My Social Networking article in Law Practice Management

My article on Social Networking is up at Law Practice Management’s website. How’d I know? I got a LinkedIn request from a reader. Cool.

One clarification, that I realized after reading my own article: I should have made it clearer the connection between CRM and social networking. I didn’t do that clearly enough in the article, which I think leaves you wondering why the mention of CRM is in there at all. My take: CRM tells you who you and your organization knows. Since the people inside your firm are the ones most likely to have a vested interest in helping you connect the dots to your intended contact, I see those internal contacts as being the strongest and most likely to result in succesful links. External contacts — those that sites like LinkedIn map — increase the potential for finding useful contacts. But the links between you and your target — often have no reason to help.

More on this later, as I’m generally a fan of LinkedIn. But I think they’re going to see some resistance as the network grows and the strength of the intermediate links weakens.

Also, an interesting statistic: when I wrote the article just a couple months ago, my network was 45 people and 15,000 connections. Today, at LinkedIn, my network is over 80 people and today grew past 50,000 connections.

I’ll run the numbers to compare the other stats from the article. It’s an amazing indicator of LinkedIn‘s growth. (Belong to LinkedIn? You can always send me a connection request at rick@rklau.com.)