Adrian Dayton is an attorney with a passion for growing law practices through the power of social media. We met through twitter about a year ago and meet bi-monthly for lunch to discuss our respective consulting practices.

We’ve often discussed how our websites and social media profile pictures are the first impression that we give to any perspective clients. I always remind clients that the quality of your imagery reflects the quality of your brand in the minds of your customers.

Adrian is in the process of branding his practice. He had invested in a (soon to be released) new website and graphic design services for his marketing collateral. So it was definitely time for us to put together some high quality images to be used across his different marketing channels.

If you’re a lawyer, I’d highly recommend giving Adrian a tweet to discuss how he can help you with your social media marketing for your practice.

Amber and I headed down to my family’s cottage on Keuka lake as a quick vacation before “All-You-Can-Jet” — we thought it would be a great way to relax before my national speaking tour.  We took the opportunity to use it as a dry-run to test out our workflows and make sure we didn’t forget to pack anything.

Here are some photos from the first day of our trip.

These images were taken in a small stairwell with only about five-minutes from Doug walking off stage until I was breaking down my gear. Doug is very dedicated to his fans and had been on stage for almost two hours. I know how tiring it can be to be on tour, so I wanted to finish the shoot as efficiently as possible. That’s why it’s always important to practice, practice, practice.

I had my lighting designed and my exposure correct in about three test shots. We took about five frames after that and then I thanked him for his time and we parted ways.  I really appreciate Doug taking the time to let me photograph him, please check out his act and buy his merch!

You can hear what Doug Stanhope has to say at:

http://www.dougstanhope.com
http://www.facebook.com/officialstanhope
http://www.myspace.com/dougstanhope

Smoke Rendering Courtesy: Philip Brunner

Here is an example of a properly formed #FF post:

@buffalogeek: Here’s a #Buffalo FF @susanlynncope @nickelcity @clarkdever @charlieriley @peteherr @buffawhat @mattbova @herobeth @nowbuffalo

The benefits of the traditional form of Follow Friday are these:

• Concise
• Easy to follow people directly from the tweet
• You tend to get retweeted as a Thank You from the people you list

The drawbacks that I see are the following:

• You don’t get to give much information about why you are listing them
• It’s a very ephemeral media to make a recommendation through
• It spams up the twitterstream all day and makes it more challenging to find good posts
• It doesn’t allow you to give them any link-love;  In-bound links are the currency of the internet.  If you really want to promote a friend or follower, a link to their website helps their google rank and their follower count.

With these issues in mind, I present to you my first; second-generation #FF post.

• @adriandayton – Had a great lunch with this man today, he tops the Twitter charts for Buffalo with over 50k followers.  He makes his living consulting and speaking on Social Media for Lawyers.
• @buffalogeek – Broke the Carl Paladino E-mail Scandal this week, spends equal time muckraking and nerding it up.  He is an anchor point in the Buffalo tech community and his political blog is a great read.
• @susanlynncope – My fiancee surprised me this week with her initiative to create TEDxBuffalo;  She strives to be a thought leader on how to integrate Social Media in to Event Planning.
• @kevinpurdy – Editor of one of my favorite blogs and a fellow Buffalonian.  His personal blog might not be as geeky as LifeHacker, but it’s still well worth the read.
• @karakane – Kara is in charge of Communications at Medaille College, she recently hired me for an event.  I was pleasantly surprised by her media savvy and her communications blog.
• @himay – Jamie is a biochemistry graduate student at the University of Buffalo, if you thought his hacking ended with GMOs; you’d be wrong.  This guy and his bacteria blog scare the crap out of me; I’m recommending you read him not only out of fear for humanity(someone needs to keep an on eye on this guy) but also for his great conversational skills and futurist interests.

So there you #FF 2.0 (#FF2).  I hope you enjoyed it and if you like the idea, feel free to steal it.  I’d love to see more in depth descriptions of peoples relationships with twitter and their community.

Post-Production and Surrealist Photoshop Wizard – Philip Brunner.
Photo Concept/Model: Clark Dever
Image Capture: Susan Lynn Cope

Twitter was started by a guy named Evan Williams (@ev) as a way for people to update their status. Some of you non-nerds may think that facebook came up with the status idea, however, ever since time in memorial; Nerds have been broadcasting their status. From .plan files on unix shells, to /away messages on IRC, and then “Away” messages on AIM, every time a new communication medium is created nerds figure out a way to update their friends on what they’re doing. With the growing prevalence of cell phones it was just a natural evolution for nerds to update their status via Short Message Service(SMS) and want it to propagate to all of their Points-of-presence. After all, according to Wikipedia “SMS text messaging is the most widely used data application on the planet, with 2.4 billion active users, or 74% of all mobile phone subscribers sending and receiving text messages on their phones”. So Twitter is the convergence of the nerds need for statusing, saturation of cell phones, and the open protocols of the internet. Basically, @ev and his team of hackers wrote a little app that took SMS data and published it in a “micro-blog” on the web. The reason that tweets (The nomenclature used for twitter posts) are limited to 140 characters is due to the SMS standard being restricted to that length.

What can I do with it?

You can use the tool in several different ways; Twitter is part Hive-mind, part global consciousness, part blog, part marketing tool, part instantaneous telepresence, part flashmob generator, and last but not least a nifty way to synchronize your status on your social networks.

Hive-mind is the concept that none of us are as smart as all of us. If you post a question on twitter and tag it properly, there is a good chance that you will get a response. Even if you don’t post a question, if you use some of the twitter search tools you will find tons of leads that will point you in the right direction.

Global consciousness is similar to the idea of a hive-mind, but it has more to do with awareness. Twitter has users all over the world and there are tools that will automatically translate their posts for you and translate your responses back to them. The staccato nature of twitter posts leads people to speak concisely and directly, a side effect of this is that messages tend to be easier to translate. The asymmetrical nature of twitter allows for interesting dynamics, you can follow anyone you wish who has an account. They get notification when you do and get to decide if they wish to follow you back. Twitter gives you access to some of the biggest influencers in the world. I follow a plethora of technologists/futurists, the dalai lama, lance armstrong, tony hawk, levar burton, and kevin smith. Interestingly enough some of them follow me too, on a theoretical level this means that my reflection on a subject could influence the dalai lama’s view of our existence… neat, huh?

I originally joined Twitter in mid-2008, right before I left for Arizona to travel back to New York. I used it to micro-blog my progress across the United States. I didn’t know if I would have reliable internet access, but I wanted to be able to update my family and friends and allow them to know where I was at fairly regular intervals. With twitter I could type a message up via SMS and even if I didn’t have cell phone reception at the time I could rest easy, knowing that it would be beamed to my account as soon as I had the slightest hint of cell phone reception. Since then, I have used it mainly as a way to document and journal interesting events as they happened, so that I could reflect on them later or share them with friends in real-time.

You can also use twitter as a marketing tool. As I continue to develop my Photography, I seek both models and feedback from my fellows. I can tag a tweet with the word #photo or #photography and it instantly becomes accessible to the thousands of photographers around the world.

Twitter is a stream of data, you choose how much of the flow you want to consume by carefully selecting who you follow. Every second of every day, hundreds of thousand users are adding tweets to the unimaginable choir that is the twitterstream. Many of them tag their tweets so they can be more easily filtered out of the noise and heard by those who are interested in the associated topic. When Continental Flight 3407 crashed in Clarence, NY (15 minutes from my house) the twitterstream provided an immense amount of data, within a few hours I had links to youtube videos from the scene, tons of photos on flickr, analysis of the crash from other pilots, even the ATC radio traffic in mp3 form from a local Hammer. All I had to do was search for #3407, #Continental, #BuffaloCrash and a few other tags. Twitter provides you a rich source of data from anywhere in the world at any given time.

Another powerful feature is it’s ability to generate “FlashMobs”, unrelated or loosely tied affinity groups that suddenly appear at a location. An example of this is two days ago when Levar Burton invited his followers to meet him for a beer in Toronto. If I had a car at that moment, I would have raced across the border to share a drink with Mr. Reading-Rainbow-LaForge himself.

Lastly, if you’re not interested in the consciousness, the celebrity, or the networking aspects of the application; you can use it for it’s original purpose… To update all your status notifications! There are plugins for just about every social networking site, blogs, and instant messaging clients that will allow you to automatically synchronize your status messages from your twitterstream.

How do I get started ?

1. The first thing you need to do is go to: http://www.twitter.com and sign up for an account.
2. Then I recommend setting up your mobile device and adding the twitter SMS number to your contacts (40404)
3. Grab a twitter client, I highly recommend Tweetdeck: http://www.tweetdeck.com
4. Tweet your first message to the twitterstream
5. Next start following me by going to http://twitter.com/clarkdever
6. Then use Twitter’s tools to find other contacts you might know: http://twitter.com/invitations
7. Now might also be a good time to google for plugins for twitter and social networks
8. Lastly, if you’re looking to find other random local people (say for marketing purposes) I recommend the following googlehack: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:twitter.com+”Location+Buffalo,NY”+OR+”Location+Buffalo” (Obviously, replacing the city with your own).

Twitter’s Grammar

It’s up to you to decide how you’re going to use twitter. I’ll leave you with a few twitterisms.

@username This is the way to publicly reply to a user
d username This is how to send a private message to a user (you can only DM people who are following you)
RT @username This is how you tell people that you are “Retweeting” what another said. Important Note:If you want to comment on their post, your comment goes before the RT (ie. Congratulations Dude! RT @clarkdever Check out this magazine article that I’m featured in: http://bit.ly/12hours)
#keyword This is how you identify the topic of your post, even if you didn’t say it directly (ie. “#Buffalo The 198 has an accident by the albright knox heading East Bound” Users who have searches for the word #buffalo would instantly get the traffic update.)

I also recommend using tools like http://bit.ly (which has the ability to tweet built in) to shorten long urls, so you can provide some information about the link you’re posting if it’s not apparent from the URL itself.

Please share this Primer and feel free to Copypasta it as your own note, all I ask is that you ask people to follow me if they join twitter!

Hope this was insightful and I’ll tweet you later,
Clark Dever
https://twitter.com/clarkdever