Parents, Students, Internships and Social Networks

Recently, I’ve taken devoted time outside of designing business networks for investors, lawyers and corporate professionals, to talk with two high schools about creating a network of parents and alumni that mentor students professionally.  The mentoring includes summer or school-year internships, take-a-child-to-work day; classroom lectures and in-school business projects.

The premise is that parents of the students are a tremendous but usually under-organized resource for helping all children in the school explore jobs, gain introductory business experience and build their professional resume in preparation for college and beyond.  In the current economy, it’s especially difficult for aspiring young professionals to acquire opportunities professional learning and work, whether it’s in graphic design, architecture, veterinary skills, green jobs, social causes, etc.  And there are many parents willing to give some flexible amount of time, even if (in a private school situation) ability to give money is constrained these days.

A Social Network for High School Parents and Students

Such a career connection program has strong characteristics related to successful, online-faciliated communities: it’s a private or pre-screened network, where each ‘provider’ (a parent) has a strong possibility for benefit (to their own children), and profile information is easy to represent and share. You can even think of social networking features like discussion groups and fan clubs, where talk about a career path or business project is shared.

The idea of an organized parent / alumni / student social network, documented in a skills- and willingness-to-help database, and supported by school staff to ensure quality, is apparently not that common, given my conversations with a sample of educational professionals and online research.  The basic idea is straightforward but there are a number of hurdles to address.  I welcome feedback from readers about schools that have such programs or want to pilot them.

Lots of Ways to Mentor

Here’s the concept: the school staff/board/PTA ask parents to volunteer information about their profession and company background (e.g. solo practitioner or corporate, location) and opt-in to any of the following: a willingness to speak to students occasionally on the phone; present at a class; help run a short professional project at the school or be a judge of a business contest; take a student to work for a day or a week; or offer a full-blown internship.  Parents are strongly motivated to participate, time permitting of course, because they want their own child to have a skill-developing, resume-building professional opportunity and because their relatively small circle of friends may not have something immediate to ‘swap’ among their kids. Students have some access to the database, possibly with staff intermediation (or with certain contact information hidden) and after some screening to ensure true commitment, are put in touch with a parent relevant to their interests.

Yes, but…

The hurdles to address are several, the greatest being ensuring the quality of the experience for everyone involved.  Parents who invest time in students don’t want it wasted through an excess of calls or investment in students that aren’t committed to working hard and learning.  The students are looking to internships for real learning experiences, not making copies.  Other considerations include how to measure the return on investment to the school for managing the program, prioritization of student requests, and ensuring parents’ data privacy.

Moving Forward…

The above challenges can be addressed, primarily through careful design of the program with school staff, and a selection of parents and students, plus careful screening and monitoring of quality, at least until a culture of mutual commitment to success is created.  I’ll be exploring this program idea further with the school and welcome ideas and collaboration.   At minimum, a school/parent/student network is a positive, self-sufficient, democratizing alternative to a trend of better-off families paying firms thousands of dollars to set up internships for their children.

Today

Synching Team Mindsets through Creative Invention

The health newsletter of Dr. Weil has an interesting piece on how musician’s brain waves synchronize when they play songs together (“Musicians’ Brain Waves Are Also in Tune“).  A researcher at the Max Planck Institute looked at electrical activity in the brains of pairs of guitarists and found that two regions of the mind show high degrees of brainwave synchronization when they play an improvised song together.

I’m a jazz/rock musician (guitar, drums, keys, a bit of bass and vocals) who long ago decided I’d be more productive applying my creativity to business collaboration and marketing.  In other words, I wasn’t even close to the brilliance some of my friends displayed as musicians, and opted for a business career plus a classic-rock band of mid-life guys in in my basement instead. But I’ve been continually fascinated by replicating the creative environment and satisfaction of music in business environments.

“In the Groove”

A takeaway from the study, in my opinion, is that creative, right-brain thinking creates an alignment of invention and emotion that makes it fun for people to work together and to create new, breakthrough ideas. I’ve only dabbled in classical music and the fine arts, but my hunch is that the more real-time improvisational the art, and the less structured the roles, the greater potential for mental alignment.  Jazz works this way, group improvisational comedy, probably dance, and even high-performance tennis doubles.

Happy Hours as Invention Opportunities

A way to leverage this is to find a time each week for people to set aside their pressing to-do’s, and just brainstorm about business opportunities. In one of my businesses, we made this the Friday afternoon pizza hour.  The really good ideas for business improvements and new products came also exclusively via these sessions – it was the only time where people had permission to think outside their roles, stop worrying about their obligations or speaking out of turn, and pose a zany theory to see where it led. One person was assigned to capture the notes (today I would commit them live to a Wiki, chat board, or feature-request log, and if you’re really ambitious in a distributed company, you could try having people contribute in a Twitter feed).  The drinks usually associated with happy hours are completely optional (and probably not permissible in many businesses). Jelly beans work fine.

Team Productivity Enhancers – What Works…

Three other discussion threads in the same vein:

- I’ve read reports comparing team productivity in two scenarios. In both, a team is given an important business challenge to resolve. In scenario one, a team is told to go off individually, spend an hour or more researching the issue and coming up with ideas, and bringing them to the table at the next meeting. In scenario two, the team is asked to work on the problem only in group meetings. The findings about which created greater results were, that while the individually-prepared team gave “good” responses to the problem more consistently, the team only interacting in groups created breakthrough solutions that addressed more fundamental issues or new opportunities. They were able to think beyond the initial problem and invent a vision.  This didn’t occur 100% of the time, so you are taking a bit of a chance with group brainstorming, but where you are creating new ideas without a driving deadline, this approach is much more effective.

- There has been a lot of talk about how Google gives their employees 20% free time to brainstorm and create/test new inventions (see the NY Times and Fast Company). Empowering people to not only create ideas, but to develop them is powerful. And, it’s relatively easy in the software industry, where the cost of pilot production and posting something to the Web is small. However, based on experience at another major West Coast software corporation, it can get out of hand. Too many individuals can start posting too many ideas for the company to manage; creating redundant projects and unsanctioned competition between divisions and executives; and spinning off lots of unprofitable activities. A few techniques allow you to balance innovation, entrepreneurship and directional control in these situations:

1. First, document all ideas somewhere. The mere fact that someone’s idea is being recorded gives the mind positive reinforcement, and individuals/teams start taking more time to explore more ideas.
2. Second, have a prioritization process for the ideas.  I think it’s too much for any individual to have complete discretion to pursue any ideas. The best approach is to have the inventor/evangelist need to demonstrate the business case for the idea before spending more than a few hours on it. This teaches engineers and other technical types to think about ROI as a prime organizational driver.  The education takes time but is well worth it for organizational productivity – again, aligning people in the same mindset. For other companies with a more time-pressed or hierarchical style, I’ve experienced monthly meetings for the entire department (or if small enough, the entire company) where the best ideas submitted that month are highlighted, the creator is given a small award/reward, and management commits to reporting back in 4 weeks on exactly what they will do with the idea.

- Third, there’s an interesting trend toward crowd-sourcing invention, where the vast resources of talented people on the internet are encouraged to contribute en masse to projects, ranging from highly-technical R&D and licensing projects (e.g. the company Nine Sigma), to online resources such as Wikipedia type databases of cost-saving solutions for small businesses.  There’s the potential to rethink business invention and the consulting industry through crowd-sourcing.  A colleague of mine, David Gusick, is pursuing this path at Extreme Collaboration.

“Have a Nice Day” – By Creating Something with Others

If all of the above is time much to absorb for your hectic business day, I leave you with this “stop and smell the roses” thought from Dr. Weil in his newsletter blurb above: “To my mind, [the Max Planck Institute] study highlights one of the great joys of playing music, one voiced by many musicians: a sense of self-transcendence. Playing music together creates a rare chance to step outside of ourselves and our small concerns and join our minds wholeheartedly with others in creating something no individual could make alone. Seen in this light, creating beautiful music is simply a wonderful byproduct of a larger reward – connecting deeply with other human beings.”

When the worlds of business and music collide.

Practical Tools for Law Firms to Expand their Clientele and Mindshare

I’ve been asked recently to present to law firms on practical ways to improve their online presence, and combine this with traditional relationship building methods.   The result is this presentation, which describes specifically how to polish a LinkedIn individual or company profile, obtain speaking opportunities and be quoted in articles with minimal effort, and use surveys and low-key events that allow industry executives (who are your potential clients) to mingle.

The steps require between 1/2 hour and 2 hours a week for your partners who emphasize business development. The range depends on whether you want to be simply “credible” in your online presence, or “facilitative” in blending networking and outreach with online activities, as shown on my slide about the efforts & results continuum from “Simply Present” to “Online Leader.”

For those attorneys and practices that still are challenged to find time to build their presence and relationships, consulting services like my Vital Access make it easy and cost-effective to draft content and research speaking/article/outreach partners, while leaving the final sign-off and interpersonal communications to you.

The slides can be viewed here (the fonts in the original ppt are better aligned):

Social Networks Get Industry-Specific (Again)

The original concept of a social network, or any online community, was to bring together individuals with a common interest or background for discussion, enjoyment and business. After a while, social network sites – LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, XING, etc – realized that they could maximize profit by offering one site, or platform, on which lots of interest groups could create their own connections and discussion areas.

Long tail web sites win, end of story? Not quite.

Industry social networks are (re)emerging in force. They’re driven by:

1. The clutter people are experiencing on sites like LinkedIn. Your own home page is now populated with ads, promotions for add-on applications, groups/chats with mixed value and mainly self-marketing, and updates about scores of people you may have linked to (but don’t want to know when they link to someone else, and you haven’t bothered turning off this feature).  I’m personally in the midst of spring-cleaning all the add-ons that LinkedIn and Facebook have spawned on my screen.
2. The fact that many professionals are more comfortable with an industry-backed approach than a open-to-the-public platform. Several law firms have indicated concern about connecting with colleagues on LinkedIn because it might give away information about client relationships, though they don’t have a specific regulation of issue to point to.  Doctors who are colleagues of mine have rarely tried the online networks and don’t see much potential for business from them.
3. Finally, industry-specific platforms have the ability to offer much more value through structured interactions. For example, consumer product designs can jointly suggest ideas for a product design in a CAD/CAM type of model, and green technology engineers can share plans and spreadsheets in ways that can be duplicated or compared across projects.

Here are fast-growing examples of industry specific networks in law, technology, medicine and green technology/sustainability.

For Lawyers:

• Martindale, the Lexis/Nexis database of law firms and attorneys has quietly launched a Connected platform for its members (read an early review). A corporate attorney who is refreshing and expanding her business contacts tells me that the power of Martindale is that practically every lawyer is already listed in the system – you can easily learn the whereabouts of law school alum or colleagues from a prior practice, and connect.  In comparison, for my work with trademark lawyer, only 20% of her contacts are already in LinkedIn and we both feel it’s intrusive to tell other colleagues to join LI just for the sake of connecting.
• Martindale’s venture compares with other, startup firm-driven social networks for lawyers. Legal Onramp features a repository of legal ‘shareware’ documents and a carefully selected list of bloggers/forum hosts on topics like intellectual property, instead of the free-for-all on public social networks that breeds creativity but also a lot of useless promotion. Then there’s the JD Supra platform for sharing and collaborating on legal documents.

For Doctors:

• Sermo is a highly popular platform, originally created for doctors to share questions and recommendations for patient care.  So far it’s more about the many forums on individual topics and cases than about networking with colleagues per se, but the fast and informal interactions seem to be creating new bonds between specialists in the same field who don’t already know each other. And Sermo is beginning to generate revenue polling doctors for the benefit of drug investors and others. The time seems ripe for doctors to band together not only on medical practice issues, but on changes to national healthcare policy as well.

For the green sector – clean energy/environmental sustainability

• 2degrees is an active network whose name is a play on (a) the need to prevent the earth’s temperature from rising more than 2 degrees celsius to prevent catastrophe and (b) a friend-of-a-friend in a social network.  2degrees seems to be effective at bringing together professionals from a diverse set of businesses and scientific/NGO domains to popularize solutions to the world’s environmental challenges.

These cases suggest that both larger organizations like Lexis Nexis and startups can achieve momentum building industry-specific social networks.  They become much more sticky when the interactions go beyond mere connecting and text discussions to what I call “transactional social networks”, where the business process or workflow of an industry is re-invented to be performed in parallel by larger groups. This is akin to the Open Source movement in technology of the early 2000′s, in which one of my consulting clients CollabNet created a white label platform for other companies to build their cross-company, software developer networks.

Another industry ripe for semi-open social networks is institutional finance – among private equity and VC investors, high net worth individuals, investment research users, and others.

More on clean energy and financial networks in coming posts…

How Lawyers Can Grow Billings Using Online Networks and Internet Marketing

I’ve been engaged lately in several projects for attorneys and law firms, with the objective of expanding their business clientele through an online presence. Consider it “LinkedIn and Beyond for Lawyers.” An online presence — in social networks, blogs, webinars — has become more acceptable, even expected, for attorneys in the last few years.

• LinkedIn, the largest networking site for professionals across industries, has over 750,000 lawyers and legal services providers with profiles.
• The American Bar Association site lists over 5,000 ‘blawgs by lawyers.
• Specialized communities are sprouting. LegalOnRamp is an online network exclusively for corporate general counsel to interact with each other and law firms; featuring more-than-cursory articles, a wiki to freely publish documents, survey results and industry data; and an active Ask the Expert section.

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Where’s the benefit? The most common question for those starting to focus online is: “What do I get out of it? I created a LinkedIn profile but haven’t gotten any inquiries.” Of course, your results vary with effort. Consider a few common objectives:

• You want to maintain contact with affiliates and other lawyers that will refer business to you. In this case, a profile for each professional, inserting the bios from your web site, is a good start on LinkedIn. Once these are published, you can request connections to your colleagues already on LinkedIn. Xing is a comparable social network emphasizing Europe and Asia and Plaxo is another recommended service with 40m subscribers, in which you receive updates about colleagues’ change of contact information. You can also publish quick thoughts or new to all your colleagues on these sites, which will complement regular emails and holiday cards. This assumes you have a solid electronic contact database. For this, Microsoft Outlook is a good start, with Microsoft Business Contact Manager or Avidian’s Prophet to enable contact sharing in a midsize firm, or Salesforce for a larger, multi-office practice (see this LinkedIn Question & Answer Chat about the best contact manager for a small to mid-sized firm). Creating your LinkedIn presence can take less than an hour in this minimal approach, with cleaning up your contact database being the major task. However, the result is that people who know and appreciate you will find you more easily, not that new prospects will seek your counsel.
• You want prospective clients that are evaluating your practice to find a solid web presence. Here, you’ll want to polish your professionals’ LinkedIn profiles to include a bio written in an approachable first person. Change the standard “Ms. Doe is a patent lawyer representing firms of all sizes…” to include specialties (“I have worked extensively with both manufacturing and non-manufacturing technology entities, such as universities and the NIH“) and benefits (“I… help clients execute on strategies to leverage the value of their IP“). Then, add at least 20 links/connections to clients and colleagues; a photo and a vanity LinkedIn URL with your name, and have several clients publish short testimonials for your work (which you can propose in draft form and have them revise). This may take a few hours but puts you into the realm of credible online presence, beyond your web site.
• You want prospects you’ve met to keep you in mind. For this case, minimally consider a quarterly e-newsletter with updates on law in their industry, and your publicly-known cases. One effective approach is to orient your content by industry of your client, rather than by legal domain — which few lawyers seem to do. A pharmaceutical client, a telecommunications company and an e-commerce startup use different language to refer to their intellectual property needs — one speaks of protecting an new product pipeline, another defending its technology and the third seeing a competitor copy their online brand. For them, it’s insufficient to state on LinkedIn that “I serve all industries” and leave it at that, or to write about patent /trademark activity across multiple industries. Free or for-fee webinars, or local lunches work well, as does joint presentations with complimentary service providers, such as a local private equity fund or networking association.
• You want to solicit new business interest through your online presence. This is where substantial time is needed, because so many lawyers are attempting the same thing. Only a few per domain of expertise can break through the clutter, so you’ll want to strive for the frequency and depth of content that only one or two other firms can match when you search Google. You can accomplish this by writing white papers that help clients, or being the most frequent and insightful blog on a particular topic such as food and drug law, as well as a public speaker. Also, consider creative and even bold offers, such as Clock Tower Law’s offer of a free trademark registration for a startup. And combine online initiatives with local business development, such soliciting speaking engagements. One of my clients and I are working with a cost-effective outsourced service to find and monitor industry events for speaking opportunities, and having an executive assistant at the law firm propose the practice leader as a speaker.

Finally, be aware of how others are writing about you on the web. ZoomInfo compiles career biographies of anyone who has had a professional profile published on the web. Two lawyers I tracked shared first and last names (their middle name differed), but very different track records and some information had been confused between them by the automated system. You can fix this by claiming ownership about your data and correcting it. A site such as Vault.com lets prospective employees write about their experience with your firm. One firm I was tracking had a strong presence on Google, ranking 5th when I searched for “NY intellectual property law firm.”  Yet on Vault, the first comment to appear was from a paralegal job candidate who wrote “If you [even] speak English, they will hire you,”  and another candidate said “the place is in shambles.” Not an attractive situation!

In sum, it takes little effort to get online and stay in touch with those who appreciate your reputation. Actually building your reputation online takes more time, but there are intermediate steps that allow you and your firm to match your business development goals with time availability.

For more thoughts, see the powerpoint I’ve posted below about how law firms can grow their revenues with Web 2.0 technologies. This is an update of a presentation I made a little while ago to the New York County Lawyers Association.

How Lawyers Can Grow Billings Using Online Networks and Internet Marketing

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