Free Web Tools for the Way You Work

Nicholas Gaffney provides a slew of free web tools in his Marketing the Law Firm Newsletter article, “Free Web Tools for the Way You Work.” While many of the apps on this list will be familiar to you, Gaffney offers some excellent suggestions on PR and collaboration tools as well as advice on how lawyers and law firms can use these tools effectively. -M

New Foreclosure Data Mapping Site Launched

The Center for Housing Policy, KnowledgePlex, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation and the Urban Institute have just launched tools that allow users to create customized maps on Foreclosure-Response.org, a new website that we highlighted a few weeks back. Powered by DataPlace, these tools allow users to identify areas in which to target foreclosure resources and efforts. -M

Twitter 101

As several of our recent posts suggest, Twitter is gaining popularity among legal aid and public interest advocates and organizations. For those who haven’t yet experimented with Twitter, or are just getting started, here’s a short introduction that provides some background, tools and resources for using twitter effectively.

Getting Started
To get started using Twitter, go to the Twitter sign-up page and create an account. Even if you’re not planning to use Twitter right away, it’s a good idea to reserve a user name for your organization. (For example, twitter.com/legalaid has already been taken by a website (legalaid.com) that trades on our community’s good name to generate affiliate revenue by sending visitors to commercial websites.) Your user name (or what goes after the twitter.com/ and becomes your profile’s landing page) is limited to 15 characters, but should ideally be much shorter than that.

After you have registered, you’ll need to make a decision about who to follow. A good starting point is to follow folks already using Twitter in our community, as they are likely to have followers who are interested in what you have to say. It’s also worth noting that nothing that you do with your Twitter account is really permanent. You can un-follow as easily as you can follow, and delete any messages that you post (although users that follow you may see them before you can delete them). While the other users that you follow will display on your profile, their messages (or “tweets”) will only appear to you.

As for your own messages, they must be 140 characters or less. You can also choose whether you want your account to be public or private. If it’s public, anyone can see what you post and you’re more likely to attract followers. If it’s private, only folks that you approve will be able to see your messages. (For example, @technola and @accesstojustice are public because we want anyone who is interested to be able to follow us, but my own personal profile @mjburnett is private because I want to have control over who sees my messages.)  In either case, the messages that you post will be “delivered” to all of your followers as soon as you post them. Indeed, this is what makes Twitter so powerful: it provides real-time content syndication to a group of people that are interested in what you have to say or what your organization is up to. To follow someone,  go to their profile and click “follow.” Or, if their profile is private, click “send request” and wait for them to approve you.

Tools
Before going too much further, you should download one of three popular applications to help manage your Twitter account(s). If you are looking for a light, easy to use application I would suggest Twirl. If you need to manage multiple Twitter accounts, or like the idea of integrating things with Firefox, try Twitterfox (this is what I use most of the time). Finally, if you aspire to be a Twitter power user, download TweetDeck (this is what Kate uses most of the time). If you want to tweet from your iPhone, I like the free version of Twitterrific (for BlackBerry there is TwitterBerry). You can also post and receive tweets via SMS on your cell phone.

Another set of twitter tools relate to posting automatically from a RSS feed, scheduling posts, and Twitter analytics. There are several good tools that do one or two of these things, and a great tool for doing all of them called HootSuite (formally Brightkit). If you have a RSS feed for your website or blog, Twitter is a fast and easy way to start driving qualified traffic to existing content. HootSuite allows you to easily syndicate your RSS feed content to one or more Twitter accounts (you can also use the popular Twitterfeed for this), as well as to control how often items are posted and to append text (i.e. “News:”) to your post. It also tracks how many people click on your links and shortens your URLs so that they take up less characters. If you’re not ready for HootSuite or a similar application, you may want to consider the browser toolbar add-on for TinyURL, which will allow you to easily create short links to save precious characters (140 characters is less than you might think). Note also that some applications will automatically shorten long links.

Resources
There are a lot of good resources on Twitter out there, including Twitter’s FAQ. Here are a few to get you started:

General:
Newbie’s guide to Twitter (CNET)
Birds of a Feather Twitter Together (Wall Street Journal)
Beginner’s Quick Start Guide and Tutorial to Using Twitter (zappos.com)
Twitter Etiquette (Twitter Fan Wiki)

Legal:
Tools and Tactics to Tweet Well on Twitter (LTN)
Legal News Feeds on Twitter (JDScoop)
145 Lawyers (and Legal Professionals) to Follow on Twitter (JDScoop)
Twitter Posts on Real Lawyers Have Blogs (Kevin O’Keefe)
The Pros & Cons of Twitter (Lawyer2Lawyer Podcast)
Tweet Sixteen: 16 Ways Lawyers Can Use Twitter (Robert Ambrogi)
Attorneys Flocking to Twitter for Marketing (Lawyers USA)

-M

Free Marketing Webinar

TechSoup reports that MarketingProfs is offering a free marketing webinar on April 1, 2009 from 11 am to 5 pm Eastern. Topics that they’ll cover include

• Online branding
• Building community with Facebook
• Getting your fans to tell your story

For more information, check out the TechSoup post about the free webinar. – K

Free Friday: Flash Video Webinar

TechSoup’s Kami Griffiths will interview Colin Carpenter and Lori Pottinger from International Rivers about their flash video, “We All Live Downstream”, which was chosen as runner up in the Adobe-TechSoup 2008 Show Your Impact contest. Learn about the process  for developing a flash video and how to produce a similar video for your organization. Register online here. -M

JDScoop Profiles Legal Aid & Non-Profit Legal Organizations on Twitter

On JDSupra’s blog, JDScoop,  Adrian Lurssen profiles legal aid and non-profit legal organizations on Twitter in his latest effort to capture lawyers and legal professionals using Twitter. The post, inspired by today’s New York Times article, Interest Rate Drop Has Dire Results for Legal Aid, also highlights nonprofit legal groups using JDSupra for online outreach, including Pro Bono Net and Texas RioGrande Legal Aid.  -M

Arkansas Access to Justice Commission Launches EqualJusticeWatch.org

The Arkansas Access to Justice Commission today announced the official launch of EqualJusticeWatch.org:

The goal of the new Arkansas Equal Justice Watch website is to encourage action by state leaders to support equal access to justice for all Arkansans.  The Watch is a project of the Arkansas Access to Justice Commission created by the state Supreme Court to expand civil legal justice.  This website is designed to provide legislative decision makers with the latest information about civil legal aid in their districts as well as enable constituents to easily research civil justice issues in their communities.  Data for each of the 75 counties in the state include population demographics on poverty, education, disability, divorce, foreclosure, bankruptcy in addition to the 2008 numbers and types of cases handled by civil legal aid.  Through this website visitors can easily locate and contact their Senator and Representative to express support for justice legislation.

Congratulations to the Arkansas Access to Justice Commission,  Center for Arkansas Legal Services, and Legal Aid of Arkansas on launching this innovative initiative to help ensure access to justice for all Arkansans! -M

More Legal Aid Groups Using Social Networking Tools

I wanted to highlight an excellent list of legal aid groups using social networking tools that Tom Winter of Community Legal Aid Services in Ohio posted to the comments for yesterday’s post on new blogs and twitter profiles. It condenses a few blogs and twitter profiles that we have highlighted here in the past as well as a great list of legal aid groups on Facebook and MySpace. A hearty thanks to Tom for researching and collecting all of these in one place! -M