Whether it’s a relatively minor challenge such as another interruption from an important-but-prickly client, or a major challenge such as the defection of a key partner or referral source, the second the event hits your consciousness, you can either REACT to it, or RESPOND to it.

This inflection point can influence what happens from the very first seconds and minutes all the way through the unfolding course of the challenge over hours, days or longer.

Here’s the difference between reacting and responding: When we react, we are thinking, feeling, and behaving out of patterns born from past experience.  Unconsciously, we say to ourselves, “this – or something like this – has happened before. I know what it means and it’s not good.  It’s a pain; it’s going to cause big trouble, etc.”

When we respond, on the other hand, we pause for a few seconds, before kicking into pattern-based reaction, and we ask “what is in my enlightened self-interest here?  What are my options? How do I want to respond to this challenge most beneficially?”

It’s quintessentially human, of course, to react rather than respond to difficult news and events.

But learning to take that pause — and then respond — can save you from traveling down a less-than optimal path.  It helps you think more clearly about what behavior will bring you the most good.  Maybe you’ll refrain from saying something you’ll regret.  Or maybe you’ll take a moment to figure out what you should say that will keep the problem from happening again, or minimize its impact.

At the very least, by responding instead of reacting, you give yourself room to make the smartest move in relation to the situation.

3. Schedule Time and Set Limits

Allocate specific time on specific days for your social media activities and use reminders and alarms to signal when to stop.  A good old egg timer works just fine for this.

4. Avoid Social Media as Procrastination

Notice the little voice in your head or that pang of guilt in your gut when you’re using social media to avoid doing something else.  It’s no different than when you use other activities to procrastinate, such as revising a contract for the seventh time because you’d rather not file your expense report.

5. Systemize Your Processes

In addition to starting your day with a period of effective planning, the concept of systemizing your activities is one of the most powerful competencies you can cultivate to elevate your success.  Here are some examples of how you can systemize your social media activities:

• Use Google alerts to find things to forward, comment on, or write about
• Use writing “formulas” to methodically generate engaging articles (e.g., http://www.successfulblogging.com/blog-headline-formulas/)
• Set up an Excel spreadsheet with the “LEN” function to automatically count characters so you instantly know how long your tweet drafts are
• Create subfolders and rules in Outlook to automatically route your social media-related email.

6. Employ Software Utilities to Automate and Leverage Your Actions

• Use tools like HootSuite (www.hootsuite.com) to pre-schedule tweets (you can batch a whole bunch and load them up to go out over time)
• Use RoboForm (www.roboform.com) to securely capture and store all of your logins and form-fill information for one-click access to all of your sites.
• Use a micro recorder or VOCANOTE (www.vocanote.com) to capture your ideas when you’re out and about (JOTT lets you call an 800 number and sends a transcript and the audio file of your call to your email)

7. Delegate Tasks to a Social Media Assistant

Hire an SMVA (social media virtual assistant) contractor via www.Guru.com or www.Elance.com to chop up your longer content (print or audio) and put them into smaller blog posts, podcasts, tweets, etc.  SMVAs can do everything from ghostwrite to manage all of your content distribution.

So what is the right amount of time to spend on social media?  It’s the combination of minutes and activities that will be sustainable for you.  Remember, building your presence among social media networks to point where new inquiries and new clients come is an ongoing process.  Taking the approach outlined here, a good overall allocation of time is spend one to two hours per week on social media.

Like a fractal, which can be magnified to reveal the same structural pattern at both the micro and macro levels, your approach to managing your social media activities will reflect your overall approach to time management.  If you’re a strong time manager, the guidelines presented here will be fairly easy to follow.  If you’re not, you’ll pick up some tips that will help you manage all of your time more effectively, including your social media time.

On to metaphor number two: we all know that going food shopping without a list is not as effective as going with a list.  Without a list, it takes longer, you get things you don’t need (and you forget things you do need), and you often spend more money than necessary.  Why? Because you’re wandering, trying to rely on your memory, and buying on impulse.

The combined implication here?  Improving your overall time management skills will help you more effectively manage your social media time, and following a game plan will make that time more efficient and more profitable.

The first step is to develop a positive mindset about this still-new – and fast-evolving – phenomenon.  Many attorneys are hesitant to allocate consistent time building their social media presence because they:

• don’t have enough understanding of the various processes involved
• had unrealistic expectations about results when they started and then gave up after a few months
• are not convinced of the ROI (return on investment) they’ll receive
• have heard horror stories from other people about time wasted on social media
• are generally risk-averse and threatened by the thought of publishing widely distributed content on the internet
• find it too hard to find good content on a regular basis
• find it too hard to come up a fresh perspective or unique voice

Here are the first two of seven tactics for creating that positive mindset and spending the right amount of time on your social media activities.  The next post will cover tactics three through seven.

1. Establish Activity Targets

Set targets for the number of actions to take each week, and block out time for them on your calendar.  These might be the number of blogs posts you’ll read – or write, or comment on.  Or tweets you’ll post, or forward.  Or how many JD Supra articles you’ll look at.  Or how many LinkedIn profiles you’ll review.  During very busy weeks, you might shoot for two or three brief actions for a total of 10 minutes.  During average weeks, shoot for five to 10 actions, and during light weeks 10 to 20 actions.   Remember, many actions can take just a few minutes, while some will take longer.

It’s good practice to allocate roughly one quarter of your social media time to research and reading, one half to writing content, and the last quarter to engaging your readers/followers by forwarding and/or commenting on useful content from others.

Finally, since you can’t master all social media channels at once no matter how motivated you are, consider focusing on one or two major SM channels each quarter: Q1: LinkedIn and JD Supra; Q2: Facebook; Q3 Blogs; Q4: Twitter

2. Be Smart About Learning the Basics

• Find a college kid or law school student to teach you the basics
• Use YouTube to find video tutorials on how to accomplish a particular social media task

Use the “Help” or “Learning Center” features of the various social media sites (LinkedIn has an excellent online guide – which, strangely, they make difficult to locate: http://learn.linkedin.com

First, you’ll enjoy a period of enthusiastic energy.  But sooner or later you will encounter resistance from within.  In his book Mastery³, George Leonard describes the phenomenon of homeostasis, the natural tendency of self-regulating systems to resist change and return to equilibrium.  In microscopic organisms, human beings, and corporations alike, homeostasis is always working to create a steady state.  Furthermore, resistance to change is “ . . . proportionate to the size and speed of the change, not whether the change is a favorable or unfavorable one.”

Leonard explains that the path of mastery in any endeavor has a predictable pattern.  First there is a significant spurt of progress, then there’s a slight decline to a plateau of sustained practice.  Then the danger zone appears at some point during this plateau.  It’s where you’re most likely to “backslide.”  Something throws you off and you just don’t get back.  However, if you continue practicing throughout the plateau period, you will eventually experience another significant spurt of progress – and another slight decline, and then you’ll then settle onto your next plateau. The cycle of growth continues according to this pattern until your normal experience is significantly different from where you started.  Anticipating the inevitable resistance you’ll meet during the plateau stage and building a plan that supports you through it is essential to getting to your next level.

Putting It All Together

There are two keys to thriving in this era of increasingly higher client expectations.  The first is to craft a coherent strategy based on building quality relationships and develop the skills to apply it.  The second is to cultivate the positive attitudes necessary to be successful in your endeavor.  Fortunately, these two keys are mutually reinforcing.  Having a plan and practicing skills makes it easier to be positive, and having a positive attitude makes it easier to work your plan and practice your skills.  So where do you begin?  The best place to start is with an exercise in self awareness: clarify exactly what you want to accomplish in your practice, why you want to accomplish it, and by when.  Of course, this can be quite a challenge in and of itself.  But by meeting it, you’ll be well on your way to meeting whatever other challenges lie ahead.

Not surprisingly, your attitudes about business development, marketing, and time management are shaped by how you see yourself and the world around you.  And in turn, these flow from a complex mix of inherited traits, learned behaviors, unconscious beliefs, emotions, and a lifetime of experiences.  You are, as of today, the sum total of this mix.  But you also enjoy the uniquely human capacity of self-awareness, and this profound gift allows you to learn and grow and consciously change that mix, and thus change yourself.

The single most important attitude you can adopt, therefore, is a positive approach toward business growth through self-awareness.  There are two reasons why this is so.  First, the majority of limitations you experience with regard to business development are internal and powerfully self-regulating.  Left unexamined and unchallenged, these emotion-based limitations feel like they’re objectively true, so they pre-empt (or stall) your efforts to change.  “He’ll think I’m a snake if I ask for his business.”  “I just can’t break through to my next level of revenue.” “I don’t have time to research that prospect.”  “I didn’t become a lawyer to have sell myself to people.” “I don’t have the right personality to be a good business developer.”  These are internal belief states; they influence your behaviors but they’re not externally, unchangeably true.   Self-awareness lets you distinguish between legitimate skill set weaknesses (which can be remediated or compensated for), and negative self-constructs (which keep you stuck).

Second, having a positive attitude toward business development through self-discovery allows you to harness your extraordinary ability to actually change your mind – to change your internal belief states and the emotions that both create and reflect them.  Researchers in the field of neurocognition speak of the “plasticity” of the brain, of its biochemical responsiveness to either positive or negative thoughts.  Sports psychologists and performance coaches have been helping top athletes cultivate mentally-generated performance gains for the last 30 years.  In fact, no world-class competitor would even consider training their body without training their mind as well.  Techniques such as “belief management,” “mental rehearsal” and “self-talk reframing” are easily learned and directly applicable to the challenge of business development.  The key success factor with these techniques, of course, as with business development itself, is your attitude toward them.

Yes, you have to think like a lawyer once you’ve been retained.  But you have to think like a buyer to get hired.  And that means you have to think like [cue: music from Jaws]. . . a sales professional.

I know, I know.  Such an admonition is anathema to many lawyers.  But think about it: What does a good sales professional ultimately do?  They get people to feel comfortable enough to pay someone else to get something they want.  That’s it.  It’s morally neutral.  So get over it if the word (much less the concept) of “selling” holds you back.

Indeed, if you can truly help a prospective client achieve his or her desired outcome, why shouldn’t it be you who is paid to do so, as opposed to another lawyer who happens to be better at “closing the deal”?

So how can you learn to approach prospective clients in a way that takes the focus off you and gets them talking about what matters most to them?  It’s quite simple tactically, but you’ll have to practice it to make it a habit:  you ask high-value questions that yield important information and then you listen carefully for when the answers you get present openings for you to speak; and when you do speak, it’s to provide very brief answers or comments and to ask more follow up questions.

Here are 30 powerful, high-value questions from a master of professional services marketing, Alan Weiss.  They come from a list of 101 questions to which I’ve provided a link at the end of this SuccessTip, but ponder these for now.  (Note: the essence – and purpose – of these questions apply whether you’re talking with an individual consumer about estate planning or with a General Counsel about handling their global compliance needs.)

Establishing Objectives

1. What is the ideal outcome you’d like to experience?
2. What results are you trying to accomplish?
3. What better [business] condition are you seeking?
4. Why are you seeking to do this (work/project/engagement)?
5. How would the operation be different as a result of this work?
6. What would be the return on investment (sales, assets, equity, etc.)?
7. How would image/repute/credibility be improved?
8. What harm (e.g., stress, dysfunction, turf wars, etc.) would be alleviated?
9. How much would you gain on the competition as a result?
10. How would your value proposition be improved?

By pushing the buyer on the end results you are helping to articulate and formalize the prospect’s perceived benefits, thereby increasing your own value in the process.

Establishing Metrics

1. How will you know we’ve accomplished your intent?
2. How, specifically, will the operation be different when we’re done?
3. How will you measure this?
4. What indicators will you use to assess our progress?
5. Who or what will report on our results (against the objectives)?
6. Do you already have measures in place you intend to apply?
7. What is the rate of return (on sales, investment, etc.) that you seek?
8. How will we know the public, employees, and/or customers perceive it?
9. Each time we talk, what standard will tell us we’re progressing?
10. How would you know it if you tripped over it?

The more completely you understand your buyer’s thinking about how they will measure success, the easier it will be to establish realistic service expectations.

Assessing Value

1. What will these results mean for your organization?
2. How would you assess the actual return (ROI, ROA, ROS, ROE, etc.)?
3. What would be the extent of the improvement (or correction)?
4. How will these results impact the bottom line?
5. What are the annualized savings (first year might be deceptive)?
6. What is the intangible impact (e.g., on repute, safety, comfort, etc.)?
7. How would you, personally, be better off or better supported?
8. What is the scope of the impact (on customers, employees, vendors)?
9. How important is this compared to your overall responsibilities?
10. What if this fails?

The more concretely you understand the value the prospect places on the achieving his or her objective, the fewer obstacles you’ll encounter with respect to fees and payment.

Objectives.  Measures. Value.  OMV.  At the very least, memorize the acronym (if not several of the questions from each category).

The mere act of asking OMV-based questions allows you to demonstrate your value as a savvy counselor and excellent listener far more effectively than your telling the prospective client how qualified you are and why they should hire you.

To recap the drill: Ask your prospects high-value questions.  Listen carefully.  Resist the temptation to provide an answer or solution unless asked a very specific question.  Instead, ask more probing questions that help the prospect clarify their thinking about OMV.  It’s the key to effective lawyer marketing.

Here’s the link to all 101 questions, which are grouped by categories such as “Finding the Economic Buyer” (which saves you from wasting time with people who don’t have the authority to actually hire you) to “Preventing Unforeseen Obstacles” (which helps you anticipate typical problems that arise in the last stages of getting hired).

1. They’ve committed to work that’s outside their immediate legal expertise and they don’t feel confident about completing it.

2. They feel they haven’t done the best job possible for their client. Perfectionism has gummed up the works.

3. They need to respond to the poor performance of an employee or peer. They feel uncomfortable in that managerial situation and thus put it off.

4. They’re caught in the vortex of their mental to-do list and are just trying to cope with the next pressing thing.

Timothy Pyschyl, professor of psychology at Ottawa’s Carleton University and an expert on the reasons people procrastinate, offers this simple but powerful strategy: make a 10 minute deal with yourself. Acknowledge, “I don’t feel like doing that,” but do it anyway for ten minutes. Then decide whether to continue. Once you’ve started, and have overcome the inertia, it’s easier to stay on task.

So, let yourself off the hook and stop feeling guilty about avoidance behavior. You don’t even need to analyze why you’re procrastinating; just make The 10 Minute Deal. You’ll make progress on the task at hand and you’ll silence that annoying voice at the back of your mind.

For more on overcoming procrastination, we recommend this 15-minute audio by one of our favorite practice development gurus, David Maister.

Several studies of “knowledge management” practices calculate the annual dollar value of the time a knowledge worker spends searching for information to be at least 10% of his or her salary.   When you add up your payroll, you can see the impact quite dramatically.

That’s why I’ve previously recommended that all lawyers and support staff get, learn, and use the best search tool available.  That tool is called X1.  (www.x1.com).  X1 is not only the leader in desktop and networked search, it’s the emerging leader in e-discovery search.

Pardon the jargon, but it’s truly a game changer and it’s extremely affordable.   You can download a free trial copy.  You’ll wonder how you worked without it.  It will save you hundreds or thousands of hours within a few short years.  (And no, that’s not hyperbole.)

Now on to the resource mentioned in the title of this post
X1 has added “Social Discovery” to its lineup and is providing a complimentary 1-hour webinar on social media discovery this coming Wednesday, March 28th at 10am PST / 1pm EST.

If you’re a litigator, this will soon be relevant to your practice (if you’ve not encountered it already).  Even if you’re not a litigator, it looks to be an eye-opening presentation.

Get more information and register here.

From the info page about the Webinar:
“Evidence from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networking sites is now commonplace in litigation.  However, despite extensive discussion on this topic, little direction has been given on how to actually collect, process and review social media evidence in a routine and scalable fashion, consistent with best practices– until now. D4, experts in computer forensics and collections, just recently had a case involving the capture of several dozen Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, which amounted to over 2 Million items from those.  With X1 Discovery’s new investigative tool for social media, X1 Social Discovery, they pared down the item count to roughly 7,000 items, in a matter of days, which normally would take a litigation support team weeks or months to accomplish.  
In this Webinar you will:
•    Learn practical applications for searching, collecting and authenticating social media evidence;
•    Hear about recent social media discovery case studies;
•    Gain best practices for investigating social networking sites;
•    Learn about emerging technologies and effective tools that can be applied to the challenges you face today for social media discovery.”

If you attend and you find it valuable, drop me a line.  I’d love to know.

Try noticing when you use the verbs “have” and “find” as you’re talking or thinking about a given situation where time is an issue.  Then, as you become aware of how often you use this kind of semantic slight-of-hand to avoid responsibility for your time choices, try to replace those verbs with the verbs “choose” or “spend.”  When you get this deep in your bones it becomes extremely powerful and impacts your productivity.  For example, you will naturally begin to reduce the many time-robbing interruptions you choose to allow, and you’ll become more effective at delegating, so you’ll have fewer competing choices on your plate – which means you can choose to spend more time developing business.

The most common objection to marketing cited by attorneys is that it feels like a form of selling, and that selling, if not unethical, is at the very least unprofessional.  Unfortunately, it’s easy to use the negative associations evoked by thoughts of  “chasing work” and “going for the close” as an excuse for not having a thoughtful approach to business development.  The truth is, however, that the most effective and profitable approach to business development is also the most ethical and enjoyable.

When you’re genuinely qualified to serve someone’s authentic legal need because your experience is well-matched to their situation, and when your conversation with them is grounded in your desire to understand and serve them, you’re not selling anything.  If you’re well prepared, if you ask questions that deliver value by clarifying the situation, if you’re listening effectively – and if you conclude that you can, in fact, provide a high-quality solution – you will be able, at the appropriate time, to discuss the buying decision comfortably and directly.  When you operate from this place of professional integrity, the experience, regardless of whether or not you are hired, will have been valuable.

Of course, it takes time to get to the point where you are consistently creating opportunities to meet with well-matched prospective clients.  And it takes time to become confident in the skills listed above, just as it takes time to build trusting, sustainable relationships.  But by committing to a positive attitude toward marketing, and by committing to do business development through relationship development, you’ll get there.