberg, Discovery, Vevo, Vice Media, Condé Nast Entertainment and Warner Music Group.
What does this mean for marketing legal services?
Now, not only will “big” media be tapping into the crowd-sourced breaking news stream that Twitter has repeatedly proven to be, but the same media will be supplanting (or perhaps extending) its own reporting resources through the fact and opinion posts that inevitably follow a news event.
We have previously urged lawyers to adopt Twitter micro-blogging as a method of being found and chosen as sources for big media content. Now we can point to the transformation of Twitter content into big media as a reason to not only open an account, but participate vigorously in the conversation because it’s a direct route into big media content. Of course, lawyers should continue to make themselves known to reporters by following them on Twitter. (Follow this twitter list of top legal reporters to get started.)
So, what will it take to be among the better known legal experts in a media world as wide as Twitter? The best news is that there are just a few rules and they are largely the same as they’ve ever been.
- Pick the words for your profile carefully and use ones descriptive of your skills, along with offering a tidbit on your personality or interests.
- Listen avidly and respond when you can to posts about issues you can help make sense of.
- Use links aggressively to point back to your own content.
- Recognize and use hashtags, the # handles that users (and media) employ to identify and summarize content on similar topics.
- Pass along relevant content (retweet) from the people you follow. Be generous.
- When you’re followed or when your content gets picked up in the media, be grateful. Issue a thank you in Twitter. Retweet.
Twitter’s financial future may not be in the advertising it can generate alongside the tweets of its users, but in the relationships it can forge with news media and other content creators. The leverage it has developed in its six years as a niche blogging product leaves it as the only viable provider of this linkage to user-based content in a already breakneck news cycle.
Lawyers and their marketing professionals need to hop on and hang on. The (New York?) Times, they are a changing.