Corporate & Securities Law

Time for Twittering Lawyers?

By John Wallbillich

When a company hits the cover of Time magazine, it’s either best for lawyers to take notice or for the board to update the exit strategy. This time, it’s all about Twitter; I took a look at it a few months back.

Here’s two of the co-founders of Twitter, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, with their blue bird of happiness:

(Ed: OK, the picture has been *slightly* enhanced for conversational purposes.)

One observer commented that the title of the story, “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live,” almost induced nausea. Another recently noted a Harvard Business Review report that for all of the moonshot growth of Twitter as a social network, very few really use it much:

Twitter’s usage patterns are also very different from a typical on-line social network. A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

I went over 10 months from my first Twitter “tweet” to my second; my problem was when I saw the question on my Twitter home page that asks “What are you doing?” I always answered “Who cares?” Twittering seemed awfully similar to frittering. Here’s some more by Carolyn Elefant on just that.

But it’s a phenomenon, and if you want to learn more about Twitter, Jaffe Associates just published Part I of a white paper “Twittering for Lawyers,” and you can find it here. It’s very helpful, I wish I had the benefit of it before I started.

And, to hedge my bets a bit, yes, I Twittered a tweet about this post about Twitter.

Full post as published by The Wired GC on June 05, 2009 (boomark / email).